Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of June 22nd – ‘Hairspray’ Comes to Criterion

Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, we have a pair of John Waters films joining the Criterion Collection, led by Hairspray. They’re not the only Criterion titles this week, either. Plus, there’s our usual assortment of 4K re-releases as well. What else is hitting shelves, you say? Well, read on to find out…

Joey’s Top Pick

Hairspray (Criterion)

From The Criterion Collection: “After decades of pushing the boundaries of bad taste with his underground provocations, John Waters found surprising mainstream success with this infectiously irreverent rock-and-soul comedy. It’s 1962, and the only things bigger than the bouffant hairdos are the popular dance crazes sweeping the nation. When Baltimore teen Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) shoots to stardom on a local TV dance party, her radical self-confidence and support for racial integration launch a movement that takes the city by storm. Costarring the inimitable Divine in a fiercely funny double role, Hairspray finds Waters marrying his wildly subversive sensibility with a newfound bubblegum sweetness for what may be his most irresistible film.”

Also Available This Week

50 First Dates (4K)

Alpha

Biosphere (Blu-ray) (Interview here with filmmaker Mel Eslyn)

Click (4K)

Dark Horse (Blu-ray)

Eagles of the Republic (Blu-ray)

The Grey (4K)

Hang ‘Em High (4K)

I Know What You Did Last Summer: The Complete Series (TV)

The Last Showgirl (Blu-ray) (Interview here with writer Kate Gersten)

Masters of the Universe: Revelation / Revolution (TV)

A Simple Plan (4K)

Slither (4K SteelBook)

What Dreams May Come (4K)

–

Criterion Corner

Desperate Living

From The Criterion Collection: “Following the unrepentant outrageousness of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, director John Waters brought his notorious trash trilogy to a fittingly twisted close with this antifascist fairy tale. After hysterical housewife Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) murders her husband with the help of her fed-up housekeeper (Jean Hill), the newfound “sisters in crime” escape to the bizarro shantytown of Mortville, a depraved penal colony presided over by a despotic queen (Edith Massey) whose tyranny pushes her subjects to shocking revolt. Deviant cops, death by dog food, DIY surgery—Waters unleashes all this and more in an at once relentlessly warped and oddly moral vision of queer rebellion.”

–

Magellan

From The Criterion Collection: “A hypnotic journey engraved in images of staggering beauty and horror, this monumental achievement from Lav Diaz boldly rewrites the imperialist mythmaking of the Age of Discovery. Elegantly minimalist yet overpowering in its scale and impact, Magellan follows the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) as he embarks on his epochal quest to cross the Pacific—a voyage that spirals into zealotry and violence when he attempts to impose Christianity upon the people of the Philippines. Abetted by García Bernal’s radically antiheroic portrayal, Diaz composes a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.”

Stay tuned for more next week…