Jean Cocteau’s 1959 Film, ‘Testament of Orpheus’ is celebrated for many reasons, but did anybody stop to acknowledge quite how great the end title is? The sequence opens to a shot of an expectant knife, in slow motion a balloon falls onto the blade, popping open, and releasing its smoke bomb, slowly fading into Cocteau’s hand-written ‘fin’.
The Criterion Collection dvd is out for Ang Lee’s, Ride with the Devil.
Between The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Ang Lee made Ride with the Devil, a beautifully crafted and viscerally thrilling film about the American Civil War, told from an unorthodox point of view and starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, and Jeffrey Wright as conflicted Confederate sympathizers. At the time, however, Lee wasn’t able to see his vision all the way through. At the studio’s urging, he delivered a project that was more an action picture than the ruminative, idiosyncratic drama he’d intended; details were cut and the pacing of certain scenes (including the devastating Lawrence Massacre set piece) altered. Now, with the help of the Criterion Collection, Ang Lee presents Ride with the Devil the way he intended, in a restored director’s cut, available in both Blu-ray and DVD special editions. “Thanks to Criterion, I finally have the opportunity to do the material justice,” Lee says. “With the addition of eleven minutes of footage, it is what it’s supposed to be—a bigger movie. It really breathes like one, and the complex history comes to life. Ride with the Devil is a true American story, and I love it.”
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