DVDs, 12/19.

Wendell B Harris Jr's Chameleon Street "won the grand jury prize at Sundance but has barely been seen since, perhaps because it so stubbornly refuses to conform to art house ideas of what a black independent film should be," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "The great mystery of this accomplished, erudite film is why it had no follow-up; Mr Harris's only other screen credits are for small roles in Out of Sight (1998) and Road Trip (2000). With luck, this well-produced DVD will refocus attention on his mercurial talents." Also reviewed this week are Two-Lane Blacktop and a giant thunker from United Artists: "Containing 90 films on 110 discs, packaged in a metal container that tips the scales at 30 pounds, this has got to be the biggest DVD bundle of them all - and possibly the most soporific."

This week in IFC News, Michael Atkinson explains why it's hard not to overhype Once and watches Feed, "a found footage portrait of the 1991 campaign circus, in and around the New Hampshire primaries, that eventually led to Bill Clinton's party nomination and presidency. The primary visual tool at work here is the satellite feed, the video footage sent out to the networks (and therefore out into space, only to be captured by satellite geeks) during the unbroadcast moments of the candidates - Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, George HW Bush, Bob Kerrey - combing their hair, making lame jokes, picking their noses, chatting inanely with makeup people, and often sitting and doing nothing at all. The upshot is access to precious visions of our ostensible leaders, whose political machines work so hard to exalt them as leaders, as little more than opportunists, showbiz canards and empty-headed buffoons."

"There are very few 'perfect' films," begins an entry at the Vancouver Voice from DK Holm. "The handful that exist are a precious resource to viewers who, say, suffering from the flu and numerous aches and pains, require an entertainment to delight and distract them. There is The Apartment. There is The Searchers. There is North by Northwest and Charade and LA Confidential and The Seven Samurai. The Lady Vanishes is another member of this elite group, and it now enjoys a re-release as part of the Criterion Collection in a new double disc set. It is a joyful opportunity to reacquaint oneself with this wholly American entertainment."

Diablo Cody lists her top ten Criterion releases.

Howard Hawks's Scarface "gets away with giving us enormous pleasure from unspeakable actions because it promotes in us a sense of intellectual and emotional mobility," writes Dan Sallitt. "It does not have to romanticize violence or violent people to get its effects; it does not have to create a narrative that denies us one perspective or another on the violence. In this context, our thrilled response to killing registers simply, a fact among other facts."

"Climates is partly about encroaching isolation and separation, about the growing distance between two people in a doomed relationship," writes MS Smith. "But on a more precise level, the film centers on the enduring ambivalence that results from separation; parting is not sweet sorrow, but a prolonged, painful exercise full of compromises, equivocations, lies, advances, and regressions."

Mala Noche "harkens from a time when independent cinema was often regional cinema and films could grow from within a community, drawing identity and color from the crucible of local culture and the physical world of its environs," notes Sean Axmaker at TCM. In the interview included with this Criterion release, Gus Van Sant "describes his most recent films - Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park - as a return to the freedom and evocative simplicity of Mala Noche."

For Ed Howard, Lola "is Fassbinder at his witty, delirious best, deftly blending political satire and overwrought melodrama, with a stunning set of performances from some lesser-known lights in the director's stock company."

"[I]f the 1929 novel is Fassbinder's primal scene, then [Berlin Alexanderplatz] is his monumentally encompassing dream-work," writes Michael Joshua Rowin. "And it's a dream that has as much to do with studying the Weimar origins of fascism as it does with using its colossal canvas to push the exploitation and suffering Fassbinder explored in every one of his other films into deeper psychological, political and aesthetic territory."

Also in the L Magazine, Nicolas Rapold on John Ford's "breakout 1924 epic," The Iron Horse: "Ford can capture in a single shot so very much: early on, a manifest-destiny pioneer gazes warmly at a mountain pass - perfect for dynamiting as a railroad shortcut - like he's fallen in love."

Bob Turnbull watches the Eclipse collection, Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy: "I popped in the first of the three Saura films with pretty high expectations - and had them all exceeded."

Mike Everleth finds Other Cinema's Xperimental Eros to be "a nice mixture covering a wide range of sexually contemplative positions. True, there are some pieces that may induce arousal, but for the most part watching these shorts may cause one to never look at sex quite the same way again."

"I don't know much about anime, per se, nor do I know much about film history, per se, but I know plenty about both to know that Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress is one of the best movies I've seen about either subject," writes Ryland Walker Knight.

The Cat and the Canary is "a mildly amusing horror-thriller-comedy hybrid, but what really makes the film is the visual look that it has been given," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker for MSN, Bryant Frazer, Peter Martin at Cinematical and Peter Sobczynski's "Happiest DVD Column On Earth" at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Posted by dwhudson at December 19, 2007 3:52 PM