It's a self-sacrifice recall!

 

The DVD release of "Atlas Shrugged Part One" describes the film as such: "Ayn Rand's timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life for a new millennium." That's right, "courage and self-sacrifice." Which, as anyone familiar with the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand knows, is the complete opposite of everything she stands for. Self-sacrifice? Are you kidding? Or could this be a kinder, gentler Ayn Rand?

 

Naaah, it's just another misstep in the film's awkward stumble to insignificance and anonymity. In fact, it's supposed to read "Ayn Rand's timeless novel of rational self-interest," because as we all know, nothing is more courageous or rational than self-interest. Copies of the DVD and Blu-ray sold through the film official website have the correct text but retail editions are all about the self-sacrifice.

 

So copies of DVDs and Blu-rays on the shelves are being recalled and corrected, and a website has been set up for anyone who already purchased a copy. Because surely SOMEONE bought a copy of the DVD, right?

My question: why would you want to replace it? Not because Harmon Kaslow, CEO of Atlas Productions and producer of the film, thinks that "You’ve inadvertently got yourself a real collector’s item there." I just think that if you're going to leave the "comes to life" part on the case, then why quibble about the rest of inaccuracies?

 

Thanks to The Slog for the tip.

 

Here's the complete press release (from the Atlas Shrugged Movie website), after the jump.

 

Known as "The Platinum Blonde" and "The Blonde Bombshell," Jean Harlow was a natural sex symbol for the thirties: gorgeous and shapely, yes, and her fondness for skipping undergarments and wearing low-cut gowns didn't hurt either, but she was also street smart and savvy.

Though never a greatest of actresses (she didn't hold a candle to Carole Lombard, for one), she could hold her own opposite the best of them and MGM paired her up with their top actors: William Powell (her great love), Spencer Tracey and especially Clark Gable, with whom she starred in six film. Even in her most glamorous roles, there was a little of the girl who grew up scrapping her way to success, and her death in 1937 at the age of 24 (from kidney failure) kept her image frozen in place: the all-American sex bomb, both glamorous and down-to-earth.

 

See below for a clip of Harlow from "Reckless"

 

Most of her greatest films have already been released on DVD—"The Public Enemy," "Platinum Blonde," "Red Dust," "Dinner at Eight," "Libeled Lady"—but not all of them. The Warner Archive box set "Jean Harlow 100" (Warner Archive) features seven films from her prime including one of her best ever, the snappy screwball showbiz satire "Bombshell" (1933).

 

Harlow plays Hollywood superstar Lola Burns, a not-so-thinly veiled riff in her own persona (in one scene, she's called in for retakes on the "Red Dust" rain barrel scene, certainly one of the real-life Harlow's most famous screen moments), and Lee Tracy is pure mercenary drive as an unscrupulous publicist who actually enjoys the torment he puts her through as he manufactures scandals and breaks up romances with his con-man shenanigans. The script was reportedly inspired by the real-life ordeals of Harlow and Clara Bow and Harlow is clearly in on the gag and having fun with it, playing the public role of the big screen glamour girl while her private life is all chaos and frustration. Victor Fleming, one of the sturdiest of MGM's house directors, and a solid cast of supporting players (Frank Morgan as her fraud of a father, Una Merkel as her sassy assistant, Pat O'Brien as her exasperated director) keep the film running in top gear.

 

It's the only out-and-out comedy in the collection, but all of these films are smorgasboards of Hollywood entertainment: romance, melodrama, comedy and even a musical number or two in most films and right up front in "The Girl From Missouri" (1934) and "Reckless" (1935). Both of these films feature Harlow as a showgirl, though she's dubbed in the singing scenes and even body doubled for some dancing sequences (see the clip below and you can hear and see for yourself) and co-star Franchot Tone, who in these early years made a specialty of the inebriated society playboy with a penchant for grand gestures. But William Powell is the real romantic lead in the latter as a sports promoter who took Harlow out of the carnival and into the big time and still carries a torch for the dazzling girl. Also directed by Fleming, the film is a romantic drama with screwball attitude, show-biz color and a melodramatic streak, an alchemy that isn't always smooth but seems just right for the era.

 

J. Edgar Hoover was as much a publicist as he was a lawman over his career, making himself the face of the FBI as far as the media was concerned. He was credited as consultant on numerous films, TV and radio shows and even books, seen in newsreels and portrayed as a figure of paternal authority whenever seen or referred to in classic movies. So it's kind of surprising that no biopic ever surfaced until after his death. You'd think he would have nurtured quite the big screen hagiography in his lifetime.

 

Instead, the first Hoover bio-pic hardly makes him out to be an American hero. And it wasn't by Clint Eastwood, either. "The Private Files Of J. Edgar Hoover" (1977) was a labor of love project from exploitation legend Larry Cohen, an independent director (and writer and producer) if there ever was one, and it was the closest that he ever got to an all-star cast.

 

Oscar winner Broderick Crawford is Hoover, the once-dedicated agent who cleans up the bureau out of moral indignation over abuses and then builds it into his own private duchy of power and control, using information and blackmail to maintain his position and authority through every successive administration. Rip Torn is the young agent who becomes disillusioned by Hoover's abuses and a guest cast of historical figures is incarnated by a great collection of character actors and class acts: Howard Da Silva as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Michael Parks as Robert Kennedy (who is actually far more convincing than "J. Edgar"'s Jeffrey Donovan), Raymond St. Jacques as Martin Luther King, Andrew Duggan as Lyndon Johnson, Jack Cassidy as Damon Runyon and Lloyd Gough as Walter Winchell. José Ferrer, Celeste Holm, Ronee Blakley, John Marley, June Havoc, Lloyd Nolan and George Plimpton also costar.

 

Dan Dailey (once a comic lead and song-and-dance man) is his trusted "friend" Clyde Tolson, the man whispered to be his gay lover, but Cohen doesn't give in to rumor of Hoover's cross-dressing and closeted identity. His Hoover is a highly sexually repressed man (possible impotent), anxious when it comes to sexual contact with women, aroused only when listening to secret recordings made of the sexual activities of other people (including his own agents). Eastwood revisits all these in his film, but Cohen was there 35 years earlier. There are plenty of contradictions in this Hoover, all of them designed to create Cohen's portrait of a man who isn't really aware of his contradictions.

 

Available by order only from the MGM Limited Collection, from Amazon, Screen Archives Entertainment, Classic Movies Now and other web retailers.

 

Here's what's new on DVD and Blu-ray this week as featured on Videodrone

 

Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for November 8

 

New Releases:

'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2' brings a satisfying conclusion to the beloved series

Foreign Affairs: Catherine Breillat's 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'Human Resources' and 'A Better Tomorrow' - Remade

The New Release Rack: 'The Change-Up,' Shrugging off 'Atlas' and a Remake called '13'

 

TV on DVD:

'Page Eight': David Hare in John Le Carre-land

'Doctor Who: Series Six, Part Two' - The Once and Future Death of The Doctor

TV on DVD Channel Guide: 'Case Histories,' 'Mr. Magoo' and 'A Child's Garden of Poetry'

 

The Cool and the Collectible:

Gift Guide Goodies: 'Band of Brothers/The Pacific Special Edition Gift Set'

Humphrey Bogart sits at 'The Left Hand of God,' a new edition of the 1951 'A Christmas Carol,' the documentary 'Great Directors" and more

 

Blu-ray Debuts:

Exclusive clip: The Unseen 'Blue Velvet' (NSFW)

David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' at 24

Blu-ray Round-up: Bergman's 'Fanny and Alexander' and Hoffman is 'Little Big Man'

Plus 'Mutiny on the Bounty' with Brando, 'To Die For,' 'The Fisher King' and more

 

Streams and Channels:

Beyond Netflix: Alternatives for streaming video

Bargain for the Week: Celebrate 11-11-11 with 'This is Spinal Tap'

 

Coming up next week:

"Larry Crowne" (Universal)

"Beginners" (Universal)

"Griff the Invisible" (Vivendi)

"Bellflower" (Oscilloscope)

"The Tree" (Zeitgeist)

"Three Colors: Blue White Red" (Criterion)

"Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis" (Kino)

"Being Human: The Complete First Season (U.S.)" (eOne)

"West Side Story: 50th Anniversary" (Blu-ray) (MGM)

"Evil Dead 2: 25th Anniversary" (Blu-ray) (Lionsgate)

"The Rules of the Game" (Blu-ray) (Criterion)

"Farscape: The Complete Series" (Blu-ray) (A&E)

 

For calendar of upcoming releases, click here

 

“Right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven….” – Nigel Tufnel, 'This Is Spinal Tap'

 

It's the holiday that comes once a… well, ever. Or never, actually. Nigel Tufnel Day isn't a real holiday, of course, it's just an excuse to celebrate the greatest fake rockumentary ever made and its contribution to the world of rock and roll: the amp that goes up to eleven. It's one higher, you see.

 

So of course there's a sale. Starting today (11-11-11) and continuing through Monday, November 14, you can get "This Is Spinal Tap" on digital download for $4.99 on Amazon, iTunes and X-Box. And Amazon is also dropping the price on DVD and Blu-ray editions.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for November 8

 

"Blue Velvet" (MGM), David Lynch's masterpiece of the rot under the picture-perfect façade of small town idealism, debuts on Blu-ray with a treasure trove of recently discovered deleted scenes. Videodrone's review is here and you can view an exclusive deleted clip on Videodrone here.

 

"Fanny and Alexander Box Set" (Criterion) - Ingmar Bergman explores the joys and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan living in turn-of-the-century Sweden, through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander in his most autobiographical film. “Bergman's 1982 career summation (is) the kind of rich, timeless, cautionless magnum opus we can only receive, like benedictions, from artists who've paid their generation's dues of sweat, risk, tears, and honesty,” writes Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson. “Exploring his own psycho-aesthetic roots and how they sprouted in his earlier films (the iconography, from household spaces made menacing to ghosts and suggestions of God himself, virtually catalogs the '50s-'60s filmography), Bergman locates a generosity and élan that make "F&A" feel like his youngest film."

Bergman announced that it would be his last film and approached it as his swan song, creating two versions: a three-hour theatrical film (which won awards around the world, including four Academy Awards) and a longer mini-series version created for Swedish television. Both are presented in new digital restorations on the three-disc Blu-ray set, along with the documentaries "The Making of Fanny and Alexander" (a feature-length film directed by Bergman himself) and the 2004 "A Bergman Tapestry" (featuring interviews with the cast and crew) and the hour-long interview "Ingmar Bergman Bids Farewell to Film" that film critic Nils Petter Sundgren recorded for Swedish television in 1984. Also features commentary on the theatrical version by film scholar Peter Cowie, video footage of the models for the film sets, costume sketches, a still gallery and a booklet with essays by Stig Bjorkman, Rick Moody, and Paul Arthur.

 

Dustin Hoffman is "Little Big Man" (Paramount) Jack Crabbe, a 121 year old survivor who narrates his adventures of the old west and surviving Little Big Horn, in Arthur Penn’s modern classic, a revisionist western adapted from Thomas Berger’s novel. Adventure, comedy, social satire, and tragedy are rolled together in this unforgettable, often rollicking tour of the old west through the eyes of a man who lived among both the settlers and Indians (as the adopted son of a Cheyenne Chief, played with easy charm by Chief Dan George). Penn deftly balances the shifts in tone and creates a film that manages to be warm, winning, and unendingly entertaining, while still delivering a painful lesson in America’s genocide of the Native American population. More than simply myth deflated, it’s history run through the ringer. Faye Dunaway co-stars as his adopted white “mother” (whose interest in the young man rescued from the redskins is more than maternal) and Robert Mulligan almost steals the film as the flamboyant and borderline insane General George Custer. No supplements.

 

The 1962 version of "Mutiny on the Bounty" (Warner), the second version of the real life story (as dramatized by Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall in their famous novel) of the most famous mutiny in British naval history, is a handsome but creaky piece of filmmaking. An attempt to mount a mighty epic in the David Lean vein, it gets swamped by its arch dramatics, insistent "grand" imagery (show all that location money in every shot) and Brando's eccentric, fascinatingly foppish interpretation of Fletcher Christian. Brando's ego famously ran amok during the production, causing production delays and forcing original director Carol Reed to drop out, replaced by old Hollywood hand Lewis Milestone. The new Blu-ray is pretty darn gorgeous and shows off the craft of the 70mm production quite nicely, but at three hours that's an awfully long video postcard of the South Seas. Trevor Howard is a walking barnacle of a career navy man who prizes authority and punishment over leadership and Richard Harris apparently walked in from another movie as the seaman who leads the sailor revolt. Features the original, uncut roadshow version, as seen in initial reserved-seat engagements, complete with Overture, Intermission, Entr’acte and Exit Music. Supplements include alternate prologue and epilogue sequences, the 2006 featurette "After the Cameras Stopped Rolling: The Journey of the Bounty" about the ship built for the film, and four vintage featurettes.

 

The 1995 "To Die For" (Image), directed by Gus Vant Sant, is a wicked little satire starring Nicole Kidman as an ambitious weather girl as ruthless as she is shallow. Kidman is superb and Joaquin Phoenix is heartbreaking in an early role as an impressionable, troubled teen seduced by the older woman and manipulated into murdering her husband (Matt Dillon). Van Sant brings a cutting edge and sly humor to the script by Buck Henry (who also has a small role), a little indie attitude in a Hollywood film. Stay through the closing credits, which are darkly witty and very satisfying. No supplements.

 

Robin Williams gets top billing in "The Fisher King" (Image) as a mad homeless man who has retreated into a fantasy world after the terrible murder of his wife but Jeff Bridges is the story's tragic hero, a damaged soul who undertakes a quest. Washington Post critic Desson Thompson celebrates the film as "A modern epic that fuses myth with hard-edged reality, it's a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly engaging experience." Terry Gilliam directs. No supplements.

 

Angelina Jolie is "Gia" (HBO), the streetwise Philadelphia working class kid who became America’s first supermodel, in the 1998 made-for-HBO drama. As told by Michael Cristopher, Gia was a casualty of the late 70s high life and drug scene, and Jolie’s earthy, passionate portrayal provides an anchor for the glamour-rebel attitude. Features the unrated version of the film.

 

The original web series Mortal Kombat: Legacy" (Warner), starring Michael Jai White and Jeri Ryan, arrives on home video in a Blu-ray edition only (no DVD). The nine-part series, based on the video game and the movie franchise, is a prequel that looks in on characters before the first tournament and runs about 100 minutes The disc also includes five featurettes.

 

Frank Henenlotter's tongue-in-cheek horror comedy "Frankenhooker" (Synapse), about a nerdy inventor who rebuilds his dead girlfriend from the body parts of prostitutes prostitutes he sacrifices to the cause, is played broad and silly, resulting in an inconsistent and sloppy (though often hilarious) gore comedy. Oddly enough, it’s the most successful film of the cult filmmaker's career to date. Features commentary by Henenlotter and make-up effects designer Gabe Bartalos and four featurettes.

 

And the rest:

 

William Wyler's 1965 "The Collector" (Image), starring Terence Stamp as a disturbed young man who collects women he collects butterflies, adapts the John Fowles novel with restraint, avoiding the psycho-thriller potential in favor of a psychological drama. Nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Samantha Eggar.

Paul Newman earned an Oscar nomination for "Absence of Malice" (Image), a drama about journalistic ethics directed by Sydney Pollack. Includes a featurette and a deleted scene.

 

Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise and Roger Moore headline "The Cannonball Run" (HBO), the 1981 speed-and-slapstick outlaw car race comedy from director Hal Needham. Features bits by Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Jackie Chan, among others. The Blu-ray includes commentary by Needham and producer Albert S. Ruddy.

 

"The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl" (Lionsgate), Robert Rodriguez's superhero famtasy for kids, was originally presented in 3D. No such dimension on the Blu-ray, but by now it has another selling point: Taylor Lautner takes his first lead as Sharkboy. With director commentary and a featurette.

 

"A Christmas Carol: 60th Anniversary Diamond Edition" (VCI) also debuts this week, covered on Videodrone here.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for November 8

 

Humphrey Bogart dons the collar in "The Left Hand of God" (Twilight Time), a 1955 drama set in 1947 China. He enters the film riding a mule to a remote Catholic missionary caught between the local warlord and the brewing revolution and proceeds to win the hearts and minds of the villagers with his savvy understanding of their culture and his ability to switch from English sermon to Chinese conversation. There's more than meets the eye to Father O'Shea, as is clear in his queries about the local trade caravans and the handgun he keeps handy, but I don't want to give too much away. Suffice it to say that Father O'Shea had another, quite worldly life before putting on the collar and trekking into rural China, as did nurse Anne 'Scotty' Scott (Gene Tierney), who apparently arrived in the middle of nowhere with a wardrobe worthy of a New York socialite.

 

Edward Dmytryk directs this mix of Asian exotica, Catholic piety and Hollywood style with anonymous professionalism, his specialty since he returned from his blacklist exile, named names and took his place in the studio machine. The cast carries the supermarket bestseller story -- E.G. Marshall as the anxious and outspoken American doctor, Agnes Moorehead as his frank wife and steely partner in missionary life, Lee J. Cobb as the Chinese warlord with the manner of a New York mob boss, and especially Bogart as the weather-beaten realist in vestments. We're in the same territory as as the original "Magnificent Obsession" and "The Keys of the Kingdom" a decade later, in the wake of a world war and the cold war, but Dmytryk is just going through the motions of moral conflict and hard decisions, unwilling to commit to Bogart's trials and unable to understand Tierney's torment as she falls for a man of God while waiting for her missing-and-presumed​-dead husband. It's a handsome widescreen film with solid performances (extra credit goes to Moorehead's mix of moral commitment and practical realism) and compelling performers, but it never rises above the reductive melodrama of the plot.

 

Like all of the Twilight Time releases, it features an isolated audio track with Victor Young's score and a leaflet with notes by Julie Kirgo.

 

The 1951 "A Christmas Carol," starring Alistair Sims as Scrooge, is considered by many to be the definitive film version of the Charles Dickens classic, with Sim as the greatest of the Scrooges: "For everyone who has seen the crisply-made black-and-white production, he is the definitive Scrooge," writes film critic James Berardinelli. "At a reasonably short 85 minutes, this is nevertheless a complete experience, and the strength and depth of its drama makes it the most memorable of any adaptation of the tale. "A Christmas Carol: 60th Anniversary Diamond Edition" (VCI) is yet another new edition of the classic film, remastered for both DVD and 1080p HD for Blu-ray and featuring all-new supplements, including interviews with British film historian Sir Christopher Frayling and original U.S. Distributor Richard Gordon, a featurette on director Brian Desmond Hurst and clips from the 1922 versions of "A Christmas Carol" and "Bleak House." The Blu-ray edition also features a bonus DVD with a 1939 radio adaptation narrated by Orson Welles and starring Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge.

 

"Great Directors" (Kino Lorber) presents conversations with ten of the world's great directors (from Bernardo Bertolucci and Catherine Breillat to John Sayles and Agnès Varda) by director Angela Ismailos. "Despite the title, Ismailos' documentary is not a study of what constitutes great direction," complains San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle. "Rather it's a nicely arranged film in which a variety of filmmakers Ismailos likes discuss their inspirations and influences." The DVD features a bonus disc with four hours of additional interview footage with the directors.

 

"Produce Your Own Damn Movie!" (Troma) is the third collection of DIY filmmaking tips from exploitation auteur Lloyd Kaufman and friends, from David Cronenberg to Roger Corman to The Duplass Brothers. The two-disc set features over five hours of material, organized by theme, everything from raising money to developing a business plan. It's a practical guide with real-world examples, and Kaufman gets a lot of folks to share their experiences.

 

Luigi Comencini's 1974 "Delitto D'Amore" (Raro Video) (aka "Crime of Love"), a romantic melodrama with a streak of social commentary stars Giuliano Gemma and Stefania Sandrelli as two factory workers in Northern Italy who fall in love and marry, only to fall victim to the pollution caused by the factory. Features an interview with film historian Adrian Apra and a booklet featuring interviews with director Luigi Comencini and film notes.

 

The horror,  the horror:

The 1976 "Survive!" (VCI) was the first film to dramatize the true story of the 1972 airline crash in the Andes and the survivors who resorted to eating the dead to survive. This film, a low-budget Mexican production produced and directed by Rene Cardona (whose resume includes plenty of Santo films), takes a decidedly exploitative approach to the material ("What they did to stay alive is the most shocking episode in the history of human survival," reads the poster). It was released in the U.S. in a dubbed version at 86 minutes. This DVD features the American cut as well as the original, uncut Mexican version, which runs close to two hours.

 

"Thankskilling" (MVD) offers Troma-style horror comedy with buckets of gore and a high-concept premise: a homicidal turkey takes revenge over Thanksgiving break. And it cost on $3,500. The DVD features commentary and a blooper reel.

 

"House of the Damned: 15th Anniversary Edition" (MVD) and "Lust for Vengeance: 15th Anniversary Explicit Version" (MVD) revisits two microbudget horror films from Sean Weathers.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for November 8

 

David Lynch looks behind the smiling faces and stucco houses of small town America and finds a shadow world of pure evil in "Blue Velvet" (MGM), making its Blu-ray debut this week.

 

From the opening shots Lynch turns the Technicolor picture postcard images of middle class homes and tree lined lanes into a dreamy vision on the edge of nightmare. College boy hero Kyle MacLachlan and Nancy Drew high school innocent Laura Dern delve into a mysterious case revolving around a severed human ear, and MacLachlan moves from boy scout to voyeur to participant, plunging into a nightmare of sex and sadism he’s alternately repulsed and obsessed by.

 

25 years later, it's just as effective, unsettling and unnerving. Lynch’s eerily mundane sets and locations, real world settings stripped to a ghostly austerity, make his odyssey all the more insidious, and composer Angelo Badalamenti adds to the texture with the smooth, spooky strains of his lush score. Dennis Hopper’s manic, obscenity shouting performance as sadistic drug dealer and blackmailer Frank Booth became his Hollywood comeback and, by most accounts, earned him an Oscar nomination (that it happened to be for another film is beside the point; Academy voters couldn’t exactly nominate him for such a ferocious, disturbed, psychically damaging creation, now, could they?). Isabella Rosselini is terrifyingly desperate as Hopper’s sexual slave (and later MacLachlan’s illicit lover) and Dean Stockwell purrs through his role as Hopper’s oh-so-suave buddy. Candy colored clown, baby!

 

To mark the 25th Anniversary of the film, the Blu-ray debut features a new and exciting supplement: a collection of over 50 minutes of deleted scenes, edited into a phantom feature of stories around the edges of the film. I explore the deleted scenes (the supplement of the year so far) at Videodrone here, where you can see an exclusive deleted clip featuring Dennis Hopper and Kyle MacLachlan.

 

Also includes a very short set of outtakes and the supplements from the previous DVD release, which includes the excellent 70 minute documentary "Mysteries of Love," featuring interviews with almost everyone involved in the production from the stars to composer Angelo Badalamenti (whose first collaboration with Lynch this was). Everyone but Lynch, of course, who appears only via an archival interview from 1987. The new interviews are, of course, shot against a blue velvet curtain. There is also a 10 minute featurette showcasing deleted scenes reconstructed from production stills (according to the introduction, those scenes no longer exist in any other form), along with stills, posters, and a trailer.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for November 8