It’s mid-afternoon here in Lithia, Florida, on a cloudy – and at times rainy – Tuesday in August of 2022, and as I sit here in the semi-darkness of my small bedroom/writing room, I’m checking on Amazon if my pre-order of Maid in Sweden has shipped yet.
Well, as of 5:20 PM Eastern, the Blu-ray edition of Maid in Sweden – a mainstream erotic film from 1971 directed by Dan Wolman and starring Swedish model-actor Christina Lindberg – has a scheduled delivery date of Thursday, August 11, but it still has not been shipped. It’s not an “import” title – Kino Lorber is a U.S. company, and the discs are manufactured in North America, so I’m surprised that Maid in Sweden’s street date is today, but Amazon has not shipped my package yet.
Ah, well. No biggie. I thought my order would arrive between tomorrow and Friday, although of my movie orders from Amazon have arrived on the actual release date because the e-retailer received its shipments from the manufacturer a bit earlier than predicted and shipped pre-orders to the consumers ahead of schedule.
If it gets here this week, though, I’ll be content.
As for my other pre-orders….
The two-disc set with the new 4K UHD edition of John Milius’ original Red Dawn (1984) from the Shout! Factory is still scheduled for an August 16 release, so I’ll probably get it – no surprise there – by Friday of next week. I have the DVD from the early 2000s and the MGM-UA Blu-ray from 2012, so even if it is delayed past that day, I can still watch the movie, albeit without the sharper image of the 4K UHD Blu-ray.
Today, though, I learned that Universal Pictures Home Entertainment is also releasing Jurassic World: Dominion, the conclusion of Colin Trevorrow’s follow-up trilogy to Amblin Entertainment’s Jurassic Park films on the 16th.
I have mixed feelings about this because when I pre-ordered my copy, Amazon had no information about when the home media edition of Jurassic World: Dominion would drop. I don’t plan to cancel my order, but man, is August going to be a pricey month as far as online shopping goes!
Unlike Red Dawn, I have not seen Jurassic World: Dominion in any format, not even in theaters, so if I get both orders on the same day, I’ll watch it before I watch Milius’ conservative fable about a group of American teenagers who become guerrillas after a Soviet-led invasion of the U.S. I’ve seen Red Dawn close to 40 times since I watched it in a Miami theater in 1984, but that’s over a span of 38 years. (Owning a movie on home media, after all, does not mean it’s on constant rewatch. Even with Star Wars films, I don’t watch them frequently.)
Hopefully, my copy of Maid in Sweden will ship out tonight and arrive on Thursday. I’m curious to see if Lindberg was as attractive – or “hot” – in this movie as she’s reputed to be. Weirdly, she is a few months younger than my older half-sister (who celebrated her 72nd birthday in March) and is – as this post is being written – 71 years old.
That’s the cool – yet somehow unsettling – thing about film (or any visual art, including photography and even painting): a movie is both a product of its time and a snapshot, if you will, of a moment that has passed and can never be relived, just looked at on a TV set or a projectionist’s screen.
(Which reminds me, one of my crushes when I was a teenager, Olivia Newton-John, died yesterday at the age of 73. I was not a huge fan of her music, but I did watch Grease when it was first released on VHS, and boy, she was so gorgeous in that movie! Olivia was diagnosed with breast cancer three times – in 1992, 2013, and again in 2017 – and by the time her doctors discovered that cancer had returned for the third time, it had metastasized to her lower back and spread into her bones. She will be missed by her family, friends and fans.)
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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