The Blue Angel
(Kino Lorber)
In Josef von Sternberg’s classic
tragedy, Emil Jannings plays a professor who falls in love with Lola-Lola, a
popular cabaret performer, played by none other than Marlene Dietrich. Their
bizarre relationship—which ends in death, natch—is recounted by Sternberg with
his usual expressionistic touches, and his two stars give powerful
performances. For an 83-year-old film, the Blu-ray image is superbly detailed.
Driving Miss Daisy
(Warner Bros)
The Best Picture that directed
itself (Bruce Beresford was shamefully not nominated), this genteel but
touching 1990 adaptation of Alfred Uhry’s play also won a Best Actress Oscar
for Jessica Tandy’s feisty portrayal of the Southern lady unable to drive any
more. That Morgan Freeman (her chauffeur) and Dan Aykroyd (her loving son) are also
good is a tribute to Beresford’s rapport with actors; his low-key style, while
perfect for the material, was too subtle for the Academy. The Blu-ray image is
first-rate; extras are Beresford, Uhry and producer Lili Zanuck’s commentary;
new and vintage featurettes.
(Disney)
Tim Burton’s original 1984
half-hour live-action short was perfectly macabre. Now that he’s busying doing
lazy remakes of Alice in Wonderland
and Dark Shadows, Burton returns to this
youthful short for an 85-minute stop-motion animated feature, a pleasant time-waster
that strains to fill its extra running time with material that doesn’t feel padded.
Burton’s arresting visual sense helps to an extent. The hi-def image looks good
in both 3D and 2D; extras include the original shorts and making-of featurettes.
(PBS)
The remarkable life and career of
the movie-music-theater mogul is recounted in two immensely entertaining hours,
as Geffen gives a blow-by-blow description of his rise from Jewish kid in
Brooklyn to head of major record labels, producer of Broadway smash hits and
one-third (alongside Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg) of DreamWorks
movie studio. There are many talking heads from the Eagles’ Don Henley and
Glenn Frey to Jackson Browne and Yoko Ono, who figures in the show’s most
poignant moment: John Lennon’s 1980 murder. The hi-def transfer is fine; extras
include bonus interviews.
(Opus Arte)
Richard Wagner’s mammoth opera—only
he could compose a five-hour “comedy”—has complex characters (mastersinger Hans
Sachs, upcoming singer Walther, his love Eva), despite the anti-Semitism of
comic foil Beckmesser. David McVicar’s Glyndebourne staging smartly avoids
obvious nastiness by taking these characters at face value: the portrayals by Gerald
Finley (Sachs), Marco Jentzsch (Walther), Johannes Martin Kranzle (Beckmesser)
and Anna Gabler (Eva) let us enter Wagner’s world sans baggage. The Blu-ray
image is excellent, the music—by the London Philharmonic and Glyndebourne
Chorus under conductor Vladimir Jurowski—sounds splendid, and extras are
featurettes about the opera’s problematic legacy.
(PBS)
The eternal riddle of 900 moai statues populating Easter Island
have taxed historians, scientists and everyone else for centuries, and in this Nova special—which shows how difficult
it was moving the large carved stones to their current positions—a team of
volunteers recreates how they think the stones were moved. The eye-opening result
gives credence to one of many theories that explain how those massive objects
sit there today. The Blu-ray image is first-rate.
(Criterion)
In Rene Clément’s superior 1960
adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller The
Talented Mr. Ripley—later made into an overwrought 1999 epic by Anthony
Minghella—Alain Delon was at the height of his star power as the amoral
protagonist who casually destroys lives while on an Italian holiday. The
beautiful vistas of Italy and of the performers (lookers Maurice Ronet and
Marie Laforet costar) are ravishingly recreated in the Criterion Collection’s
terrific hi-def transfer; extras are vintage Delon and Highsmith interviews and
a dry overview of Clément’s career by Denitza Bantcheva.
(MPI)
In this stunningly photographed, non-narrative documentary, natural and man-made wonders like Versailles and the Taj Mahal are shown in all their glory. Director Ron Fricke demonstrates mankind's spirituality through the awesomeness of nature and our shared humanity. Shot in 70mm, the best way to watch this is
on Blu-ray, where the details of Saint Chappelle’s stained-glass windows are luminosity
perfected. Extras include interviews and a making-of featurette.
(Weinstein Co/Anchor Bay)
Unlike Zero Dark Thirty—which reenacts the raid on the Pakistan hideaway that
got bin Laden in its final half-hour—Sea
Team Six is a gritty reenactment whose 90 minutes drum up the necessary
patriotism and jingoism. It’s done proficiently, and the raid itself looks accurate;
simply dramatizing these brave men’s heroism is enough for most viewers. The
Blu-ray image is tremendous; the lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Arts and the Mind
(PBS)
In a culture where defunding arts
education keeps growing, this two-hour PBS documentary documents, without
falling into the usual partisan trap, how the arts are needed more than ever.
Lisa Kudrow narrates this elucidating look at how music, poetry, dance, painting
and theater are godsends to sick young children, veterans with post-traumatic
stress disorder, and even Alzheimer’s patients.
(one 7)
Carlos Mayolo’s eerie 1983 horror
entry concerns a family in Colombia whose disintegration leads to incest and
murder. Although the scenes between teenage cousins are unsettling (Adriana
Herran is especially persuasive as the girl), Mayolo overplays his hand when he
turns the insane goings-on into an allegory about his country’s dictatorial government.
Still, with a truly horrifying ending, the movie is memorable, even in the
crappy-looking transfer on this DVD.
(Sony)
As any Dancing with the Stars fan knows, its winner-turned-cohost Brooke
Burke is a star because of her physical endowments, not any obvious talent. Her
newest exercise workout DVDs, Sexy Abs
and 30-Day Slimdown, present Brooke
in all her glory showing how this 40-something mother of four got her
incredible shape. As an added bonus, included are Brooke’s favorite smoothie
recipes!
(Acorn)
This isn’t the gargantuan 1965 David
Lean adaptation with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in one of the big screen’s all-time
romances: instead, it’s the 2002 British TV version with a then-unknown Keira
Knightley in the pivotal role as the beautiful Lara. Knightley acquits herself
well, suggesting more worldliness than the lovely Christie did; her co-stars,
Sam Neill as Komarovsky and Hans Matheson as Zhivago are good enough, but
Knightley and the expansiveness of the setting are the true stars, even on the
small screen. Extras include 70 minutes of on-set interviews and featurettes.
(Film Movement)
Director Julia Murat
impressively—and unself-consciously—takes the inhabitants of a remote Brazilian
village at face value, recording their lives straightforwardly and giving a valuable
sense of life’s unhurried pace. Artfully mixing magic realism with documentary
realism by grounding her story’s fanciful aspects in natural goings-on, Murat’s
beautiful balance is greatly assistance by her superb editor Marina Meliande
and equally fine cinematographer Lucio Bonelli, whose painterly Cinemascope
compositions blend reality and magic effortlessly. This assured feature debut, dealing
with life, death, and eternity, makes us anxious to see Murat’s next move. The
bonus short film, by debut director Sahim Omar Kalifa, is Land of the Heroes.
Karlheinz Stockhausen—Michael’s
Journey Around the World
(Wergo)
When he died in 2007 at age 79,
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen had just begun a new project: Sound—The 24 Hours of the Day, following
a massive, seven-opera cycle Light, each
segment named after a day of the week. One of the biggest of that insanely overambitious
series, Thursday, had this 50-minute piece
as Act II. This clarinet/horn concerto in all but name dazzlingly pits soloists
Marco Blaauw (trumpet) and Nicola Jurgensen (basset horn) against members of Ensemble
musikFabrick—led by conductor Peter Rundel—all of whom play this fiendishly difficult
music brilliantly.
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