What Blu-Ray did you watch last night?

[Steve Klare]

Saturday Night: Amadeus

I love this movie, watch it maybe once a year.

I walked away with it with a different point of view this time: kind of a new appreciation for electric light! Watching Mozart walk around the apartment with a candelabra trying to do demanding visual work like writing music, of course I know better, but I kept getting this nagging feeling: "Maybe if you were smarter with money, you could pay the power bill!".

-Modern Problems!

Movies like this are actually healthy for we modern people to appreciate what we have: the poor man was laying there dying in a room without central heat, no ambulance, no emergency room, no blood tests, no antibiotics, no x-rays and prime time for some "doctor" to show up and "cure" him by opening a vein and taking some blood. (There's an opinion that healthcare was so terrible back then that people who were too poor to afford a doctor were often better off.)

Life is still far from perfect, but it has to be better than this! (I mean: did you see that...mental healthcare facility?)

[Graham Ritchie]

This one from "Imprint" the picture quality is very good, as with the special effects. A good nights entertainment projected using the Epson. I had never seen this movie before, but as I was watching, some of it reminded me of 2001.

[Graham Ritchie]

Watched the blu-ray of "Spitfire" projected using the Epson two nights ago. For anyone interested in aircraft this is outstanding documentary, highly recommend it.

[Graham Ritchie]

After listening to the excellent soundtrack on LP by Maurice Jarre the other day, I was thinking I should once again watch the movie, so I did, now the only thing I have to navigate is the Spanish menu to get the Ingles soundtrack this is where learning at school another language would have come in handy. I have bought blu-ray titles from not just Spain, but from Italy, France and Germany all Region "B" blu-ray the same as Australia and NZ.

I have to add that I have been happy with the blu-ray quality from those countries, no complaints. Anyway back to the movie, this was the second film Harrison Ford did for Peter Weir. The one before was "Witness". Hopefully one day both films will be given the full restoration works, as I think they deserve it.

Anyway a couple of previous screen shots thrown in from the Spanish release, one thing that would be really nice is finding good color 35mm prints of both titles, now that would be something.

[Ed Gordon]

Graham, Witness is available on Bluray. You can find copies of it on Ebay for about $15 (US). Witness is one of those movies you can re-watch often. Mosquito Coast was ok, but not in the same league as Witness.

[Graham Ritchie]

That's true Ed I have "Witness" on blu-ray, overall I think to that its a better film than "The Mosquito Coast". I don't think it did well on its cinema release. Harrison Ford character came across as a person totally absorb in himself to the cost of his family. I have never read the book, but understand he was even worse in the novel.

[Ed Gordon]

That's true Ed I have "Witness" on blu-ray, overall I think to that its a better film than "The Mosquito Coast". I don't think it did well on its cinema release. Harrison Ford character came across as a person totally absorb in himself to the cost of his family. I have never read the book, but understand he was even worse in the novel.

Your comment about Ford's character being "a person totally absorb in himself to the cost of his family" may be the reason the film did not do to well. I only watched it once, and the only thing that stayed with me was a dislike of Harrison Ford's character (Han Solo can't ever be a bad character!). Another factor may be that Paul Schrader wrote the script. His style worked well in Taxi Driver, but did not work in Mosquito Coast.

Siskel & Ebert agreed with us on Witness:

Maurice Jarre did the score for both films. His Witness score is a highlight of this scene of the barn building:

[Steve Klare]

We found out something kind of astounding about our son the other night: twenty-one years old, he had never seen a James Bond movie! What makes this disturbing is being the son of a film collector, he's been pretty generously exposed to culture beyond his own century: he knows who Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were and if you say to him "Moses supposes his toeses are roses" he's likely to answer "-but Moses supposes erroneously!".

-so despite the years sending this kid to college, we had an obvious gap in his education to fix!

The solution came with my Blu-ray of You Only Live Twice. This is actually a very special movie to me. It just may be the first big-screen movie I ever saw, and is absolutely the earliest one I remember. I was five years old, enjoying that last summer of sweet freedom before I was sentenced to Kindergarten! (I made parole the following June...) We were renting a cottage next to a lake in way-upstate New York and there was a drive-in theater down the road. The car was Mom's one year-old 1966 Mustang coupe. I remember the speaker hanging in Dad's window, the astronaut being stranded out in space, and particularly the helicopter with the big magnet dropping that Toyota sedan full of bad-guys in the water. (James Bond's...interludes with multiple gorgeous women wouldn't make a strong impression until Junior High: a five year old just isn't...equipped to process these ideas!)

It's all about showmanship, so I needed to set the scene for my kid. I told him the story of when I first saw the movie. I got the drive-in speaker and set it up in front of the screen. I often lead with some film-based shorts, and in this case I went with the Pathé Pic, Auto Cine on Super-8:

Auto Cine (1967)

-about Rome's brand new drive-in theater. It was a nice choice because this just happens to be the same summer we went to see You Only Live Twice at the Starlite drive-in six time zones away, and by a happy coincidence there is also a '66 Mustang coupe in attendance.

While 007 was romping in the Murphy bed with that spectacular young woman, I said "Can you imagine how my parents felt seeing this with two young kids in the car?" -as a young adult, he understands this completely because he sometimes has to sit through...intense scenes with his Mom and Dad there! (Opposite, yet Equal!).

We on the other hand enjoy these moments: good for a lecherous smile at least!

On reflection, five decades later: I'd say You Only Live Twice was mostly a movie for Dad! (In my own way, I enjoyed it too!)

So now our kid has at long last seen a Bond film. Now don't get me wrong here: this educational process is an ongoing thing! For example he's pretty firm on just who Bing Crosby was, but we still have a way to go on Bob Hope.

(We'll keep at it!)

[Mike Newell]

Avatar The Way of Water and Indiana Jones Dial of Destiny. Avatar was faultless and brilliant despite long running time. Indiana Jones was fine but CGI effects were definitely a bit dodgy at the start. Reminded me of Polar Express.

[Brian Fretwell]

Jumanji, Welcome to the Jungle. I'd seen this on TV a few times but as the HD box attached to my projector packed up not on the big screen, so when I saw the disc fr £2 second hand I had to get it. woth it for the scenery alone. (I am NOT talking about Karen Gillan)!!!

[Graham Ritchie]

Yes and she did all her own stunts much to the praise of the stunt people and cast, including of her fitness by Dwayne Johnson in the making of. It really does come across that everyone got on really well on set. The Epson can do 3D as well, so its one movie to watch every so often in that format.

[Mike Newell]

Poor Things. Interesting movie. Definitely different from the Marvel Universe 😂

[Ed Gordon]

Remember when you were a kid, and you could never understand why the adults praised the movies of their time when all you saw were old scratched films on the small black and white TV screen?

As Mark Twain observed:

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

I recently watched a restoration of the 1953 film Beat the Devil.

The 2k restoration was made from a 4k scan of the original camera negative. The original sound track was also restored. As for the film itself, Roger Ebert said:

John Huston's "Beat the Devil" (1953) shows how much Hollywood has lost by devaluing its character actors. In an age when a $20 million star must be on the screen every second, this picture could not be made. Huston has stars, too: Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, but his movie is so funny because he throws them into the pot with a seedy gang of charlatans. "We have to beware of them," the Jones character warns her husband. "They're desperate characters. Not one of them looked at my legs."

"Beat the Devil" went straight from box office flop to cult classic and has been called the first camp movie, although Bogart, who sank his own money into it, said, "Only phonies like it." It's a movie that was made up on the spot; Huston tore up the original screenplay on the first day of filming, flew the young Truman Capote to Ravallo, Italy, to crank out new scenes against a daily deadline and allowed his supporting stars, especially Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, to create dialogue for their own characters. (Capote spoke daily by telephone with his pet raven, and one day when the raven refused to answer he flew to Rome to console it, further delaying the production.)

There are times during the movie when you can sense Capote chuckling to himself as he supplies improbable dialogue for his characters. Lollobrigida, the Italian sex star, was making her first English-language movie, but Capote has her explain, "Emotionally, I am English." She claims to take tea and crumpets every afternoon, and quotes the writer George Moore, who I believe has not been quoted before or since in any movie. Bogart describes his early upbringing: "I was an orphan until I was 20. Then a rich and beautiful lady adopted me." And Lorre of course has his famous dialogue about time, which deserves comparison with Orson Welles' "cuckoo clock" speech in "The Third Man." "Time . . . time," Lorre says. "What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook."

If "Beat the Devil" puzzled audiences on its first release, it has charmed them since. Jones told the critic Charles Champlin that Huston promised her: "Jennifer, they'll remember you longer for `Beat the Devil' than for `Song of Bernadette.' " True, but could Huston have guessed that they would remember him more for "Beat the Devil" than for the picture he made next, "Moby Dick"?

Read Ebert's full review at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/g...the-devil-1954

[Brian Fretwell]

Catchimg up (a little ) on previous purchases last night it was "Carry on Jack" a naval comedy that only had two members of the regular "Carry on Team" in it (Charles Hawtree and Kenneth Williams) though had future regular Jim Dale in a small role. Mainly great picture quality, but the high definition really showed up the duped in sailing shots taken from othe films, the bit rate went down by a third during these as well showing the lack of detail. I'll have to watchi it agin with Bernard Cribben's narration.

[Graham Ritchie]

"The Great Escape" 1963 the 50th Anniversary Edition blu-ray, taken from the original camera negative and studio source elements. One of the films I remember watching at the old La Scala cinema during the 60s,