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#119 | February 7, 2006
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This week’s Dispatch is brought to you by:
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"I don't understand how someone can make love without being in love."
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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You've no doubt been wondering about those little "Raw Sugar" icons that recently appeared on each DVD's page on GreenCine. We've been experimenting with something new by teaming up with the innovative folks at Raw Sugar. Their new "social" search engine is accelerated by guiding results with member-designated tags. Raw Sugar has tagged and shared over 135,000 URLs in the two months since opening their public beta. GreenCine fosters thinking forward; our own beta test with RawSugar is a way for users - particularly those running their own blogs - to extend the GreenCine experience through tagging. For more information, scan their FAQ.
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Available to watch now via GreenCine Video-on-Demand
service: Save the Forest, a satire of ‘80s teen movies by director Michael Field, or, as the filmmakers themselves put it, "Where else can you get 80s nostalgia, vulgar employees, beer pong, and porn?" In Save the Forest, that's where.
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The Canadian black comedy Léolo seemed born for cult status from its very inception, and the tragic early death of Jean-Claude Lauzon, its brilliant director, only adds to its mystique. The film is a funny, disturbing, even bizarre coming of age story of sorts, and completely without parallel. It tells the story of...read the rest here.
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No Man's Land, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002 (upsetting Amelie), is a brilliantly conceived black comedy set in the midst of the Bosnian-Serbian War, of which this film serves as a sort of microcosm. Satirizes not just the futility of war, but modern media's coverage of it. Absolutely scathing and devestating. Don't overlook this one.
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More like this: Wednesday Night Save-the-World Society
| Fame Whore
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More like this: My Life as a Dog | La Promesse
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More like this: The Cranes Are Flying | The Cuckoo
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By jove, we've got some highlights culled from this week's new DVD releases:
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). "Animation by hand and from the heart (you can literally see Aardman animators' fingerprints on some of the clay characters). Whimsical and hilarious, with perfectly realized set pieces," wrote Craig Phillips, placing Wallace and Gromit's first feature-length adventure at number ten on his year-end best-of-05 list.
The Best of Youth (2003). Placing it at the top of his best-of-05 list (as did many, many other critics) in the New York Times, A.O. Scott called this six-hour made-for-Italian-TV drama tracing the diverging fates of two brothers from the 1960s through to the near-present "an intellectual as well as an emotional feast, with dozens of superb performances." (Don't forget the second disc.)
Also
out this week, and worth putting in your queue, too:
Twitch calls The Call of Cthulhu (2005) "a loving homage to the [H.P. Lovecraft's] work, a direct adaptation of the original story short as a black and white silent, holding as tightly as possible to the techniques that would have been employed when the story was originally written in 1926... and it works fantastically well"; filmed in 1986 at a Maryland concert arena parking lot before a Judas Priest show, Heavy Metal Parking Lot is an unvarnished anthropological study of American metalheads in their mid-80s glory. The VHS bootleg was a favorite among musicians, movie stars and cult-video fanatics worldwide, who will be pleased by this limited-edition DVD with a pristine digital-video transfer of the original uncut 16-minute film, plus over two hours of exclusive new stuff.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) returns to DVD in a special two-disc edition with a doc on the film's making and audio commentary featuring director Philip Kaufman, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, editing maestro Walter Murch and co-star Lena Olin; Eros is three short films by three acknowledged masters in the three wildly divergent fields they've claimed for themselves, each addressing the titular theme, and just about everyone agrees that Wong Kar-wai's segment, The Hand, revisiting the atmo of In the Mood for Love and 2046, is the most successful.
New Anime:
Samurai 7 Volume 4: The Battle for Kanna (2004). "Wrapped in a brooding, stylized cover, Samurai 7 screams hard-boiled samurai action," writes Sean Broestl for the Anime News Network. "But beneath the cool exterior is a show that is trying hard to conceal the fact that it knows how to smile, even laugh at times. To the uninitiated, Samurai 7 may end up being this year's surprise title."
A complete list of
this week's New Releases
| Coming Soon | New
Releases Archive
We've added some new titles to GreenCine's rapidly expanding Video-on-Demand (VOD) service, including a handful
from 70s erotic auteur Nick
Phillips.
And for those Mandarin-speakers among you, we are proud to offer exclusively on-demand the fabulous Chinese historical series Dynasty of Chian Lung. Meanwhile, learn martial arts with Five Forms to Black vol.1, with masters from 20 different disciplines show you what they know, teaching you how their moves work and why.
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  Since we're on the subject of erotica, and preparing ourselves for (or preparing to avoid) Valentine's Day: on our sister adult site, BlueCine, renowned sex advice columnist Isadora Allman contributes her thoughts on some of the sex education videos currently available.
Next week: Look for a primer that fits the subject in the air on February 14th.
Meanwhile, on to more somber topics: Having completed Gaza Strip, James Longley then spent two years making Iraq in Fragments, which has just picked up prizes for best Documentary Directing, Excellence in Cinematography and Documentary Film Editing at Sundance. In November, Hannah Eaves spoke with co-producer John Sinno; here, days before the premiere of Fragments, she spoke to the film's director.
Who needs to travel when you have the GreenCine
Daily? Now playing: features on Seattle's Science Fiction Short Film Festival, Senses of Cinema and Criticine (no relation), the line-up for the upcoming SXSW fest, and Jonathan Marlow's wrap-up of Rotterdam. All that and more - and it's free!
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The GreenCine Genre
of the week: Marionation.
Sure, it's the style that Team America used and abused (in
addition to poking fun at just about everything and everyone else), but the
best stuff from this old-fangled animated style came from
Britain, and specifically from the talents of puppetmaster Gerry Anderson. Check out Thunderbirds and Supercar, and all of Anderson's fun action series. We think marionation is, well, super. For background reading, try our interview: "Let's Get Small: a talk with Gerry Anderson."
The member list of the week: What the heck, we'll plug one of our own here. Check out our brand new compilation of recent GreenCine Staff Picks, in easy-to-digest member list format. It's an eclectic bunch of films, but each one's a favorite of GreenCine staffers. We'll create more compilations soon.
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Thanks to everyone who came to our special The Sicilian Clan screening last week at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We're secretly plotting more screenings, and as soon as we've booked 'em, you'll see it here first!
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