In contemporary Kowloon, sullenly earnest young security guard Tyler (singer Nicholas Tse) becomes caught in the crossfire of rival drug cartels even as he’s offering awkward support to lesbian policewoman Ah Jo (Cathy Chui), who’s pregnant with his baby. After finding moderate success at the helm of the Jean-Claude van Damme vehicles Double Team (1997) and Knock Off (1998), Vietnamese-born Hong Kong action vet Tsui Hark (it’s pronounced "choy huck") makes a triumphant return to freewheeling form with Time and Tide, a relentlessly inventive B movie elevated to dazzlingly kinetic heights by an almost complete disdain for detailed, logical narrative and a judicious blend of wildly imaginative CGI with good old-fashioned sweat-stained stuntwork. Don’t worry that the first hour isn’t adding up, by the time the chase through a huge, crumbling apartment block segues into the climactic showdown in Kowloon’s cavernous train station and the adjacent arena in the midst of a rock concert (highlighted by some gunplay from Ah Jo during her delivery), you won’t care. Columbia TriStar’s DVD edition has no extras, but that hardly matters: with its widescreen Panavision presentation and breathless, propulsive movement (note the sly spoofing of various John Woo films), Time and Tide just plain rocks. 

Beyond the A List

On the New Jersey shore, young transfer student Barret (Robert DiPatri) is saved from a fight in his new high school locker room by angry loner Ryan (Eion Bailey). As the two become friends, Barret learns the true extent of Ryan’s anger and depth of his despair, even as he searches for A Better Place. Writer-director-editor Vincent Pereira shares some creative traits with his co-executive producer Kevin Smith, the celebrated director of Clerks and Dogma. Chiefly, Pereira’s a good writer who can’t yet coax natural performances from actors. Yet Bailey brings an undeniably affecting intensity to Ryan, and if the film as a whole is reminiscent of such sensationalist teen angst movies as Over the Edge, well, that’s not such a bad thing. The Synapse Films DVD has a raft of extras, including three separate introductions by Smith and his producer Scott Mosier; a fine Datacine transfer of the 16mm film elements themselves (slightly letterboxed); a commentary track from Pereira and his cast, and a handful of deleted scenes. 

As Australians headed to the polls for pivotal federal elections in 1969, Don Harrison (John Hargreaves) and his wife Kath (Jeanie Drynan) host a party for their friends. As most of them are on the losing side, Don’s Party turns into an inebriated sexual free-for-all during which John’s inebriated friends unwittingly play into the least flattering elements of the Australian character. The fourth film by director Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy), Don’s Party is adapted from the play by acclaimed writer David Williamson. It won six of the eight Australian Film Institute Awards for which it was nominated, and is acted to the hilt by its large cast. The WinStar DVD edition is fullframe, with a clean print that shows some color fading. There are no extras on the disc. 

Terminally ill Greek writer Alexandre (Bruno Ganz, stepping in for Marcello Mastroianni after the actor’s death) embarks on a metaphysical journey, during which he revisits an afternoon with his long-dead wife and assists a young Albanian orphan. The work of Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos is much celebrated in Europe, but few of his stately, intricately-staged films have been embraced in America (some research might yield VHS tapes of his 1975 work The Travelling Players or 1988’s Landscape in the Mist, and there’s a DVD of his award-winning 1995 film Ulysses’ Gaze, starring Harvey Keitel). Eternity and a Day has reminded more than one viewer and critic of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and for those willing to invest the time and energy in them his movies can be absorbing, emotional experiences. This New Yorker Video release is exclusive to a clean, letterboxed VHS edition for now, and priced to rent. 

Israel, 1973: Weinraub (Liron Levo) and his buddy Ruso (Tomer Ruso) are soldiers caught up in the Yom Kippur war, in which Egypt and Syria launched attacks in Sinai and the Golan Heights. Nearly nine minutes go by at the beginning of Kippur, director Amos Gitai’s acclaimed follow-up to 1999’s Kadosh, before a word is spoken, and his strategy of long takes and an unblinking camera eye mark this as an audacious blend of art film and war epic. And be warned: once it gets going, Kippur is every bit as harrowing as Full Metal Jacket, the first forty minutes or so of Saving Private Ryan and even the most fearsome moments in the otherwise tepid Pearl Harbor. In truth, the emotional effect is a cross between hyper-realism and dislocation, as if the whole conflict were nothing but a huge, bloody, bad dream. This is accomplished in part through the aforementioned long takes, combined with a blocking technique that only hints at the larger war, focusing instead on the individual heroics and Herculean efforts of the medical squad to which Weinraub and Ruso become attached. Although there are no extras on the Kino on Video DVD edition of the film, the letterboxed transfer, complete with English subtitles for the Hebrew dialogue, is spotless. 

Under the auspices of Clint Eastwood, director Bruce Ricker in the mid-1970s filmed a number of surviving members of The Oklahoma City Blue Devils in Kansas City, including Jay McShann, Big Joe Turner, Jesse Price, Ernie Williams and, of course, Count Basie. The exuberant The Last of the Blue Devils makes a welcome return to home video courtesy of Kino; their DVD edition includes a new, fact-packed commentary track from Ricker, 19 minutes of outtake footage of Turner and McShann in performance, and a single-sheet insert listing the chapter stops by song title. Also available from Kino as part of this "Music Legends on DVD" release (but sold separately) is the DVD issue of their recent VHS Carnegie Hall, director Edgar G. Ulmer’s star-packed 1947 musical love story set against the backdrop of the New York performance hall. 

Not long ago, comedian and social activist Julia Query took a job stripping at the Lusty Lady, a San Francisco club. Although she and her co-workers had a healthy humorous attitude towards their work ("it’s like a weird pajama party," says one), the conditions under which they had to dance were so restrictive that Query organized the crew into a union -- but not without a fight from the mostly female management (after all, it’s called the sex "industry"). The struggle resulted in the Exotic Dancers Union, a chapter of Service Employees International 790. The primitive technical nature of Live Nude Girls Unite!, which was shot by Query, co-director Vicky Funari and a few others, actually helps sell the point, as does the obvious score and Query’s chipper and intimate first-person narration (concurrent with these events, she was coming out to her Jewish mother as both a lesbian and an exotic dancer -- who, despite six years of ballet, isn’t much of a dancer). The First Run Features DVD edition of Live Nude Girls Unite! includes a trailer, photo gallery, and barely six minutes of what’s billed as "never-before-seen bonus footage" -- but not, alas, a booklet. 

Director Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song) is angry at the way blacks have been treated in American movies, and so he penned this 50-minute documentary for television to tell us how and why. Under the direction of cinematographer Mark Daniels, Van Peebles presents demeaning clips and offers reasons and possible solutions for the offensive racial stereotyping that existed in even the most mainstream and respectable of Hollywood movies. As provocative and useful as the film is, there are two glaring problems: Van Peebles, though eloquent, has never had a problem with humility; and the subject deserves a longer, more reflective and perhaps less self-serving treatment. The WinStar DVD edition offers no extras. 

At the height of the Great Depression, intellectual tramp Godfrey (William Powell) is fetched by ditzy socialite Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) as part of a high society scavenger hunt. Back at her lavish home, Godfrey becomes the butler and shows the imbecilic family up for the superficial twits they are. Available for years only in a dupey, fuzzy and altogether dismal form (the result of a lapsed copyright that put the film in the public domain), director Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey has been given new life in a DVD pressing from The Criterion Collection that must be counted among the year’s best releases. Working from a duplicate negative, the picture and sound quality are first-rate here, yielding details previously unseen and restoring an early, influential and still important screwball comedy (from the pen of Marx Brothers collaborator Morrie Ryskind) to a high, studio-era gloss. The disc’s extras include a fine essay from Preston Sturges biographer Diane Jacobs (Criterion has pressings of the Sturges titles Sullivan’s Travels and The Lady Eve in the works); an audio commentary track from film historian Bob Gilpin; the 1938 "Lux Radio Theatre" broadcast in which Powell and Lombard recreated their roles; a production stills archive and original theatrical trailer. But the most provocative segment of the disc is a brief and expletive-laden selection of outtakes in which the principals flub their lines and swear a blue streak. Like this important new transfer of My Man Godfrey itself, the effect is refreshing and more than a little revelatory. 

In 1940s rural Georgia, young David (Jacob Tierney) is forever changed by the arrival of his Aunt Mae (Gena Rowlands) and the death of his hot-headed father (Denis Leary) in World War Two. Among the most meticulous of living filmmakers, director Terence Davies had, prior to The Neon Bible, made just three shorts and two features in some 18 years of work. His two features, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) are about growing up Catholic in working-class Liverpool -- a theme picked up and transferred to the American south with hypnotic perception in The Neon Bible. With stunning wide-screen photography by Mick Coulter and an absorbing approach to period detail, the stately, stylized and challenging The Neon Bible pays off with an emotional intensity all too rare in contemporary art films. WinStar’s DVD pressing has no significant extras or even a printed booklet, but preserves the craftsmanlike presentation with a clean, crisp print. 

Sicilian laborer Mimi (Giancarlo Giannini) refuses to vote for the Mafia’s candidate in a local election, and loses everything through his political bullheadedness. The Seduction of Mimi is the first in a remarkable string of sociosexual comedies written and directed in the 1970s by Italian auteur Lina Wertmüller, who had cut her teeth as assistant director to Fellini on such landmark films as 8 ½ (at this writing Guy Ritchie and Madonna are remaking one of these, 1974’s Swept Away). As carnivalesque as Fellini but much more socially of the moment, Wertmüller’s movies are loud, merry affairs, featuring the distinctive set and costume design of husband Enrico Job. Mariangela Melato, who costars as Mimi’s mistress Fiore, appeared in three of these movies: Mimi, 1973’s Love and Anarchy and Swept Away. WinStar’s DVD pressing of The Seduction of Mimi preserves the letterboxed format, although the print is a bit faded. The rounded yellow English subtitles are distinctive and easy to read. 

Vowing to ditch such frivolous Hollywood fare as Hey, Hey in the Hayloft, idealistic young filmmaker John L. "Sully" Sullivan (Joel McCrea) ditches his entourage and embarks on an incognito tour of 1940s America, accompanied only by "The Girl" (Veronica Lake), better to soak up the ambience for his planned magnum opus O Brother, Where Art Thou? (yes, that’s where the Coen Brothers got the title). Sullivan’s Travels is the first of legendarily eccentric writer-director Preston Sturges’ 11 transcendent American comedies to receive the DVD treatment, and the Criterion Collection pressing contains a generous complement of extras, including an interview with Sturges’ widow Sandy; a dupey but still clever original trailer; brief audio recordings of the director himself; and galleries of storyboards, blueprints, production stills (including five photos from excised sequences) and publicity material. And what should be the crown jewel of this collection is actually the set’s single biggest drawback: the commentary track by director Noah Baumbach (Kicking & Screaming), Bowser, Best in Show director Christopher Guest and writer-actor Michael McKean. McKean is erudite and Bowser informative, but Baumbach hardly registers and Guest’s deadpan absurdities are downright annoying. Still, this ranks as one of the year’s DVD keepers, an invaluable addition to any DVD collection. Criterion also promises Sturges’ third film, The Lady Eve, in mid-October. 

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