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DVD Spotlight: Week of 6/24.

Solo Sunny "Konrad Wolf's Solo Sunny was widely regarded at the time of its 1980 release as perhaps the best film to come out of the unhappy nation then known as East Germany, and with the passing of time the 'perhaps' might safely be removed," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "On its surface the film is a Socialist reinterpretation of the highly romanticized youth films that flooded America in the early 70s - its heroine, Sunny (Renate Krössner), is a wide-eyed waif from the industrial provinces who dreams of becoming a pop star in the big city. But it is at heart a devastating study in social determinism, in direct line with the realist Kammerspiele films of the late Weimar period."

"The rediscovery of Classe Tous Risques is, in a way, doubly special, as it leads us to reexamine the work of someone who is not an acknowledged master," writes Andrew Chan at the House Next Door. "[Claude] Sautet's career is notable for its lack of ostentation.... What anchored his films was not the nouvelle vague's cinephilia or ideology, but rather the ordinary human concerns he found at the center of big genre constructions like the criminal underworld or the comic ménage a trois. For him, even the fantasies of genre were subject to the cruel disappointments of real life." (See Walt Opie's review on Guru, too.)

Blog entry 06/25/2008 - 10:57am
Cotinue reading. . .
The Furies (Criterion).

(Also appeared on GreenCine Daily.)

The Furies "Criterion's surprising, all-stops-out release of [Anthony] Mann's early western The Furies (1950) offers a valuable view of this director nearing the height of his powers, before his gifts had calcified; in many ways, it's his most exciting movie because it's also his most unresolved, opening up a Pandora's box of psychological issues that cannot be contained in any conventional conclusion," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door.

"In truth, The Furies, frontier setting notwithstanding, barely counts as a western," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times. "There are elements of film noir in both the plot and the look; many key scenes unfold under cover of darkness (Victor Milner earned an Oscar nomination for his moody cinematography). Above all, though, it plays like a Freudian melodrama, dissecting the hysterical and ultra-competitive love-hate relationship between widowed patriarch TC Jeffords (Walter Huston) and his headstrong daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck)."

Blog entry 06/24/2008 - 11:09am
Cotinue reading. . .
DVD Spotlight: 6/18.

(Cross-posted from GreenCine Daily.)

Carmen Miranda"Did Carmen Miranda invent performance art?" asks Dave Kehrin the New York Times. "From Cindy Sherman to Madonna, artists across the cultural spectrum have continued to build on her flamboyantly absurd representations of the feminine, now anthologized in a new box set from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.... No less than Jerry Lewis did a decade later, she brought an unpredictable anarchy to the staid business of studio filmmaking."

"Let's consider Danny Boyle's Sunshine as both a characteristically exaggerated response to environmental crisis and an extended visual pun on the term 'Enlightenment.'" And traxus4420 is off and running at culturemonkey.

Blog entry 06/18/2008 - 2:19pm
Cotinue reading. . .
New and Coming Releases: June 17, 2008

A ton of great releases out this week, from French noir courtesy Criterion to oodles of anime to cult TV, Carmen Miranda, Emile de Antonio, a pot doc, horror, indie comedies and... oh my, we're breathless just talking about it. See for yourself.

Blog entry 06/17/2008 - 11:03am
Cotinue reading. . .
New and Coming Releases: June 10, 2008

Many fine titles see their way to disc this week, including a critically acclaimed historical series from HBO and a slightly less acclaimed but still very worthy historical drama, sleepers, docs, mock-docs, 'toons and much more. Check it out.

Blog entry 06/10/2008 - 11:06am
Cotinue reading. . .
Heavy Metal in Baghdad

(Originally appeared on GreenCine Daily.)

By David D'Arcy; a few notes follow.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad Why a heavy metal band in Baghdad? "Just look outside," says Faisal, the rhythm guitarist in Acrassicauda (the latin term for "black scorpion") as he points to bombed out streets where nobody's saying "mission accomplished" these days. Heavy Metal in Baghdad [Official Site] tells us that there is only one metal band in Baghdad - or, at least, there was, before the band moved to Damascus. The band members are now in Turkey.

In Baghdad, where the members of the band approach the streets with all the comfort of entering a free-fire zone, this black scorpion - "the most dangerous spider in the desert," says the bassist, Faris - is just another endangered species.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad is out on DVD June 10.

Blog entry 06/05/2008 - 5:08pm
Cotinue reading. . .
DVD Spotlight: 6/4.

Cross-posted on GreenCine Daily.

Variety "One of the pioneering wagon-train movies of the inaugural, New York-based independent film movement, predating Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise, Bette Gordon's Variety (1983) comes off in retrospect as a veritable time capsule of post-punk downtown coolness," writes Michael Atkinson for the IFC. "Just read the credits: screenwriter Kathy Acker (experimental novelist), star/photog Nan Goldin (famed shutterbug and model for the Ally Sheedy role in High Art 15 years later), soundtrack composer John Lurie (of Jarmusch movies and the Lounge Lizards), cinematographer Tom DiCillo (director of Living in Oblivion, etc), producer Renee Shafransky (Spalding Gray's longtime girlfriend), co-star Luiz Guzman, bit players Spalding Gray and Cookie Mueller (veteran of John Waters's universe), production assistant Christine Vachon, and so on. Where is Cindy Sherman? The grungy vibe of Variety is itself a window on the past - only at the nascent launch of a DIY indie wave in the post-60s period could you, or would you, set an interrogatory neofeminist psychodrama like this in a Times Square grindhouse devoted exclusively to cheap Euro-porn."

Dave Kehr in the New York Times on What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?: "Directed by Blake Edwards from a screenplay by William Peter Blatty, this 1966 antiwar farce, made as things were heating up in Vietnam, is one of the most ingeniously constructed American comedies, a brilliantly sustained series of plot reversals, inverted identities and reconfigured values."

Blog entry 06/04/2008 - 12:00am
Cotinue reading. . .
New and Coming Releases: June 3, 2008

From music biopics and music videos to sexy international dramas, from anime to long lost cult films (thanks to Legend Films), from TV to lotsa comedies, June comes in with a ton of eclectic new DVD releases. Come check 'em out.

Blog entry 06/03/2008 - 11:17am
Cotinue reading. . .
Vince Vaughan's Wild West Comedy Show: DVD Contest!
Blog entry 05/29/2008 - 1:44pm
Cotinue reading. . .
DVD Spotlight: Thief of Bagdad

Criterion's Thief of Bagdad.

Cross-posted from GreenCine Daily.

The Thief of Bagdad "[F]or all of its implication in its historical moment, The Thief of Bagdad plays - in the newly remastered DVD from the Criterion Collection - like a timeless fantasy, a pure and naï expression of, as Sabu puts it in his famous curtain line, the search for 'some fun and adventure, at last!'" writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times.

"Re-watching The Thief of Bagdad... is not unlike rereading Treasure Island," suggests Gary Giddins in the New York Sun. "Conceived to enchant children, they both requite the adult longing for formative influences that withstand disillusionment and fashion. Unlike Treasure Island, an exemplary display of English prose and plotting, with one of the finest first sentences in fiction, The Thief of Bagdad (1940) occasionally sputters, losing tempo and continuity; yet it, too, survives as a model of its kind, reveling in cinematic craftsmanship - not least the then-novel techniques of color and trick photography - and boasts one of the most magisterial opening shots in cinema."

Blog entry 05/27/2008 - 12:58pm
Cotinue reading. . .

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