New Release: Insignificance Blu-ray and DVD

Insignificance movie scene

Theresa Russell goes Marilyn in 1985's Insignificance.

Having already issued editions of Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and Bad Timing (1980), the Criterion Collection continued to explore the director’s canon with the release of his 1985 film Insignificance on Blu-ray and DVD on June 14, 2011.

Four unnamed people who look and sound a lot like Albert Einstein (Michael Emil, In the Spirit), Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell, Spider-Man 3), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey, Shade of Pale) and Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis, Sweet Smell of Success) converge in one New York City hotel room for Roeg’s inventive movie adaptation of Terry Johnson’s 1982 play.

With a combination of whimsy and dread, Roeg creates a fun-house-mirror film of cold war America that questions the nature of celebrity and plays on a society’s simmering nuclear fears. Pretty wild stuff, and arguably the best thing that Ms. Russell (the former Mrs. Roeg) has ever done.

The Blu-ray and DVD carries the list prices of $39.95 and $29.95, respectively.

Each of Criterion’s discs contain newly restored digital transfers, supervised and approved by Roeg and producer Jeremy Thomas, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition, plus the following special features:

  • new video interviews with Roeg, Thomas and editor Tony Lawson
  • “Making Insignificance,” a short documentary shot on the set of the film
  • original theatrical trailer
  • booklet featuring an essay by film critic Chuck Stephens and a reprinted exchange between Roeg and screenwriter Terry Johnson

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.