Author: Doug Cummings

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

DVD review

I haven’t seen The Day After Tomorrow, and given its scathing reviews, I don’t intend to any time soon, but seeing Rialto’s new print of the original Godzilla (1954) last night (certainly a much smoother, dramatically cohere film than its American makeover), I found myself pondering end-of-the-earth films in general, and one my own favorite entries in the genre, Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), in particular.

Available as a superb DVD from Anchor Bay (with a beautiful widescreen transfer and Guest commentary), the movie is an unusually literate and thematically nuanced genre film. Peter Stenning …

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Film Archive Action

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“Increasingly some of the greatest international film archives–currently the CinÈmathËque franÁaise and Britainís National Film and Television Archive–are under acute threat from official economic cut-backs and the incursion of ill-informed new bureaucracies.

The most acute current crisis is the threat to the National Film and Television Archive. The British Film Institute, the body currently entrusted with its administration, has drawn up an ill-considered ìPlanî for financial cut-back and reorganisation of the Archive.”

Click FilmArchiveAction.org for more information and to sign a petition in support of the Archive.…

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Take Care of My Cat

Film review

Back in 1995, I had the pleasure of living in South Korea for the summer months teaching conversational English to a variety of young adults. It was a wonderful experience being immersed in a culture which had recently modernized but nevertheless retained its roots in a rich historical tradition.

While I was there, I eagerly sought Korean films, but after several weeks, I came to the aggravating realization that the only movies readily being distributed in Korea were Hollywood blockbusters like Pocahontas, Batman Forever, Apollo 13, and, yes, Waterworld. Koreans told me they thought Disney’s Native …

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The Holy Mountain

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The official website for the Masters of Cinema Series from Eureka Video in the UK is now online, featuring our first release, Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926). Unlike the Kino region 1 version, this 2-disc set contains the original German intertitles (subtitled), the complete three-hour 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (which Kino only sells separately), and a new essay by yours truly, which can be previewed here.

The film represents a key work of a pretty fascinating genre in German film, the “mountain film,” or Bergfilm, which did not survive World War II. …

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PAL speedup

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One of the many pleasures of owning an inexpensive multi-region DVD player is being able to purchase DVDs from around the world and watch them at home. (Well, I suppose an expensive multi-region player would do the trick as well.) But one of the problems that sometimes occurs with European DVDs (or North American DVDs sourced from European tapes) is that they have been recorded in the PAL video format, which runs at 25 frames per second instead of the film-standard 24 frames per second. If care isn’t taken, the film simply plays 4% more quickly on video.

My friend …

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