DVD Talk Forum - March 2010 Criterion Releases

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March 2010 Criterion Releases

From Criterion:

This March, we bring three new filmmakers to the collection—
idiosyncratic, daring directors every one: Nicholas Ray, with his 1950s suburban nightmare Bigger Than Life, starring James Mason; Marco Ferreri, whose Dillinger Is Dead, with the ever-charming Michel Piccoli, is all kinds of crazy; and Pedro Costa, an important name in contemporary cinema whose Fontainhas trilogy will introduce you to people, real and imagined, you’ll never forget. All this and Blu-ray Kurosawa and Days of Heaven, too!***

***It's been mentioned in HD TALK, but the Kurosawa BDs are Yojimbo and Sanjuro and Criterion is also releasing Days of Heaven and Bigger Than Life on Blu.

Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa

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One of the most important artists on the international film scene today, Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been steadily building an impressive body of work since the late eighties. And these are the three films that put him on the map: spare, painterly portraits of battered, largely immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. Hypnotic, controlled works, Ossos, In Vanda’s Room, and Colossal Youth confirm Costa as a provocative new cinematic poet, one who locates beauty in the most unlikely of places.

Bigger Than Life

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Though ignored at the time of its release, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life is now recognized as one of the great American films of the 1950s. When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason, in one of his most indelible roles) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal affliction, he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug, resulting in his transformation into a psychotic and ultimately violent household despot. This Eisenhower-era throat-grabber, shot in expressive CinemaScope, is an excoriating take on the nuclear family; that it came in the day of Father Knows Best makes it all the more shocking—and wildly entertaining.

Dillinger is Dead

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In this magnificently inscrutable late-sixties masterpiece, Marco Ferreri, one of European cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteurs, takes us through the looking glass to one seemingly routine night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer, played, in a tour de force performance, by New Wave icon Michel Piccoli. In his claustrophobic, mod home, he pampers his pill-popping wife, seduces his maid, and uncovers a gun that may have once been owned by John Dillinger—and then things get even stranger. A surreal political missive about social malaise, Dillinger Is Dead finds absurdity in the mundane. It is a singular experience, both illogical and grandly existential.