WINGS 5 minute Blu-ray Teaser!

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Gagman 66
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WINGS 5 minute Blu-ray Teaser!

Post by Gagman 66 »

:D Wow! Take a gander! This you gotta see. Amazon just put up a 5 minute promo, featuring excerpts from one of the two documentaries on the Blu-ray edition.Out in stores today. This is fantastic! Now I am really pumped for the release! I was blown away. Thanks much to Greg Nestor for bringing it to our attention. Very impressive. Hopefully, my order will be here in just a few hours from now. Will need to hook my new Blu-ray player back up before it get's to dark. Hope I got home in time.

Let me just say that one of the first things Paramount should do is get all of the Bootleg's off of Ebay. When I looked in November, there were at least 6 different bootlegs, I mean 6 different kind of bootlegs, not the some covers and packaging there. Most looked very official. I don't know if any of those were the Photoplay version or not, probably all from the old 1985 Paramount laser-disc with the Gaylord Carter score, but there sure were a bunch of them. :( I was pretty amazed at just how many .

:-[ Those colored flames you see were in the original film in 1927. They have been re-created here for the very first time since it's original release. So they have been missing from surviving prints until now. I have read about them in the past being absent, even in previously tinted prints by AMPAS and LOC. The tinting and toning effects are supposed to be as close to vintage as they have ever been.

The Photoplay Productions print of 1993 was tinted, but about 75% of it was all gold, with some blue. That's about it. Maybe a little bit a amber in a few scenes. While I'm anxious to hear the recreation of the 1927 J. S. Zamecnik score for the first time, it's still the Carl Davis Main-title theme I keep humming when ever I see a still from WINGS. So it's kind of sad that great work will likely fade into oblivion. As this release will be far more accessible than the Photoplay restoration ever was. Must say this was an unexpected event by Paramount, and Warner's really needs to get cracking and give as us the long since overdue 2004 restoration of THE BIG PARADE, yet to debut on TCM, let alone on DVD or Blu-ray. Classic film fans everywhere need to support this release, son't be waiting for a TCM debut which may be many months from now, or Netflix. Buy the Blu-ray or the DVD. Buy a copy of both. They are surprisingly affordable.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/ ... nt_fb_link" target="_blank



:) Big, Big review of the WINGS DVD-Blu-Ray release in the New York Times!


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/movie ... r=2&src=tp

Pilot’s-Eye View of the War in the Air
By DAVE KEHR
Published: January 20, 2012
THE Academy Award nominations for 2011, which will be announced on Tuesday, will most likely include a few nods to “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius’s careful if sometimes condescending pastiche of silent-era filmmaking. Most people seeing “The Artist” will probably be seeing a movie without (much) spoken dialogue for the first time; the trick will be getting them to see a second example, preferably an authentic one.

Conveniently, Tuesday is also the street date for Paramount Pictures’ truly magnificent, high-definition restoration of William A. Wellman’s 1927 World War I epic “Wings,” which the studio is releasing both as a Blu-ray disc and as a DVD. For those unfamiliar with silent film, this would be a very good place to start.

¶ At the first Academy Awards banquet, held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16, 1929, “Wings” was honored as the Outstanding Picture of the 1927-28 season, a distinction that over the years has come to be accepted as the Academy’s first Best Picture citation, though that fledgling event also honored F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” as the season’s most Unique and Artistic Picture, a category that, unfortunately, had been scuttled by the time the second banquet rolled around.

¶ There were no formal nominations or voting procedures in the early years of the Academy. The winners were simply announced (three months ahead of time for the first awards) by the members of a Board of Judges on Merit Awards. But even if there had been balloting, “Wings” would most likely have been the winner. Still a runaway hit after almost two years, the film was just moving beyond its initial big city, exclusive presentations into national release, re-equipped for its rollout with recorded music and sound effects.

¶ “Wings” possessed many of the qualities that would define future Oscar winners: a huge budget (two million 1927 dollars); a sweeping historical subject that incorporated thrills, romance and sentiment; the leading female star in the country (Clara Bow, at the height of her notoriety as Hollywood’s “It” girl) flanked by a pair of handsome newcomers (Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen); and an innovative use of technology. (The initial engagements were presented in Magnascope, a process that allows for supersize images for selected scenes, almost exactly as the Imax-ized blockbusters do today.) The modern Oscar winner that “Wings” most closely resembles is James Cameron’s 1997 “Titanic”: a grand entertainment in the something-for-everyone tradition that has been lost in the more recent era of niche marketing. “Sunrise,” though immeasurably the greater film, wouldn’t have had a chance.

¶ Paramount, actually, was coming a bit late to the game with “Wings.” Two previous big studio productions, MGM’s “Big Parade” (directed by King Vidor in 1925) and Fox’s “What Price Glory” (Raoul Walsh, 1926), had already begun the process of romanticizing and reclaiming the traumatic experience of the Great War. But those were films about foot soldiers, while “Wings” — perhaps inspired by the national wave of enthusiasm that accompanied Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 trans-Atlantic solo flight — was about the war in the air, a subject that literally required a new perspective. Paramount’s head of production, B. P. Schulberg, found what he wanted in a young and relatively inexperienced director named William A. Wellman, who had been a fighter pilot with the Lafayette Flying corps during the war and had published a book, “Go, Get ’Em!,” about his experiences.

¶ Today the flying sequences in “Wings” would be executed using digital techniques; in the ’30s and ’40s, they would have been created with a combination of miniatures, rear projection and optical printing. But in 1927 the only way to capture these effects was to perform them in front of live cameras, and Wellman found himself at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio commanding a 220-plane escadrille staffed by Army airmen and Hollywood stunt flyers.

¶ Because the planes were too small to accommodate an actor, a pilot, a cameraman and a camera, Harry Perry, the director of photography, found a way of mounting a camera in the front cockpit so that it could be operated from the pilot’s seat. Those close-ups of Arlen (who had learned to fly in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps), Rogers (who learned to fly during the production) and their comrades are gripping because they are unshakably, unmistakably real: actors filming their own performances, on sets sailing thousands of feet above the ground.

¶ The emotional core of “Wings” is the intense male romance played out between the Arlen and Rogers characters. Their relationship includes some surprisingly tender scenes of physical affection that our contemporary self-consciousness about such matters would make inconceivable in a mainstream film. Yet Wellman, who would include similar if less explicit scenes in later films, puts all of the film’s dramatic weight behind the male couple, to the point where Clara Bow, the ostensible star, seems excluded from her own movie. (She plays a hometown girl who volunteers as an ambulance driver to be on the same continent with Rogers, the boy next door she has grown up loving.)

¶ Commissioned in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Paramount’s founding, the present edition of “Wings” is a sterling example of the kind of miracles that can be worked when a major studio throws itself — with support from the Film Foundation — behind a major restoration. Working from the badly damaged duplicate negative that survives in Paramount’s archives, a team of technicians from Technicolor’s Restoration Services stabilized the image, removed dirt and scratches, added the appropriate color tinting and even some hand-stenciled effects (bursts of yellow flame for machine-gun fire) while maintaining the tight grain structure of the original photography.

¶ Accompanied by a five-channel stereo rerecording of the original score composed by J. S. Zamecnik and sound effects supervised by Ben Burtt, “Wings” is about as perfect a presentation of a silent film on a home video format that I’ve ever seen. Here’s hoping that Paramount won’t wait another hundred years before tackling a few more titles from their silent holdings. “The Artist” is a fine film, but it seems very small beside the real thing. (Paramount, Blu-ray $29.99, DVD $15.99, not rated) .


Still another Big, Big review in the Smithsonian! This one even talks to people at Paramount with the clear implication that there should be more Silent film releases from their archives! Nothing specific mind you. Maybe BEAU GESTE, and OLD IRONSIDES. I just wish they would consider FORBIDDEN PARADISE, STAGE STRUCK, A KISS FOR CINDERELLA, LORD JIM, and CHILDREN OF DIVORCE.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/movies/ ... red-wings/


Plus More Strong Reviews at the these links:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_ ... lu-ray.htm

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Wings-Blu ... 15/#Review
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pvitari
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Re: WINGS 5 minute Blu-ray Teaser!

Post by pvitari »

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/ ... nt_fb_link" target="_blank

This amazon link doesn't work. :(

My Blu-ray arrived but I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.
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CineMaven
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Re: WINGS 5 minute Blu-ray Teaser!

Post by CineMaven »

William Wellman Jr. will be appearing at NYC's Film Forum...

http://www.filmforum.org/events/more/wi ... wellman_jr
"You build my gallows high, baby."

http://www.megramsey.com
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