Studio Canal / Kinowelt / Optimum

[Randall Maysin Again]

I think MIchaelB said the BBC are a real b*tch to deal with and demand enormous sums of money for these things, though maybe he was just referring to little boutique labels rather than those that are an arm of an actual production company or studio. But I think if its not on the Amazon listing now with all the other stuff, its not going to show up later!

[Matt]

A Very British Psycho was Channel 4, not BBC, which might make it easier to license. But an Ian Christie commentary makes this an easy choice.

The Criterion laserdisc had as its sole feature a commentary by Laura Mulvey, which may have been on selected scenes only and which may have become the “audio essay” on the DVD edition. It’s been ages since I had the disc out, but I remember it being interesting in that it concerns her work on “scopophilia.” I wouldn’t necessarily miss it.

[Randall Maysin Again]

I would love it if Criterion would prioritize analytical extras from the most ridiculous and deranged academics they can dig up. Maybe they could even get a room full of them!! Once they start releasing some of Altman's crappier films like Quintet or Ready to Wear especially!

[Matt]

Amazing they’ve never had Žižek do a commentary (though he has done an essay and a Criterion Closet video). And it’s too bad they never got around to an edition of Eyes Wide Shut with Michel Chion providing an adaptation of his BFI Film Classics monograph that argues the film is told from the point of view of the Harford’s unborn child.

[ryannichols7]

I think MIchaelB said the BBC are a real b*tch to deal with and demand enormous sums of money for these things, though maybe he was just referring to little boutique labels rather than those that are an arm of an actual production company or studio. But I think if its not on the Amazon listing now with all the other stuff, its not going to show up later!

that's been the track record I've seen. I doubt Canal will add it, it would more likely be Criterion including it on their disc, assuming they release it stateside and not Canal. given that the SC disc is a pretty "complete" package on extras and how long we had to wait for The Trial after the UK release (which was worth it, extras wise), I'm gonna say the SC disc will be the safe call for me. hopefully I can find the Criterion DVD cheap for the doc, that's what I did for The River, but that also wasn't out of print..

A Very British Psycho was Channel 4, not BBC, which might make it easier to license. But an Ian Christie commentary makes this an easy choice.

The Criterion laserdisc had as its sole feature a commentary by Laura Mulvey, which may have been on selected scenes only and which may have become the “audio essay” on the DVD edition. It’s been ages since I had the disc out, but I remember it being interesting in that it concerns her work on “scopophilia.” I wouldn’t necessarily miss it.

Ian Christie is terrific on every P+P release I've heard him on, and our original forum thread for Peeping Tom confirms his track for that one is just as worthwhile. Mulvey's track was the same on the Criterion DVD, but given how I feel about her Journey to Italy track, I can't imagine being into it.

I would love it if Criterion would prioritize analytical extras from the most ridiculous and deranged academics they can dig up. Maybe they could even get a room full of them!! Once they start releasing some of Altman's crappier films like Quintet or Ready to Wear especially!

we can't even get them to provide any analytical extras at all hardly nowadays, it's just calling in whatever director/actor they can to talk for 20 minutes about whatever given disc there is, and they call it a day on any other analysis. I'm still shocked they actually pulled out a scholarly track for The Trial. but I do love your idea, I wish more labels in general would do it, but I guess it's not worth the limited budget

Amazing they’ve never had Žižek do a commentary (though he has done an essay and a Criterion Closet video). And it’s too bad they never got around to an edition of Eyes Wide Shut with Michel Chion providing an adaptation of his BFI Film Classics monograph that argues the film is told from the point of view of the Harford’s unborn child.

I bust out laughing at my kitchen table reading that, gonna have to buy that book now!

[Randall Maysin Again]

LOL! I'm glad you like my idea.

Altman is i'm assuming underrated in the mainstream and immensely overrated by many academics. They think he's Christ reborn. I get the impression that every single one of his films released after MASH has at least a few academics who think its the GFOAT and wrote their thesises (yes, thesises) about it. Criterion should spotlight a different freak for each release!

Eyes Wide Shut is an okay film, my main problem with it really is, what kind of a f*cking loser picks *Tom Cruise* to be the scion and golden boy doctor professional at the center of their big soul-searching erotic (and heterosexual) film? It says something about Kubrick, his clueless side, that that's who he wanted.

PS has Criterion commented in any way about why their releases are such thin gruel these days? Is there any theory as to why? Just curious.

[therewillbeblus]

Eyes Wide Shut is an okay film, my main problem with it really is, what kind of a f*cking loser picks *Tom Cruise* to be the scion and golden boy doctor professional at the center of their big soul-searching erotic (and heterosexual) film? It says something about Kubrick, his clueless side, that that's who he wanted.

Oh man, it’s the most perfect casting ever if you see the film as I do. Not gonna tread deeply over my many posts crowding the last page of its dedicated thread, but the film is in large part about the egocentric complacent part of man stripped down to reveal impotence, limitations, and insignificance that just destroy the idea of who we think we are and want to be: the star of life’s movies, especially our wives’. Who better than Tom Cruise to emulate that delusional narrative we build for ourselves to protect us from realizing our pathetic weakness in facing the humbling truth? And what a brilliant trick Kubrick pulled with that casting, reflexively hammering home his point with the influence of star power. What do you think the film is about?

[Randall Maysin Again]

LOL whatever the film may or may not be about, don't ask meee, it shouldn't be about someone who I find utterly ridiculous and fabricated, and not in the desirable way you...seem to be attributing to him?, and can't accept as real on any level whatsoever, aka Tom Cruise. that's all. I've always felt that way about him (haven't seen Born on the 4th of July, which I know is thought by us smartypantses to be his finest hour/one accomplishment). Pauline Kael: "He's like Robert Taylor. He's patented. His knowing that a camera is on him produces nothing but fraudulence." If I was a horse, I wouldn't let him ride me and I would whinny at his smarmy, closeted-homosexual-not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that, crazy Scientologist presence. In any serious film I've seen him in, he is like a kidney stone that needs to be ejected as soon as possible.

[therewillbeblus]

Regardless of whether or not I like Cruise and think he has star power in other films (I do, though not a huge fan of the one you mention), your point and mine meet in the middle of the venn diagram for Eyes Wide Shut: Cruise isn't supposed to be desirable in the film. Sure, he is desired by some of these women, but he pathetically can't actualize any of it, and he just exists passively as the narrative happens around him, enveloping him into a nightmare where he's the center of a narrative that relentlessly treats him like an extra. It's quite literally a myth-smashing epic about the false value of our own sense of 'star power' in our lives, so it eviscerates Cruise's by giving him a role that's devoid of almost all opportunities for charm - or, if he gets the chance to use it, it's quickly taken from him or transformed into elusive pixie dust, and we watch him react to this confused in isolation, not with a crowd admiring him or holding their breath as he chants some Jerry Maguire lines. This should be the film for people who don't like Tom Cruise! He's a cheekily-placed pawn, a vehicle manipulated without his consent by Kubrick to boldly say, "Yes, even this guy who is literally The Perfect Movie Star to the public is just as meek and insignificant as anyone else." Maybe you never found him charming or likable in other films, but those films clearly believed he was a god on screen and fed you that narrative, and Kubrick is the first to dare to disembowel that image, bluntly and transparently. Anyone who watches this and thinks the film is catering to Cruise's powers to carry a movie is watching something that, in its pure functionality, would be the inverse of what I feel the film is so fundamentally about on a thematic level. I don't think I can understand the complaint about his casting without more information on your interpretation of the film's ethos - because if you think Kubrick made a mistake in casting him, that speaks to some wildly different reading that I have no grasp on. The film would still be effective with other actors in the lead, but it doesn't need a better actor. The parable benefits from an icon for the iconoclastic gutting of mankind's own grandiosity.

[Randall Maysin Again]

No, I totally agree that doing what you described is the smartest thing I could imagine anyone coming up with to do with Tom Cruise in their film. But you can deconstruct and turn inside-out Tom Cruise and his image all you want, he's still Tom Cruise, unfortunately. I'm not really even saying that his casting is a mistake, up to a point. I'm not sure what other actor I'd rather see in this role, other than someone who I think has at least a kernel, and maybe just a kernel, of human authenticity and maturity, instead of Tom Cruise. I guess I should see the film again before I comment further, but in a way that's almost a point I'm making--life cutting Tom Cruise down to size in this film, where that is indeed one of the film's main themes (and I'm not disputing what you said you see in this film), made zero impression on me emotionally, so that I don't remember it at all. I do think such a transformation should make more of an impression on my feelings and imagination than what I remember, but I shouldn't really commit to this as a criticism--as I should see the film again, I haven't in a while and lots of it is not clear in my memory. I'm not really arguing with any of your points. But I find his face itself, at any age, ridiculous and unacceptable in basically any filmic context, an impression that is never particularily well rescued by any allegedly brilliant acting, and he's just fundamentally not very interesting to me even at his best. (I also have zero, and I mean zero, understanding of what anyone sees in Tom Hanks.)

"Yes, even this guy who is literally The Perfect Movie Star to the public is just as meek and insignificant as anyone else."

I guess all I'm saying is, when the movie star in question is someone like Tom Cruise, or Shirley Temple, or Julie Andrews, someone who I find robotic and childish and inauthentic in everything they do, that even their artful deconstruction is likely to seem to me a bit of a fool's errand and not that interesting, to a degree, at least in a serious film.

[hearthesilence]

The richest part of Eyes Wide Shut for me was the depiction of someone who's an outsider who believes they've worked and earned themselves a life of privilege. You rarely see a film take such a complex look at what it means to be a doctor in terms of its place in the social and class order.

I thought Kubrick's decision to cast Cruise (who, more than anyone else, had an "all-American boy" image for the general public in 1999) was a good one. It's interesting and counterintuitive because the central character in Schnitzler's book was Jewish, lived in early 20th century Vienna, and was a medical doctor (like Schnitzler himself). Despite what he's made of his life, that character is still excluded from Viennese society because he's Jewish. If one were to view Tom Cruise as a closeted homosexual - and it's possible Kubrick was playing with that idea when he included that scene of frat boys making homophobic remarks at Cruise - that does play into that idea of Cruise being even more the outsider who's aiming to earn respect and admiration from a conservative-looking upper class society. But I don't think that's the case because he doesn't indulge any homosexual impulses in the film. (The overall plot to me is about someone who acted how he thought was appropriate to attain this life of privilege, then discovers how prominent members of this society behave and act in ways he didn't think were acceptable, ways that tap into desires that are hidden or suppressed, and eventually there's a sense that he should be able to act in similar fashion too. It's dramatized in a great way because he finds he's not allowed to - if not by society then by life - but when he's finally willing to cross the line into complete infidelity by going back to a particular prostitute, he finds out he still can't.)

[FrauBlucher]

specs for Peeping Tom, which I don't see Criterion topping. think this is a pretty safe preorder..

THREE-DISC SET (ON 4K BLU-RAY/TWO BLU-RAY DISCS)
NEW 4K RESTORATION OF THE FILM
DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
Intro by Martin Scorsese (2007)
Take Me To Your Cinema: The Legacy of Peeping Tom
Restoring Peeping Tom
The Eye of the Beholder
Intro by Martin Scorsese (2007)
Interview with Thelma Schoonmaker (2007)
Audio Commentary by Professor Ian Christie
Original Theatrical Trailer
32-page booklet with new essays
AND MORE...

Ian Christie will be a much better commentator compared to what CC would likely port over. I enjoy all his contributions to P+P (or just Powell) discs

Trailer

[Finch]

The modern music SC used for this trailer is atrocious.

[ianthemovie]

I had the same reaction to their Contempt trailer. The music they slapped on that one feels even more wrong-headed considering Georges Delarue's score is one of the most sublime of any film. The only reasonable explanation would be if they can't use these original scores in the trailers for some obscure rights-related reason (?)

[furbicide]

Has anyone noticed this warning at the beginning of StudioCanal discs? It was on both of the new Muratova releases, which I found pretty odd (and there's definitely nothing in them that would warrant it).
https://imgur.com/a/XcCK79x

[Yakushima]

Has anyone noticed this warning at the beginning of StudioCanal discs? It was on both of the new Muratova releases, which I found pretty odd (and there's definitely nothing in them that would warrant it).
https://imgur.com/a/XcCK79x

I noticed this and was puzzled as well. Whoever decided to post those warnings has likely not seen the films.

[furbicide]

I just assumed that they're now attaching it to all of their releases of "old" films ... you know, just in case.

Content warnings have been around for a while now (and film classification advice was arguably the original content warning, and an uncontroversial one at that), but this really does feel like something new and different: a suggestion that all works from previous generations are problematic until proven otherwise, and that all should be approached with caution. It's kind of wild to think about!

[tenia]

Or that it's easier to include everywhere than to research which movies might need it exactly.
(Always look for the laziness first)

[mhofmann]

Almost no movie that Studiocanal has ever released needs this kind of "warning". We just need more educated movie watchers.

[tenia]

I think so too, but if a generic introductory 15 sec text panel is what gets labels not worrying about whatever they release and just releasing them, as some kind of brainless blanket practice, I couldn't care less. Just add the text and get it going.
(I wonder, however, if your view of the Studiocanal catalogue is correct and if it actually contains that few questionable representations)

[jlnight]

UK viewers are used to seeing these content warnings for television broadcasts of older material (television and film), certainly in recent years. It's basically shorthand for discriminatory attitudes and language, racism, sexism, homophobia and other politically incorrect material that just does not fly any more. I'm kind of surprised that it would be included on a disc since the BBFC content advice would probably cover that. I'm guessing it's a UK disc, right?

[domino harvey]

I mentioned this a few months back, but there’s a racism warning on Studio Canal’s disc of Coup de torchon. None of the other Tavernier films in the set had a warning

[FrauBlucher]

That's why I believe Criterion won't release it

[Matt]

The cynic in me thinks that studios will just start putting these bland, broad trigger warnings before every film they release, even the most innocuous, just in case someone somewhere is offended by anything at all in the film. They’ll say, “Well, we did warn you.”

[swo17]

I'm offended when new films don't include a disclaimer that they "reflect current attitudes, which will never become outdated or be found offensive"