Welcome back to SavantLand, the website where you can always find the subject you seek - silly comedy, sex, political intrigue, or cinema classics. We'll just take a sip on our expresso here, and continue to tonights four eclectip, eclak ...ecleck, ... very different reviews.
Paramount's The Big Bus is a precursor comedy to Airplane! that many people prefer. Combining droll wit, with great lines like, "Eat one foot and you're marked for life!", this crazy spoof of disaster movies is the first and only film about an atomic powered non-stop express Bus. Stars Stockard Channing and Joseph Bologna.
HBO's The Vagina Monologues is a TV version of the one-woman stage show that still has companies running all over the country, 6 years after it began. Eve Ensler performs her own work, and it's a quality effort that demystifies and de-shames the female sex organ, and sex in general. Very educational, and very different.
"Z" is the bombshell political thriller from Costa-Gavras, about the 1967 murder of a Greek government minister that was revealed to have been a conspiracy. Shot in French and starring Yves Montand and Jean-Louis Trintignant, this is one of the best movies of its kind.
Finally, there's Criterion's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which has been out for two years but is the subject of a review because it's being shown next weekend on the Sundance channel. This is the third weekend of Criterion's Classic Cinema series; Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers plays next Saturday the 20th at 9PM, and this Carl Th. Dreyer masterpiece on Sunday the 21st at the same hour. Really a transcendant film, there's a restoration story here that's nothing less than miraculous.
Oops, not quite done yet. You may remember Savant's dismay to learn that KINO's theatrical release of METROPOLIS was to be at 24fps to accomodate its original score? Kino's not referring to the projection speed in any of its advertisements. But on its Kino Metropolis Website, you can see a trailer for the new restoration that shows many of the new, never-before-seen shots that the Germans have restored. I don't mind promoting the release of the film, even though I'm hoping for a more projection-speed friendly version down the line. Kino's trailer-promo is very nicely done, too. Thanks, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at July 14, 2002 04:34 PM