The Criterion Collection has officially announced two titles for release on Blu-ray
on August 18: Akira Kurosawa's '
Kagemusha' and Jacques Tati's '
Playtime'. Both films will be presented in 1080p 1.85:1 video
with stereo lossless audio (DTS-HD Master Audio for 'Kagemusha',
uncompressed for 'Playtime') and optional English subtitles, and will include all
the bonus features present in their respective DVD editions.
In 'Kagemusha', a peasant thief is called upon to impersonate a dead warlord,
and then finds himself haunted by his spirit as well as his own ambitions. With
this late color masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa returned to the samurai film and to
a primary theme of his career—the play between illusion and reality.
Sumptuously reconstructing the splendor of feudal Japan and the pageantry of
war, Kurosawa creates a historical epic that is also a meditation on the nature
of power.
Extras for 'Kagemusha' include:
- Audio commentary featuring Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince (author of
The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa)
- “Lucas, Coppola, and Kurosawa”, in which directors George Lucas and
Francis Ford Coppola discuss Kurosawa and their roles as executive producers of
'Kagemusha'
- A 41-minute documentary on the making of Kagemusha, part of the Toho
Masterworks series “Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create”
- “Image: Kurosawa's Continuity”, a new video piece that reconstructs
Kagemusha through Kurosawa's paintings and sketches
- A series of Suntory Whiskey commercials made on the set of
'Kagemusha'
- A gallery of storyboards painted by Kurosawa and images of their
realization on-screen
- Theatrical trailers and teasers
- A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Peter Grilli and an interview with
Kurosawa by renowned critic Tony Rayns
'Playtime' was the creative apex of Jacques Tati's gloriously choreographed,
nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology. For this
monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production,
Tati again thrust the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur
Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a bafflingly modernist Paris.
Extras for 'Playtime' include:
- Video introduction by writer, director, and performer Terry Jones
- Selected scene audio commentary by film historian Philip Kemp
- “Au-delà de 'Playtime',” a short documentary featuring archival behind-
the-scenes footage from the set
- “Tati Story”, a short biographical film about Tati
- “Jacques Tati in Monsieur Hulot's World,” a 1976 BBC Omnibus
program featuring Tati
- Rare audio interview with Tati from the U.S. debut of 'Playtime' at the
1972 San Francisco International Film Festival
- Video interview with script supervisor Sylvette Baudrot
- “Cours du soir,” a 1967 short film written by and starring Tati
- Alternate international soundtrack
- An essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum