DVDs, 4/15.

One of the well-known virtues of DVDs is the format's service as a vehicle for revised, improved versions of movies, the Director's Cut, wherein the filmmaker restores to full effect what the studio had truncated for whatever reason, be it tone, pace, or being able to fit in more screenings a day.

The latest big film to enjoy this form of modern restoration is Barry Levinson's popular favorite, The Natural, the baseball movie with Robert Redford released in 1984 and based on the novel by Bernard Malamud. Now available in a double disc set with about 10 bits of supplementary material, plus a version of the film somewhat longer than the previously released version. The consumer's immediate question will be, just how different is the "new" Natural?

Gregory P Dorr of the DVD Journal notes that "most of [what] is most noticeable [is] in the opening sequences," while Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, explains that in "a taped introduction, Barry Levinson explains that this longer re-cut clarifies the opening half-hour while both adding and subtracting footage."

Gary Tooze of DVD Beaver offers a bit more detail, noting that the new film "has about 20 extra minutes - mostly in the opening scenes which define our protagonist a bit darker than in the theatrical cut. Levinson tells us that this 'new' version is closer to the intended film he hoped to make but lack of time forced [him] to create the eventual theatrical. It also loses some of the theatrical scenes making it only about 6 minutes longer overall." The anonymous reviewer at Current Film echoes this, almost to the letter.

Fusion3600 of DVD Authority writes that "The Natural still looks and feels like the same movie, just with some things more fleshed out. So some characters get a little more time, a few arcs are given more room to shine, and the Roy Hobbs character comes off as more isolationist than before. I can see why fans would be split as to which version is the best, but I suspect most will stick with the original theatrical edition." Fortunately, the way the internet works, movie reviewers, too, can go back to their reviews and add details later, if they choose. Perhaps being ever so pressed for time, no one, it turns out, did a compare and contrast between the two versions of The Natural.

But is the film worth revisiting in the first place? There is a consensus among the reviewers that it is. Dorr rather brilliantly summaries baseball itself as "a game that emphasizes and isolates the major dramatic conflicts: man vs man, man vs nature, and man vs self. It assumes the pretense of a team sport, but is really a series of individual tests of skill and character with only fleeting moments of team interaction. It's a series of Mexican stand-offs," he writes, before going on to say that The Natural "asserts with great conviction that what enamors us so with great athletes is the heightened circumstances within which they strive to escape human constraints in pursuit of perfect moments of pure grace."

For Erickson, The Natural is a "remarkable filmic construction," one that "demonstrates a command of cinematic graphics that betters today's comic-oriented action films." For Tooze, The Natural is "an extremely enjoyable film - I'm one who sees past the obviousness and few tech-baseball errors and I allow myself to fall head first into the larger-than-life story." For the Current Film reviewer, The Natural "remains a fantastic effort from director Barry Levinson."

- DK Holm

"Tuesday marks the release of Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show, a four-disc selective retrospective of the paradigm-breaking, paradigm-setting 1992 to 1998 HBO comedy about a late-night talk show host and his codependents - a set with which [Garry] Shandling, its star and guiding light, was thoroughly, even profoundly involved," writes Robert Lloyd. The set "revels in contradictions: the seriousness of comedy; playing a role to become yourself; offering for public consumption what the menu describes (in Shandling's own handwriting) as 'intimate, personal, indulgent visits with my friends that are meant for only me to see.'"

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Easily the most provocative and important dance DVD released thus far in 2007 collects three acclaimed television films adapted from collaborative, iconoclastic stage productions by England's DV8 Physical Theatre." Lewis Segal reviews that one and three more dance titles.

"Despite its escapist intentions, Green For Danger is simply too steeped in wartime paranoia ever to work as a simple crime thriller," writes Tom Huddleston. "Which is fortunate, because in the final analysis the film is so much more - an examination of interpersonal relationships under pressure, a rather bleak and unsatisfied romance, a gleeful tribute to wilful eccentricity. What emerges is a sort of Ealing noir, by turns hardboiled and hallucinatory, horrific and hysterical."

Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Ian Johnston on Shoeshine and its place in Vittorio De Sica's oeuvre.

John Coulthart recommends Tim Buckley: My Fleeting House.

Michael Atkinson at IFC News on Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple: "[T]he day you see it in any context might be the darkest day of your year." More from Jonathan Kiefer in the Sacramento News & Review.

"Abbas Kiarostami's Ten has been a highlight of my ongoing and extremely rewarding mini-Iranian film fest," writes John Adair.

David Haglund in Slate on the Hemingway Classics Collection, five films in all: "These are prime examples of a peculiar subgenre one might call Hollywood Hemingway: widescreen, Technicolor adaptations featuring foreign settings and doomed love, and always at least half an hour too long. Mostly products of the 1950s, they were made when Hemingway was a living legend and motion picture executives - thanks to the collapse of the studio system and the new ubiquity of television - were deeply insecure."

"Prohibition, extortion, crooked political figures may provide a social/political backdrop to the story of Rico Bandello and his ilk but these issues are never addressed in the book or in the film. Little Caesar never gets mired in a moral argument nor tries to explain the causes or expose the operations of gangsterism," writes Thom Ryan. "Gangster films still owe great a debt to that gat-blasting, wry mouthed miscreant named Little Caesar for helping to codify one of the greatest guilty-pleasure genres of them all."

Tim Lucas notes that the deluxe edition of Don't Look Back, "when held in one's hand, has the earnest heft of a Bible," before moving on to Masked and Anonymous: "It's hard to tell whether this film - co-scripted by Bob Dylan and director Larry Charles - was intended as a fantasy or an allegory, but I'm inclined to see it as a remake of Don't Look Back of sorts, and Dylan's own jet-black recrimination of a world that has failed to heed the warnings of his best-loved songs and grown monstrous."

"Movies that passed well below the critical radar when they were first released in the United States - in urban grindhouses and Southern drive-ins - are now returning in prestige editions, loaded with commentary (by [Tim] Lucas) and extra features," writes Dave Kehr, reviewing The Mario Bava Collection, Volume 1 in the New York Times. "For [Mario] Bava, a modest man who died in 1980 without ever making any claims for himself or his work, the road from the grindhouse to the art house - or at least, the virtual art house of the DVD player - has turned out to be surprisingly, encouragingly short."

"Cinema played a key role in mediating audiences' understanding of the [Mexican] Revolution, and no other director was better suited to take up the challenge than Fernando de Fuentes," argues Chris Robé, reviewing the Revolution Trilogy.

Also in PopMatters: "It may strike the reader as somewhat odd to see the release of a Darren Aronofsky Collection consisting of only two films: the wrenching saga of hope corrupted to become despair encapsulated in Requiem for a Dream (2002) and the fascinating intellectual thriller Pi (1998)," writes Chadwick Jenkins. "On the other hand, there is a certain fittingness to packaging these two films together. Aside from being the early efforts of a shockingly talented and aggressive filmmaker, these films - while relating quite different stories - share an underlying narrative structure and a profound concern for the individual's deeply embedded need for the patterns that inform his/her life."

And a Short Ends and Leader DVD roundup.

Sean Nelson in the Stranger on Performance: "Rigorously psychedelic, structurally unsound, sexually omnivorous, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's grand experiment riffed on identity, stardom, art, and violence at a time when cinema was beginning to tear itself apart. The fact that the film starred Mick Jagger at the height of his Satanic majesty was just one of the cosmic jokes at the center of this subversive masterpiece."

"[P]erhaps the most overlooked great film Kubrick made was his version of Lolita," suggests Paul Clark at ScreenGrab.

It's only the last two thirds or so of the second season of Twin Peaks that's "awful - well, not awful, but hugely disappointing," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

"The biggest mystery in Blue Velvet is not its story but how one film can keep evolving in a viewer's perceptions more than 20 years after it was first made," writes Edward Copeland.

Half Nelson: The John Hiscock interviews Ryan Gosling for the Telegraph, Wendy Ide, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden for the London Times. Akin Ojumu in the New Statesman: "Inevitably, Half Nelson will raise questions about whether its makers are 'soft on drugs,' but the film honestly shows the complex role drugs can play in our lives, and challenges some lingering prejudices about addiction. We've certainly come a long way from Sinatra's smack alley."

Roundups: DK Holm - yes, the very same - at ScreenGrab, Movie City News, Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky, Kevin Polowy at Cinematical and Jess Sauer in the Austin Chronicle.

"Dragon's Lair is now fully compatible with the All New PlayStation 3 in full 1080p High Definition video as well as your standalone Blu-ray Player."

Drawn!'s giving away copies of The Animation Show, Volumes 1 and 2.

UK residents: Win Old Joy DVDs and posters from Tom Hartshorn.

Posted by dwhudson at April 15, 2007 1:32 PM