Adventures in Blu-Ray: Noir Archive Volume 2: 1954-1956

It seems like it was just last April—come to think of it...it was last April—when I borrowed some bandwidth on the blog to talk about a collaborative Blu-ray effort between Mill Creek Entertainment and Kit Parker Films/The Sprocket Vault featuring nine movies previously released to MOD DVD as part of Sony’s Choice Collection.  That compendium…

Adventures in Blu-ray: The Big Clock (1948)

How did it come to this?  Within 36 hours, George Stroud (Ray Milland), editor of the popular Crimeways magazine, finds himself trapped in the tower of an enormous clock located in a prominent part of the Janoth Publications building.  In flashback, Stroud explains how a disagreement with his autocratic boss, Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), was the catalyst for the series of events…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Noir Archive Volume 1: 1944-1954

In Jacobellis vs. Ohio (1964), a U.S. Supreme Court case addressing the First Amendment (an Ohio movie theatre banned the 1958 Louis Malle film Les Amants because they believed it to be “obscene”), Justice Potter Stewart made a famous observation about obscenity that has become a colloquial expression today.  “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I…

From the DVR: Coma (1978)

Dr. Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) is a surgical resident at Boston Memorial Hospital and though this sort of thing should be discouraged because office romances are always complicated (if Chicago Med is any indication), she's dating the chief resident in surgery, Dr. Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas).  A longtime friend and college chum of Wheeler’s, Nancy…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Joseph H. Lewis Double Feature – My Name is Julia Ross (1945) and So Dark the Night (1946)

He was known as “Wagon Wheel Joe” to his peers in the motion picture industry—a mocking nickname given to him by those who edited his B-Westerns during director Joseph H. Lewis’ early moviemaking days.  Joe is a solid example of the kind of film director who, to borrow an observation from author Gregory Mank on fellow…

Adventures in Blu-ray: The Day of the Jackal (1973)

On August 22, 1962, Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiery—in concert with the right-wing Organisation armée secrète (OAS)—attempted to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle by firing on de Gaulle’s automobile as it maneuvered through the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart.  De Gaulle miraculously survived the attempt (one of the machine gun bullets narrowly missed his head), and Bastien-Thiery…

A little housecleaning

The blog has been fallow for a few days, so I regret the lack of activity...but as we were welcoming in July I received a notice in the mail that Oglethorpe County requested my presence as a Superior Court “traverse juror” the week of August 7.  Yes, it’s the time-honored practice of drawing jury duty;…

From the DVR: The Good Shepherd (2006)

The 2006 film The Good Shepherd is a fictionalized take on how the Central Intelligence Agency came to be, using the failed Bay of Pigs invasion as the starting point of its narrative.  Senior counterintelligence agent Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) learns that the operation was compromised by a leak inside the agency, and his investigation…

From the DVR: One Exciting Night (1922)

Wealthy John Fairfax (Henry Hull) returns to his family estate after a sabbatical abroad and while attending a garden party with his "Auntie" (Grace Griswold), is hit with Cupid's arrow after gazing upon one of the hostesses—a young girl named Agnes Harrington (Carol Dempster).  John's barely-disguised romantic affection towards Agnes is reciprocated in kind...though she's…

From the DVR: The 6th Day (2000)

After the first successful cloning of an animal in 1996—shout out to Dolly the sheep!—the race is on to try the technology out on humans...but almost immediately, there are issues addressing the ethics of such a practice (did we learn nothing from Frankenstein?).  In a credits prologue featured in the 2000 film The 6th Day,…