Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 2 August

My Summer of Love (Pawlikowski, 2004) is an Imprint Blu-ray

This week’s news that Disney are going to stop selling phys­ic­al media in Australia (and by default New Zealand) came as quite a shock. They are a huge part of the mar­ket and the with­draw­al makes nor­mal retail of DVD, Blu-ray, UHD, etc. even less ten­able than it has been.

I appre­ci­ate that col­lect­ors like myself are a dying breed. I like to own things, cata­logue them, dis­play them. In an age where digit­al own­er­ship means noth­ing – some­times Apple will upgrade a movie for free, and some­times it simply dis­ap­pears when the “own­er” chooses to with­draw it – hav­ing a phys­ic­al copy of some­thing that you can watch, cher­ish and even lend, means something.

The com­pan­ies that are fight­ing the good fight for phys­ic­al media are now focused on afi­cion­ados like me, not the dis­ap­pear­ing rent­al mar­ket or cas­u­al gift buy­ers. Madman in Aotearoa and Australia are still dis­trib­ut­ing their col­lect­ible animé releases and are also work­ing with ViaVision (and their Imprint imprint) to get clas­sic films restored and avail­able to watch in the best qual­ity available.

Yes, sil­ver discs are still the best way to watch movies.

Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2004 debut fea­ture My Summer of Love has just been released by Imprint – in their stand­ard lim­ited run of only 1500 cop­ies – and I had some­how nev­er seen it before.

Natalie Press plays Mona, stuck in a small Yorkshire town between a broth­er who has found God (Paddy Considine) and a posh new arrival, Tamsin (Emily Blunt).

Blunt obvi­ously went on to become a star but why Press didn’t fol­low the same tra­ject­ory is per­plex­ing . She’s elec­tric throughout.

Pawlikowski had been mak­ing short doc­u­ment­ar­ies for the BBC and went on to win an Oscar for the Best Foreign Language film Ida in 2015 and was Oscar nom­in­ated for the 2019 drama Cold War.

This news­let­ter will nev­er for­get phys­ic­al media, so occa­sion­ally there will be recom­mend­a­tions that are hard to imme­di­ately lay your hands on. My Summer of Love is also avail­able digit­ally from Apple (but not Arovision) and is a rent­al not avail­able for “sale”.