Savant's new reviews today are
Well, howdy again from a wet Los Angeles, where people never learned to drive in anything but perfect weather. I understand the rest of the country is still freezing and snowed in, so I'm not asking for sympathy here.
Some powerful pictures in the review list today. The Chase and Wisconsin Death Trip are entertainments easy to recommend. Criterion's Salvatore Giuliano was a big Huh? to me two days ago, but after seeing it I've formed a completely different attitude to the way 'real' events old or new are presented in movies. The film takes a highly contentious piece of (then-recent) Italian history and presents it in a way that reveals the truth behind the official story - but it doesn't invent anything. There are no invented scenes where characters recite authors' messages, and no 'personal' background on people nobody reliable ever got close to, like the bandit hero of the title. After years of insufferable docudramas that trivialize big issues and muddy the real meanings of events, this was quite a revelation. It wasn't entertaining in any conventional way. I was fascinated, and rather humbled ... I'd never heard of this picture. Criterion's disc convinces me that there are still great treasures to be discovered in movies unseen.
In addition to the Savant reviews above, I've added a couple of short notices to the DVDTalk review
database only:
Hamilton Mattress,
Corvette: The Fastest 50 Years
and
The Statue of Liberty (The History Channel).
Thanks for reading ... stay warm, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at February 21, 2004 10:02 PM