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DVD
of the Week: Rosemary's Baby
(Criterion). Roman
Polanski's
1968 chiller has become so much a part of cinematic language and lore
that watching it afresh—on a newly released Criterion Blu-ray
and DVD—is to savor the pervasive influence of the film as a
pop-cultural standard. A box-office sensation that brought Paramount
Studios back from the grave, it's not as though the movie ever lacked
for appreciation. It racked up $33 million, the eighth highest-grossing
title in a year ruled by 2001:
A Space Odyssey,
just a few mil ahead of Planet
of the Apes
and Night
of the Living Dead.
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more >>
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Polisse, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jane, and more.
- What
We're Watching: Foreign Parts, Magic Mike, Elena.
- Explore:
Retro Active: Memories of Murder.
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The
Boston Globe's Wesley
Morris had some pretty emotional
reactions to this cop thriller from France. "I wanted to stand up and
cheer...All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing
and clapping and eye-covering... Polisse
is so like those shows that it’s utterly unlike them.
It’s raw where, say, SVU
is slick. It’s personal where CSI
is histrionically forensic. It’s funny where NCIS
can be labored." Joe
Morgenstern also notes the
film's fever pitch: "What makes it such a singular experience is the
convergence of fine acting, moral urgency and a willingness to linger
on moments of great intensity." |
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Steve
Dollar summarizes:"This
kaleidoscopic documentary explores the (sur)reality of the English
musician, performance artist and provocateur Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
and his companion of 15 years, the late Lady Jaye Breyer. When Lady
Jane died in 2007, she was part of an ongoing collaboration with her
mate to become a single 'pandrogynous' entity." "What makes all this
compelling is that the industrial music pioneer P-Orridge (whose
concerts shine) is so well spoken. And so human. Rarely do films offer
such intimate insights into the inner workings of a true artist,"
writes SF Gate's David
Lewis.
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Foreign
Parts
(directed by the team of Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki) has all the
makings of a groan-inducing activist documentary along the lines of Scott
Hamilton Kennedy’s The
Garden
or (worse) a ghoulish voyeur’s-eye-view of extreme poverty in
America. Instead, Paravel/Sniadecki have pulled off the rare verite
documentary that manages a formal grace and doesn’t patronize
or fetishize its subjects. Read more >>
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The
anomalous smash of the year, Magic
Mike's
transgressions are mild but—in the context of a summer
Hollywood piece of counter-programming—bold. The main selling
point is naked male bodies: not, notably, of muscled heroes in various
poses of violence, but in dance numbers only slightly raunchier than
the average Step
Up
number. Beefcake bro Channing
Tatum strips down in a role
based on his experiences as a 19-year-old male stripper, a spectacle
with the potential to make heterosexual American men nervous. Read more >> |
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Elena
is didactic filmmaking and in interviews, director Andrei
Zvyagintsev hasn't been shy in
explicitly stating his fundamental criticism of the contemporary
Russian underclass. "This is how they will behave," he noted in an interview
conducted at the film's Cannes premiere. "At one point we considered
calling the film The Invasion
of the Barbarians." "They" are
the title character's (Nadezhda Markina) son Sergei (Aleksey Rozin) and
his family, notably grandson Sasha (Igor Orgutsov), whose grades are so
bad he'll end up serving mandatory army time unless the right college
officials are bribed. Read
more >>
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[This
week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Luis Prieto's remake
Pusher.]
Frank ( Kim
Bodnia) is headed for disaster
from the outset of Pusher,
as evidenced by his introduction via a tracking shot from behind his
left shoulder as he moves from the bright exterior of a Copenhagen
street into the deep, dark confines of a local establishment. A
low-level drug dealer working alongside Tonny ( Mads
Mikkelsen), a wild partner with
"Respect" tattooed across the back of his shaved skull, Frank figures
himself a big shot, and in that mistaken assumption, he functions as
something of a noir antihero, doomed by his own hubris.
Read
more >>
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Re-Made
in America
Podcasts!
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