Pick of the week: Ford at Fox
Dog of the week: Sorry, no woofers
Weighing in at 12 pounds, "Ford At Fox
Here is one of the most ambitious DVD sets to date, timed to woo the well-heeled gift-giver. (A lot of film lovers undoubtedly will gift themselves.) We're looking at 24 Ford films -- most of them new to DVD -- ranging from "The Iron Horse" (1924) to "What Price Glory" (1952). "The Iron Horse" restoration is an action-packed marvel; I was lucky enough to see it in a Fox theater a few weeks back.
The set comes in Bible black, its contents secured with an all-business strap. The new documentary "Becoming John Ford" rests at the bottom in a clamshell case; the Ford discs come nestled into a photo-album-style book that looks like something the elders used to store old weird America snapshots. The accompanying book fits right nice on the coffee table.
The new docu, from Ford expert Nick Redman, is a fairly grim affair, long on grad school musings about the great man and his art. The talking heads are led by chief mourner Joseph McBride. Walter Hill does a nice job of reading Ford's words over the clips. Hard to imagine Ford liking this docu.
Screenwriter Lem Dobbs puts it best: "All this jibber-jabbering about John Ford ... it's all nonsense in the end because it never explains anything." Check out the "American Masters" piece that came with the "John Wayne-John Ford Film Collection."
The week's big commercial releases are Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" and Sony's edgy-kid comedy "Superbad," both looking good on Blu-ray. "Pirates," in fact, picked up the best images award at Home Media magazine's high-def awards the other night.
The Capt. Jack franchise feels played out, but still there's some great imaginative stuff to be enjoyed on this (overly) long voyage.
New and notable:
Arctic Tale (Paramount)
Battlestar Galactica: Razor extended (Universal)
The Bob Hope Collection (MGM)
Diagnosis Murder: Third Season (Paramount)
Drama/Mex (Genius)
Exiled (Magnolia Home Entertainment)
Erik the Viking: Director's Son's Cut (MGM)
Ford at Fox (Fox)
The Hottest State (ThinkFilm)
Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks (The Criterion Collection)
Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door (Anchor Bay)
The Last Man on Earth (MGM)
The Nanny Diaries (Weinstein Co./Genius Products)
New York, New York: 30th Anniversary (MGM)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Disney)
Saturday Night Live: Second Season (Universal)
Superbad (Sony)
Tom and Jerry Tales, Volume 3 (Warner)
24: Season Six (Fox)
The Wire: Fourth Season (HBO)
Complete list of today's releases on my pal Harley's site, onvideo.org
Like Ford At Fox quite a bit. As well as classics like The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and My Darling Clementine there are lesser known gems like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) a tale of colonists duking it out with the British and upper New York State Indians during the American War of Independence. Very nice restored Technicolor picture and a great cast that includes Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert and frequent John Wayne co-star Ward Bond. Only drawback of this set is that there are no Ford/Wayne flicks - they teamed later at Republic and Warner for classics like The Searchers (1956). Nice to have this set of early Ford, though.
Posted by: Andy Cooper | January 01, 2008 at 03:20 PM