Shout Factory’s Bluray of Werner Herzog‘s Fitzcarraldo will be released on 1.13.15. The cover is actually the one-sheet art used by the film’s German distributor 32 years ago.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Don Siegel‘s Flaming Star. I probably haven’t, and if not because I’ve always thought that Elvis Presley made exactly two and a half decent films — Love Me Tender, Loving You (i.e., the halfer) and King Creole — and it was all downhill from then on. Now I’m starting to suspect otherwise. I’ll never buy the Flaming Star Bluray but maybe a high-def version will stream down the road.

“It is surprising…that this small, somber view of some of the misunderstanding and bloody strife between settlers and Indians in Texas of the 1870s is equally passionate about both,” N.Y. Times critic A.H. Weiler wrote on 12.17.60. “No guitar gala, Flaming Star is an unpretentious but sturdy western that takes the time, the place and the people seriously.

Adopt has scheduled a cool-people-only screening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, winner of the Palme d’Or winner at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. It’ll happen on Monday, 11.3 at 6 pm at the UTA Screening Room on Civic Center Drive. There is no more ardent fan of Ceylan than myself, but I missed Sleep in Cannes and then blew it off in Toronto also because of the 196-minute length. I’ve been told that it’s cool to invite “friends and fellow bloggers based in L.A.” so those with the right pedigree need to get in touch. The UTA screening room is about as good as it gets, quality-wise, so this’ll be a ripe opportunity to catch it in a deluxe way. Winter Sleep will open on 12.19 in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. The next two dozen or so markets will open between January 9th and 16th, timed to the announcement of the Oscar nominations.

A 10.25 Hollywood Reporter piece by Paul Bond quotes Exodus star Christian Bale by way of a 10.21 Christianity Today article by Drew Turney, and to me it’s hilarious. “I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic,” Bale told reporters during a recent Los Angeles sitdown. “He was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life…a very troubled and tumultuous man who fought greatly against God, against his calling.”

So much for the staunch Christian view of the man, which was more or less delivered in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments. I don’t know if Christian nutters will rise up in protest and give Exodus shit the way they dumped all over Noah, but it probably won’t matter if they do. The fact is that Noah did pretty well at the end of the day — $101 million domestic, $359 million worldwide.

“First and foremost, anything you’ve heard about the sound in that packed-to-the-rafters 70mm IMAX screening at the TCL Chinese Theater Thursday night is absolutely true. Take a proprietary IMAX sound mix and speaker configuration that can be pretty inferior and add in the fact that Nolan’s mixes tend to be muddied historically (then consider that for some reason the system was turned up to 11) — it was a recipe for disaster.” — from Kris Tapley‘s In Contention review of Interstellar, posted this morning.

“I couldn’t understand full stretches of dialogue and the IMAX of it all with the pitch darkness of the celluloid (too dark, I’d wager), it just wasn’t settling.

Interstellar is one of those big, rib-rattling, epic-sprawl movies that you only get from determined, well-funded visionaries like…well, like Chris Nolan. And this, make no mistake, is a super-charged time-travel flick that is also very personal. It’s basically about Nolan saying “there’s no place like home, like family, like love”…probably due to a suspicion that he works too obsessively and is missing out on his children’s lives or something along those lines. Sounds like The Wizard of Oz in Space, right? Without the jokes and the songs and the fancifulness, of course. And without, I regret to say, any way to believe in other-wordly realms. Interstellar is quite the wowser throttle ride — you have to see it, of course — but for me it didn’t hang together in a way that felt right or rooted or satisfying. It “played” but it didn’t sink in.

Interstellar is basically a grim story about love, loss, heroism…a down-the-rabbit-hole tale about seeking and adventuring and returning, Odysseus-style. It’s riveting at times. Now and then it’s breathtaking. And at times it is speechy and banal. At times it’s one of those “wait..give me that again?” movies. I just didn’t believe or understand a lot of it. And it has one scene that, no lie, is comically awful. Beware the killer colonist who once dropped in on Che Guevara!

That was my reaction, for the most part. I was “impressed” by it as far as the chops and the eye-filling scenery, both local and cosmic, were concerned and I generally liked the rumble-in-space stuff, but I couldn’t buy into it, man…not really. (Does this mean I’ll lose out on Paramount award-season ads? I’m weeping over this but I gotta be me.) But a friend tells me that Emile Hirsch and Chris Rock and Adrien Brody and a lot of other celebrities who saw it last Wednesday night were really blown away so…you know, don’t let me stop you. (Rock told my friend that he “doesn’t think any film can possibly match it.”) It’ll be Best Picture nominated, I suppose, because the community wants to kiss Nolan’s ass for the same reason it has smooched Spielberg’s ass for the last 39 years. And it’ll probably win two or three tech Oscars. And it’ll make loads of money.