I fail to see how that would be Persona considering both figures look male and the circle around the letter A (which has nothing to do with Persona).

I'd love for Persona to be released, but this is definitely Boy A.

Person A = Persona

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is now available for pre-order in HD on the Criterion Collection’s iTunes channel.

http://blog.criterioncast.com/post/5...-available-for

Delayed response - but yes, you got it. I only "bitch" about Dunham just because I can't stand the fact that she's a big deal now.

Well, actually, I don't care about Dunham - from my very limited exposure, I don't think she's talentless. I just thought Tiny Furniture was pretty bad, and it's one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of questionable inclusions in the collection. It has nothing to do with my hatred of Dunham, "hipsters" (whatever that term means nowadays), or successful women. In the past, I would have used Armageddon or Border Radio to make the same point.

But Criterion has always made some idiosyncratic choices - even back in the LD days. It's certainly not something I lose sleep over - as I said, I've never been one to particularly care about "the purity of the collection," nor do I think there was ever a point when they released "only the best movies."

It's just that Criterion still does a really good job of curating a collection of movies that are almost always worthwhile and interesting (and often very good and great) - so the bad films (or the movies that I find bad) stand out more.

If I thought that there had been a significant decline in the average quality of their new releases, I would be disappointed - but I actually think that they've become a bit more interesting (in a lot of ways) over the last four or five years. They've released a lot of the most obvious titles they have access to, so they've been forced to be a bit more adventurous - some of their choices are more obscure, yes, but they're often no less great than the "big" canonical titles.

I actually really liked Boy A, so I'd be fine with that. But the fact that Persona was recently posted to their Hulu channel makes me think it's probably going to be the Bergman film (though I agree that the figures being male does confuse things a bit.)

OK, I can see it now (although the male figures make me question it still... should have either made them female or make their sex more ambiguous).

What's the average length of time between Criterion releasing one of their silly "hints" and the movie in question actually coming to fruition as a Blu-ray? Five years? Six? Ever?

There are probably a few exceptions, but it almost always happens within a year - and often quite a bit more quickly than that. In some cases, they officially announce it within a month or two after hinting at it in the newsletter.

Well, let's look at some of the recent newsletters and see how they're doing:

They've hinted at Grey Gardens a good while back though and that's yet to come to fruition.

You'll have to explain the Babette's Feast hint to me. Not getting that one at all.

I haven't seen the film but a quick search yielded that one of the dishes is called "entombed quail."

I guess I'm just wondering where Eraserhead and Scanners are. Both were hinted back in January. Neither shows any sign of being announced.

Hasn't it been almost 3 years since they hinted at Y tu Mama Tambien, also? I wonder whats going on with that.

Unfortunately. It's one of the few remaining IFC holdouts.

Maybe it'll be released around the time Gravity hits Blu-ray.

Heads up, Amazon has some pretty good deals on Criterion as part of their Gold Box today.

December titles:

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Nashville
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project
Grey Gardens

For those unfamiliar with Scorsese's WCP, it includes the 6 following films:

Touki Bouki
Redes
A River Called Titas
Dry Summer
Trances
The Housemaid

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion?
Nashville?
hopefully the first of several World Cinema Foundation sets?



That's three absolute must buys for me this month.

I am really surprised that the WCP set has different films than the WCP set that Masters of Cinema is releasing.

The World Cinema Foundation has restored some 20+ films in the last five years, so presumably this will be the first of several volumes (Masters of Cinema has already stated that they plan to release new volumes on a regular basis.)

I just hope either MoC or Criterion gets around to Limite soon - I've been wanting to see that for a long time.

Everything about the way the WCP set is presented seems to indicate this is considered as a one-off for now. I guess they may want to gauge interest first?

Yeah, it's a little bit disconcerting that they don't call it "Volume 1" or something of that sort.

However, it does say "No. 1" on the cover, so hopefully that means something:



I'm sure it's a bit of a financial risk to put out such obscure titles, but hopefully the Scorsese name and the Criterion label combined will be enough to sell it so we can get more sets in the future.

Oh I hadn't noticed the "no. 1" on the small version of the cover, I guess that's a good sign!

This bums me out so hard.