The Last Emperor: Criterion Collection
By Cyril Pearl -- Video Business, 2/11/2008
To celebrate the Feb. 12 DVD release of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 40th Anniversary Edition, Sony held a film screening at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on Feb. 11.
The stars of The Jane Austen Book Club greeted fans at Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles on Feb. 5.
Warner Home Video launched a retail event to celebrate it's 85th anniversary with a party on the studio's lot on Feb. 5.
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CRITERION/IMAGE
Street: Feb. 26
Prebook: now
> Criterion’s luxurious package of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 award-winning epic is both expansive and expensive.
One of the great modern epics that has been sorely in need of a proper DVD presentation, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor receives a magnificent makeover and more in Criterion’s new four-disc edition. The original theatrical version and the nearly four-hour director’s cut are both here, sounding and looking immaculate as they tell the story of Pu Yi, the last emperor of Imperial China who took the throne in 1908 at the age of 3. In particular, Vittorio Storaro’s award-winning cinematography and carefully designed color palette of reds and yellows shine as they never have before for home audiences. Storraro is on hand to discuss his methods in several of the package’s many extras, some culled from earlier releases and others newly produced for this edition. Bertolucci is conspicuously absent from the new supplements, but his vision is discussed and lauded by others, most notably in a new one-hour making-of doc.
Shelf Talk: The Last Emperor won nine 1988 Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best screenplay, and has only been available domestically in recent years in its atrociously-transferred director’s cut form from Artisan. Criterion’s edition is sure to appeal to those who’ve been letting the Artisan version gather dust on the shelf, as well as to diehards who’ve never owned the film in digital form. But with its $59.95 price tag, don’t expect general audiences, even genuine fans, to pick this one up as an impulse buy.
Historical drama, color, PG-13 (mature themes, violence, sexual situations, brief nudity), 160 min., DVD $59.95
Extras: director/producer/composer/screenwriter’s commentary, featurettes, new interviews with composers David Byrne and Ryuichi Sakamoto, archival documentaries and BBC interview with director Bernardo Bertolucci, more
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
First Run: W, Nov. 1987, $19 mil.