Savant can't seem to decide whether he's getting sick today, but it's not slowing down the writing too badly ... not with the quality of discs that are showing up. To answer a lot of mail I'm getting, I don't know of any DVD release of RYAN'S DAUGHTER on the way. The special restoration screenings are produced by entirely different departments of the studios, so the fact that the LEAN picture is being restored means little one way or the other, DVD wise.
I did see two very good movies in advance screenings last week. Pedro Almodóvar's TALK TO HER was another step in his increasingly warm and life-affirming movies - with, of course, his Spanish surreallism intact. This time around, there's a brief movie within a movie that plays like a silent version of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, only this time with for strangely obscene purposes. Politically Correct, Pedro definitely is not, and the quirks and twists in this story of a comatose beauty are unlike anything seen outside of a horror film like THE HORRIBLE DOCTOR HICHCOCK.
The other screening was Roman Polanski's THE PIANIST, the holocaust memoir of an acclaimed Polish radio and concert pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman, who survives the Warsaw ghetto through a harrowing 6-year ordeal of waiting, hiding, trusting in others and just plain luck. It's the best 'holocaust' movie Savant has seen; a first-person account instead of a spectacle or a history lesson like SCHINDLER'S LIST. The cruelties and horror aren't laid on as thick, yet we're just as aware of the atrocities being committed on all sides. Adrian Brody is excellent in the title role, and Polanski sublimates any personal style to a straight telling of Szpilman's strange tale of survival. The show is free of pandering, hype, special pleading or moral outrage. Hints of Polanski's similar background crop up, as when we see small boys risking their lives by smuggling contraband through the ghetto wall, just as did the director. I don't think this one is being released for a while, but it's worth waiting for.
Back to the reviews ...Criterion's Solaris is one of the classier science fiction movies, a humanistic musing on the capacity of humans for grasping the unknown mysteries of the universe, when we cannot properly relate to each other or take care of our own planet. The shape-shifting, mental clones that haunt the scientists on the Solaris orbiting platform, are a riddle that cuts through genre categories.
MGM's Miami Blues is a hip and gritty crime tale about an overachieving, overreaching crook who tries to con a childlike hooker, and usurp the identity of a grungy, loveable detective. Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Fred Ward make this a memorable crimer from dependable George Armitage.
Besides the usual number of corrected typos and errors, the right time to read Savant reviews would seem to be 3 or four days after they're up. Both The Thief of Bagdad and The Day Reagan Was Shot have been amended with substantial rebuttal letters from Savant correspondents that amplify the info, or correct grievous errors in the original articles. Thanks! Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at November 24, 2002 11:06 AM