DVDs, 4/8.

I noted the other day that Acquarello has reviewed Chris Marker's The Embassy (1973), now available along with The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967) on a single DVD from the Chris Marker Store of the Wexner Center for the Arts. Today in the New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews another pair of Marker films released by First Run/Icarus Films "that unites The Last Bolshevik, Mr Marker's 1993 contemplation of the life and art of the Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, with a solid restoration (though spoiled by a poor transfer from the European to American video standard) of Medvedkin's most famous film, Happiness (1934-35). Seen together, the two films make up a tragic history of 20th-century communism, extending from the first, exhilarating blasts of the Bolshevik avant-garde to the final whimpers of the Soviet Union and the exhausted, duplicitous imagery of the party propaganda film."

Updated.

"[Harry] Houdini displayed little cinematic aptitude, yet the viewer who plunges, handcuffed or not, into Kino's new three-disc DVD tribute, Houdini: The Movie Star, may surface with the showman's grim, stocky, square-faced, curly-haired, gimlet-eyed glare forever locked in memory, like an unshakable specter from the past," writes Gary Giddins in the New York Sun. "Houdini was no actor, but he had presence."

"It is hard to envision a more perfect match between teller and tale than the one between [Terry] Gilliam and Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, the Baron Münchausen, memorialized as the greatest liar in history," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "That in itself is, of course, something of a tall tale, perpetrated by one Rudolf Erich Raspe, who cast the baron as the hero of a series of extravagantly embroidered and thoroughly implausible adventures. But stories, as Gilliam is fond of observing, are more powerful than truth. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, released as a 20th-anniversary DVD this week, stars John Neville as the famous fabulist who swoops in on an 18th century theatrical re-creation of his life and loudly denounces it as a pack of lies - not because it is untrue but because it isn't nearly outlandish enough."

"Spalding Gray was a towering figure in 1980s avant-garde theater, a performer whose relationship with his own stage persona was so unique it spawned a new genre of playwriting." Teddy Blanks introduces a package at Not Coming to a Theater Near You that features reviews of Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box and Gray's Anatomy.

Also at NCTATNY, Chet Mellema admires Platform's "unassuming affront to the cavernous social dichotomies found in China during the 1980s, as the country begins to transition from a forced communal mindset to an acknowledgement, of sorts, of the individual. Along the way, the film addresses a kaleidoscope of issues, including the roles and contributions of the artist in a labor-intensive society; the onslaught of capitalism and its side effects; youthful longing to travel and seek other locales; familial, generational and class divides; and the influx of Westernized pop culture on a people virgin to such influence."

"Warner's new nine-film box set Classic Musicals From the Dream Factory Volume 3 features four Eleanor Powell films, and they are a reminder of just what audiences attended musicals for," writes Sean Axmaker.

Wishing King Kong a happy 75th: Robert Cashill and Ted Pigeon.

"John Carpenter's mastery of hard-boiled genre tropes may be no more evident than in his 1976 masterwork Assault on Precinct 13, a neo-western bathed in urban decay and 70s racial tensions that packs - in 90 minutes, no less - more insight into life lessons and moral codes of honor (do unto others, etc) than most filmmakers achieve in an entire career." Rob Humanick.

Also: "Lions for Lambs is talky, preachy, obvious, but it's also honest, to-the-point, frank, and anything but simplistic, avoiding not only the disingenuously visceral point making of the likes of United 93, but also (and more importantly) the distancing apathy of so many films that it deliberately seeks to counter."

Guy Savage at Noir of the Week: "The Homme Fatale in Sudden Fear."

For Stop Smiling, Mark Mordue talks with Andrew Dominik about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte has been out on a R1 DVD for some time, but Eureka's just released an R2 version as part of its Masters of Cinema series and the DVD is "an exquisite piece of work," writes Glenn Kenny. As for the film itself, though, "Pauline Kael called La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad and La Dolce Vita 'The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties,' and as far as La Notte is concerned she has a point."

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker, Paul Clark (ScreenGrab), DVD Talk, Bryant Frazer, Harry Knowles and Peter Martin (Cinematical).

Updates: "[I]f the Tavianis' penchant for old-fashioned narrative folkiness has grown tedious over the last decade or two, there's still 1982's The Night of the Shooting Stars, their premier achievement, and arguably the best Italian film of the 80s," writes Michael Atkinson for the IFC. "he legacy of Italian cinema is the primary axe being ground in Diva Dolorosa (1999), making its long overdue appearance on DVD almost a decade after it dazzled authentic cinephiles at film festivals all over."

"I'm late in covering 4 by Agnès Varda and that's because I didn't want the feeling of being finished with it," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But one is never finished with Varda. She is so uncompromising, so resolutely unfashionable, so undigested by film theory and film history. Each of these four movies is like a master class in artistic independence, an unsatisfactory Zen koan whose only possible answer is its own existence."

"[I]n its formative years, the gangster movie was funnier, weirder, more sexually charged, and less constricted by moralizing than anyone remembered - as a revelatory new box set makes clear," writes Mark Harris, author of the currently widely discussed Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, for Slate. In the third volume of Warners' Gangster Collection, he finds "half a dozen relative rarities that contribute immeasurably to any understanding of how elastic, adaptable, and energetic the genre had become by 1934, when the stultifying restrictions of the Production Code began to be enforced and Hollywood movies became, for a time, duller and dumber. These movies also showcase an actor who still has the power to astound. Between 1931 and 1934, James Cagney made 17 movies, all of them for Warner Brothers. Four - Smart Money, Picture Snatcher, Lady Killer, and the irresistibly titled The Mayor of Hell - are included here. None of them is, strictly speaking, a gangster movie. But together they make it clear that rigid genre labeling is beside the point when you're considering a period in which genres, and talking pictures, were still inventing themselves."

Posted by dwhudson at April 8, 2008 6:39 AM