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NEWS ARCHIVE - 30th JANUARY - 5th JANUARY 2006 |
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3rd February 2006
DVD
Technically, it's more of a re-write-and-update of the existing review, since we'd already looked at MGM's 2001 Special Edition, and the deleted Criterion Collection DVD. I've also upgraded and enlarged the screen-grabs from the older editions (and added the equivalent frames from the new edition). Click on the sleeve image, left, or here to go to the review. The new edition is due on February the 20th. Here's a shot of the new edition's packaging...
Sony has some interesting titles scheduled for the next month or two, including a new editions of The Magnificent Seven and Platoon. Here's their schedule. 27th February The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953); Little Nikita; Rescue Me - Season One; Huff - Season One; Hunt For Eagle One; The Net 2.0; Cutting Edge - Going For Gold; Adrenalin - Fear The Rush; Appointment With Death; The Tie That Binds; Crossplot; Dream Lover; The Silence of the Lambs - The Ultimate Edition 6th March The Legend of Zorro; Platoon - Ultimate Edition; Foreigner 2 - Black Down; Hex - Season 2 12th March State's Property 2 13th March Empire of the Wolves; White Dragon 20th March The Exorcism of Emily Rose; Thumbsucker; Happy Endings; The Magnificent Seven; Die Die My Darling (a.k.a. Hammer's Fanatic) 27th March Steamboy; Beautiful Country 3rd April Fascination (Jacqueline Bisset); The Gospel 10th April Hart to Hart - Season 1 17th April Magic in the Water; A Knight's Tale - Special Edition; The Patriot - Collector's Edition 24th April Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children; Madison; The Producers Here's some sleeve art...
The disc will include a commentary track, by director Martin Campbell and cinematographer Phil Meheux, BSC. The disc will also feature deleted scenes (with optional director's commentary, 10m); behind-the-scenes featurettes (Stunts (10m); Visual Effects (6m); Armand's Party (12m); Playing With Trains (12m)); and two multi-angle scene deconstructions. This appears to be identical to the US edition, with the possible exception of the film's trailer (which is on the US disc, but probably wouldn't be listed as a bonus extra on the disc's sleeve). Running times for the bonus materials, above, are taken from the US disc (which was released this week). The RRP for the UK edition is £19.99. Tartan's schedule for the next couple of months - always in flux - currently looks like this: February 20th Vital; One Night In Mongkok; Primer; Union City March 27th Battle In Heaven; Ab-normal Beauty; Tell Me Something; Guy X; Calvaire; Saraband (Bergman); After The Rehearsal (Bergman) April 24th
A Bittersweet Life; Top Spot
May 22nd
Lady Vengeance; No Rest For The
Brave; Music In Darkness (Bergman Collection), Prison
June 26th Another Public Enemy; Dumplings; Kim Ki-Duk's Address Unknown; Pleasant Days; Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being WIld and As Tears Go By (with Cantonese soundtracks and commentaries by leading filmmakers influenced by him); Jess Franco Double Bill: Devil's Island Lovers and Night of the Assassins. 24th July
The Proposition (bonus features:
exclusive interviews with Guy Pearce and Danny Huston, details TBC);
Three and Three: Extremes (including the original version of
Dumplings); U-Carmen Ekhayelitsha; Kim Ki-Duk's The Coast
Guard; Crush;
Future Releases
36 Quai de Orfevres; The King;
The Devil and Daniel Johnson; Blood and Bones; Death of
Mr Lazarescu; Wal-Mart - The High Cost of Low Price;
Brothers of the Head (based on the novel by Brian Aldiss); Battle
Royale II: Revenge (two-disc limited edition tin); Von Trier's The
Kingdom (box set); Irreversible - Collector's Edition; The
Idiots
Optimum's schedule looks like this: 13th February Chronos 27th February Murderball; Laputa Castle in the Sky; Kiki's Delivery Service 13th March Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle 27th March
Pulse;
10th April Gojoe; My Neighbours The Yamadas; Whispers of the Heart 24th April John Woo's Run Tiger Run; Jeffrey Lau's Treasure Hunt; Mike Figgis' Stormy Monday May The Collected Adventures of Asterix (Asterix and Cleopatra, Asterix The Gaul, 12 Tasks of Asterix, Asterix in Britain, Asterix and Caesar and Asterix And the Big Fight); The Crying Game - Special Edition; Man Thing June The Louis Malle Collection (Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud, Le Feu Follet, Les Amants, Zazie Dans Le Metro); Almodovar - Volume 2 (Law of Desire, Matador, Flower of My Secret, Kika)
A six-disc box set will feature all twenty-six episodes of the CBS series, which were originally aired in 1970 and 1971. This includes episodes featuring guest appearances by Tony Bennett, Henry Fonda and Meredith Baxter.
As before, the series will be available as a box set, with an RRP of £29.99, or as six individual discs, with an RRP of £9.99 each.
The discs will feature a choice of Dolby Digital 2.0, Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1 tracks, with English HoH subtitles. The discs will also feature "script (DVD-ROM content)". RRP for the set is £24.99 - a bit steep considering the current 10-disc box set can usually be found for about £17. More interesting are Anchor Bay's plans to release Anders Østergaard's excellent documentary Tintin Et Moi. This was previously only available here as a bonus disc with the first pressing of the aforementioned ten-disc Tintin box set. RRP for the seventy-five minute documentary is £16.99.
The series plays with the events of Alley's own life, as she struggled with weight gain. In Fat Actress she plays a fictitious version of herself, struggling to re-establish her place on the Hollywood ladder. The show includes numerous guest appearances, including cameos by John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Kid Rock, Carmen Electra, Melissa Gilbert, Rhea Perlman and Wallace Shawn. The two-disc set will feature all seven "half-hour" episodes, presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen format, with a choice of 2.0 stereo or Dolby Digital 5.1 audio tracks. The set will also include deleted scenes and biographies. RRP for the set is £19.99. AUDIO BOOKS NEWS BBC Audiobooks has announced that they will be releasing three brand new Doctor Who CD titles read by David Tennant in July. Recording of the three stories, The Stone Rose, The Resurrection Casket and The Feast of the Drowned, will begin next month. The adventures will be written by established Doctor Who authors Stephen Cole, Jacqueline Rayner and Justin Richards. The discs will include bonus material featuring children "asking the Doctor everything they've ever wanted to know about life as a Time Lord". EVENT NEWS The Official Catweazle Fan Club is organising a Summer Fete at the series' "Hexwood Farm" location on June the 17th. It is hoped that star Geoffrey Bayldon and series creator Richard Carpenter will attend. More details can be found here. 30th January 2006 ZETA MINOR NEWS Ceri has updated the Incoming and Offers pages! Since the pages were last updated, a lot of titles have been announced or moved, so there's been a lot to catch up with. Hopefully you'll find a new title or two, and a couple of bargains you didn't know about. Play.com's sale ends today, I believe, so don't hang about if you wanted something from them! We're currently working on a new way of presenting this information, which will make it much easier for us to keep on top off, so please bear with us for a few more weeks! DVD NEWS
The disc will be presented in anamorphic widescreen format, with Tartan's customary choice of Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 audio tracks. Bonus features include exclusive interviews with Reygadas and one of the film's stars, Anapola Mushkadiz. RRP for the disc is £19.99.
Godzilla is presented in 4:3 format, in Japanese with optional, newly-translated English subtitles. It’s generally in pretty good condition: it has reasonably good contrast, but, unsurprisingly, exhibits constant signs of wear and tear (the BFI aren't very hot on restoration). The film is supplemented by a very informative commentary track (by Godzilla experts Steve Ryfle, Keith Aiken and Ed Godziszewski); a short documentary about the incident that inspired the film, The Japanese Fishermen (11m); featurettes on the film’s design (Designing Godzilla, 13m) and Story Evolution (6m); trailers; and poster, storyboard and artwork galleries. This is a box set edition with an illustrated booklet, featuring notes by Asian films specialist Ian Buruma. Honda’s 1957 science-fiction classic The Mysterians is presented in its original colour Tohoscope 2.35:1 format, with anamorphic enhancement. There’s no sign of the original Perspecta Stereophonic Sound: it's in rather crackly mono (some rudimentary noise reduction would have been very welcome). The Mysterians is in much better condition than Godzilla, although the multiple-pass optical techniques being used at the time do add their own layers of grime whenever the effects kick in! The disc will include a booklet with notes by Kim Newman.
The Mysterians is due on February
the 13th.
There are thirteen episodes in the series, including one that was apparently banned from being screened in the United States (Takashi Miike's Imprint). The series includes episodes directed by many of the genre's biggest names: John Carpenter, Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Joe Dante, John Landis, Stuart Gordon, Larry Cohen, Lucky McKee, James McNaughton, William Malone, Takashi Miike, and the brains behind the series, Executive Producer Mick Garris. Anchor Bay will release the series two episodes at a time, at bi-monthly intervals, beginning with Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, and Stuart Gordon's Dream in the Witch House (which is based on a story by Lovecraft). Each release will be a two-disc set, featuring interviews, commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes and that old chestnut "much more". RRP for the disc is £19.99.
The Emmy-winning series, a dramatised history of the NASA Apollo missions, is twelve hour-long episodes long. The set will include a behind-the-scenes featurette, a special effects featurette, six trailers, and "menu-based" things called History of the Moon and Famous Astrologers. Several minor features that are on the US edition are missing from the UK version. Technical spec's for the set were not confirmed. In the US the series has been released twice on DVD. Initially the series was offered in 4:3 ratio, the way it originally aired. The Signature Edition version presented them in 1.78:1 widescreen format. The Signature Edition also offered a choice of Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS tracks (the original release was Dolby Digital only), and spread the episodes over more discs (five, instead of three). The RRP is £44.99 (a bit cheaper than the US set's RRP). The pack shot is the American sleeve art, but it's the one the press release is using, so it's likely to be more-or-less identical. Last week's Zeta Minor News can be viewed here. Previous Zeta Minor News entries can viewed here. |
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The
Legend of Zorro, due on March the 6th, will be presented in anamorphic
widescreen format, with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. An Audio Described track
is also offered, as are English HoH subtitles. 
The
third season of The Doris Day Show will be released by Sanctuary on
March the 20th, just in time for Mother's Day!
Anchor
Bay has two treats for fans of everyone's favourite boy detective, Tintin,
in the next few weeks. On March the 27th they're releasing a three-disc
Herge's Adventures of Tintin box set, which will feature three
animated adventures: Tintin and the Calculus Affair, Tintin and
the Prisoners of the Sun and Tintin and the Mystery of Shark Lake.
According to the press release "all three film [sic] are being released in
versions never before available". Sadly, the press release doesn't
elaborate on this point.
Anchor
Bay is releasing the Kirstie Alley comedy series Fat Actress on
March the 27th.
Tartan
has confirmed the releases date of Battle In Heaven, Carlos
Reygadas's controversial film about a kidnapper's breakdown after a child
he kidnapped dies. The disc will be released on March the 27th.
More
details about the BFI's release of the original Japanese version of
Godzilla, and Toho's The Mysterians are now available. 
Anchor
Bay will be releasing the acclaimed cable-TV series Masters of Horror
on DVD , starting on March the 13th.
HBO
Video will release From The Earth To The Moon - The Signature Edition
on March the 20th.
