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Classic movie Bluray disk maker Twilight Time is closing up shop!

[UPDATE MAY 15: Screen Archives is taking over the Twilight Time inventory – from the news release: "Screen Archives Entertainment has reached an agreement with Twilight Time Movies to purchase the company’s extensive Twilight Time Movies inventory or back catalog effective July 1, 2020." ]

May 14, 2020: Twilight Time is liquidating stock and shutting down by June 30. They are offering sales on their various titles in inventory (many films are out of stock, they printed very small runs of their titles, 3,000 being the norm).

This company was a very good source for HD copies of many harder to get films, such as good, clean HD prints of Beat the Devil, Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Our Man in Havana, among many, many others over the years.

From the website with the announcement of ending Twilight Time:

"When launched in 2011, Twilight Time pioneered the concept of bringing rare and distinctive films of all genres to the marketplace in 3,000-unit Limited Editions, exclusively available at two website destinations: Screen Archives Entertainment and later Twilight Time Movies. This allowed devoted movie fans to obtain physical copies of highly desired titles which did not command shelf space at local brick and mortar stores. Nick aptly named the venture Twilight Time, because eventually the concept of film as physical goods would have a ‘sell-by date’ possibly sooner rather than later. Nick once said, “At the onset we never envisaged we would be around for nearly a decade before it was time for the sun to set on the company.”

The Twilight Time web site

Classic Hollywood recommendations from Yahoo News

The article is based on an attachment to the TV program Hollywood on Netflix (which I have not seen). Interesting assortment of title recommendations from the big internet service, for example they list (these four are from a nine title list at Yahoo):

1. Shanghai Express (1932)
2. Magnificent Obsession (1954)
3. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
4. The Women (1939)

All four of these titles are well known among classic film watchers, but that's not the main oddity of them being mentioned. Rather, its that they are clearly meant to present classic Hollywood film and they actually are "classic" Hollywood film. So often in contemporary media, a film called "classic Hollywood" is a title like Chinatown (1974) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), showing how much the term "classic" has stretched to encompass an era that stretches from director George Melies all the way to the dawn of the 21st century.

Blood on the Moon on Blu Ray

Blood on the Moon[Blu-ray] - AMAZON

Movies Roger Ebert hated

Slightly funny article at Cinema Blend about ten films that have a popular fanbase today but famed critic Ebert panned them when they originally came forth to theatres or when he got around to seeing them again. (Ebert didn't like Rope or Brazil? Shocking!)

(For an alternative, see this Screen Rant article on Ten Terrible Movies Roger Ebert Loved.)

(This is something the Mystery Science Theatre hosts would do sometimes, watch a horrible film but then bring up a famous film critic giving it "two-and-a-half stars" and then pointing out other, obviously better films that the critic gave lower ratings to. The fallibility of movie criticism makes for such easy comparisons, unfortunately.)

Vaughn Taylor - 1911-1983

Character actor that began in Hollywood as an editor (1933, Picture Snatcher) but became an actor with 1946's Mr and Mrs North. He racked up an impressive 190 credits with film and TV shows with his last appearance in 1976 with The Gumball Rally. He appeared on just about every major TV show through the 1950s-1970s, often with multiple appearances (for example eight different roles on Perry Mason and five on The Twilight Zone.)

Criterion releasing a high definition The Lady Eve in July

Criterion had a nice DVD set nearly 20 years ago, but this 4K restoration should be a way to see Preston Sturges' comedy in the best possible light outside of a good print in a movie theatre.

The story is a tale of switched identities (like a lot of Sturges comedies, mistaken and faked identities crop up a lot) in which Barbara Stanwyck plays both the character Jean, a card shark "working the cruise lines" (with her "father" Charles Coburn) and Stanwyck also plays Jean's twin-sister Eve who wreaks funny revenge on Henry Fonda (as wealthy ale heir Charles Harrington) for spurning Jean.

With Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Sturges' comedy is physically turned down a little bit more than in his other films. He liked to load up his "funny" with loud noises and pratfalls (not that Lady Eve doesn't have this in it, such as Fonda's misadventures at an evening party in which his outfits are continuously ruined, one after another), but with Stanwyck and Fonda there's softer bits of interchange amid the comedy, and whether this is Sturges in a slightly softer mode or just the result of the two lead actors dominating the proceedings (especially Stanwyck), it is hard to say, but The Lady Eve does stand a little bit apart from the other comedies in the Sturges' oeuvre. Incredibly, the same year Sturges made The Lady Eve, he also made Sullivan's Travels.

Here's the add-on features (copied from the Criterion Web Page here):

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2001 featuring film professor Marian Keane
• Introduction from 2001 by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
• Interview from 2020 with writer-director Preston Sturges’s biographer and son Tom Sturges and friends
• New video essay by film critic David Cairns
• Costume designs by Edith Head
• Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1942 featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Ray Milland
• Audio recording of “Up the Amazon,” a song from an unproduced stage musical based on the film
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a 1946 profile of Preston Sturges from LIFE magazine

Allison Hayes in Zombies of Mora Tau

Sophia Loren: A Life in Pictures - 192 Pages - Amazon.com

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