- Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty - Blu-ray Editions
- Creepy Archives 1 & 2/ Eerie Archives 1
- 101 Dalmations - Geronimi/Luske/Reitherman
- George of the Jungle - The Complete Series
- There Will Be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson
- Help - Richard Lester
- Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938, Vol. 1
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The Rest of It
May
31
State-of-the-art and precision-tuned, the Blu-ray restorations of Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty do more than illuminate two of Walt Disney’s most painstakingly engineered productions, they also shine a light on Disney’s surrender to the machinery that made them. By the time the footloose innovator who produced Pinocchio in 1940 began work on Sleeping Beauty two decades later, he had folded into an unrepentant technocrat, the Stanley Kubrick of cartoons. Read more
May
31
Creepy Archives 1 & 2/ Eerie Archives 1
Filed Under Reviews
An oversized comic book masquerading as a bona fide magazine, Creepy was designed to re-invent the horror comics of the fifties while capitalizing on the monster mania gripping kids of the sixties. The brainchild of writer-illustrator Russ Jones, this well-meaning monster mash made its debut on 1964’s newsstands standing shoulder to shoulder with Time and Saturday Evening Post.
Flaunting a neon yellow cover of moth-eaten ghouls painted by Jack Davis, Creepy had no trouble standing out from such a tweedy crowd. Its interiors, however, were more subdued, with stark black and white art from some of the comic industry’s best illustrators. Unfortunately the stories themselves were genuinely colorless; predictable potboilers starring crooked characters sure to meet a gruesome-yet-ironic fate. Nevertheless, that first issue seemed a reasonable launching pad for Jones’ nostalgic vision; new life for William Gaines’ E.C. Comics. Read more
Mar
29
101 Dalmations - Geronimi/Luske/Reitherman
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For most of the Sixties, Australia’s Rod Taylor owned America’s box office. The cheerfully pugnacious actor barreled his way through the tumultous decade with an equally protean body of work that produced, in alarmingly quick secession, pop-cultural touchstones (The Birds and The Time Machine), light romantic comedies (Do Not Disturb with Doris Day) and grim mercenary thrillers (Dark of the Sun co-starring Jim Brown.)
Working alongside the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Michaelangelo Antonioni, Taylor put a sophisticated spin on the standard-issue Action Hero; the actor possessed a coiled intelligence that was just as intimidating as his fists and was able to make even a bloody barroom brawl seem nuanced. But it took Walt Disney to bring attention to Taylor’s most overlooked gift, his voice. Read more
Mar
29
George of the Jungle - The Complete Series
Filed Under Reviews
Whether calmly dispatching a charging lion or cooly commandeering a bull elephant, Tarzan personified the noble savage, an uncivilized man who navigated the treacherous jungle terrain with the street-wise savvy of a New York cab driver. As portrayed by Johnny Weismuller, Tarzan’s vocabulary may have been limited to grunts, howls and the occasional pronoun but his native intelligence was never in doubt.
But what if Tarzan was as dumb as he sounded? Jay Ward and Bill Scott answered that question in 1967 with George of the Jungle, an animated parody that transforms Weismuller’s original aborigine into a very silly savage. Like Tarzan, George is a brawny, gung-ho hero, but it’s clear that this particular Jungle Jim has swung into one too many trees. Read more
Feb
3
There Will Be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson
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“…a vast plain, men crouched in uncomfortable positions, they show every symptom of distress… and now and then, amid grunts and groans, they cry out with excitement and triumph.”
That primal passage from Upton Sinclair is brought to life in the equally raw beginning to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Faustian epic, There Will Be Blood, based on Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!. Read more
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