Do You Like Argento?

While Dario Argento's last feature, The Card Player/Il Cartaio failed to achieve the fun of Sleepless/Non Ho Sonno, his TV movie (apparently a hope to ignite a new TV series) Do You Like Hitchcock?/Ti piace Hitchcock? went in an altogether different direction by weaving a narrative out of standard conventions and plot twists from the best Hitchcock films.

Not an easy task, and it's a bit surprising to see Argento having great fun in making us believe one Hitchcockian nod will follow through as the source did... and then take another amusing turn and twist to another convention. Pino Donaggio's synth/orchestral score is fairly restrained, and the location work is first rate, including the residential street that places a self-adoring babe in sight of a bespeckled film geek.

As with prior Argento films, there's adoration for fine architecture, and his camera lovingly exploits the lines and curves of old world apartments and their rickety elevators, plus the sleek glass and steel upgrade to the babe's apartment that allows the geek to survey her comings and goings. Anchor Bay's DVD brings Argento's playful film to Region 1 audiences, and beefs up the label's existing catalogue of the director's many titles. (Someone should release his Door into Darkness/Porta sul buio in a Region 1 set, now that the limited German release of the four-part TV series from 1973 is long gone.)

We've also uploaded our review of Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon, which is now rumored at DavisDVD.com to appear in a longer version on HD-DVD in December. That news is hardly a surprise, as the film's pacing was frankly a mess. We'll upload a review of the '72, version in the coming weeks, but you can read our reviews of Poseidon and the 2005 cash-in TV movie, where we compare characters, stupidities, and structural flaws of the two recent attempts to turn Paul Gallico's classic novel into a blockbuster.

Now when will Columbia release Goliath Awaits on DVD? You'd think the studio would've exploited the disaster-in-H20 wave of the past year, since this goofy but inventive drama of survivors living in the underwater wreck of a luxury liner for 40 years deserves a DVD release in its original TV length format. (The two-part series was later edited into a 110 min. version, and popped up on VHS and laserdisc.)

Lastly, we've extensively updated all of the Links sections, with new composer sites, more DVD labels, and resource sites we think are very cool and handy.

Technorati Tags: DVD Reviews, Dario Argento, and Poseidon Adventure