CRITICALMASSCAST

The return of Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair has us waxing nostalgic for the 90s, a decade full of music we love/hate. We discuss the evolution of girl pop over the last two decades, review several new releases and TV shows, and provide an update on the TIFF 2010 gala presentations.

Concert Review: Lilith 2010
Film Reviews: Despicable Me, Salt, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
DVD Reviews: Winter Light (Criterion Edition), BBC’s Beautiful People
TV Reviews: Mad Men (Season 4), Pillars of the Earth

STREAM/DOWNLOAD: M4A Enhanced Podcast

Anyone familiar with CriticalMassCast will know that we are huge fans of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, collectively known The Archers.  We even devoted a special podcast episode to their most lauded collaboration, The Red Shoes, which you can find here.

The British power duo’s iconic Technicolor classics Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes return to the Criterion Collection this week in eye-popping new digital transfers. These Blu-ray and DVD editions bring new clarity to the former’s expressionistic Himalayan highs and the latter’s exquisitely demonic dances. Blu-ray.com calls this Black Narcissus “the definitive presentation” and The Red Shoes “a spectacular package.”

You can check out some of the Criterion Collection’s other technicolour offerings at this link and stay tuned to CriticalMassCast for the second film series edition special devoted to Black Narcissus later this summer!!

The Criterion Collection have announced their upcoming April titles, among them Jean-Luc Godard’s visually stunning New Wave masterwork Vivre sa vie; Sidney Lumet’s brilliant Tennessee Williams adaptation The Fugitive Kind (certainly overdue for a renaissance), starring Marlon Brando and…. Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, which was touted as my #3 best film of 2009 on episode three and a favourite film of mine.

The film will be available as a 2-disc DVD edition and a 1-disc Blu-Ray on April 20, 2010 .  Here is what you can expect on the Criterion edition:

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Olivier Assayas and cinematographer Eric Gautier (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• New video interview with Assayas
• A short documentary featuring interviews with Assayas and actors Charles Berling and Juliette Binoche, and showing the cast and crew on set
• Inventory, an hour-long documentary by Olivier Gonard, shot partly in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, that examines the film’s approach to art
• Theatrical trailer
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Kent Jones

- posted by Greg