December 2010 Criterion Collection Titles Announced: Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome On Blu-ray, And The BBS Box Set On DVD

Cronos

Guillermo Del Toro

Criterion # 551 Available on DVD and Blu-ray, December 7th

Guillermo del Toro made an auspicious, audacious feature debut with Cronos, a highly unorthodox tale about the seductiveness of the idea of immortality. Kindly antiques dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) happens upon an ancient golden device in the shape of a scarab, and soon finds himself possessor and victim of its sinister, addictive powers, as well as the target of a mysterious, crude American named Angel (a delightfully deranged Ron Perlman). Featuring marvelous special makeup effects and the unforgettably haunting imagery for which del Toro has become world-renowned, Cronos, is a visually rich and emotionally captivating dark fantasy.

Videodrome

David Cronenberg

Criterion # 248, Available on Blu-ray, December 7th

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyperviolent torture show called Videodrome. As he struggles to unearth the origins of the program, he embarks on a hallucinatory journey into a shadow world of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games, and bodily transformation. Starring James Woods and Deborah Harry in one of her first film roles, Videodrome is one of writer/director David Cronenberg’s most original and provocative works, fusing social commentary with shocking elements of sex and violence. With groundbreaking special effects makeup by Academy Award ®-winner Rick Baker, Videodrome has come to be regarded as one of the most influential and mind-bending science fiction films of the 1980s.

America Lost And Found: The BBS Story

Criterion # 544-550, Available on DVD, December 14th. (9 Discs!)

Like the rest of America, Hollywood was ripe for revolution in the late sixties. Cinema attendance was down; what had once worked seemed broken. Enter Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner, who knew that what Hollywood needed was new audiences’”namely, young people’”and that meant cultivating new talent and new ideas. Fueled by money made from their invention of the superstar TV pop group the Monkees, they set off on a film-industry journey that would lead them to form BBS Productions, a company that was also a community. The innovative films produced by this team between 1968 and 1972 are collected in this box set’”works created within the studio system but lifted right out of the countercultural id, and that now range from the iconic (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show) to the acclaimed (The King of Marvin Gardens) to the obscure (Head; Drive, He Said; A Safe Place).

Head

Bob Rafelson 1968

Hey, hey, it’s the Monkees . . . being catapulted through one of American cinema’s most surreal sixties odysseys.

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring Monkees Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork
• New video interview with director Bob Rafelson
• New documentary about BBS, featuring critic David Thomson and historian Douglas Brinkley
• More!

Easy Rider

Dennis Hopper 1969

As Billy and ‘Captain America,’ Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda motored down the highway on their Harley Davidsons to the roaring strains of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild,’ and the definitive counterculture blockbuster was born.

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring director Dennis Hopper
• Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage, a 1999 documentary featuring behind-the-scenes footage
• Footage of Hopper and star Peter Fonda at Cannes in 1969
• New video interview with BBS’s Steve Blauner
• More!

Five Easy Pieces

Bob Rafelson 1970

Nicholson plays the now iconic cad Bobby Dupea, a shiftless thirtysomething oil rigger and former piano prodigy immune to any sense of romantic or familial responsibility, who returns to his childhood home to see his ailing, estranged father’”his blue-collar girlfriend (Karen Black) in tow.

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring director Bob Rafelson and interior designer Toby Rafelson
• Soul Searching in Five Easy Pieces, a 2009 video piece in which Rafelson discusses the film
• BBStory, a 2009 documentary
• Excerpts from an audio recording of Rafelson at the American Film Institute in 1976

Drive, He Said

Jack Nicholson 1970

Jack Nicholson’s enormously irreverent directorial debut, Drive, He Said, free-spirited and sobering by turns, is a sketch of the exploits of a disaffected college basketball player and his increasingly radical roommate.

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• A Cautionary Tale of Campus Revolution and Sexual Freedom, a 2009 video piece in which director Jack Nicholson discusses the experience of making this film
• Theatrical trailer
• More!

A Safe Place

Henry Jaglom 1971

In this delicate, introspective drama, laced with fantasy elements, Tuesday Weld stars as a fragile young woman in New York, unable to reconcile her ambiguous past with her unmoored present.

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring director Henry Jaglom
• Henry Jaglom Finds ‘A Safe Place,’ a 2009 video piece in which the director discusses the film
• Notes on the New York Film Festival, a 1971 video piece featuring an interview conducted by critic Molly Haskell with directors Peter Bogdanovich and Jaglom about their films The Last Picture Show and A Safe Place
• Deleted scene and screen tests
• Theatrical trailer

The Last Picture Show

Peter Bogdanovich 1971

Featuring evocative black-and-white imagery and profoundly felt performances, this hushed depiction of crumbling American values remains the pivotal film in the career of the invaluable director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich.

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Two audio commentaries, one featuring director Peter Bogdanovich and the other featuring Bogdanovich and actors Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Cloris Leachman, and Frank Marshall
• Picture This, a 1990 documentary by George Hickenlooper
• ‘The Last Picture Show’: A Look Back, an hour-long 1999 documentary
• 2009 interview with Bogdanovich
• Screen tests and location footage
• Theatrical trailers and more!

The King of Marvin Gardens

Bob Rafelson 1972

Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern play estranged siblings David and Jason, the former a depressive late-night-radio talk show host, the latter an extroverted con man; when Jason drags his younger brother to a dreary Atlantic City and into a real-estate scam, events spiral into tragedy.

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Selected-scene audio commentary featuring director Bob Rafelson
• Reflections of a Philosopher King, a 2009 documentary about the making of the film
• Afterthoughts, a short 2002 documentary about the film, produced by Rafelson
• Theatrical trailer