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DVD Bargains & Newspaper Freebies

Yellowbeard

Hoorah!

Yellowbeard is soon to be released on DVD.

It's a REALLY funny film.

Here's a short review:
Swashbucklers, pirates, public floggings, saucy tarts, beggars, queens and jolly rogers!

Scripted by the terrifically funny triumvirate of Graham Chapman, Peter Cook and
Bernard McKenna, this nautical comedy features a veritable who's who of British comedy greats... No pirating movie is safe from this crew!

Yellowbeard is the scariest and hairiest pirate on the high-seas, not to mention his predilection for frisky business! When the titular pirate is let loose, on the promise that he lead the authorities to his booty stash, all hell breaks loose. Eventually Yellowbeard, The British Navy, former colleagues and his very own long-lost son (an intellectual, to his dismay) all race to find the treasure first!
Click to expand...

More info HERE.
 
I spent a couple of days - when it was too hot to do much else - expanding, re-ordering and correcting my notes on Bargain Basement DVDs:

here

These particular versions may have disappeared but the Public Domain stuff keeps coming around - usually from the same old prints.

Well, I think I enjoyed it at the time . . . bits of it, anyway.

:?
 
Today's Sunday Times is giving away a free copy of Jean-Luc Godard's 1968 classic , Sympathy For The Devil . Also called One After 101 , it documents the making of the Rolling Stones number , Sympathy For The Devil . This is quite a rare film (last time I saw it was back in 1987) , but has recently had a DVD release . Absolute classic- a must for any Stones fan.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
I spent a couple of days - when it was too hot to do much else - expanding, re-ordering and correcting my notes on Bargain Basement DVDs:

here
Click to expand...

Good stuff :yeay:

Any chance of a plainer background though?

Yesterday I wnt to Poundland in the Strand (Bootle), as I was passing, and the selection was dreadful - mainly the kind fo thing you'd bin if it came free with your regular newspaper along with stacks of Friends DVDs. I spent a while checking through everything but didn't buy anything.
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
Any chance of a plainer background though?
Click to expand...

Just adblock it, Emps
thumbup6ly.gif


Yesterday I went to Poundland in the Strand (Bootle), as I was passing...
Click to expand...

We believe you... ;)
 
WhistlingJack said:
Mighty_Emperor said:
Any chance of a plainer background though?
Click to expand...

Just adblock it, Emps
thumbup6ly.gif
Click to expand...

By jingo now there is an idea.

WhistlingJack said:
Yesterday I went to Poundland in the Strand (Bootle), as I was passing...
Click to expand...

We believe you... ;)
Click to expand...

I didn't want tog et into the whole "I was helping my mad auntie return her upside down curtain" as that road leads to unnecesary diversions into an uninteresting story ;)
 
Emps: "Any chance of a plainer background though?"

I've zapped the naff marble backgrounds completely on those pages - I was always led to think white was too glaring but I guess folks can always adjust their monitors. :)

Yes, the Poundstores seem to be piling up mountains of unshiftable stuff at the moment. The old titles show up in bulk on the exchange & second-hand market, but often at three quid or more!

The best news recently has been the arrival of FilmFour on Freeview. Already some rare and curious things have shown up, such as Hellzapoppin', which had been on my wish-list for years.

My Film Blog is up and running at Filmjournal but I'll continue to post any good bargains here.

http://filmjournal.net/jameswhitehead/

The blogs are still going free, if anyone else wants one:

http://filmjournal.net/

:D
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
I didn't want tog et into the whole "I was helping my mad auntie return her upside down curtain" as that road leads to unnecesary diversions into an uninteresting story ;)
Click to expand...

:shock:
I too have an uninteresting movie-related upside down curtain story!
What're the chances, eh...
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Emps: "Any chance of a plainer background though?"

I've zapped the naff marble backgrounds completely on those pages - I was always led to think white was too glaring but I guess folks can always adjust their monitors. :)
Click to expand...

LOL - its fien with the white on mine.

You could always keep the marbel background but use a div/table cell with a neutral/off white background for the text blocks.

escargot1 said:
Mighty_Emperor said:
I didn't want tog et into the whole "I was helping my mad auntie return her upside down curtain" as that road leads to unnecesary diversions into an uninteresting story ;)
Click to expand...

:shock:
I too have an uninteresting movie-related upside down curtain story!
What're the chances, eh...
Click to expand...

On a Fortean forum? Evens :lol:
 
The Mail On Sunday is givingaway a free copy of To Walk With Lions , starring Richard Harris . Billed as a sequel to Born Free. Sounds a load of old crap , but may be OK.
 
Today's Independent comes with a DVD of Rossellini's Francesco Giullare di Dio.
 
WhistlingJack said:
Today's Independent comes with a DVD of Rossellini's Francesco Giullare di Dio.
Click to expand...

Well spotted, Jack. Saw this just in time to get one. Thanks. A complete, 83 minute restored print, too. :)

The Freebie-season is upon us! I wonder what other unexpected treasures will show up. :?:
 
Today's Times comes with a subtitled, anamorphic copy of the fabulous French animated film Belleville Rendez-vous
thumbup6ly.gif
 
Look , I know everyone will mock me for doing this , but I picked up a copy of Zathura on UMD in my local Woolworths for 3.99 , for my PSP . They were also meant to be selling The Descent at that price , but no copies were left when I got there.
 
Jimi Hendrix CD Free in The Sunday Times

Now here's a rarity - a music CD free with a newspaper that's actually any good! :D Today's Sunday Times has a CD of The Jimi Hendrix Experience's February 24th 1969 Royal Albert Hall gig, their last in Britain. It's a concert that has been issued commercially many times over the years, but I've never seen it as low as £2...
thumbup6ly.gif
 
Woolworths have a real deal on at the moment for anyone with a PSP- they are selling a selection of films at £3.99. I have managed to get the following...The Descent, The Fog, Zathura, Harry Potter & the Goblet Of Fire and The Longest Yard. The girl in my local shop says that as of Monday they will be increasing the number of ilms in their UMD range to be sold at that price.

Also, for the same UMD format , I managed to pick up a copy of Master and Commander at my local branch of Game , for the whopping sum of £2.99. :D
 
I had heard UMD was a dying format so it might be a good time to grab all these films cheap.
 
Freebie alert. Saturday's Grauniad has Lord of the Flies - Peter Brook's 1963 version.

Ideally this one should be watched in short trousers with a tubby bespectacled boy and a cliff to hand. Failing that, ask your friendly local butcher for a pig's head or a well-hung parachutist. :shock:
 
Today's Times has a DVD of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.
 
WhistlingJack said:
Today's Times has a DVD of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.
Click to expand...

Worth a look if looking for footnotes to Hitchcock, though you can pick it up for a quid and I've not heard of any restored version. The Waterfall DVD is washed-out and rough. The BBC have a sharper print with better colour but it's not a fillum I watch often. I wrote the following piece for the Hitchcock DVD Board so I might as well paste it in here:

A man, as it were, suspended between life and death, loses the love of his life. On the streets of the city, he sees her everywhere, rushing after women with some resemblance. He thinks he sees her again in the figure of a woman who is entering a car . . .

Later, this other woman becomes his lover but she complains of not being loved for herself, only for her resemblance to a dead woman.

This drama is played out at considerable length to the accompaniment of a lush romantic score by Bernard Herrmann.

Only it isn't Vertigo, which lies some six years in the future. The man is not played by Jimmy Stewart but by Gregory Peck and the women are Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward. The city isn't San Francisco but Paris and the traumatised man isn't a cop but a writer and big-game hunter, lying near to death on The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

The presence of Leo G. Carroll in the cast creates more diverse Hitchcockian echoes. His name may not immediately mean much but the patrician or avuncular manner made him a favourite character actor for Hitch - he appeared in Spellbound, Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Suspicion, North by North West and - with Peck - in The Paradine Case. After North by North West, he appears to have become something of a fixture on US television. Did anyone else appear in so many Hitchcock films, apart from Hitch himself? The product of a wealthy English Catholic family, he was named after Pope Leo XIII.

For all its once greatly-admired second-unit cinematography, The Snows of Kilimanjaro has faded in every sense. It has slipped into the Public Domain and can be picked up on DVD for a pound in the UK. Its pre-echoes of Vertigo might not be so noticable but for the Herrmann connection. The score is very similar to that he was to produce for Vertigo - high divided strings for the lingering love-theme, a motif he had swiped from the first act of Die Walküre, where it delineates the forbidden love of a brother and sister.

That love theme has another close relation born within a year. Another epic remembered, if at all, for its spectacular second-unit work. This time we go Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef to show off Cinemascope and stereophonic sound. Herrmann scored the underwater scenes for nine harps and his familiar love-motif accompanies a soggy Romeo & Juliet tale of rival sponge fisherfolk. The young lovers meet in an edenic orchard and the tendrils of the theme wind around them. Another one that has found its way into the bargain bins - surprisingly, some PD prints maintain the original aspect ratio and stereo sound.

Now the music from Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef was a property which 20th Century-Fox appreciated - it was added to their music library and excerpted for other productions over a long period. It is not surprising that even so creative a composer as Herrmann should have borrowed extensively from himself in scoring love music. Even so, Vertigo seems to be one of those iconic productions which creates its own precursors and sheds its light retrospectively on some films which are less often taken down from the shelf. Once sucked into the vortex, the viewer is doomed to be cruising the streets of cinema, forever seeing some resemblance to Vertigo in the frowsy old faces he surveys.

A glance at the credits for Mr Herrmann on IMDB throws up some curious facts about his posthumous career. We thought we knew his last film was Taxi Driver but his music was used with and without permission in many subsequent productions. A lot of the credits on the IMDB are for understandable purposes such as Making of documentaries. However I was startled to discover that the watery associations of Vertigo were revisited in a manner of speaking when parts of the score were filched for a little movie called Water Power. This horrid item is otherwise known as The Enema Bandit! And no, I haven't seen it! :shock:
 
Madame Bovary

Today's Independent comes with a copy of Chabrol's Madame Bovary.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
WhistlingJack said:
Today's Times has a DVD of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.
Click to expand...

Worth a look if looking for footnotes to Hitchcock, though you can pick it up for a quid and I've not heard of any restored version. The Waterfall DVD is washed-out and rough. The BBC have a sharper print with better colour but it's not a fillum I watch often. I wrote the following piece for the Hitchcock DVD Board so I might as well paste it in here:

A man, as it were, suspended between life and death, loses the love of his life. On the streets of the city, he sees her everywhere, rushing after women with some resemblance. He thinks he sees her again in the figure of a woman who is entering a car . . .

Later, this other woman becomes his lover but she complains of not being loved for herself, only for her resemblance to a dead woman.

This drama is played out at considerable length to the accompaniment of a lush romantic score by Bernard Herrmann.

Only it isn't Vertigo, which lies some six years in the future. The man is not played by Jimmy Stewart but by Gregory Peck and the women are Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward. The city isn't San Francisco but Paris and the traumatised man isn't a cop but a writer and big-game hunter, lying near to death on The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

The presence of Leo G. Carroll in the cast creates more diverse Hitchcockian echoes. His name may not immediately mean much but the patrician or avuncular manner made him a favourite character actor for Hitch - he appeared in Spellbound, Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Suspicion, North by North West and - with Peck - in The Paradine Case. After North by North West, he appears to have become something of a fixture on US television. Did anyone else appear in so many Hitchcock films, apart from Hitch himself? The product of a wealthy English Catholic family, he was named after Pope Leo XIII.

For all its once greatly-admired second-unit cinematography, The Snows of Kilimanjaro has faded in every sense. It has slipped into the Public Domain and can be picked up on DVD for a pound in the UK. Its pre-echoes of Vertigo might not be so noticable but for the Herrmann connection. The score is very similar to that he was to produce for Vertigo - high divided strings for the lingering love-theme, a motif he had swiped from the first act of Die Walküre, where it delineates the forbidden love of a brother and sister.

That love theme has another close relation born within a year. Another epic remembered, if at all, for its spectacular second-unit work. This time we go Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef to show off Cinemascope and stereophonic sound. Herrmann scored the underwater scenes for nine harps and his familiar love-motif accompanies a soggy Romeo & Juliet tale of rival sponge fisherfolk. The young lovers meet in an edenic orchard and the tendrils of the theme wind around them. Another one that has found its way into the bargain bins - surprisingly, some PD prints maintain the original aspect ratio and stereo sound.

Now the music from Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef was a property which 20th Century-Fox appreciated - it was added to their music library and excerpted for other productions over a long period. It is not surprising that even so creative a composer as Herrmann should have borrowed extensively from himself in scoring love music. Even so, Vertigo seems to be one of those iconic productions which creates its own precursors and sheds its light retrospectively on some films which are less often taken down from the shelf. Once sucked into the vortex, the viewer is doomed to be cruising the streets of cinema, forever seeing some resemblance to Vertigo in the frowsy old faces he surveys.

A glance at the credits for Mr Herrmann on IMDB throws up some curious facts about his posthumous career. We thought we knew his last film was Taxi Driver but his music was used with and without permission in many subsequent productions. A lot of the credits on the IMDB are for understandable purposes such as Making of documentaries. However I was startled to discover that the watery associations of Vertigo were revisited in a manner of speaking when parts of the score were filched for a little movie called Water Power. This horrid item is otherwise known as The Enema Bandit! And no, I haven't seen it! :shock:
Click to expand...

The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a very decent movie. When I picked it up in a dollar store, for, you know, one dollar, it was paired with an even better Spencer Tracy movie called Marie Galante.

Believe it. Every once in a while, the public domain serves up something nice!
 
This thread had sunk to page three, so maybe bargains have been thin on the ground. Today, however . . .

I might as well just paste the news given on the DVD Forums by a poster called Capricorn One:

Here

"Telegraph Film Classic Freebies


Free inside, according to today's paper, Pygmallion (1938) starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller on Saturday, and, in the Sunday Telegraph, The Browning Version (1951) starring Michael Redgrave and June Kent.
The house ad says 'start your Great Adaptations collection' so it looks as if there will be more. No further details given."

:D
 
The Guardian is giving away a copy of Mike Leigh's High Hopes on Saturday 25th .
 
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