Coming Distractions Dept.

It's been a while since my last deep-dive of upcoming titles, so here goes...

Dogora has been described as the child of films like Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka, with Cambodia as the set and Patrice Lecomte (The Girl on the Bridge) as the director. A description like that has my interest piqued in too many ways to comfortably list here.

So do we finally, finally, finally get to see Versus on Blu-ray this March? FINALLY? At last? Or do we have to cross our fingers and hold our breath and wonder what sort of delays are going to be dropped on us yet again? (Yes, I'm just a tot irate about this right now.)

Both versions of Red Cliff are headed our way! The admirably-compressed theatrical version or the über-long international version; your choice. I plan on checking out both if I can possibly pack it in, although people tell me the short version is a very efficient reduction of the whole.

Another perennial favorite of mine has finally crawled out the other end of an arduous multi-year restoration process: The African Queen. For a long time it was the only film on the AFI Top 100 list with no current home-video edition, and I'm wildly curious to see how the restoration compares to the TV prints I've seen.

The sleeper has awakened! Yes, a Blu-ray edition of David Lynch's Dune, which I both love and hate at the same time. Love for its hallucinatory quality and epic scope; hate for its trashing of the original story (probably inevitable for any movie adaptation of this book) and its many, many, many awkward moments.

Another underrated HK flick, Seven Swords, makes its way to BD (the echo of Seven Samurai in the title is more than deliberate), along with Fist of Legend — although it's not clear if the latter is the full international version or the bastardized U.S. print.