Traffic

Traffic examines the question of drugs as politics, business, and lifestyle. With an innovative color-coded cinematic treatment to distinguish his interwoven stories, Steven Soderbergh embroils viewers in the lives of a newly appointed drug czar and his family, a West Coast kingpin’s wife, a key informant, and police officers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The film, which delivers a complex and nuanced take on an issue of international importance without sacrificing any energy or suspense, is a contemporary classic, and the winner of four Oscars, for best director, best screenplay, best editing, and best supporting actor for Benicio del Toro.

Supplements:

• Restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Steven Soderbergh and supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer Larry Blake, with 5.1 and 2.0 surround  DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks on the Blu-ray edition
• Three audio commentaries, featuring Soderbergh and writer Stephen Gaghan; producers Laura Bickford, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz and consultants Tim Golden and Craig Chretien; and composer Cliff Martinez
• Twenty-five deleted scenes, with optional commentary by Soderbergh and Gaghan
• Three sets of demonstrations: one on film processing and the look of the Mexico sequences; one on film editing, with commentary by editor Stephen Mirrione; and one on dialogue editing
• Additional unused footage of various scenes, from multiple angles
• Theatrical trailers and television spots
• Gallery of trading cards depicting the U.S. Customs canine squad used to detect narcotics and other illegal substances
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Manohla Dargis

Belle de Jour

Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her after ­noon hours working in a bordello. This surreal and erotic late-sixties daydream from provocateur for the ages Luis Buñuel is an examination of desire and fetishistic pleasure (its characters’ and its viewers’), as well as a gently absurdist take on contemporary social mores and class divisions. Fantasy and reality commingle in this burst of cinematic transgression, which was one of Buñuel’s biggest hits.

Supplements:

• New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring Michael Wood, author of the  BFI  Film Classics book  Belle de jour
• New video piece featuring writer and sexual-politics activist Susie Bright and film scholar Linda Williams
• New interview with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière
• Segment from the French television program  Cinéma,  featuring interviews with Carrière and actress Catherine Deneuve
• Original and rerelease trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Melissa Anderson and a 1970s interview with director Luis Buñuel

Eclipse Series 31: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin

Jean-Pierre Gorin, widely known for his collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard in the Dziga Vertov Group (including Tout va bien), established his personal voice with this trio of fascinating, nontraditional documentaries. Made in Southern California after the filmmaker relocated there in the midseventies, Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasures, and My Crasy Life illuminate hidden corners of our culture. With these films, Gorin revealed himself as a major chronicler of American life at its most hauntingly enigmatic.

Poto And Cabengo

Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that’s an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at home. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s polyphonic nonfiction investigation of this phenomenon looks at the family from a variety of angles, with the director taking on the role of a sort of sociological detective. It’s a delightful and absorbing study of words and faces, mass media and personal isolation, and America’s odd margins.

Routine Pleasures

What do a club devoted to model trains and the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber have in common? These two lines intersect in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s lovely and distinctly American film, which takes as its subject the desire to re-create the past (the locomotive aficionados’ elaborate worlds in miniature, Farber’s teeming canvases) and expands to something richly philosophical and surprisingly funny.  Routine Pleasures  is a masterful meditation on America’s landscapes, real and imagined.

My Crasy Life

Jean-Pierre Gorin’s gripping and unique film about a Samoan street gang in Long Beach, California, is, like other works by the filmmaker, a probing look at a closed community with its own rules, rituals, and language. Part observational documentary, part fiction invisibly scripted and shaped by the director, My Crasy Life, which won a special jury prize at Sundance, is an enthralling and intensely focused contemplation of violence and dislocation.

The Moment Of Truth

The Moment of Truth (Il momento della verità), from director Francesco Rosi, is a visceral plunge into the life of a famous torero’”played by real-life bullfighting legend Miguel Mateo, known as Miguelín. Charting his rise and fall with a single-minded focus on the bloody business at hand, the film is at once gritty and operatic, placing the viewer right in the thick of the ring’s action, as close to death as possible. Like all of the great Italian truth seeker’s films, this is not just an electrifying drama but also a profound and moving inquiry into a violent world’”and it’s perhaps the greatest bullfighting movie ever made.

Supplements:

• New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Exclusive interview with director Francesco Rosi from 2004
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Peter Matthews

Godzilla

Godzilla (a.k.a. Gojira) is the roaring granddaddy of all monster movies. It’s also a remarkably humane and melancholy drama, made in Japan at a time when the country was reeling from nuclear attack and H-bomb testing in the Pacific. Its rampaging radioactive beast, the poignant embodiment of an entire population’s fears, became a beloved international icon of destruction, spawning almost thirty sequels. A thrilling, tactile spectacle that continues to be a cult phenomenon, the original, 1954 Japanese version is presented here, along with Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the 1956 ‘Americanized’ version.

Supplements:

• New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• New high-definition digital restoration of  Godzilla, King of the Monsters,  Terry Morse’s 1956 reworking of the original (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary for both movies by film historian David Kalat
• New interviews with actors Akira Takarada and Haruo Nakajima and special effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai
• Interview with legendary  Godzilla  score composer Akira Ifukube
• Featurette detailing  Godzilla‘s photographic effects, introduced by special effects director Koichi Kawakita and special effects photographer Motoyoshi Tomioka
• New interview with Japanese-film critic Tadao Sato
• The Unluckiest Dragon,  an illustrated audio essay featuring historian Greg Pflugfelder describing the tragic fate of the fishing vessel  Daigo Fukuryu Maru,  a real-life event that inspired  Godzilla
• Trailers for  Godzilla  and  Godzilla, King of the Monsters
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic J. Hoberman