Birds of a Feather

A couple of highly-regarded, long lost movies, I Am Cuba (1964) and Two Lane Blacktop (1971), got the deluxe DVD treatment late last year, after decades in red tape limbo.

Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov's depiction of the overthrowing of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 was met with plenty of censorship by his native government—despite its slighly propagandistic tone—and subsequently only screened a few times in Cuba and the USSR. A 1990 screening at the Telluride festival and a limited theatrical run in the US in the mid '90s—thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola—led to a DVD release in 2000, but this new version (labelled "Ultimate Edition") with its 'making of' and a doc on Kalatozov himself is considered the definitive document on this film.

Monte Hellman's pean to American existensialism—disguised as that quintessential late '60s/early '70s film archetype of choice: the road movie—allegedly has the most unique ending in film history, according to David N. Meyer in his delightful book The 100 Best Films to Rent You've Never Heard Of: Hidden Treasures, Neglected Classics, and Hits From By-Gone Eras (St. Martin's Griffin). Hmm...
Starring singer/songwriter James Taylor—who, to this day, due to his discontent with Hellman's approach to filmmaking, is said to have never seen the movie—and the late Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, this third try at the DVD market—the first two are out of print and fetch upwards of $100 among collectors—includes a bonus disc with a documentary featuring an interview with Kris Kristofferson talking about how his song "Me and Bobby McGee" got to be so closely associated with TLB.