In the Talking Heads classic “Heaven,” David Byrne asserts, in the declarative tense of someone who’s been there, that “Heaven is a place / a place where nothing / nothing ever happens.” Depending on the receiver, this information is either a relief or a comedown — a paradise of blessed stillness or an eternity of boredom. In Byrne’s metaphor, heaven is a bar whose live band … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Japanese anti-actioner ‘Cloud’ a corrosive satire on the capitalist dream
As someone who dabbles in reselling myself — albeit of on-the-level vinyl records, not suspiciously cheap “designer” goods — the scenario outlined in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film Cloud (Criterion Premieres, $23.96 Blu-ray, $19.96 DVD) is the stuff of nightmares. Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who initially works in a garment factory by day, entered the world of online … [Read more...]
The View From Home: In a pig’s eye: Sublime ‘Babe’ and its more manic sequel are far more than kids’ stuff
Babe is not, as James Cromwell points out in a new interview for the film’s new Blu-ray release ($19.96, Kino Lorber, in a double feature with Babe: Pig in the City), a children’s film. It is, rather, an “adult fairy tale,” a distinction that helps to explain its generation-spanning endurance in the popular culture, in the cinephile’s library, and in the annals of vegan … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Criterion, Scorsese pair up for another globetrotting collection
The Criterion Collection continues to provide a vital service in partnering with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, launched in 2007 to preserve and restore important but neglected films from mostly economically marginalized countries. The distributor just released its fifth box set of titles from the World Cinema Project ($79.96 Blu-ray), and while these collections … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Israel Palestine on Swedish TV’ a vital argument for journalistic access
Watching Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (Icarus Films, $29.98 DVD), a hulking film composed entirely of archival footage and spanning nearly three and a half hours, a paraphrased lyric from Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” surfaced often in my mind: “How did we get here?” Ultimately, after absorbing this exhausting and multifaceted account of the world’s most … [Read more...]
The View from Home: Gabin, Dietrich smolder in 1940s gem
As far as I’ve been able to research, the French film industry never fell under the yoke of a censorship regime as sweeping as the Hays Code, which effectively neutered American cinema from 1934 to 1968. Yet Martin Roumagnac, a 1946 crime thriller newly restored and released by Icarus Films ($26.49 Blu-ray), bears the hallmarks of a Hays-era Hollywood noir, its lasciviousness … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Riefenstahl’ a revelatory prosecution of the Nazis’ favorite filmmaker
Was Leni Riefenstahl, director of the Third Reich-commissioned documentary Triumph of the Will, a card-carrying Nazi? Or just an artist who seized a fulfilling opportunity? German director Andres Veiel, with lucid patience and a questing curiosity, probes the controversial filmmaker in Riefenstahl (Kino Lorber, $23.96 Blu-ray), a documentary borne out of the bequeathing, in … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A trio of films that do better leaving noir in the shadows
Kino Lorber’s ongoing drip-drip release of Universal’s seemingly endless archive of Golden Age film noirs continued with its most recent box set, The Dark Side of Cinema XXVI ($24.99 Blu-ray), the latest entry in this library of classic crime cinema. But as its three titles reveal, one person’s noir is another’s romance, and is another’s gilded literary adaptation, films that … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Consciousness is for the birds
The subtitle of Judy Irving’s tender and soulful 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Kino, Blu-ray, $23.96) could be In Defense of Anthropomorphism. And it’s a pretty darn effective one. Mark Bittner, the doc’s subject, doesn’t see himself as an eccentric for the hobby that became his passion: feeding and caring for the countless feral parrots — nonnative … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Eephus’ tallies more than the loss of a baseball game
The men who arrive at a soon-to-be-demolished baseball field for a final recreational matchup in Carson Lund’s directorial debut Eephus (Music Box, $34.95 Blu-ray, $29.95 DVD) are not soon for the majors, or even the minor leagues. These characters creak and smoke and curse. Many are boomers, or close to it. “I think we could all use some medical work,” one player says, in a … [Read more...]