GreenCine Daily: DVDs, 12/2.

December 2, 2008

DVDs, 12/2.

"In its blunt, bludgeoning way, White Dog ranks among the toughest and most probing examinations of racism in American cinema," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times. "[Sam] Fuller's brute-force direction gives this outrageous allegory the hyperbolic treatment it demands." More from Erin Donovan at the Guru and from Craig Phillips.

"The late Marguerite Duras's novels, with their accretion of visual detail and incantatory dialogue, lent themselves to movies, but Duras disliked others' adaptations of her work and began, in the 1960s, to direct," writes Richard Brody in the New Yorker. "Her fourth film, Nathalie Granger (in a two-disk set from Blaq Out / Facets), from 1972, is a vehicle for a pair of international divas, Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosé, albeit an unusually low-key one; the setting is a cluttered old house near Paris, which was Duras's own."

"[I]n [Douglas] Fairbanks we recognize a contemporary," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times: "a bright, open-faced young man who moves quickly and naturally, who lives in a world of speed and mass communication that is recognizably our own, who aspires not to the tragic martyrdom of the Victorians but to immediate pleasures and ordinary happiness. This is the performer whose development is traced in Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer, an extraordinary, well-produced set of 10 features and one short film that arrives on Tuesday from Flicker Alley. These aren't the more familiar costume epics from Fairbanks's later career - several of which have been issued in fine editions by Kino International - but rather the modern-day comedies that first established his screen personality." More from Sean Axmaker.

Alibi "Alibi lies on the cusp between American silent and sound filmmaking," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Like many a film of the day, its visual style reflects an accommodation made to the arrival of sound, with fluid, expressive sequences that were clearly shot silent and then overlaid with music and sound effects alternating with static dialogue-heavy scenes. The film's fascination lies in its hybridity, the tug-of-war enacted before our eyes between the two conflicting styles that support silent filmmaking on the one side and sound on the other. Does it need to be added that silent cinema wins out resoundingly?"

Michael Atkinson for IFC on Still Life: "It's a magnificent journey, made all the more mysterious by Jia [Zhang-ke]'s seizures of fantasy... As always using a non-professional cast and incorporating the left curves of happenstance into his setups, Jia is making the kind of cinema the early 21st century may well become noted for eons hence - a circumstantial cinema, of poeticized reality and observed humanity, free of bullshit and patronization and cliché." Also reviewed is Lionsgate's box set, Roberto Rossellini: Director's Series: "This is not the neorealist Rossellini, the wrestling-with-Ingrid Bergman Rossellini, nor the historical-dissection Rossellini. This is the Rossellini that dumped Bergman and came back to Italy after getting kicked out of India by Nehru (for another romantic scandal, to a married woman who'd become his third wife), and found himself paying penance with studio projects."

Scott Marks has been watching Gordon Douglas.

"Though ostensibly riddled with Cold War paranoia, Mirage (1965), directed by Edward Dmytryk, is too slight and warmly lit to be as noir as the set-up promises, but it is terrific fun, particularly while the ambiguity holds and we know as little about what the hell is going on as David [Stillwell (Gregory Peck)] does," writes Josef Braun. Also: revisiting The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim.

Kevin Lee on Law of Desire: "Pedro Almodóvar's international breakthrough is not so much about the destructive power of love and lust as our willingness to be controlled - and devastated - by such emotions; in other words, not desire but the desire to be desired."

"Considering the various convulsions going on with the Thai film industry, it would seem that Nonzee Nimibutr might never make a film like Jan Dara again," writes Peter Nellhaus. "Nonzee's third feature is not a genre exercise as are most Thai films. The depiction of sex would also be more likely censored as well. The best way to describe Jan Dara is to think of it as a Thai version of a classic Greek tragedy, actually several combined into one. A more contemporary comparison might be with Tennessee Williams, without the coyness, a Freudian nightmare."

"30 years and change later, the New York segment of [Alice in the Cities] seems an inexhaustible document of an old New York that is gone forever," writes Glenn Kenny in his "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" for the Auteurs' Notebook.

"After my third viewing of Closer I suddenly became aware of an implicit subtext which made me completely re-evaluate the resonance of the story. Mike Rot argues at Row Three that a "nesting of the morality play within a 'Hollywood Romance' is Mike Nichols's stroke of genius."

Mister Lonely came out on DVD recently, and rather quietly, too. For Interview, Elvis Mitchell talks with Harmony Korine.

"With the recent release of Sony Pictures' Budd Boetticher box set, our understanding of the late 1950s western - that high-water mark of the genre when it had achieved an advanced level of self-awareness but before it dissolved into apocalypse and self-parody - becomes considerably expanded." Andrew Schenker on Comanche Station for Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"In the lovably lo-fi sci-fi Christmas on Mars, psych rock band the Flaming Lips have invented a straight-to-DVD film that could be a lost cousin to 2001, but born on the other end of the budget universe," writes Mike Plante for Filmmaker.

William Hare has the Noir of the Week: Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend.

Amanda McCormick lists the "10 best things about Short Cuts" at the filmlinc blog.