The Wish List

With so many films now available on DVD, there are still plenty that we here at DVD Outsider are crying out for. On the basis that if you wish to hard for something you might get it, here are some of our most requested, listed in alphabetical order, led by the latest submissions. Promised upcoming releases will be added, and on release the tutles will move into our Released page.

Latest Additions

Slarek
30 September
2006

Away From it All [UK 1979]
Yes, it's a short film rather than a feature, but it's an absolute scream, and I so, so want to get hold of it and show it to everyone I know who was to young to see Life of Brian on its original cinema release, which this played as support to. Mind you, they'd also be too young to get the central joke, having never had to sit through those wretched Global-Queensway travelogue shorts that used to accompany feature films in UK cinemas in the 1970s. Away From it All plays just like one of them (complete with horrible font for the titles), at least for the first five minutes. The only clue of the increasing anarchy to come is that the narrator, one Nigel Farquhar-Bennett, sounds suspiciously like John Cleese. Please, someone, find this film and attach it to a Python re-release or as part of a short film compilation - anything!

Rob	And Life Goes On [Iran 1991] Yet another masterpiece from Iranian legend Abbas Kiarostami. The film follows an actor who plays Kiarostami and his son on a journey to the devastated city of Guilan in Iran after an earthquake to search for the star actors of his last film, Where is my Friends House?. It is a film that shows how people manage to cope with such a tradegy. Coming across characters in various mountainous villages Kiarostami observes how the people are determined to live life as best they can. Also a region 2 of Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us would be nice. There is a region 1 release but is not that easy to get hold of.
LG 13 Dec 2004	Despair [West Germany/France 1978] One of modern cinema's most acclaimed and influential film-makers, the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder has had several of his key films released on DVD, but not this visually arresting, powerfully acted adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Fassbinder's first English language film was scripted by Tom Stoppard and starred Dirk Bogard as a Russian factory owner living in Berlin in the 1930s looking to escape his monotonous life. One day he meets his own double (although in the film he looks nothing like him) and the two swap identities. A beautiful and compelling film that cries out for a strong transfer to showcase Michael Ballhaus's photographic compositions.
Slarek 11 March 2006	The Devils [UK 1971] I can't understand why I've not put this in earlier. Ken Russell's brilliant adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon and the play by John Whiting is the perfect Russell project, and he responds with a film that is pure cinema - it looks gorgeous and yet captures perfectly the hysteria of a time when religion was all powerful and a man could be executed purely because of the spite and jealousy of others. Oliver Reed and Venessa Redgrave are at their finest, and get great support from Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian, Gemma Jones and Georgina Hale. The set design in particular is just fabulous, courtesy of one Derek Jarman. This cries out for a special edition release, especially following Mark Kermode's work to recover the missing scenes. The opportunity for a director's cut has been there now for a couple of years, so why are we waiting?
LG	Dites-lui que je l'aime/The Sweet Sickness [France 1977] Gerard Depardieu excels as a man off his nut, still obsessed with a woman who left him for another man. Based on a novel by brilliant ex-pat writer Patricia Highsmith - author of The Talented Mr. Ripley - this is yet again a superior French cinematic version of a tale by a British (or, in this case, "near-British") female crime writer. Miller's work has been gradually showing up on DVD - cf. the recent Mortelle Randonee and Alias Betty. Here's another one due for a digital release.
Camus	Dream Child [US 1996] Dennis Potter is beginning to be represented on DVD. He made his considerable name writing brilliant TV drama which broke the fourth wall, stood on many an executive toe and startled audiences into waking up. His cinematic forays were less successful as he frequently and happily took Hollywood money and wrote to what he perceived Hollywood wanted (within Potter's own sense of the Potter universe). But in Dream Child (beautifully directed by Gavin Millar) he got what he gave us. It's a British film championed by Verity Lambert and Thorn-EMI as they were known. And it's a gem. Ian Holm as Lewis Carroll. Co-produced by the 'other' man who gave us The Phantom Menace. Hang on, scratch that. Dream Child was made in the days when Rick McCallum hadn't even met George Lucas. And for what it's worth, Pauline Kael adored it too... Ah hell, I'm biased. It's the first movie I got my name on. Bring it out!
Slarek 11 March 2006	Dudes [USA 1987] Penelope Sheeris's tale of three New York punks who head out west and end up playing Cowboys and Indians for real has attracted some extraordinarily negative reactions, but for my money is one of the director's most enjoyably good natured films, and one friends and I used to watch regularly over a few beers back in VHS days. Come on, there's the making of a cult film here if a few more people could actually get to see it.
Slarek 7 July 2005	The Executioner's Song [USA 1982] A very solid and compellingly told TV Movie adaptation of Normal Mailer's exhaustive study of convincted murderer Gary Gilmore, who elected to be shot by firing squad and whose eyes were the subject of a particularly creepy punk song by The Adverts. Tommy Lee Jones, in a star-making early role, plays Gilmore with just the right might of nervous charisma and suppressed violence. There were two versions available of this, a 136 minute TV movie and a cut down 97 minute theatrical version with more realistic dialogue. An amalgamation of the two would be quite something.
LG	Kamikaze '89 [Germany 1982] Definitely a one-off, this peculiar hybrid - science fiction, neo-noir, hippie movie, and all-around whatsit - is notable for one of the few, and last appearances on screen by director Rainer Maria Fassbinder as the lead in this film based on a novel by noted Swedish crime writer Per Wahloo. Wolf Gremm, a colleague of Fassbinder's - in fact, his primary cinematographer - has a lot of fun focusing on his director pal's face, actions, and costumes (definitely over the top), and the film could be described the same way. But it's a unique piece of cinema for its time, perhaps made even more so with the trademark sound of Tangerine Dream as the soundtrack composers. If Fassbinder's own highly stylized films have garnered DVD releases, why not this one?
LG	King Lear [UK/Denmark 1971] Peter Brook's dark, violent and experimental adaptation of one of Shakespeare's most filmed plays remains one of the most memorable and, paradoxically, hard to track down. A job for the BFI, perhaps?
LG Dec 2004	L.627 [France 1992] Bertrand Tavernier's superb police drama stars Didier Bezace as 'Lilu', a highly strung verteran detective who angers his boss and is transferred to a desk job in a a poorly equipped but enthusiastic anti-drugs unit, led by joker Dodo. Tavernier is less interested in plot than in character and the day-to-day mechanics of police work, and from this fashions an almost documentary-like film whose 145 minutes just fly by.
	A release in France from Studio Canal does put it within UK viewers' reach and it does have English subtitles. But it also has a commentary by director Bertrand Tavernier, co-screenwriter Michel Alexandre and actress Charlotte Kady and a spattering of other extras, which are unlikely to be subtitled. Could someone plesase pick this up for UK distribution...
Slarek 7 July 2005	O Lucky Man! [UK 1973] The second of Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis trilogy may be a little more ramshackle than its predecessor, but its range of targets is greater, it has the Alan Price Band as its Greek Chorus and includes possibly the most disturbing image in any of Anderson's films, involving a transformed boy at a clinic run by the half-bonkers Graham Crowden.
Slarek	The Outfit [US 1974] John Flynn's criminally unseen tale of a small-time crook who takes on The Mob is one of the best crime dramas of the 1970s, a decade we here at Outsider keep looking back to with starry-eyed nostalgia (because Hollywood was making good films then). Robert Duvall and Joe Don Baker are both at the top of their game, and Flynn, who also made the Tarantinio favourite Rolling Thunder, doesn't waste a line or dialogue or a single shot, and you can take that both ways.
CNash 2 February 2006	Outlaw Star [Japan 1998] Sunrise's acclaimed animé series, has been given a Region 1 release, but has yet to grace our shores under Region 2 - rather strange, given that other animé with similar themes (Cowboy Bebop, Chrono Crusade, Evangelion) have had multiple R2 releases. Stylistically, Outlaw Star is a match for the ever-popular Cowboy Bebop, and has themes along the same lines. It's also been compared to Joss Whedon's short-lived series, Firefly. It sees an unlikely crew of "outlaws" (here taken to mean an independant tradesperson and not a criminal) band together in search for various personal goals - money, purpose in life, etc. Animé fans in the UK have long been crying out for a release ever since it premiered several years ago on the ill-fated CNX Channel.
LG	Passion D'Amore [France 1981] Fine performances, not least from veteran Jean-Louis Trintignant, lend weight to this unusual twist on Beauty and the Beast, a film impossibly hard to track down on almost any format at present.
Slarek 30 October 2005	Private Schulz [UK 1981] It's too often forgotten that the legendary Jack Pulman, who will rightly go down in history for adapting Robert Graves' marvellous I Claudius for what remains one of television's finest ever achievements, also turned his hand to wartime comedy in this wonderful story of hapless forgers pulled out of prisons to work for the Third Reich. The cast are just superb - Michael Elphick has never been better as Schulz, Ian Richardson steals every scene he is in as Major Neuheim (and a couple of other roles), Billie Whitelaw is smart and aluring as the brothel madame Schulz lusts after, and Clive Merrison's hestitant Gestapo officer Kruger has to be one of the funniest creations in TV history. Come on BBC, this is one that definitely should be out there.
Bro Utal 13 October 2005	Saraku [Japan 1995] Masahiro Shinoda's long-planned answer to Kenji Mizoguchi's classic, Utamaro and His Five Women. This film had limited release outside Japan, despite glowing reviews; is visually opulent; and is among the most coherent works of a Japanese nouvelle vague director whose greatest strength is the integration of traditional Japanese theatrical conventions with contemporary Japanese film style (e.g., Buraikan, Double Suicide, snippets of Samurai Spy and Owl's Castle). One needn't be a Shinoda fan (like me) to relish this film. I find Sharaku's absence from DVD inexplicable.
LG Dec 2004 strongly seconded by Bro Utal October 2005	Yashagaike / Demon Pond [Japan 1979] A strikingly filmed but virtually unseen (at least in the West) Japanese folk tale from director Masahiro Shinoda that starts in almost neo-realistic style as the central character - school teacher Gakuen Yamasawa - travels through drought-stricken land in search of a lost friend. On his arrival at his intended destination, the film undergoes a visual transformation, the gritty look of the first act giving way to scenes of startling visual beauty and inventiveness, as Gakuen becomes involved in a fairytale story of the Demon Pond of the title, a Dragon God and a beautiful princess. Given the extraordinary look of the film, you'd think this would be a prime candidate for a DVD release, but so far there has been no sign, even in its home country.

Click here for a list of past inclusions on the list that have since become available

If you have any suggestions for The Wish List that you want to risk putting our way then email them to us and we'll consider adding them. Most sensible suggestions will be considered, and a brief summary of why you want to sse the film released on DVD would be very useful, as would your prefered screen name.

We also welcome any information of the availability or upcoming release of anty of the titles on the list.