THE FILM:

A compact but remarkably in-depth and far-reaching art history lesson, the short video A New Look: Samuel F.B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre, created as a commemorative/educational piece by the Terra Foundation for American Art, manages to do several things surprisingly well given its tiny 30-minute running time. It is principally a document recording and celebrating the restoration of an interesting and important work of art, but it also spans outward to touch intriguingly and informatively on American cultural history, technological development, international communication, and cultural exchange.

Samue...Read the entire review

THE VIDEOS:

Watching the five video artworks collected on Seducing Time: Award-Winning Videos by Lynn Hershman Leeson, it is difficult not to free-associate to the tittering David Thewlis character, introduced as "a video artist," from The Big Lebowski. But more relevantly, Leeson's work brings to mind the very sincere, very passionate, and not entirely untalented video artist played to gently satirical comic perfection by Ileana Douglas in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, whose work seems to exist in some art-world vacuum. The bulk of the videos compiled o...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I have always been fairly ignorant about any sort of art-world who's-who there might be, so Claudia M ller's documentary About Jenny Holzer was my introduction to a fascinating artist who, along with the more celebrated photographer Cindy Sherman and collage-maker Barbara Kruger (who are famous enough that even I have heard of them) was part of a wave of American female/feminist (whichever you prefer) artists who took over the gallery-and-museum scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Holzer's medium," the DVD copy informs us, "is language," and that is essentially true; but what she actually does is hone her written texts to have the sound and feel of clich s, maxims, soundbytes, or slogans, and then runs them in public spaces that usuall...Read the entire review

Perpetual Peace:
It is important that I get a few things straight with you right now. (Does this seem like a peaceful approach, or an aggressive approach?) But first, I'd like to ask you what exactly is it do you think peace is? OK, glad to have that out of the way. So, again, for my deal. I am more or less a pacifist. I don't think much comes from fighting other than the desire to continue fighting, or to completely vanquish the enemy, i.e. to kill the enemy. I do, however, acknowledge some realities of the human animal, and realities that have been fostered over millennia of civilization. To wit: anger is the easy path. If you can follow my train of thought, you might understand what Perpetual Peace is all about.

What one can't argue is that this is an extremely stylish release, starting with its digipak presentation - that of a plastic tray in which to house the DVD proper, glue...Read the entire review

Includedon this release (aptly entitledthe Merce Cunningham Dance Company:Robert Rauschenberg Collaborations) are three separate films (Suite For Five, Summerspace, and Interscape). Merce Cunningham is an accomplished andfamous dance company with a long and prosperous history. This releaserepresents the combined efforts of filmmaker Charles Atlas and designerRobertRauschenberg, who collaborated on each of these three uniqueaudio-visual danceprojects. The composer John Cage contributed scores for SuiteFor Five and Interscape.Fans of dance on film...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=46777 Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:50:36 PST Recommended

THE PROGRAM

The mention of the Ivory-billed woodpecker will likely draw looks of apathy or shrugs of shoulders from the average person, but to the people of Brinkley, Arkansas the Ivory-billed woodpecker is a symbol of hope, that for once their small town of not quite 4000 will mean something to the world just by the very existence of the bird. Scott Crocker's documentary "Ghost Bird" examines the re-discovery of the Ivory-billed woodpecker by residents in the Brinkley area around 2004, and illustrates how much the possible re-emergence of the bird means not only to the scientific community but a small microcosm of the world at large. Once thought to have been extinct for more than 50 years, the very claim that someone has possibly seen the bird sparks a series of events that question the veracity of the claim, but more importantly remind everyone the precious ecosystem that we are a par...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44914 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:25:54 PST Recommended

Even the most infrequent concert-goer knows the mix of curiosity, anticipation, and mild dread that comes with tracking down a new, back-door, back-alley, backwater venue, and in a sense, Todd P. Goes to Austin is a documentary about that feeling. Director Jason Buim follows Todd Patrick, or Todd P., as he prepares for a series of free concerts to run simultaneously with the SXSW film festival. Although the shows Todd plans are meant to be outdoor, rather than inside one of those dingy venues, the film still captures that same blend of feelings from the musician's side of things, showcasing their journey in a battered, half-dead van, ostensibly towards Austin but really into the great unknown.

Too many modern documentaries are more about a scene or a topic rather than an actual person, but Todd is a solid anchor for the scene being covered, and a good interview subject. He clearly and decisive...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=46773 Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:22:08 PST Skip It

THE MOVIE:

What happens when a starfucker gets dumped by the star he's glommed onto? He makes a movie, of course, and screws that star some more.

Guest of Cindy Sherman is a documentary that has a split-personality, but that ultimately engenders a very specific reaction. On one side, it's a legitimate story of an art fan and amateur journalist who finds love with a major artist; on the other side, it's self-aggrandizement at its worst. Paul H-O is a video addict. In the early 1990s, he started his own cable access show in New York. "Gallery Beat" lasted nearly a decade, with Paul and his comrades interviewing artists and filming gallery openings and art happenings. It's here that Paul developed his addiction, his need to constantly be in front of the ca...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=46591 Fri, 10 Dec 2010 04:24:05 PST Rent It

THE PROGRAM

Alex Cox's "Straight to Hell Returns" is a slightly tweaked re-release of his 1987 cult-classic, punk rock, Spaghetti Western comedy, "Straight to Hell." Cox, never a director to shy away from a challenge, co-wrote the script with Dick Rude, who also steps into the role of Willy, one of a trio of ne'er-do-wells that also include Simms (played by Joe Strummer) and Norwood, whose shoes are filled by Sy Richardson, a tremendously underappreciated actor who should be getting a cut of royalty checks from Samuel L. Jackson, whose cool, no-nonsense routine is very reminiscent of Richardson's style, especially in this film. Also along for the ride is Courtney Love as Norwood's pregnant girlfriend, Velma. Following an unseen bank robbery, our heroes quickly find themselves seeking refuge from the their criminal boss, Mr. Dade (Jim Jarmusch) in a dirty town straight out of any cheaply...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=46960 Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:24:57 PST Skip It

At the very least, Teknolust, by artist Lynn Hershman-Leeson, is an ambitious, wildly original movie. Unfortunately, it's also a broad, shot-in-the-dark mishmash of political and sexual themes that never gel into anything that's plainly entertaining, or even a consistent curiosity. There's either too much going on, or not enough to latch onto, and the viewer is left to swim through Leeson's stew of ideas and concepts on their own.

Tilda Swinton plays a quadruple role as a scientist named Rosetta Stone and her three cloned test subjects, Ruby, Olive, and Marine. Apparently, the three clones are partially robotic, although which parts and why are not well-defined, as are Rosetta Stone's goals for the clone-bots, which require sperm to survive. That's right, every week, Ruby goes out and locates an average schmoe specimen at a club or bar, extracts a sample, through the usual means, snaps a photo...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=45979 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 05:29:02 PDT Highly Recommended

The Product:
From 1978 to 1987, there was no hotter director than Alex Cox. Coming off the oddball punk cult classic Repo Man and the undeniably brilliant (if factually suspect) Sid and Nancy biopic, the British filmmaker was poised to become a major player in the growing realm of unique cinematic voices. Even his rock and roll spaghetti western Straight to Hell couldn't completely cool his heat. No, it took 1987's Walker to ruin his Hollywood cred, sending him into a state of industry exile from which he really never has returned. It would be five years before he directed again, and then it was for foreign investors and almost no distribution. The last straw seemed to come when he was fired from the adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (later helmed by Terry Gilliam). As a result, Cox has had to struggle to survive creatively, seeking his filmic fo...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44908 Mon, 04 Oct 2010 19:28:57 PDT Rent It

The Movie:

With each passing season, Steven Reichlen's Primal Grill series (which airs on Public Television) becomes a show that would appear to have some viability in area of cooking shows on mainstream television. It seemed a little stilted in its first season and improved on it incrementally in its second. Yet it manages to take a third step to the better in the third.

The most conscious step appears to be in how Reichlen shows how encompassing an installment is and the production staff that's required to get a show working. During one of the episodes Reichlen mentions how much the staff ...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44909 Sat, 02 Oct 2010 13:01:08 PDT Skip It

The Product:
A couple of decades ago, when CG and digital animation was new and novel, there was a lot of speculation that the technology would put a lot of movie artisans out of work. Of course, the initial concern was for those who made their living in special effects, the men and women who created monsters and myths out of latex and the proper application of cinematic sleight of hand. But as the possibilities grew, and the potential widened, those who functioned as location scouts, art and set designers, and other onstage craftsman were also threatened, the idea being that a better, more detailed backdrop could be created in the computer. Oddly, outside of George Lucas and James Cameron, few have tried to make such a suggestion a reality. One unusual example is Conceiving Ada, a 1997 effort featuring Tilda Swinton as Ada Augusta Byron King, Countess of Lovelace and "inventor" of th...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=45731 Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:22:53 PDT Rent It

Project 798 - New Art in New China:
It's an Art documentary as inadvertent globalization treatise. Exposing new art in New China somehow reinforces the notion that there's nothing new under the sun after all. With a narrow focus - the artists renting space in Beijing's Project 798 - interspersed with everyday shots of Chinese culture, this hour-long documentary highlights what may have been an unexpected insight; that artists are pretty much the same the world over. And for a peek into a world that many Westerners consider the most mysterious of all, it becomes clear that we're all way more similar than we'd like to think. As an introduction to contemporary Chinese artists, it's a fine look, but for those hoping to widen their artistic vistas, well, you've kind of seen this stuff already.

During the mid-1990s, Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts set up a workshop space in a defunct fact...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=45195 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 10:02:49 PDT Rent It

First-time filmmaker Amy Grill's 2009 documentary Speaking in Code is a character-driven v rit exploration of the techno music subculture; conceived, created, and self-financed with her then husband David Day, a struggling techno promoter and DJ in Boston. Grill spent two years following a loose cadre of DJs, producers, and promoters attempting to balance their obsession for music with the demands of their personal lives.

Speaking in Code isn't intended to be a history of techno, but Grill does provide just enough background for the outsider to contextualize the character-driven stories she's interested in: a fusion of European electronica and African-American dance music, techno emerged in Detroit and Chicago in the late '80s. Ironically, techno failed to take ...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44471 Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:37:19 PDT Recommended

Alison Chernick's one-hour documentary about Jeff Koons strikes a generally admiring tone in tracking the career of the accomplished and hugely famous visual artist. The film hits the highlights of his varied and ever-evolving portfolio of projects, from his earliest show, "The New," which featured spotless household appliances carefully displayed in pristine glass vitrines, and his world-famous oversized "Puppy," made of live flowers, and right up to his more recent "inflatables" of "Celebration" - cast-steel balloon animals and toys. All of Koons' art enshrines elements of American pop culture in forms that are inert, gargantuan, and "perfect." Koons uses enormously expensive methods of fabrication for his complex pieces, processes that are made even more expensive by his...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44765 Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:16:57 PDT Rent It

Devil Come To Hell And Stay Where You Belong:
The tortured syntax of that title should let you know you're in Arthouse territory with this film from Massimilian and Nina Breeder, a married Italian couple filming their cross-country trip through the USA. This is a truly aggressive arthouse film, one that challenges viewers at every turn. In fact the movie is so challenging and ambiguous it's often unclear as to whether it's just a big put-on. If it weren't frequently so rapturously gorgeous it would be more trouble than it's worth.

Quite the exemplar of experimental narrative, Devil barely has a plot; the couple decides to hit the road across the good old U. S. of A. The DVD box tells us they're heading to California, though I can't quite recall. For mysterious and shocking reasons, their course ultimately changes. Meanwhile, they drive a lot, have sex every now and again, wander arou...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=43884 Tue, 25 May 2010 05:11:59 PDT Rent It

THE PROGRAM

"Alex Katz: Five Hours" is an enlightening and frustrating glimpse at the creation of a work of art. Filmed by Vincent Katz and his wife Vivien Bittencourt, the film is a 20-minute look at Vincent's father, Alex creating a painting. Prior to this documentary I had never heard of Alex Katz and the paintings of his I looked up, weren't really my bag. "Alex Katz: Five Hours" doesn't change my opinion of Katz as an artist, but it did make me think long and hard about the creative process.

In all honesty, reviewing this disc is no easy feat. It contains only the documentary, which boils down five hours of Katz painting a portrait of his wife into 20 brief minutes. There is no narration and our only access to the aural world of Katz is through the snippets of raw sound. The majority of the film is backed by Meredith Monk songs, which, quite honestly, grated on the nerves....Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=41811 Tue, 18 May 2010 05:16:37 PDT Highly Recommended

Sometimes when handling the legacy of a genius like Beethoven, it's best to let the man speak for himself. Filmmaker Phil Grabsky implicitly understands the power of the subject's own words - and, in the case of Beethoven, his music, too. In Search of Beethoven is an incisive, inquisitive documentary that compiles wide-ranging source material to form an unusually propulsive narrative life of this most towering of cultural icons.

Grabsky culls insightful commentary from a few dozen interview subjects (including Emmanuel Ax, H l ne Grimaud, Riccardo Chailly, and Sir Roger Norrington) and combines it with narration by Juliet Stevenson and readings from Beethoven's letters. In addition, we are treated to excerpts from newly-shot live performances of Beeth...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=43555 Mon, 03 May 2010 18:05:52 PDT Rent It

THE PROGRAM

To say "The World of Buckminster Fuller" was a crushing disappointment is a vast understatement. I first heard of the man, during my undergraduate studies in chemistry. In the field, a C₆₀ molecule is called a Buckminsterfullerene (or informally, Buckyballs), due to it's striking appearance to the geodesic domes created by Fuller. His name stuck in the back of my mind for years, and one a handful of occasions, I looked up information about him online, never fully learning much about the man. What I did find, was Fuller was an absolute genius, decades ahead of his time (and still ahead of our own) in the field of design. He sought not only to revolutionize how we live, but also how we view our own existence. The one constant that did pop up, whenever I decided to read up on Fuller, was the existence of a 1971 documentary, "The World of Buckminster Fuller." Clip...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=41812 Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:18:36 PDT Highly Recommended

Like the best documentaries, Robert Snyder's Michelangelo: Self-Portrait is simultaneously entertaining, enriching, and inspiring. Simple in concept, but complex in its editorial approach, Snyder's film is narrated through the artist's own words, taken from diaries, letters, and early biographers, and accompanied by images of his work. The result is a stirring and unique film biography, one that is devoid of narrative cheats and artifice.

We begin with Michelangelo's voice in a letter to the great biographer Giorgio Vasari; the artist complains of his various ailments and describes a new piet he has begun (the Rondanini Piet ). From here, the narration consists of more or less chronological biographical information in "flashback" form, as Michelangelo ...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=41813 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:14:25 PDT Skip It

Hal Hartley was, in a fairly quiet way, one of the defining filmmakers of the 1990s. His spare, mannered, witty style presaged the work of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, and his influence is even visible, to an extent, in Quentin Tarantino's films. The verbose, often opaque dialogue of his strange, still, oddly focused characters suggested the particular angst of that decade - a moody inward paranoia about the location of the border that divides sincerity from irony. Two of his best films - Simple Men (1992) and Henry Fool(1997, and a Cannes winner for Best Screenplay) - deal with this theme in diverse and extremely funny ways. Henry Fool can be read as one of the central cinematic statements of the 1990s, a film that delves deep into the tenor of the er...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=41818 Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:07:27 PDT Highly Recommended

THE FILM

"Listen pal, you can't waltz in here, use my toaster, and start spouting universal truths without qualification!"

In the early 1990s, I happened upon Hal Hartley's "Trust" on the shelf of my local video store. An impulse rental due to a fraudulent synopsis provided by the box-art design folks at Republic Pictures, finding "Trust" was pure serendipity, nudging me to investigate the curious, colorful world of independent film, back when the label meant bed sheet exhibition and a few bloodstains on the print. It brought about the Hal Hartley phase of my movie appreciation quest, which was stoked further by the offbeat short film, "Surviving Desire."

An American Playhouse production, "Surviving Desire" furthered Hartley's fascination with the cold mechanics of love, dreaming up a relationship between a caustic, questioning college professor named Jude (Mar...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=40308 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:37:10 PST Highly Recommended

Kiki Smith: Squatting the Palace:
I've gotten a lot of weird ideas about art, working, and art appreciation from this 45-minute look into artist Kiki Smith's process, and I'm sure Smith would like that. Here Microcinema continues its serious yet eminently approachable series of examinations of renowned contemporary artists. As an artist myself, I think I can safely say that you norms out there think we are weird, because we are. And many will be put off by Smith's eccentricities (both in personality and methodology) as displayed in this documentary, yet the tale directors Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz construct from interview/ action segments filmed as Smith prepares for the 2005 Venice Biennale ultimately paints a glowing, complex portrait of the artist.

The filmmakers aren't present; their camera is an observer eliciting compelling ruminations from Smith and others, notably studio a...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=42322 Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:51:41 PST Recommended

All About Prints is a compact and informative short documentary that covers the basics of printmaking across a variety of media. This program will be of interest to artists, curators, collectors, or to anyone mystified by the catchall term "print." Printmaking encompasses a wide variety of processes that use different methods, materials, and equipment to achieve a vast array of visual effects.

We begin with woodcuts - a relatively simple matter of carving an image onto one side of a wood block and covering the areas to be printed with ink. The next major print-related development used copper plates, which allowed for a number of variant processes such as engraving, etching, and aquatints. Copper plate processes use acid to burn lines into the metal, ...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=42056 Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:55:14 PST Highly Recommended

The Film:
For many years I wanted to do a documentary that traced the history of rock-n-roll from a completely black perspective. While I love rock as much as the next person--and perhaps even more than the next person--there is a special place in my heart for black rockers, and I've often felt most of them have never gotten there just due. Sure, guys like Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix are often cited when listing the contributions of African-Americans to rock music, but there are many other names that have been forgotten or seldom known. And that's why I planned for many years to do a black rock documentary. Fortunately, filmmaker Raymond Gale had the same idea as me, and thanks to his film Electric Purgatory: The Fate of the Black Rocker, I can now scratch off one project on my "Things To Do" list.

The history of rock music has always favored white musicians like Buddy Holly, Bi...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=41358 Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:48:29 PST Recommended

THE PROGRAM

"Empire of the Eye: The Magic of Illusion" is a tricky DVD to review. It's an extremely basic, straightforward presentation, which appears to have been at one time, created for a museum exhibition. I say this because "National Gallery of Art, Washington" is slapped on the bottom of the cover. I've encountered such a disc before, but had the luxury of having actually attended an accompanying exhibition. My initial fear with this disc, is it heavily relied on the viewer being familiar with an exhibit. Whether an exhibit linked to this documentary exists or not, ends up being irrelevant though, since this 50-minute look at illusion in art is quite engaging, and very enlightening.

Hosted by Al Roker, "The Magic of Illusion" takes viewers into the world of Renaissance era art, where the use of optical effects and some quite remarkable technical understanding, elevated pai...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=41155 Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:15:47 PST Highly Recommended

Simple. Straightforward. Beautiful. Commissioned for the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth, 2006's In Search of Mozart is a lucid, superbly produced look at the classical composer's life and music. Filmed all over Europe in the places where Mozart lived and worked, In Search of Mozart also features a host of today's most celebrated musicians and artists performing selections from of a multitude of the composer's works, giving the viewer a stunning, intimate crash course in Mozart's oeuvre.

If you're like me, I know Mozart from his various musical pieces I've heard throughout my life, and from Milos Forman's film, Amadeus, and that's about it (and it's been years since I've seen it last). I'm certainly no scholar of his work or li...Read the entire review

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