Happy Half Anniversary

Hi, everybody! This week marks six months of the newsletter, and I wanted to open with my profound thanks, to all of you, for buying into this project. You could have thrown your cash into crypto, but you chose a more righteous path, and I really appreciate your support. (Also, tell your friends!)

I wanted to open this edition by asking for feedback. Are you enjoying Shiny Things? Is there anything you want to see more or less of? The one thing I’ve been thinking about is the way reviewing a film theatrically might take away from more comprehensive coverage when the disc comes out – especially now that home releases follow within weeks of a theatrical opening, rather than months. Anybody have any thoughts on that? Would you prefer I hold all coverage until the film is available on disc, or do you want to know about a given title as soon as it’s in theatres? Bear in mind that I don’t attend quite as many press screening as I used to, so it’s not like there’ll be theatrical coverage every week or even every month.

Let me know! It says I’ve enabled comments on the web posts, but if you’d rather reach out directly you can just e-mail me at normwilner@gmail.com. I really am interested in the feedback … but whatever happens, I’m definitely gonna review The Fabelmans next week.

Here’s another reason to e-mail me: I made a mistake in Thursday’s edition. David Bowie was famous for wandering around New York with a foreign-language newspaper tucked under his arm, but it wasn’t German; I’m not sure how I got that wrong, but Kate caught it as soon as the newsletter landed in her inbox. (She rightly noted that it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Bowie carrying a German publication; he lived in Berlin for a few key years, after all.)

Anyway, that now leads us to a trivia question: E-mail the correct nationality and/or language of Bowie’s newspaper of choice to normwilner@gmail.comwith the subject line “Bowie Incognito” for a chance to win the Moonage Daydream Blu-ray, courtesy of the very nice people at Elevation Pictures. Boom! A giveaway right off the top! Canadian residents only (sorry), contest closes at 12 pm ET on Wednesday November 23^rd.

Now, where were we? Oh, right:

I’m not sure I have anything left to say about Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca at this point. It’s one of the greatest studio movies ever made, and I’ve written about its various editions for various publications since the very earliest days of my career. VHS, LD, DVD – they came out, I covered ’em.

Ten years ago I went out to Washington when Warner Home Entertainment flew critics out to D.C. to inaugurate the Warner Bros. Theater at the Smithsonian with a screening of the new 4K restoration, starting the ball rolling on Casablanca’s 70^thanniversary. My piece on the event vanished in one of MSN Movies’ content purges a while back, but it was a fun night and the film looked just swell – though the sound wasn’t quite loud enough to muffle the gentleman behind me compulsively muttering every line of dialogue along with the cast.

Maybe that’s to be expected. As a cultural experience, Casablanca exists beyond itself; like Citizen Kane, Psycho and The Godfather, more people have seen it parodied and referenced in other media than have watched the actual film. But watch the film and all that goes away; Casablanca remains a pretty much perfect movie, a story of resistance and redemption with solid narrative lines, sharp dialogue and sharper performances.

Every single actor is in peak form, in service to the story; Bogart and Bergman play an exquisite duet of longing and hurt that only their characters can fully appreciate, while the supporting cast colors in their stock types with vivid specificity, giving the picture an urgency that reflects its wartime production. Was Rick Blaine a stand-in for America, working up the courage to get off its ass and join the fight against Hitler? Or was it just that Bogart’s weariness and amoral posturing created the metaphor in the moment?

André Gregory – André Gregory! – picked Casablanca for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie a couple of years ago, and we explored that, and much more; he actually saw the film as a kid on its opening day, and offers some invaluable context as to how it played with audiences of the time. Give that a listen if you haven’t already. Or listen to it again, it holds up just fine.

So does Casablanca, of course. With the film’s 80^th anniversary approaching, Warner released a 4K disc earlier this month, built around a new Ultra High Definition restoration from what the studio describes as “the best-surviving nitrate film elements” – and if that leads you to lower your expectations, I suggest you bring them right back up again. This disc is a stunner, an excellent demonstration of how digital restoration technology can coax celluloid back to vivid life.

Don’t worry about the digital techniques smoothing or blurring out any fine details; Casablanca feels properly photochemical, with the higher resolution bringing new textures and details to light, and HDR kicking in to add depth to shadows and silhouettes. The monaural soundtrack has been fully remastered as well, sounding richer and more vibrant even than it did in the Blu-ray release. Within minutes I was willing to call this the best presentation of Casablanca I’ve ever seen, and that includes three theatrical screenings.

Perhaps aware that anyone who’d be willing to buy a bells-and-whistles collector’s edition of Casablanca already owns either the 65^th or 70^th anniversary Blu-ray boxed sets, Warner has opted to go a simpler route with the 4K release. There are no new extras here, but the accompanying 70^th anniversary Blu-ray offers hours of supplements – commentaries from Roger Ebert and Rudy Behlmer, Bacall on Bogart, a feature-length episode of PBS’ Great Performances, a shorter but no less interesting 2011 celebration of director Curtiz, new interviews with Bogart’s son Stephen and Bergman’s daughter Pia Lindstrom and another dozen or so extras produced for earlier home-video releases. If you never got around to picking up the 70^th anniversary set, well, have at it.

And since the holiday season is upon us, Warner also rolled out new 4K editions of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Elf this month. I only asked for Elf, because I promised I’d only write about movies I liked in this newsletter and also life is short.

Jon Favreau’s Christmas charmer remains as adorable and heartwarming as ever, and the new UHD master is a dazzler, with bright colors and delightful details popping throughout the film. It’s a substantial upgrade from the existing Blu-ray, which I spun up this time last year when Brooke Nevin picked the film for her SEMcast; I would have said the HD master was fine, but in comparison to the UHD it looks almost washed-out, as though whoever did the transfer wanted to balance out the different color temperatures of the North Pole sequences and the Manhattan locations.

The new 4K edition is much livelier, playing up the Rankin-Bass pastels in Santa’s world while also leaving room for more organic reds and greens in New York, especially in the toy store. I was especially pleased to see that the added definition allows Will Ferrell’s Buddy to seem even more manic and terrifying in early scenes, where his eyes sparkle with Christmas madness in a way that lets us understand why James Caan’s Walter might be a little wary of letting him into his apartment, let alone his life. The 2008 Blu-ray is included with the 4K disc, in case you want to compare the two – or just revisit the supplemental package, which is still very sweet. So is the movie, which marks its 20^th anniversary next year and still feels kind of miraculous, really.

Forgive the awkward segue, but I've been meaning to write about this next set since before Halloween:

Last fall, when Edgar Wright and I were talking about Last Night in Soho, I cited Italian giallo films as a clear inspiration for that film’s supernaturally inflected psychological-thriller textures – your Argentos, your Bavae, your Ercolii – and he agreed, up to a point. His real influence, he said, was the wave of increasingly stylish British cinema from which the Italians took their cue – Hammer horror, sure, but also Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and especially Powell’s Peeping Tom. The Italians may have perfected giallo, in his opinion, but the English started the ball rolling.

Why am I telling you this story to preface a review of Arrow Films’ new boxed set Gothic Fantastico: Four Italian Tales of Terror? Because the quartet of black-and-white thrillers collected in this Blu-ray boxed set feel like the bridge point between the two, a liminal creative space between 1963 and 1966 when filmmakers tried to riff on an existing trend and wound up creating something else entirely. Mario Bava’s Black Sunday had already happened, offering producers and directors a template for heaving tales of haunted manses, unquiet legends and strange, sexually-charged entanglements, but Bava’s formula was so specific and weird that no one else could get it right. The films in this set feel like experiments to figure out another way to recombine those elements – which Arrow summarizes handily as “madness, obsession and messed-up families” – for an audience that clearly wanted more.

I’m used to ambitious boxed sets containing films I’ve never seen, but this one contains movies I’d never even heard of – The Blancheville Monster, Lady Morgan’s Vengeance, The Third Eye and The Witch, presented on separate Blu-ray platters with a reasonable assortment of special features. Each title is offered in a new 2K restoration, scanned and restored from the original camera negative, with remastered Italian soundtracks, and English dubs for all but Lady Morgan’s Vengeance. As Arrow points out in its restoration notes, all four films were shot with post-synch sound, allowing for greater flexibility in the dubbing … but meaning no one soundtrack is the “true” audio. It’s a very entertaining ride through a period of Italian genre cinema with which I was not at all familiar, and there’s something to enjoy in every film.

Lady Morgan’s Vengeance, directed by Massimo Pupillo, is an almost preposterously proper Gothic romance that hides a roiling psychosexual funhouse, as nobleman Paul Muller and his overly familiar maid Erika Blanc do their best to do in his innocent new bride (Barbara Nelli); I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Guillermo Del Toro spent a little too much time watching this one as a kid. The Blancheville Monster, from journeyman genre helmer Alberto De Martino, mashes up several Edgar Allan Poe stories – or at least lifts their tropes – for a tale of family members scheming to undo one another in their remote castle.

The Witch is a hothouse drama following an academic (Richard Johnson) caught in a sort of erotic feedback loop at the home of a strange woman (Sarah Ferrati) and her hot young daughter (Rosanna Schiaffino). Damiano Damiani pours on the hallucinatory flourishes, but for all his verve his movie’s weirdness pales next to Mino Guerrini’s The Third Eye, a blatant reworking of Hitchcock’s Psycho that casts Franco Nero – Django himself – considerably against type as a sheltered taxidermist whose possessive mother (Olga Sobelli) engineers the death of his girlfriend (Lady Morgan’s Blanc, looking eerily like Patti D’Arbanville’s twin sister here)… and that’s just the first act.

Things get considerably wilder as the film goes on, and if the premise sounds familiar it might be because exploitation legend Joe d’Amato reworked the elements for his 1979 splatter film Beyond the Darkness – which itself was part of a post-giallo movement in ultraviolent Italian cinema. Look at that, we were traveling in a circle the whole time.

Arrow’s scholarly-minded supplements lean heavily on film critics and video essayists; Mark Thompson Ashworth provides a video introduction to each film, and Kat Ellinger, Miranda Corcoran, Keith Allison, Lindsay Hallam, Paul Anthony Nelson, Rachael Nisbet and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas contribute commentaries and video essays. Antonio Tentori, a screenwriter who’s worked with Fulci and Argento, weighs in on The Blancheville Monster and The Witch, while Erika Blanc puts in separate features about working on Lady Morgan’s Vengeance and The Third Eye; Lady Morgan director Pupillo and star Muller each get their own sit-downs on that disc. The limited-edition set comes packaged with an 80-page book of essays and a double-sided poster; I was sent check discs, so I can’t speak to those … but I expect they’ll live up to Arrow’s customary standards for this sort of thing.

Arrow’s also offered the spiffy special-edition treatment to a pair of movies that could be seen as the American response to the Hammer horror movement: The Count Yorga Collection is a two-disc set of Bob Kelljan’s Hammer riffs Count Yorga, Vampire and The Return of Count Yorga, which play with the idea of an aristocratic European bloodsucker arriving in Los Angeles rather than London to feast on the attractive young women of Southern California. They aren’t good, exactly, but they’re kind of great, mashing up the stuffy self-seriousness of British horror cinema with the mildly disreputable American milieu in which they were conceived. We also get the fun of spotting baby-faced Michael Murphy and Craig T. Nelson in tiny roles – Murphy in the original, and Nelson in the sequel.

Arrow’s set offers new 2K restorations of both films taken from 4K scans of the original camera negatives, adding a slew of fun new supplements – like a present-day interview with Murphy, and an appreciation for Count Yorga from Frank Darabont, among others – to archival extras produced for earlier editions of the films, boxing it all up with a hardcover book of essays, a double-sided poster, lobby cards and a reproduction of the original Count Yorga pressbook. Again, I only received check discs, so I didn’t get to play with any of the add-ons. But if you’re building a holiday wish list, both this set and the Gothic Fantastico would be nice things to include.

And that’s it for another week! If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly the sort of nerd who’ll provide valuable feedback, and I’d love to hear it – so send me an e-mail at normwilner@gmail.com and offer any thoughts you might have. And it’s okay to Google the answer to the Moonage Daydream trivia question; it turns out there were quite a few stories about that newspaper.

Coming next week: New 4K releases of Malcolm X, Saturday Night Fever, Wayne’s World and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and that review of The Fabelmans I teased at the top. See you soon.