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David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

My quick take on 2001: A Space Odyssey is that, after carefully rewatching the film and reading a fair amount about it over this past week or so, I arrived at the conclusion that it’s my favorite movie of all that have ever been made. I have said the same thing in the past, but that was many years ago, long before I had become familiar with so many classics of world cinema and Hollywood’s past that preceded my birth. My deep immersion over the past decade into a self-directed study of film history led me to temporarily suspend judgment on so momentous a question as what I consider to be “the greatest film ever made,” but now I’m pretty comfortable with saying that it’s this one, without any doubt on my part. That’s subjectively speaking,...

It's reassuring to learn that the gulf between east and west isn't as great as we might assume: it turns out that, in the sixties, just as they did in Europe and America, people in Japan got about mainly by means of jump-cuts.Nobuhiko Obayashi is best known for Hausu (a.k.a. House, 1977), a dayglo, balls-out insane horror movie that plays like a cross between The Evil Dead, a lunatic's idea of Douglas Sirk, and a girl's comic, all fed through a mincer and laced with psilocybin. The prolific filmmaker (still going strong today) actually began in the sixties with TV commercials and experimental films, of which the forty-minute oddity Emotion is one.The movie, a collage of camera effects, stills, pixillation and every other trick the decade had to offer, opens with a dedication to Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses, but though the film does feature lesbianism and vampirism,...

House (Hausu) Directed by: Nobuhiko Obayashi Written by: Chiho Katsura Starring: Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Kumiko Oba, Ai Matsubara Just in time for Halloween, the Criterion Collection has released director Nobuhiko Obayashi's creepy, cartoony and absurdly hilarious feature film debut House (Hausu) on DVD and Blu Ray. The film is a smorgasbord of in-camera tricks and techniques that celebrate all of the best elements of genre filmmaking while creating a completely unusual and unique cinematic experience. The synopsis on the back of the House blu ray couldn't be more appropriate, describing the film as Scooby Doo through the lens of Mario Bava. It's certainly a colourful experience that probably owes some of its imagery and effects to Italian genre films. To put it into a modern perspective, the film's aesthetics could be described as a Michel Gondry take on J-Horror. Oddly enough, Hausu was apparently Japan's direct response to...

Janus Films' aggressive booking and marketing of Nobuhiko Obayashi's psychedelic art-horror film House (Hausu) has quickly turned a heavily-bootlegged Japanese obscurity into a North American pop culture phenomenon. So much has been written about House in recent years that one might get the impression that there is not much to say. To the contrary, The Criterion Collection's new Blu-Ray shows there is much left to be said about House.

Nobuhiko Obayashi was itching to use his skills as a television commercial director -- he did those Charles Bronson Mandom commercials floating around the Internet -- to make a feature film. He asked his 11 year old daughter Chigumi to come up with some ideas. She came up with some wild concepts that only a little kid could dream up, including: an evil cat, a house that eats people, a finger-chopping piano, murderous futons, a bleeding clock and all other sorts of mayhem.

It feels like we've been waiting forever for Criterion to tell us when they're going to release Nobuhiko Obayashi's insane masterpiece House (or Hausu), and it looks like it'll be arriving just in time for Halloween on DVD and Blu-Ray! Look at this list of special features: * New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition) * Constructing a House, a new video piece featuring interviews with director Nobuhiko Obayashi, story scenarist and daughter of the director Chigumi Obayashi, and screenwriter Chiho Katsura * Emotion, a 1966 experimental film by Obayashi * New video appreciation by director Ti West (House of the Devil) * Theatrical trailer * New and improved English subtitle translation * Plus: An essay by Chuck Stephens...

Here we are again: another mid-month Criterion Collection new release announcement, with some incredible titles to talk about. Many of today’s announced titles have been teased at in one way or another, over the past few months.

First up we are finally going to see Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Criterion Collection #2, Seven Samurai finally making its high definition debut in the states. This release was something that Criterion mentioned back in December, as the Ak 100: 25 Films of Akira Kurosawa was released, and the Yojimbo / Sanjuro films were about to be announced on Blu-ray. In the post, Jonathan Turell mentioned that they wanted to have Seven Samurai ready on Blu-ray for Kurosawa’s birth month as well, but that it wouldn’t be ready until later in the year. The Seven Samurai Blu-ray was also teased at earlier this year when Amazon suddenly added a pre-order page for it,...