DVD and Blu-Ray watchdog DVD Beaver has taken a look at the new Criterion Blu-Ray of The Darjeeling Limited…and they love it.
(click to enlarge)
You can read their review at their site, where you’ll find more hi-res screen caps, and visit our previous story on the DVD and Blu-Ray where you’ll find links to pre-order. By using our links you help to support the site.
Last night’s season premiere of the (very good) NBC comedy Community opened with an homage to The Darjeeling Limited, which you can view below.
Community just began its second season on NBC, and The Darjeeling Limited will be available on Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray on October 12.
It looks so detailed I imagine it’ll be even more impressive in person, but we like it.
Pre-order the DVD here and the Blu-Ray here. For specs on the set take a look at our earlier story, the DVD and Blu-Ray will be out on October 10th.
Update: You can view a hi-res version of the cover over the Criterion Cast.
The Criterion Collection has announced their fall releases, and as we previously reported The Darjeeling Limited will finally be making it to the collection.
No cover art yet, but we do have info about the 2 Disc set, which you can find after the break.
Though it is still without a firm release date, you can now pre-order The Criterion Collection edition of The Dajreeling Limited on Blu-Ray at Amazon.
Remember, by ordering through our links you’re helping to support the site and keep us up and running.
It appears Darjeeling is one of the few Criterion titles with a pre-order page that hasn’t already been officially announced, so hopefully that means we can expect a release date soon.
Over at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz (freelance critic, and author of one the earliest and best profiles of Wes, and this incredible series of video essays from earlier this year) has been taking a look at some of the most influential directors of the decade in an on-going series of essays. Seitz’s latest examines the work of Robert Zemeckis and Wes Anderson.
An excerpt:
That’s where Wes Anderson comes in. The director of “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004), “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007) and this year’s Roald Dahl adaptation “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is as much a train-set filmmaker as Zemeckis, Jackson and Lucas, and like Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson (“Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Blood”), Zemeckis and Spielberg, he’s one of the few prominent Hollywood filmmakers working in the ’70s auteur tradition — and doing it with a style so distinct that it can never be stolen, only imitated. He’s notorious for fretting over every aspect of his movies, from the texture of the clothes to the precise geometric motion of each shot and camera movement to the choice of on-screen font (he prefers variations of Futura). Detractors describe his style as fussy, overcomplicated, even airless — and if one prefers a messier, more spontaneous kind of filmmaking, or a more “invisible” style of direction, Anderson is almost certainly the opposite of fun.
I won’t mount a defense of Anderson as an exciting, imaginative and important filmmaker in this article, because I’ve already done it in a series of video essays.I mention him in this piece because of two particular aspects of his art. One is his commitment to analog moviemaking. He shoots on film and prefers to do everything, special effects included, on the set rather than create them after the fact. Even when he employs digital effects or processes, he calls attention to their artificiality; think of the obviously stop-motion sea creatures in “Aquatic” — or, for that matter, the unruly, roiling fur on the creatures in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — which the director insisted be fabricated with hard-to-manage animal hair rather than more controllable synthetic hair, because he just liked how it looked.
Be sure to read the full piece at Salon, and leave your comments below. It’s a great essay, and well worth the read.
From Richard Brody’s New Yorker blog, where he ranked TDL the second best film of the 00s:
As ever with the films of Wes Anderson—the best new American director of the last twenty years—love and death, comedy and tragedy, comfort and adventure, understanding and opacity, style and substance fuse in a modernism of personal and reflexive cinema and a classicism of grand and subtle literary emotion.
Richard Brody profiled Wes a few weeks ago for the New Yorker. On Brody’s excellent film blog for the New Yorker, Front Row, he added some additional commentary (and praise) for “The Darjeeling Limited”:
I’ve seen it many, many times since that press screening two years ago. It has not only held up but gotten richer; each viewing yields fresh wonders.
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