Other DVDs, 11/20.

"Born in 1931 to a peasant couple who'd moved into Bergamo in Italy, and learning his craft making documentary films while working as a clerk at the Edison-Volta electric factory, Ermanno Olmi kept the humanist spirit of neo-realism alive in the 60s and 70s with films featuring non-professional casts." The Observer's Philip French recommends Olmi's "masterpiece," The Tree of Wooden Clogs.

Glenn Kenny revisits Close Encounters of the Third Kind in order to focus on "Spielberg's reconception of [Roy] Neary [Richard Dreyfuss], which was instated in the Special Edition and remains in the Director's Cut. It really does change the whole timbre of the film, and does so in a fairly ruthless way."

Keith Phipps, too, reviewing the 30th anniversary edition for Slate, focuses on Neary rather than the spaceships. "[P]articularly if you haven't seen the movie in a while..., you realize the movie has a rather un-Spielbergian subtext. The protagonist, a young suburban dad penned in by the responsibilities of fatherhood, leaps at the first chance to leave those responsibilities behind. Given the opportunity, in the movie's final scene, to board the aliens' mother ship and fly away, he doesn't spare a thought for the wife and kids he's leaving behind. The stars await."

Kevin Lee offers an insider's glimpse into the making of extras for DVDs from New Yorker Films.

"The White Hell of Pitz Palu came by its title honestly, for making this was indeed a five month's hell on frozen earth, with primitive equipment there to record cast suffering unprecedented in movies before or since," writes John McElwee in another great entry at Greenbriar Picture Shows. "Much was mined from the frozen husk of White Hell. You could build entire serial chapters out of footage spectacular as this, and on at least two occasions, Universal did."

"Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes is the year's most chilling horror film, a cold-stare portrait of planetary waste that makes An Inconvenient Truth look like, well, an Al Gore lecture," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC News.

Dave Kehr in the New York Times on Susan Hayward: "Agony was her business, and she knew it inside out." More from Dan Callahan in Slant.

Ray Young watches Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean, a combination DVD and CD of the composer's 1992 concert with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It's a pleasure to watch him conduct and comment on his own work. Superbly orchestrated despite a limited rehearsal period, he plays selections from [Lawrence of Arabia], Dr Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984), performed just months after Lean's death at 83."

DVD roundups: DVD Talk; Bryant Frazer and Peter Martin at Cinematical. And, as always, the Guru.

Online viewing tip. For the Guardian, Xan Brooks and John Domokos talk with Werner Herzog about Rescue Dawn. More (in text) from Related: Christopher Goodwin in Sunday's London Times.

Posted by dwhudson at November 20, 2007 1:36 PM