Forthcoming Lists Discussion and Random Speculation Vol. 4

[Minkin]

I assume Naqoyqatsi is Janus as well.

Looks like its still with Miramax/Lionsgate. Perhaps a one-off license or some sort of Lionsgate/Miramax deal? I suppose Lionsgate would never release Naqoyqatsi on its' own.

[cdnchris]

Purple Noon is a pleasant surprise! I completely forgot that that one may finally be on the table for them to release. Solid month for December. Maybe July is the new "let's take it easy" month?

[matrixschmatrix]

Still leaves a lot of stuff from the New Year's clue hanging, doesn't it? I'm anxiously awaiting Wild Strawberries on blu, but I feel like there's a fair amount of other stuff that haven't popped up yet either.

[warren oates]

Like the Wenders road movies box or Pina and what else?. Still, it's impossible to complain with another great month like this one. Everything but Brazil for me. The Qatsi trilogy will be especially nice to see alongside Ron Fricke's Samsara, which looks great in 4K on the big screen and comes out on Blu-ray in December too.

[Jeff]

Are any of these licensed from Hollywood majors, aside from Brazil (Universal)?

Brazil = Universal
Koyaanisqatsi = MGM
Powaqqatsi = MGM
Naqoyqatsi = Miramax or possibly Steven Soderbergh, Miramax could just have theatrical and streaming rights now
Following = IFC
Purple Noon = Plaza Productions (French company that frequently licenses to Janus & Criterion for U.S. distribution.)

Still leaves a lot of stuff from the New Year's clue hanging, doesn't it? I'm anxiously awaiting Wild Strawberries on blu, but I feel like there's a fair amount of other stuff that haven't popped up yet either.

Like the Wenders road movies box or Pina and what else?

And your mother too. \:D/

[The Narrator Returns]

Everything but Brazil for me.

Yeah, yeah, I get that everybody has their own opinions and shit, but whaaaaaaa?

[criterion10]

BTW, is the Qatsi trilogy now the quickest newsletter hint announced yet? Or is it tied with Heaven's Gate?

I thought I'd make a small list of films that have been hinted at yet not released yet. Feel free to add to it:
Grey Gardens (Blu) -- Newsletter
On the Waterfront -- Newsletter
Wild Strawberries (Presumably DVD and Blu upgrade) -- New Year's Drawing
Y Tu Mama Tambien -- ???

[Jeff]

Y Tu Mama Tambien -- ???

New Year's drawing (the last two years in a row!)

[warren oates]

Everything but Brazil for me.

Yeah, yeah, I get that everybody has their own opinions and shit, but whaaaaaaa?

I certainly admire Gilliam's drive to make films in his own vision and his sometimes epic struggles to do so, they just don't usually click with me. I've gotten into this on other threads with matrix. It boils down to how I like to take my Kafka -- funny as the author intended, but with no extra goofy cartoon sauce on top. I also admit that I have a giant problem with almost all fantasy films. It's as if the genre's closed off to me. I can go as far as the "fantastique" if it's something like Lynch, but when the hobbits and orcs start coming out of the woodwork, my eyes glaze over.

[matrixschmatrix]

BTW, is the Qatsi trilogy now the quickest newsletter hint announced yet? Or is it tied with Heaven's Gate?

I thought I'd make a small list of films that have been hinted at yet not released yet. Feel free to add to it:
Grey Gardens (Blu) -- Newsletter
On the Waterfront -- Newsletter
Wild Strawberries (Presumably DVD and Blu upgrade) -- New Year's Drawing
Y Tu Mama Tambien -- ???

Bitter Rice too, no? There's quite a few from that sneak preview of movie lists we were decoding a long time ago- Ministry of Fear and Life of Oharu and so on- but we never had any particular date on those, so I can't really count them as delayed.

[Cinephrenic]

Can't really complain because I don't think we ever had a December slate this big. Looks like they wanted to push these titles out before the end of the year.

[captveg]

Are any of these licensed from Hollywood majors, aside from Brazil (Universal)?

Brazil = Universal
Koyaanisqatsi = MGM
Powaqqatsi = MGM
Naqoyqatsi = Miramax or possibly Steven Soderbergh, Miramax could just have theatrical and streaming rights now
Following = IFC
Purple Noon = Plaza Productions (French company that frequently licenses to Janus & Criterion for U.S. distribution.)

Thanks man!

[Jeff]

Bitter Rice too, no?

That was my guess based on a drawing in the New Year's clue two years ago. I thought this was Silvana Mangano in that film, but wonder now if it could have just been Harriet Andersson from Summer with Monika.

[onedimension]

'Following' is one of the longest hint-to-disc releases- but Y Tu... & Wild Strawberries will be up there.

[ShellOilJunior]

I'm most interested in Purple Noon.

I'll pass on Following and Brazil (Which I think is merely 'good'). It probably wasn't good to watch Brazil a few weeks after reading 1984 -- the book is much better in my estimation. I'd watch Brazil again but probably won't purchase.

[tavernier]

Nothing but Brazil for me.

Fixed!

[zedz]

Whoa! Biggest December ever?

Has to be-- for once this looks like a normal month

That's because we had an 'early Christmas' the month they only released Le Havre. (Lucky us!)

[Dragoon En Regalia]

Just Qatsi and, maybe after I've seen it, Following. We already have the original Brazil set at our house, and my family likes to get the most out of its DVD library.

[cdnchris]

I assume Naqoyqatsi is Janus as well.

Looks like its still with Miramax/Lionsgate. Perhaps a one-off license or some sort of Lionsgate/Miramax deal? I suppose Lionsgate would never release Naqoyqatsi on its' own.

The announcement e-mail lists both MGM and Lionsgate as the licensors. So you're probably right, they didn't see the value in releasing Naqoyqatsi on their own. (They have licenced to Criterion before with Kicking and Screaming, so they're obviously somewhat open to the idea.)

[ianungstad]

It's probably just a special one-off deal. Which would be unfortunate. There's plenty of Lionsgate titles I'd like to see Criterion take a crack at.

[cdnchris]

Oh for sure. They probably knew they would sell dick-all if they released it on their own and the only way to make money was to probably take a piece from Criterion's sales of a set, since they've had the other two from MGM for so long. I'm still curious as to why they let go of Kicking and Screaming but I'm guessing Baumbach pressed for that.

But at least they're open to it. If Warners owned it I doubt it would ever happen.

[HistoryProf]

Everything but Brazil for me.

Yeah, yeah, I get that everybody has their own opinions and shit, but whaaaaaaa?

Mr. Oates has certainly proven to be the most, erm, provocative? new member since James Mills graced us with his insights.

as for what we didn't get this year, at the bottom of my wishlist .doc I have the following listed as "confirmed" - the first three i believe were newsletter clues, while WS and Y tu mama were from the new years illustration...2 years ago!

Le Samourai
Pina
On the Waterfront
Ghost World
Wild Strawberries
Y tu mama tambien
Bitter Rice
Pierre Etaix Eclipse
The Shooting and The Hired Hand

[feihong]

I certainly admire Gilliam's drive to make films in his own vision and his sometimes epic struggles to do so, they just don't usually click with me. I've gotten into this on other threads with matrix. It boils down to how I like to take my Kafka -- funny as the author intended, but with no extra goofy cartoon sauce on top.

I can get behind this idea. I used to love Gilliam films as a child, but as time has gone on their lack of depth and filmcraft have made the Gilliam films feel unnaturally cold to me. Having met Gilliam and then watched the La Mancha documentary, I can see that Gilliam is certainly devoted to doing what he's doing, but I think he doesn't really have the intellectual capacity or the natural instinct necessary to engage too many worthwhile aspects of his medium--certainly he doesn't create the kind of work his ambition leads him to pursue.

What was most instructive to me was watching Orson Welles films as an adult, and discovering just how much Gilliam borrows straight out of Welles. The Trial and Mr. Arkadin seem to me the blueprint for Brazil. The distorted angles, the crosscurrents of dialogue, the compositions that dwarf human beings and lose them amid twirling spires of impossible architecture--Welles presented all these ideas and Gilliam clearly loves them and wants to work with them. But Welles' compositions are distorted and his audio tracks a cacophony because they reflect the alienation of real human beings--from their environments, from the bombardment of ideas that surround them. Welles shows people on the brink of cracking. But Gilliam shows us a gallery of people already cracked, turning in their own demented spirals. In Welles movies people intone tracts of dialogue at each other in vain hopes the other human being will hear them. In Gilliam films characters engage in a kind of sub-Python babble, absent of purpose--we can see that the point is missing, because not only does no one in a Gilliam film ever listen to all the demented chatter, but no one speaking in a Gilliam film ever expects anyone to listen, either. I don't see Gilliam having much use for people, for drama, or for plot. He really is just trying get us from one remarkable image to another, and while some filmmakers have worked wonders in this respect, Gilliam is weighed down; trapped in a mainstream moviespace that demands that he house his ideas in a moving, changing plot. Like Andy Warhol, story and character are not Gilliam's strengths. Unlike Andy Warhol, theme is not really Gilliam's strength either. He reaches out to Welles time and again, and he does aspire to show us people society thinks are crazy but that he believes are basically entirely on the level. But real alienation is never Gilliam's subject to command, because he can't apply his stylistic trappings to any story or character that would reveal such a theme. Welles presumes that the social spaces we create have become warped, and his style grows out of his desire to capture that warped space, and show us what has become twisted and perverted. Gilliam assumes that the basic structure of the world is warped--not absurd, the way Suzuki or Aldrich might see it, but patently insane. Gilliam accepts that skewed vision, and in fact he enjoys it. It makes me wonder what he got out of that time with Monty Python. How far was he in on the joke? Did he assume his fellow Pythons were funny just because they were nuts? Does he really not notice subversion, or separate it from the kind of neurotic quibbling that populates the plot-space of his own films?

I should also say that I found him to be very nice, chipper and manic, and I think he seemed extremely shy. I felt that he enjoyed frippery in general because it allowed him to stay hidden, and dodge direct questions. I never got the sense though that he thinks at all deeply about what he's doing. He's definitely very stubborn and dedicated, and his visual imagination is marvelous and full of unique images. But I think mainstream film is not necessarily the medium for his talents. He is an amazing survivor, though.

[matrixschmatrix]

Honestly, discussing 'the dialog in a Gilliam film' seems off the point, particularly relating the dialogue to Gilliam's own history in Python- most of his movies are co-written or written by others, and it's my understanding that he rarely writes the dialog even in those movies in which he gets a screenplay credit.

Dismissing him as someone who drifts from set piece to set piece seems also to betray at best a shallow viewing of his work- the things I remember from, say, 12 Monkeys are as much the characterization of the Bruce Willis character, childlike, alienated, hulkingly sensitive, and exceedingly charming as any of the larger setpieces, and often (as in Brazil) the visuals absolutely do work towards a more in-depth, expressionistic characterization, with the dream sequences literally representing the headspace of character who is certainly as well realized as any in the half-baked (though nonetheless wonderful) Mr. Arkadin.

It's easy enough to dismiss a filmmaker by comparing him to a revered one, to the revered one's disadvantage, but I think the cinema of Gilliam reaches so many people not simply because he can conjure the occasional striking image- Michael Bay can do that- but because there is a fully realized world in so many of his works, worlds inhabited by people who are recognizably human despite being somewhat deranged by the alterity of their surroundings. Their human qualities are vital to the functioning of the movies, and to me there's no question that Gilliam cares very deeply about both people and theme- the Palin character in Brazil, for instance, is an indelible portrait; it would be easy enough to play up the irony of his position, to make the torture prove that Palin's kindliness and affection for his family are mere hypocrisy, but Gilliam allows him to be shown as truly both, truly a decent man and also a monster, in a way I haven't seen elsewhere and which seems horribly familiar from recent events. Brazil is designed around that tension, and that tension is a wonderfully strong theme- which is obvious if one bothers to watch the Love Conquers All version, wherein it's excised.

[movielocke]

I certainly admire Gilliam's drive to make films in his own vision and his sometimes epic struggles to do so, they just don't usually click with me. I've gotten into this on other threads with matrix. It boils down to how I like to take my Kafka -- funny as the author intended, but with no extra goofy cartoon sauce on top.

I can get behind this idea. I used to love Gilliam films as a child, but as time has gone on their lack of depth and filmcraft have made the Gilliam films feel unnaturally cold to me. Having met Gilliam and then watched the La Mancha documentary, I can see that Gilliam is certainly devoted to doing what he's doing, but I think he doesn't really have the intellectual capacity or the natural instinct necessary to engage too many worthwhile aspects of his medium--certainly he doesn't create the kind of work his ambition leads him to pursue.

I should also say that I found him to be very nice, chipper and manic, and I think he seemed extremely shy. I felt that he enjoyed frippery in general because it allowed him to stay hidden, and dodge direct questions. I never got the sense though that he thinks at all deeply about what he's doing. He's definitely very stubborn and dedicated, and his visual imagination is marvelous and full of unique images. But I think mainstream film is not necessarily the medium for his talents. He is an amazing survivor, though.

There are few intellectual onanisms as satisfying and self-flattering as declaring an other to be intellectually insufficient.

Additionally, creating a reductive binary comparison only reveals the limitations of the analyst's insight who is engaging in such a regrettable flattening. Such flattening is typically rendered invalid upon examination by the simple mechanism of selection/confirmation bias; reduction generally fails at any insight but is almost always successful at revealing the aesthetic preferences of the analyst rather than actually engaging with the work being critiqued.