One of the biggest surprises of the 2000 film year was this entirely engaging film, with Billy Crudup, in an astonishing performance, as the hapless protagonist who can't help but screw-up everything, from getting addicted to drugs, having a relationship with his girlfriend (Samantha Morton), making a living for himself, or having an encounter with a malevolent, snakeskin-wearing man who may or may not be the Devil. He finally attains stability, and redemption, in the Southwestern desert, where he learns how to interact with people at a retirement home and through an Amish couple whom he sees but never introduces himself to. Director Alison Maclean (Crush) has marshaled numerous names, including Denis Leary, Will Patton, Dennis Hopper and Holly Hunter, in supporting roles, and Jack Black, previously of High Fidelity, is brilliant, again as a hospital orderly with whom Crudup's character works for a spell. The VHS edition is priced to rent, with no compelling extras on the DVD.

Penelope Cruz gives a dynamite performance in this small, fleeting, but nonetheless enjoyable romantic comedy as a cook who leaves her native seaside town in Brazil to go to the U.S. -- and San Francisco, another town by a sea -- after having trouble with her boyfriend. The boyfriend goes after her, and so, too, does everyone else, after they get a taste or even a whiff of her cooking. (It is not, of course, just how she makes it, but the feeling that she puts into it while she makes it that causes people to become enchanted.) Brazilian director Fina Torres' film may seem technically crude or unsophisticated by Hollywood standards -- but sometimes that's not such a bad thing. And the music, with original tunes by Luis Bacalov, combined with Cruz's performance, is wonderful. The DVD has no extras.

Beyond the A List

Among the most ravishingly beautiful Technicolor films ever made (Jack Cardiff won an Oscar for his cinematography), Black Narcissus, adapted by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger from the novel by Rumer Godden, tells of a young Mother Superior, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), and her struggles establishing a school and hospital with an offshoot of her Sisters of Mary order at a remote, windswept former palace and harem 9,000 feet up in the Himalayas. Wracked by doubt and desire, Sister Clodagh tries as best she can to manage the four nuns under her, only to watch as the increasingly unstable Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) cracks under the pressure of putting thoughts of sexy British local Mr. Dean (David Farrar) out of her mind. An update of the lauded laserdisc issued by The Criterion Collection some time back, this newly expanded edition features a gorgeous digital transfer from a 35mm interpositive print (created with Cardiff’s input), a fine essay by respected film critic Dave Kehr on the fold-out inner sleeve, a theatrical trailer, English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired and an exciting collection of production stills (incredibly, the film was shot entirely in and around London’s Pinewood Studios, with a collection of matte paintings and camera tricks, supplementing Alfred Junge’s production design, that puts modern computer generated images to shame). The most important extras of the set are a commentary track featuring a conversation between Powell (who died in 1990) and Martin Scorsese, a huge fan of the film whose editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, was married to the director; and the whimsical, specially commissioned "Painting With Light," Craig McCall’s 27-minute documentary on Cardiff and the making of Black Narcissus. Sure to be listed among the top DVD releases of the year (pity Entertainment Weekly couldn’t hold their January 10 "50 Best DVDs" issue a few weeks), Black Narcissus -- named for the exotic imported aftershave used by one character -- is an essential part of any movie fan’s burgeoning collection. Perhaps Scorsese puts it best, when he describes this one-of-a-kind film as "bathed in color."

In a bleak part of New York City, a group of Spanish day laborers bicker among themselves before one is crushed by a falling wall; two teenagers from the same village meet by chance at a wedding reception, only to lose each other in the concrete canyons; a homeless puppeteer tries to enroll his daughter in a public school; a sweatshop worker desperate for wages to send home to her sick daughter stands up to her callous employer. Five years in the making, The City (La Ciudad) employs classic elements of black and white photography, documentary and social realist filmmaking to tell a quartet of stories, linked by a visa lottery photographer’s storefront shop and peopled with immigrants selected by photographer-writer-filmmaker David Riker (who moved from pictures to film because "I wanted the people in my photographs to be able to speak"). "The pain you go through in this country to get a life…," someone says in the first episode, and to the heartbreaking strains of Tony Adzinikolov’s score this remarkable film gives an eloquent face to that daily struggle. Available on tape only, The City is in Spanish with English subtitles and is at present priced to rent.

In early 1970s Georgia, determined cockfighter Frank Mansfield (the late, great Warren Oates) plies his trade on the violent rural circuit. Among the handful of great cult movies of the 1970s, the film was adapted from hard boiled writer Charles Willeford’s novel by director Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) and an uncredited Earl Mac Rauch (New York, New York), produced by the legendary Roger Corman, photographed by the great Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven), scored by the then-unknown Michael Franks and edited by Lewis Teague (Alligator). The cast features a young Harry Dean Stanton, an even younger Ed Begley Jr., Millie Perkins, Troy Donahue, Richard B. Shull and Troy Donahue. Owing to the violence of the rooster battles there’s been controversy surrounding this memorable work for twenty-five years, and to this day the film is banned from public exhibition in the United Kingdom. But above all Cockfighter is a film about honor and addiction, and a touchstone of such cultural importance that Almendros devotes a chapter of his sadly out-of-print 1986 memoir A Man with a Camera to his work on it and Willeford (whose name is misspelled on the sleeve) also wrote extensively about his experiences on the set. Note that the expressive Oates acts the role almost entirely mute, with his thoughts punctuating the action via narration. The splendid Anchor Bay DVD transfer is accompanied by Tom Thurman’s incisive fifty-four-minute 1993 documentary career overview Warren Oates: Across the Border, talent bios, various media spots (a TV ad refers to the film under one of its many alternate titles, Born to Kill) and a commentary interview in which Hellman and original production assistant Steven Gaydos (now the London-based co-executive editor of Variety) discuss the movie’s gestation and marketing -- including the director’s reluctance to make a movie with such violence towards animals and frustration at not having enough time to do it right -- with American Cinemateque programmer Dennis Bartok.

Dante Tomaselli's debut feature, which he wrote and directed, is about a woman who's found dead in her infant son's nursery, face-down in a birthday cake lying on the floor; a nun who is killed after being struck by a model airplane, and another nun who's attacked by a flying pair of open scissors; a young teenage boy (Danny Lopes) at a Catholic school who sees faceless nuns strolling on the lawn, and leering nuns looking in at him through the window; a sinister, tough-sounded priest (Vincent Lamberti) who wears a black leather overcoat, gives instructions to his class on how to perform a frog dissection by first placing "pins through its hands and its feet," and dispenses pills to the students on the q.t. ("Can priests take Valium?" one boy asks); the boy's grandmother (Irma St. Paule), who seeks help from the school's headmaster and, when that doesn't work, from a psychic (the psychic says that her grandson is "very far away, though. Much farther than you thought." "You mean, he ain't in New Jersey?"); phantasmagorical scenes which are supposed to represent the boy's deceased mother trying to use her son to get out of Hell; and, in one scene, the boy, clad only in a diaper, locked up in a wire animal cage while a woman torments him by shaking the contents of a baby's bottle at him. Tomaselli has described this film (which is beautifully photographed, by Brendan C. Flynt) as being like a visit to "a psychedelic fun-house"; he may want to turn his attentions more towards story and character. Without them, the film descends into being simply one freaky-deaky scene after another.

Married Osaka paper merchant Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) sacrifices everything -- his family, his business, his very soul -- in service to his erotic obsession with courtesan (read: prostitute) Koharu, played by Shima Iwashita -- director Masahiro Shinoda’s wife and business partner. On the heels of their 2000 release of Kwaidan (see the 2000 Nitrate Online Fright Film Festival here), The Criterion Collection once again explores the stylized theatrical conventions of the Japanese film. Here, Shinoda and screenwriters Taeko Tomioka and Toru Takemitsu (the highly-respected composer) adapt Chikamatsu’s 1720 Bunraku puppet play, mixing obvious theatrical conventions and puppetry with live action, eccentric framing and a highly stylized black-and-white look. The emphasis in this version is on honor and destiny: the only way to transcend their transgression is through the extreme act of the title. Tellingly, both courtesan Koharu and Jihei’s wife Osan are played by Iwashita -- an indication, perhaps, that Shinoda (who may be glimpsed in the early scenes as filming is prepared) isn’t comfortable with the tradition. The DVD package features a generally fine digital transfer from a 35mm composite fine-grain master (which does show a little wear), an illuminating essay by the late feminist film theorist Claire Johnston, and newly transcribed and very clear English subtitles.

In a remote corner of western Canada, an American army base and the surrounding community are terrorized by a series of unexplained deaths until crusading Major Jeff Cummings (Marshall Thompson) and his new squeeze Barbara (Kim Parker) discover that kindly yet intense professor R.E. Walgate (British character vet Kynaston Reeves) is actually projecting his thoughts via atomic energy into hideous mutant brains that fly through the air, whip their tales around the necks of their victims and suck out their brains. Now that’s entertainment: when not engaged in the preservation of more lofty cinematic touchstones (see Black Narcissus and Double Suicide, above), The Criterion Collection finds plenty of time to rescue and restore such legendary B movies as The Blob, Brian De Palma’s Sisters and Herk Hervey’s low-budget classic Carnival of Souls. Cinematographer-turned-director Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend without a Face fits snugly and proudly into this roster, a quasi-legendary genre exercise that overcomes some early inertia to generate a supremely creepy climax highlighted by a bevy of the brains terrorizing a group of humans trapped in the living room of a remote house (Night of the Living Dead, anyone?). The DVD sports a new, digitally-cleaned transfer from a 35mm fine-grain master that preserves the stark black-and-white palette, while the always-dependable Criterion extras include audio commentary from producer Richard Gordon and genre film writer Tom Weaver; an illustrated essay on British genre films by film historian Bruce Eder, an essay in the fold-out booklet by professor and author Bruce Kawin; still photos and ephemera with commentary; and vintage advertisements and lobby cards that provoke a tangible nostalgia for a long-lost era of shamelessly titillating promotion.

On the eve of his death in 1828 at eighty-two, the painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Francisco Rabal) lies confused and ill in the house he shares with the last of his many lovers, Leocadia (Eulalia Ramón), and their young daughter Rosario (Dafne Fernández). Helpless to control the visions that come to him unbidden, his life and tumultuous times are then told in flashback, as the forgetful Goya (embodied as a younger man by actor Jose Coronado) spins tales of his eventful life -- he lived through the decline of Spain, four monarchies, occupied government and bloody war of independence -- to the tolerant Rosario, who’s obviously heard them all before. Beyond breathtaking, this collaboration between director Carlos Saura and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (whose numerous collaborations include Flamenco and Tango) pulses with life, energy and imagination, as key works from the painter’s oeuvre are brought vividly to life on lavish sets constructed at Rome’s storied Cinecitta Studios. Although unscreened at presstime, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment’s DVD edition of the film promises a stunning sensory experience, a riot of light, color and sound accessible regardless of prior familiarity with Goya or his work; the VHS tape is priced to rent.

Here’s an invigorating and charming companion piece to Ken Burns’ Jazz (see January’s Box Set Corner). Filmed at Paramount’s studio in Astoria, Queens, these collections of authentic period short films from some of the greatest names in music -- originally conceived to preface and complement the Hollywood movies of the period on a theater’s bill -- flesh out the clips presented in the Burns work. Thus, while Jazz shows clips from Louis Armstrong’s A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (which gets disc one off to a propulsive start), the set-up to the song is included here to place it in dramatic context. A standout lighter moment on disc two features Anna Chang fending off the advances of obnoxious sailor Cary Grant in Singapore Sue. The roster of talent is truly impressive, with performances from Duke Ellington, Ethel Merman, Cab Calloway, Ginger Rogers, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Bing Crosby and many more. Without overt emphasis, the compilation also addresses the criticism that Latin influences on jazz are underserved in Burns’ documentary: Vincent Lopez’ Those Blues and the special bonus short Jazz a la Cuba, featuring Don Aspiazu and His Famous Cuban Orchestra doing that Rhumba thing under aerial shots of old Havana, provide a vivid climax to volume one. The clever menu page of these Kino on Video editions have a jukebox interface, which allows the viewer to click through each song and preview it in a window to the right of the title list. Inquisitive consumers should note that the back cover of each disc only hints at the dozens of songs within, which are detailed on each inner sleeve. Each disc is sold separately, and the picture and sound quality is generally very fine.

A conflicted yet feisty young woman, Lolly Ann (Angela Bettis) finds her ticket out of a repressed smalltown life in the form of Mexican classmate Joseph (Douglas Spain), who breaks into her home while on the lam from a violent run-in with racist locals. The generally firm-handed directorial debut of actor Don Most (Ralph Malph on the old Happy Days TV program), the film overcomes a heavy-handed racist subplot to soar on the wings of the chemistry between the two leads and Bettis’ remarkable, mercurial perf as Lolly Ann. An extraordinary complex creature whose demeanor recalls the noble vulnerability of Joan Allen and the defiant resolve of Holly Hunter, the teenager is straddling that fence between adolescence and womanhood, burdened with an austere childhood yet not quite ready to stand on her own two feet. In the same way Juliette Lewis commanded the screen in Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear by virtue of her anonymity, Bettis -- who segued from this to a distinctive supporting role in Girl, Interrupted -- gives proceedings an unpredictable, invigorating emotional charge. Vanguard International’s VHS release is priced to rent, and research indicates the DVD has no extra features.

Called out of retirement by his former boss Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) to help catch the crudely dubbed "Tooth Fairy" serial killer (Tom Noonan), intuitive and empathetic FBI Forensics expert Will Graham (William Peterson, who plays an older and wiser spin on the character in CBS’ surprise hit CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) is reluctantly forced to seek advice from his old nemesis, the now-incarcerated but still highly dangerous madman Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox). After the brutal killing of tabloid journalist Freddie Loundes (Stephen Lang), blind photo developer Reba (Joan Allen) is imperiled, only to be daringly rescued by Graham. Michael Mann’s third feature and first following the tremendous success of his television series Miami Vice, Manhunter takes a number of liberties with its source novel, Thomas Harris’ "Red Dragon" ("Lecter" somehow becomes "Lecktor"), yet Mann nails not only a suffocating mood of sinister dread but a visual strategy that is at once obviously 1980s lurid but somehow timeless in its elemental, stylized use of color -- qualities which have earned the film a reputation as among the most stylish and frightening of the decade. Credit cinematographer Dante Spinotti, working on his first American film, for refining a look that has served Mann well in his subsequent movies (both Heat, which was in gestation at the time, and the acclaimed The Insider reflect both story themes and visual motifs). Anchor Bay Entertainment offers both the razor-sharp and vivid transfer of the released version and a "Director’s Cut" on separate VHS tapes. The single DVD edition features two David Gregory documentaries on the film, The Manhunter Look: A Conversation with Dante Spinotti (ten minutes) and Noonan, Peterson, Cox and Allen’s reminiscences in Inside Manhunter (seventeen minutes), while a two-disc "Limited Edition" has the released version on one disc and the director’s version (only three minutes longer and reportedly of poor quality) on disc two. Conspicuously absent from any supplementary material is Mann himself.

The spirit of the enjoyable "B" monster movies from the Fifties and early Sixties is alive and may be found in this 1984 picture (previously released as Night Shadows). Two brothers, Jack (the talented Wings Hauser) and Mike (Lee Montgomery), are on vacation and have their car waylaid outside a town in the Carolinas which, coincidentally, has a chemical plant nearby which is dumping toxic waste that is subsequently turning all the inhabitants in the town into toxic zombies with a very bad attitude towards garden-variety human beings (one zombie, trying to get at someone in a car, simply sticks its finger up to the glass of a closed window and melts his way through it). Bo Hopkins plays the town's disgraced sheriff, trying to make good, and Jennifer Warren is the town doctor. Jody Medford also provides some female interest: in her first scene, she says "I must look a mess," then takes off the kerchief ‘round her head, lets down her hair, and turns into a Vargas beauty. John "Bud" Cardos directed, and the picture has a lush music score by Richard Band, some surprising plot turns, fine make-up effects, and a couple of genuinely creepy moments.

---

Box Set Corner:

An occasional exploration of video and DVD’s higher end

---

The Films of Dusan Makavejev various, 1966-1992  Released 01.30.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

FULL REVIEW BUY VIDEO

Among the most audacious and subversive conjurers in the cinema, Dusan Makavejev (b. 1932, Belgrade) used the do-it-yourself filmmaking aesthetic necessitated by his Yugoslav birth and upbringing, combined with a keen appreciation for psychology (in which he majored at university) -- and an eternally controversial championing of the libido over all -- to fashion some of the most distinctive and freewheeling feature films ever conceived. Built largely around staged sequences featuring actors improvising in real-life situations (often supplemented by "found" footage), each work is a volatile mix of drama and documentary, comedy and tragedy, sex and politics, all uniquely informed by the filmmaker’s nomadic lifestyle. After years of spotty availability, Facets Video has assembled six of his 10 features to date (including his first four) into one cohesive package that charts the improvisational yet firmly focused concerns of this visionary, provocative filmmaker. In Man is Not a Bird (Čovek nije Tica, Yugoslavia, 1965), an engineer assembling machinery in a small town finds love and wonder, while Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice, Yugoslavia, 1967) looks at the romance between a rat exterminator and the title character. Innocence Unprotected (Nevinost bez zaštite, Yugoslavia, 1968) reassembles the surviving cast and crew of a grade-Z 1942 melodrama made in Nazi-occupied Belgrade, while his most notorious work, W.R. -- Mysteries of the Organism (W.R. -- Misterije organizma, Yugoslavia/Federal Republic of Germany, 1971) hilariously mixes the teachings of sex therapist Wilhelm Reich with various dramatic and documentary sequences promoting political and sexual insurrection (that the "W.R." might also mean "world revolution" is just one of many elements that earned the film both the Luis Buñuel prize at the Cannes festival and a an exhibition ban from unamused Yugoslav authorities). Two flamboyant tales of sexual emancipation in France and Holland form the backbone of the eternally controversial and little-seen Sweet Movie (France/Federal Republic of Germany/Canada, 1975), while the 1992 return to form Gorilla Bathes at Noon (Germany, 1992) follows a disoriented and abandoned Russian officer around the changing Berlin landscape. Of his remaining four features, only 1981’s Swedish-British co-production Montenegro (aka Pigs and Pearls, starring Susan Anspach) is available; among the works apparently gone missing is among his most high-profile, 1985’s Australian-shot The Coca Cola Kid, in which Eric Roberts and Greta Scacchi tryst against the backdrop of a whimsical soft drink war (many of these films will be broadcast on the Sundance Channel in early February). Each tape is also available individually at $24.95; at $149.95 the complete set is no monetary bargain but offers the committed cineaste an invaluable glimpse into iconoclastic mid-century central European filmmaking.

---

Don't have a DVD player? 
Click on the button below to buy one:

Buy at Amazon.com

---

Didn't find what you are looking for? Look in the back issues of the store or in the extensive catalog of Amazon.COM by entering your search in the text box below:

Search: Books Popular Music Classical Music Video Toys Electronics Enter keywords...