Nitrate Online explores a sampling of the most noteworthy, provocative and satisfying video and/or DVD releases for the month of July 2000 (give or take a few weeks). Titles are followed by original country and year of release, as well as release date (if known). Street dates change constantly and often differ from format to format, so check with your favorite online or brick-and-mortar supplier for up-to-date information.

There’s something to be said for consistency, particularly over a thirteen-film career now on the verge of its third decade. And while there’s the legitimate question of what makes Pedro Almodovar popular with a wide audience just now -- did the world finally catch up with his gender-bending worldview or has he gradually retooled his approach for the mainstream? -- there’s little debate about the unity of his vision. Since he first burst on the American art-house scene with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown over a decade ago, Almodovar has staked out the territory of a Spanish cross between George Cukor and John Waters, the flamboyant but compassionate chronicler of the often tangled but always rewarding relationships among women. Following the momentum of 1995’s The Flower of My Secret and 1997’s Live Flesh, All About My Mother confirms his increasing maturity as a filmmaker of great visual and emotional gifts (a pity the 1999 Cannes jury didn’t think so, giving Almodovar the Best Director award instead of the Palm d’Or everybody else thought the movie deserved). The complex and rewarding saga of a mother who travels from Madrid to Barcelona after her son dies tragically, All About My Mother makes pointed structural references to the Bette Davis picture All About Eve and Tennessee Williams’ "A Streetcar Named Desire" in its story of show business, sexual ambiguity and support. Drawing from the circle of actresses that have appeared in many of his films, Almodovar elicits rich performances from Cecilia Roth as the grieving mother, Marisa Paredes as a vulnerable actress, and Penelope Cruz as a pregnant nun (what would an Almodovar movie be without a pregnant nun?). Thoughtful and heartfelt, All About My Mother is a melodrama for moviegoers wary of the genre. The DVD edition includes an isolated music score track, production notes and featurette, and a conversation with the director.  

Winner of the Audience Award at the recently-concluded Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, Alan Parker’s adaptation of Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s heart-wrenching memoir about growing up in extreme poverty in Limerick, touches some audiences and leaves others cold. In this way it displays much of what’s good and bad in the director’s oeuvre. On one hand, there are some ferociously vivid performances, particularly from the always-dependable Emily Watson as the Angela of the title, who must suffer the human weaknesses of her husband (Robert Carlyle) while raising her brood. But, as with most of Parker’s most popular films (Fame, Mississippi Burning), there’s a huge gulf between the accuracy of the image and the honest emotions they portray -- this is why he’s best at the loud pomp of rock and roll in such work as The Commitments and Pink Floyd: The Wal (although the subtleties of Evita completely eluded him). Technically accomplished yet somehow unaffecting, Angela’s Ashes is, at the end, an emotional conundrum. The DVD edition includes commentary from both McCourt and Parker, as well as interviews with cast and crew and the film itself in both widescreen and full-frame formats.

As empty and wrong-headed as Hollywood gets, Leonardo DiCaprio’s much-ballyhooed follow-up to Titanic (not counting his frighteningly authentic turn in Woody Allen’s Celebrity,) is a misfire from beginning to end. He plays a strident, selfish American out for kicks in Southeast Asia who discovers a deceptively sinister paradise in the form of a remote island populated by like-minded dropouts under the mysterious control of the great Tilda Swinton, whose mastery of her craft -- see The War Zone, below -- is completely wasted (their love scene together is a profoundly twisted moment in the annals of contemporary movies). Nothing about the film rings true for a moment, from DiCaprio’s faux hip petulance to the wildly improbable plot. The only saving grace, as is usual in a film directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), is the music, highlighted by an early sequence on the beach cut to Sugar Ray’s respectful cover of the lovely Brian Eno/John Cale composition "Spinning Away." Which is exactly what this movie seems to have done. The DVD includes a commentary track from Boyle, deleted scenes and an alternate ending, a storyboard gallery, TV spots and the All Saints' Pure Shores music video.

Denzel Washington's performance as Ruben "Hurricane" Carter, a professional boxer who was wrongfully accused of murder and imprisoned, holds one's attention throughout this otherwise square, sometimes poorly-made film which condenses real-life incidents, and skips over others. The work of several law firms, for instance, who donated considerable time to helping Carter is reduced to the sole efforts of three Canadian social workers (who are, fortunately, portrayed by a trio of fine actors: John Hannah, Deborah Unger, and Liev Schreiber), and the film never reveals what motives the police detective (Dan Hedaya) who railroaded Carter into jail had (or even if there were some unknowable motives behind his actions). There are some fine scenes depicting Carter's growing relationship with a young boy (Vicellous Reon Shannon) who is inspired by Carter's published memoirs, but they are shuttled into the background during the last portion of the film, which shifts from being a wronged-man scenario into a story about racism, an indictment of the prison system, and finally into a courtroom drama and mystery. (Rod Steiger, who appeared in director Norman Jewison's earlier film, In the Heat of the Night, appears as a judge during the courtroom sequences). But Washington's exceptionally well-conceived portrayal of Carter holds things together-- not an inconsiderable achievement-- and the film may cause people to seek out Carter's book "The Sixteenth Round" and Sam Chaiton and Terry Smith's account of Carter's case, "Lazarus and the Hurricane". The DVD edition includes an audio commentary from Jewison, deleted scenes, production notes and a "location spotlight."

A two-part TV. film adaptation of the Gospels, written in contemporary vernacular, and with Jeremy Sisto, smiling goofily and shambling amiably, in the title role. Much of the teachings have been cut back or dropped to make room for scenes of political intrigue, backroom plotting, and even blood-and-gore, as if the filmmakers were afraid that people would grow restless and start flipping channels if there was too much talking. Joseph and Mary are played by German actor Armin Muller-Stahl and the British Jacqueline Bisset-- which raises questions of credibility about how they could have raised a son with a decidedly SoCal accent-- while Gary Oldman shamefully swans his way through the role of Pontius Pilate. But the height of lunacy is reserved for the scenes where Jeroen Krabbe appears, in a late-twentieth century suit, as the Tempter, who, with a wave of his hand, swamps the screen with boffo visual effects, or transports himself and Jesus to a modern-day battlefield under fire. "A world war! What a concept!" Krabbe cries. Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Like the American high school kids who in future generations will look to Oliver Stone’s JFK for facts about the Kennedy assassination, this incarnation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park offers the writer’s sense and sensibilities filtered through a distinct creative/feminist agenda -- that of Canadian adaptor and director Patricia Rozema. Thus, this Fanny Price is less glum and more pro-active than Austen’s (and in fact resembles the writer’s own apparent temperament, culled from her writings and journals), even finding herself the object of overt affections from both sexes. The cumulative effect is oddly disjointed, neither an accurate visualization of the book nor a contemporary spin on the issues it raises. Still, Frances O’Connor brings a beguiling earthiness to Fanny, matched by the sexual craftiness of Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola as the scheming Crawfords, Mary and Henry. Only poor Jonny Lee Miller, saddled with the most conflicted character, lacks the requisite punch as Edmund Bertram (although playwright-turned-actor Harold Pinter makes the most of the severely compromised Bertram patriarch). Coincidentally, a DVD edition of the 1986 BBC production  of Northanger Abbey (currently being remade with Rachel Leigh Cook in the lead) was released June 27. The Mansfield Park DVD features unspecified audio commentary and an equally mysterious "making of" component.

Roman Polanski's film of Arturo Perez-Reverte's excellent novel, The Club Dumas, with Johnny Depp as a rare book hunter who is engaged to authenticate a volume that may possibly hold supernatural powers, turns out to be one of the director's more minor works. Polanski really seems to be simply marking-time with this picture: the protagonist's love for swashbuckling adventure stories (and how they start to blur in with his real-life experiences) which enlivened the novel has been removed, and what's left is nothing more than routine spookery, something that any director can make off-the-cuff. (And Polanski knows his way around the territory, having already made Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, and the underrated The Tenant.) Johnny Depp's performance is fine, as is Barbara Jefford, as the proprietor of a library on demonology who comes off with all the charm and poise of an upper-class socialite, while Emmanuelle Seigner, when she isn't whipping her blonde hair around while casting sly glances and throwing herself in and out of cars, shows that she can throw a kickboxing movement with the best of them. The DVD edition features a commentary track from Polanski, production info and a "making of" featurette, as well as the film in both widescreen and full-frame versions.

A good try: an attempt to do a literary adaptation that is serious-minded without being solemn, yet also doesn't look like it's merely bouncing about in period settings for the fun of it. Ralph Fiennes plays the early 19th century Russian aristocrat of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, a roué who indulges himself until he meets a young girl, Tatyana, whom he first spurns but then finds that he has genuinely fallen in love with her. As Tatyana, Liv Tyler looks beautiful but simply isn't entirely up to the task of the role as an actress, but Fiennes' performance (which initially seemed too poised and remote) is ultimately affecting in its portrayal of a man of manners who suddenly finds himself stung by the force of true feeling. Martha Fiennes, Ralph's sister, directed the film; novelist D.M. Thomas translated the letters exchanged by Onegin and Tatyana from Pushkin's original Russian text. The DVD edition has no listed extras.

The picture's strong points -- the fluid and expressive animation, its dark but beautiful design, the songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz -- are probably better appreciated now than when the film first came out in 1995, with an overwhelming tidal wave of promotional tie-ins. Pocahontas (voiced by Irene Bedard, sung by the Broadway musical actress Judy Kuhn), while loving and respecting her father, tribal chief Powhota (voiced/sung by Russell Means), meets and falls for New World newcomer John Smith (voiced/sung by Mel Gibson). He proves to be receptive to her ideas about respecting Nature, learning from other cultures, and honoring one's ancestors, as opposed to the grasping and avaricious Capt. Ratcliff (voiced/sung by David Ogden Stiers), who, convinced there's gold to be had out there, tells his men that "with all that's in ya,/Boys, dig up Virginia!" The central romance is not unlike those in "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast", and the animal sidekicks-- a hummingbird named Flit and a raccoon named Miko-- almost succeed in worming their way into your heart. Kuhn's rendition of Colors of the Wind -- even after one had heard it, in all sundry and various forms, all over the place in 1995 -- is undeniably ravishing. Billy Connolly and Christian Bale also provide voices for some of the supporting characters. The only Disney Studios animated feature to be directed (so far) by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg. The DVD version of the film features a couple of music videos (Colors of the Wind and If I Never Knew You), interactive components and the requisite theatrical trailers.  

In the end far better than the third chapter of this emblematic teen horror franchise has any right to be, Scream 3 (the target audience has no time or tolerance for Roman numerals) manages to, uh, flesh out the characters without stretching credulity. Putting the overly-complicated but shrewdly funny plot aside for a moment (the faithful know it, while newcomers are advised to see the films sequentially), the film’s makers have themselves become critic-proof by deriding the movie’s very existence up front. Yet for all the meddling that apparently went on behind the scenes, director Wes Craven has pulled everything together and made a movie that succeeds both as mindless entertainment and a sly meditation on personal growth, remorse and facing up to individual and group demons. By the end, Scream 3 has proven itself a surprisingly fun conclusion to a unique cycle of horror films that were products of their decade. The DVD edition includes an alternate ending with commentary from Craven, outtakes from all three films and Creed’s What If music video. The trilogy is due as a box set September 26.

Beyond the A List

By their very nature, movies are products of their times: what captures the public’s imagination today could be video store fodder tomorrow. In this way, old movies are endlessly fascinating windows on their day, giving modern audiences clues to trends in fashion, morals, rhythm and storytelling that help to decipher eras gone by. Thus is the case with Roger Vadim’s 1956 debut sensation …and God created woman, the film that, as much as many of its celebrated brethren of the about-to-be-launched French New Wave, bridges the gap between the more conservative post-war Gallic cinema and the young and sexy thinking that would soon overtake the industry. Twenty-one when the film was made and Vadim’s lover since the age of fifteen, Brigitte Bardot (by then Mrs. Vadim) stars as Juliet, the resident free spirit of St. Tropez (that "Pagan Paradise," according to the amusingly dubbed trailer included in the package) who spends her time balancing the various overtures of smooth millionaire Carradine (Curt Jurgens), caddish Antoine (Christian Marquand) and Antoine’s naïve younger brother Michel (a very young Jean-Louis Trintignant). The transfer offered by the Criterion Collection is flawless, restoring a pungency and luster to the Eastmancolor CinemaScope picture that probably wasn’t there to begin with (prior to his death earlier this year, Vadim, who consulted on the restoration, pronounced it the best version since the theatrical print). And once again, Criterion is to be applauded for their stylish and eye-catching packaging, bridging as it does the gap between 1950s chic and current product aesthetics in such a way that newcomers to the Bardot phenomenon will come for the flesh ("her ass is a song," someone says) and stay for the history. Be sure and watch the brief restoration demonstration on the disc, which vividly illustrates the minute yet cumulatively daunting task faced by the restoration team in restoring this pivotal French film to its former glory.

Before he made a name for himself directing westerns under the first name "Budd," Oscar Boetticher made this nicely smug little film noir about a private investigator (Richard Carlson, later the non-scaly star of The Creature From the Black Lagoon) who checks himself into the shady La Siesta Sanitarium in search of a corrupt judge hiding from the law. Once there his cover is blown and it’s up to the femme fatale who sent him there (Lucille Bremer) and a punch-drunk inmate (Tor Johnson, who later achieved immortality via Plan 9 From Outer Space) to save his bacon. Presaging Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, the film often plays mental illness for laughs but gets genuinely creepy when the doctors conspire to make the shamus a permanent resident. Snappy dialogue, the requisite black and white chiaroscuro (in a fine Kino Video transfer) and the pleasant sixty-two-minute running time make Behind Locked Doors a valuable addition to anyone’s noir library.

"Act a little more," John Waters tells one of his brave ensemble during priceless behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the underground classic Pink Flamingos, and the line could serve as a motto for the career of this influential Baltimore-based American independent icon. Waters defines the kind of resolutely regional, cheerfully bizarre filmmaking that everyone likes to think is the hallmark of the now dangerously stagnant Amerindie movement (the director had a cameo in Woody Allen’s recent Sweet and Lowdown and had a new picture, Cecil B. Demented, in Cannes). With reminiscences from dozens of friends and colleagues, including Steve Buscemi, Mike and George Kuchar, former Maryland censor Mary Avara (yes, Virginia, until not so awfully long ago Maryland had a film censor), Jim Jarmusch and, of course, Waters’ parents, this meticulously researched film from another Baltimorean, Steve Yeager, offers a thorough and fascinating look behind the scenes of what Village Voice critic J. Hoberman called "probably the most important underground movie made after [Andy Warhol’s] Chelsea Girls, one of the first real midnight cult films."

The great filmmakers are consistently fascinating, even in their less-than-great work. Such is the case with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman, which was dismissed by high-profile critics of the day and thus never properly distributed in the United States. Egotistical film director Niccolo (Tomas Milian) is bogged down in a new project, unable to find the right woman for his new film about an ideal woman ("I’m looking for a face," he says, seemingly helpless to describe it further). As he moves back and forth from Mavi (Daniela Silverio) to Ida (Christine Boisson), the answer becomes no less clear and he ultimately abandons the project in favor of a science fiction story. Made when the director was seventy, the film neatly sums up many of the major themes in his work (which includes the trilogy L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse), including thematic obsessions and technical innovation. Unfortunately, Facets Video’s edition of the film is full-frame (only the credit sequences are letterboxed), and the transfer is not as pristine as one would wish for a filmmaker of Antonioni’s importance. Still, they’ve done a valuable service in making this title available for inquiring cineastes, as time and fashion have been good to this inscrutable yet involving drama.

Although a troubled production from start to finish, Steven Spielberg’s first big special effects success, seen today, betrays little of the problems with weather, a malfunctioning mechanical shark nicknamed Bruce, and insufficient coverage that threatened to sink the movie during principal production (the movie’s quiet hero has always been editor Verna Fields, who, according to legend, took Spielberg’s mounds of mismatched footage and made a movie from it. Seen today, in a crisp and sonically complex new transfer replete with some seventy-five minutes of outtakes, flubs and supplementary material, Jaws is a lean, mischievous boys’ adventure that smells of sweat and aftershave, with only flashes of the childlike wonder and sentimentality that would leaven almost every subsequent film the director would make. While Robert Shaw’s scene-stealing Quint still reverts to irrationality a little to abruptly, Richard Dreyfuss’ impeccable comic timing with much of the expository material about the viciousness of sharks and Roy Scheider’s oddly touching mixture of eagerness and stoicism in the face of his fear of water remain appealing. Not incidentally, the wild success of the movie minted the now-routing summer blockbuster beauty-pageant approach to movie releasing.

A major revelation for film noir fans. After returning from a stint in the Special Services Film Unit of the United States Army during World War II (where he worked with Frank Capra on the "Why We Fight" series), Kiev-born U.S. citizen Anatole Litvak directed The Long Night, a remake of Marcel Carne’s 1939 drama Le Jour se lève (Daybreak) with Henry Fonda as chainsmoking factory worker Joe Adams (Jean Gabin starred in the original) in a steel town "somewhere near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border" and Vincent Price as the oily traveling magician who steals his girl (Barbara Bel Geddes) and suffers his wrath (Ann Dvorak has a nice turn as a "bar girl" -- read hooker -- with a heart of gold). Holed up in his boarding house after shooting Price, Fonda remembers the path that led to his undoing as the cops prepare to force him to surrender. The Long Night is presented as part of Kino Video’s fourth edition of Noir: The Dark Side of Hollywood (see also Behind Locked Doors, above, and Strange Impersonation, below), and the reissue is especially ironic in light of the fact that when The Long Night first opened, RKO Pictures attempted to buy and destroy all copies of Daybreak, an effort they were fortunately dissuaded from pursuing. In fact, the DVD edition of The Long Night features scenes from Carne’s earlier film as well as an essay on Eugene Lourie’s remarkable production design. Kino’s packaging bills the film as "a rediscovered American classic," and they’re right: reminiscent of the great Robert Mitchum film, Out of the Past (made the same year), The Long Night is an instant keeper. 

Controversial winner of the grand prize Palme d’Or at the 1999 Cannes festival after a closing day screening that had critics split down the middle, Rosetta is a monumental achievement in contemporary neo-realism, a ringing damnation of the Belgian social services system and a tour-de-force showcase for newcomer Emilie Dequenne as the title character, a young woman so determined to be a worthy contributor to society through sheer force of will that she sabotages as many jobs as she lands (in another controversial move, the Cannes jury awarded Dequenne the Best Actress prize -- in tandem with another non-professional, Severine Caneele from Humanity). Rosetta also fits snugly alongside the first feature from brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La Promesse, which also tackled the thorny issues of social services in its story of a young boy who slowly discovers his father is cruelly exploiting foreign workers. With its hand-held camera, complete lack of music and deliberate, fatalistic pace, Rosetta isn’t for all tastes by any means. But as an astonishing example of what a true filmmaking collaboration can be, it is an unparalleled achievement, at once brutally heartbreaking and giddily inspirational. At press time Rosetta was available exclusively in a cassette edition priced to rent (at $55, significantly below most such titles), with no DVD plans yet announced.

This extraordinary simultaneous release from Kino Video pairs German director Fritz Lang’s third film with his last (in separate purchases). In the digitally mastered adventure classic The Spiders, a secret society led by a mysterious femme fatale embarks on a rousing and visually imaginative journey to discover a lost Incan city of gold. Long thought lost, the film resurfaced in 1978 and here features an original organ score by Gaylord Carter. Also long unavailable in its original version, Lang’s last film, The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, reveals itself to be a nifty, letterboxed black and white Cold War thriller starring a pre-Goldfinger Gert Frobe as a police inspector trying to get to the bottom of a journalist’s murder. The criminal mastermind behind the mayhem is, of course, the same Dr. Mabuse that Lang dreamed up many years before in a sporadic series of films that straddled the silent and early sound years, here spiffed up to include references to terrorism and atomic weaponry. Although fascinating today, by most accounts the director had little enthusiasm for the project; subsequently, Lang’s only film work was an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 moviemaking drama Contempt (Le Mépris). His 1959 film The Indian Tomb is also on the July release schedule (see below). 

Talking on The Onion website recently about the recent re-release of Blood Simple, filmmaker Ethan Coen defined film noir as "plain, mean, ordinary people doing mean things to each other," a sentiment he might have felt had he screened the latest genre releases from Kino Video (see The Long Night and Behind Locked Doors, above), which include the obscure but decidedly un-ordinary noir Strange Impersonation (1946). Directed by Anthony Mann (born Emil Anton Bundmann), who went on to genre fame as the director of such important 1950s westerns as Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952) and 1953’s The Naked Spur (all of which starred James Stewart), Strange Impersonation stars Brenda Marshall as a determined scientist who shifts her energies from research to revenge when her work is sabotaged by a jealous colleague (Hillary Brooke). At sixty-eight minutes more of a programmer than a fully realized feature, the bizarre twists of the plot (plastic surgery, rampant melodrama) and Mann’s formative but still identifiable emotional intensity make Strange Impersonation a prime candidate for rediscovered cult status.

The directorial debut of actor Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Rob Roy), The War Zone is an extraordinary film, both delicate and brutal, about the multi-layered power struggle among the four members of a seemingly happy family uprooted from London to the windswept Devon coast. Along with their children Tom (newcomer Freddie Cunliffe), Jessie (Lara Belmont) and new baby Alice, Dad (Ray Winstone) and Mum (Tilda Swinton) have relocated and depend on each other for support until they can meet new friends. Slowly, Tom begins to suspect a horrible secret being shared by Dad and Jessie, the confirmation of which will lead to a life-changing confrontation. Based on a 1989 novel by screenwriter Alexander Stuart, the film benefits greatly from Roth’s restrained yet unblinking direction (he’s cited both Alan Clarke and Tarkovsky as influences). New Yorker’s letterboxed transfer is superb, preserving Seamus McGarvey’s rawboned yet crystalline photography -- an integral element of the film’s mood, and impact. Moviegoers affected by this challenging work are referred to actor Gary Oldman’s directorial debut Nil By Mouth (also starring the great Winstone) and Andrew Birkin’s similarly themed The Cement Garden, also in release this month. Harrowing, unforgettable stuff.

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