This holiday season, I’ll be a very easy boy to please.  Come Christmas morning, all I really want to find under the Christmas tree is what you see above: the Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition of Blade Runner.  I blogged about this over a year ago, and it’s finally arriving on December 18th.

You can find all of the details over on The Digital Bits (which is where I found the above image), but here’s a very brief rundown of what the set includes:

• An all new “final cut” version of the film that is remastered, restored, and contains added and extended scenes
• The 1982 theatrical version of the film
• The 1982 international version of the film
• The 1992 director’s cut version of the film
• A “workprint” version of the film
• A documentary about the making of Blade Runner
• A boatload of featurettes, galleries, trailers, and other special features

And as you can see, the whole thing comes in a silver briefcase that also contains a film clip from the original feature, an origami unicorn, a model of one of the film’s “spinner” cars, and a signed letter from Sir Ridley Scott.

All in all, a very fitting tribute to one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made… and a wonderful gift for the bestest husband ever (nudge, nudge…).

Just a little reminder: tomorrow is August 1, which means that my August blogging project will be kicking off.  If you’d like to participate in this, let me know or leave a comment and I’ll add a link to your site.

One of my favorite music blogs is Disquiet.  A lot of the music blogs out there are fixated on the latest scuttlebutt from The White Stripes camp, or what Thom Yorke ate for breakfast, or which hot new “indie” release they can offer, in its entirety, for the downloading.  Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum, on the other hand, offers up interviews, MP3s, essays, reviews, and news from the realms of ambient and electronica—distinctly leftfield and experimental ambient and electronica.

After early May, the site went silent, but has recently resurfaced in a new WordPress-powered version with content galore.  It’s good to have the site back; I’ve already discovered some intriguing new sounds thanks to the most recent entries.

The mighty Hood are on sabbatical throughout 2007, but the band’s various members are remaining busy with their own projects.  First there was Chris Adam’s Bracken, whose We Know About The Need was released earlier this year on Anticon.  Now, the other half of Hood’s core, Chris’ brother Richard, is working on his project, The Declining Winter.

You can listen to two songs at the above link, though both seem like more works in progress than anything else.  Still, the same gloomy, pastoral melancholy that permeates Hood’s music is quite prevalent in The Declining Winter.  Must be something in that Leeds water…

A 7” entitled The Future Sound Of Hip Hop Parts 1 And 2 is due out in September, with an album titled Goodbye, Minnesota due out on Rusted Rail later on in the year.

I feel woefully inadequate to say too much about Ingmar Bergman, as I’ve only seen a handful of his films.  That being said, the world of film is much poorer with his death.

CNN has a brief overview of his life and work, while GreenCine has compiled a growing list of Bergman-related articles and reflections.

I was never a huge fan of the “Iron Man” comic book.  However, the footage from the Iron Man movie that’s recently surfaced from this year’s Comic-Con has me pretty excited.  Looks like it could be a lot of fun, especially with Robert Downey Jr. doing his thing.

Update: Sigh… looks like the YouTube clip has been taken down.  Hopefully this means we’ll see a proper trailer soon.

Earlier this month, I was laid up with a particularly nasty bug that left me bedridden for the better part of three days.  I spent much of that time thumbing through the three books in Raymond Feist’s Riftwar saga.  While I would never qualify them as “classics” per se, there are many portions of the novels that I enjoy a lot and re-read time and again (I suppose you can think of them as “comfort” books).

There are actually a number of books like this on my shelves, books that I find myself pulling out at random—not to read in their entirety, but simply to revisit favorite chapters and scenes.

As it is with books for me, it’s even moreso with films.  There are many times where, randomly, I get the urge to re-watch a favorite scene—even if the movie in question does not rank particularly high on my list.  Or a line of dialog will pop into my memory.  Or I’ll read about a long-forgotten favorite on some blog or forum and instantly want to revisit what made it a favorite in the first place.  Next thing I know, I’ve returned from the basement with a stack of DVDs and have spent the last hour or two swapping them in and out of the DVD player.

For awhile, I’ve been trying to think of a blogging project, something to focus on for a time that would be fun to write (and hopefully, to read and discuss). I think you see where this is heading.  And so, for the month of August, I’ll be writing something daily (hopefully) about a favorite movie scene—a scene that I go back to time after time.  Some of them are high art, and some are decidedly low art, and many are somewhere inbetween, and I enjoy them all just the same.

Consider this an open invitation to join me in this project (if you’re interested, comment on this entry or contact me).  I’d love to see what trips other folks’ cinematic triggers out there.  What scenes move, excite, intrigue, and compel you, and why?  What about them lodges in your memory?  Why can’t you forget about them?

I’ll be answering these questions for myself throughout the month of August, and I hope you’ll join me.  Should be fun…

As part of their “Filmmakers of Faith”, CT Movies offers up a look at the life and career of Andrei Tarkovsky:

Raised in the Russian Orthodox tradition, director Andrei Tarkovsky once told an interviewer, “I consider myself a person of faith, but I do not want to delve into the nuances and problems of my situation, for it is not so straightforward, not so simple, and not so unambiguous.”

The most revered Russian filmmaker since Sergei Eisenstein, Tarkovsky offers an unabashedly religious worldview, without which, he wrote, “people cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola.”

Few filmmakers intrigue me as much as Andrei Tarkovsky.  Tarkovsky is one of those filmmakers whose films and ideas on cinema I constantly find to be inspiring and enthralling, while at the same time, often frustrating and confusing—something I touch on in my review of The Sacrifice.

Thanks to Jeffrey for the link.