Chris Neilson's DVD Talk DVD Reviews https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/list/DVD Video DVD Talk DVD Review RSS Feed en-us Two Films by Marc Isaacs: All White in Barking / Men of the City DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46997 Sun, 05 Dec 2010 01:59:02 UTC Recommended

In 2009, the British independent DVD label, Second Run, released Three Films by Marc Isaacs, the first output from an immensely talented documentary filmmaker. The recent Two Films by Marc Isaacs brings viewers up to date with Isaac's most recent work.

Made for Storyville, the BBC near-equivalent to PBS's Independent Lens, All White in Barking (72 min., 2007) and Men of the City (58 min., 2009) provide revealing portraits of common Londoners.

When the working-class London borough of Barking briefly made the news for electing far-right British National Party (BNP) candidates in 2006, the British media generally sensationalized the story of a d...Read the entire review

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Liverpool DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45603 Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:17:35 UTC Recommended

Liverpool, a minimalist study in isolation, concerns a middle-aged sailor returning to his boyhood home for the first time in many years to learn whether his mother is still alive. Sailors on sea-going freighters are a notoriously reclusive lot, but Farrel (Juan Fernández), a hermit among monastics, stands apart even from the meager social conventions of ship life, preferring nothing better than to numb himself with vodka whenever possible.

There's little dialogue in Liverpool, and less explanation. The viewer is left to infer much of the story from the slight action proffered. When Farrel's ship docks in Ushuaia, the southern-most Argentine port, he obtains shore leave to visit home. After an indeterminate number of years at sea, Farrel doesn't know what to expect, and appears reluctant to complete the journey. After wasting a night in Ushuaia, he hitches his way to the tiny t...Read the entire review

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Back to the Garden: Flower Power Comes Full Circle (Ironweed # 58) DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46633 Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:54:45 UTC Recommended

In 1988, Kevin Tomlinson, a young would-be filmmaker traveled to a "healing gathering" in rural north-central Washington State to interview aging hippies who still adhered to the countercultural values of the '60s and '70s. Though he didn't do anything with the footage then, twenty years later he sought out those participants again to see whether they were still living lives in conformity with the principles they'd espoused then.

Back in '88, Tomlinson's interviewees were motivated to varying degrees by the desire to live simply, cultivate community, and embrace spirituality. Twenty years later, they're keeping the faith. Although one woman now works for Microsoft and drives an SUV, none appear to live the typical, high-consumption lifestyle typical of boomers.

Two of t...Read the entire review

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Winnebago Man DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45605 Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:26:06 UTC Rent It

In 1989, Jack Rebney was hired as a pitchman for an industrial film intended to inform RV dealers and salesmen about the new features on the latest Winnebago model. The filming didn't go well -- it was too hot and humid, there were too many flies, Jack couldn't remember his lines, and he didn't get along with the production crew. Hot and frustrated, Jack frequently let loose with a tirade of mostly self-directed profanity, which in this post Christian-Bale-Outburst era would hardly raise an eyebrow. However, unbeknown to Jack, the crew recorded his tirades and used them to get Jack fired.

That should have been the end of a rather mundane story, but it wasn't. Jack's outbursts began circul...Read the entire review

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Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis (Ironweed # 59) DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46469 Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:05:28 UTC Rent It

These are dark days for American progressivism. Voters appear poised to turn control of the House of Representatives over to the GOP, while giving the Republicans enough Senate votes to easily filibuster Democratic initiatives for the next two years. While the shift in sentiment among independents is to be expected given the anemic economic recovery with its continued high unemployment, record deficits, and growing likelihood of a double-dip recession, what is surprising is the loss of confidence among progressives themselves. To mark but two instances, in September, Shepard Fairey, the graphic artist that created that iconic Hope poster for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, expressed disappointment with the President, and now, the Ironweed Film Club, a monthly DVD subscription service renowned for its politically-progressive documentaries, has released Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis, ...Read the entire review

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The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46375 Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:22:56 UTC Recommended

Every year on March 10th, the Tibetan exile community around the world commemorates the 1959 Tibetan uprising against China -- an armed rebellion that was brutally put down by the Chinese military. In the wake of the failed insurrection, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's temporal and spiritual leader, and nearly 100,000 Tibetans went into exile to escape Chinese persecution. In the years since, as hundreds of thousands of non-Tibetan Chinese have settled in Tibet, more Tibetans have been tortured, imprisoned, or exiled during continued unrest.

In the years immediately after the 1959 uprising, the Tibetan exile community was unified in seeking complete independence for Tibet, but since the 1980's the Dalai Lama, seeking a rapprochement with China, has advocated a so-called middle-way which would allow China to control Tibet's external affairs, while restoring complete internal autonomy. However, after near...Read the entire review

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9th Company (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44022 Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:18:56 UTC Rent It

From 1979 to 1989, the Soviet Union fought a bloody war to control Afghanistan. Though generally dominate on the battlefield, the Soviets were thwarted in their efforts to establish a functional secular regime by a violent Islamic insurgency willing to wage a guerrilla war of attrition. After suffering more than 14,000 combat fatalities and 53,000 injuries, the Soviet Union ignobly withdrew. One of the final notable engagements during the nine-year occupation occurred in January of 1988 between a 39-man company of Soviet paratroopers tasked with defending Hill 3234, a rugged outpost overlooking a critical highway linking Gardez to Khost in southeastern Afghanistan, and a much larger force of irregular insurgents. 9th Company, a 2005 Russian war film, takes the Battle for Hill 3234 as loose inspiration for a fanciful adaption of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1989).

Following t...Read the entire review

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The Films of Nikita Mikhalkov: Volume 1 DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44821 Thu, 14 Oct 2010 21:11:33 UTC Rent It

Despite directing and starring in Burnt by the Sun, which won the Grand Prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Nikita Mikhalkov remains a pedestrian filmmaker more akin to Ron Howard than to Andrei Tarkovsky or Alexander Sokurov. A popular Russian mainstream actor and director since the days of Khrushchev, Mikhalkov's work is as ephemeral as the steady stream of adult drama from America's Touchstone Pictures -- it consistently captures a segment of the middlebrow cinema-going audience's attention, but fails to have much lasting value.

The staleness of Mikhalkov's oeuvre, if you can call it that, hasn't dissuaded Kino International from releasing what threatens to be the first of multiple box sets of the director's films. Entitled The Films of Nikita Mikhalkov: Volume 1, this first release includes two of the director's best known films, Burnt by the S...Read the entire review

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Himmel und Erde DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46055 Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:01:08 UTC Recommended

It's difficult to know what to make of Michael Pilz's Himmel und Erde, a nearly five-hour unconventional ethnography of the Austrian alpine village of St. Anna. Though more than an hour and a half longer than Frederick Wiseman's Belfast, Maine, it isn't nearly as finely detailed or as expansive. Instead of showing many aspects of community life in great detail as Wiseman does, Pilz shows the same handful of activities repeatedly, inviting an ever deeper reconsideration of their meaning.

Himmel und Erde, translatable as Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The documentary invites the viewer to contemplate the disruptive effects of technology on economic and social t...Read the entire review

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I Think We're Alone Now DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46027 Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:28:43 UTC Rent It

Jeff Turner and Kelly McCormick, the subjects of filmmaker Sean Donnelly's documentary I Think We're Alone Now, have a lot in common: both are mentally disabled to the point of receiving disability payments and housing assistance, neither has had a meaningful intimate relationship outside of their fantasy lives, and both are obsessive-compulsive fans of Tiffany, a pop singer whose career peaked in 1987 when she was 16, but who continues to plug away at show biz through soft porn, acting, and music. The sad lives of Turner and McCormick are laid bare in an intimate documentary which borders on the exploitative.

Jeff Turner suffers from Asperger's syndrome, a so-called "high functioning" form of autism, characterized by poor social skills, obsessiveness, and peculiar mann...Read the entire review

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Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45925 Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:37:14 UTC Recommended

With all due respect to Cornell West, if any philosopher today approaches the level of celebrity necessary to be an international household name it's the 61-year-old Slovenian professor Slavoj Žižek. The author of 58 books and countless articles, he's such a celebrated phenom that there is even an International Journal of Žižek Studies dedicated to critically dissecting his theories. But Žižek's fame isn't limited to the world of print. He's also appeared in more than a dozen documentaries including Zizek!, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and Examined Life. The modest success of these three documentaries on DVD apparently has prompted Olive Films to bring Slavoj Zizek: The Rea...Read the entire review

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The Actuality Dramas of Allan King - Eclipse Series 24 DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44637 Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:04:08 UTC Highly Recommended

Since having seen Warrendale and Dying at Grace in 2008, I've been encouraging anyone that would listen to check out the documentaries of Canadian filmmaker Allan King. Unfortunately, like Frederick Wiseman's oeuvre, the only way to get King's documentaries on DVD was to purchase them directly from the filmmaker. Now, thankfully, they're much easier to get thanks to this inexpensive five-disc release from the Criterion Collection's Eclipse label.

King, who died last year, enjoyed a varied career as a television and film director, spanning over fifty years. Although often employed to direct television commercials, television series (Kung Fu: The Legend Continues) and made-for-TV movies (Leonardo: A Dream of Flight), King's passion was making thoughtful, observational documentaries about life writ small. With Warrendale in 1967, King established himself as a pi...Read the entire review

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The František Vláčil Collection DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45811 Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:04:55 UTC Highly Recommended

In 1998, Czech film critics named František Vláčil's 1967 masterpiece Marketa Lazarová the greatest Czech film of all time, but eleven years later it's still not available on DVD in North America. Fortunately though, North American viewers with region-free DVD players can turn to the United Kingdom's premiere boutique art house label Second Run. Available since 2007, Marketa Lazarová is now also available in an inexpensive box set along with František Vláčil's 1968 follow-up The Valley of the Bees (Údolí vcel), and his competent though lesser Adelheid (1970), together with an exclusive bonus DVD of Tomás Hejtmánek's 2003 feature-length tribute to Vláčil entitled Sentiment. Like Marketa Lazarová, Valley of the Bees and Adelheid are available separately from Second Run, however, this box set is so ine...Read the entire review

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Joseph Campbell on the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44476 Tue, 14 Sep 2010 11:25:15 UTC Highly Recommended

Time was when PBS had the power to turn obscure scholars into national celebrities. In 1990, Ken Burns' series The Civil War catapulted the critically-respected, but generally-unknown historian Shelby Foote to fame and fortune. Two years earlier, similar acclaim was bestowed posthumously on professor emeritus Joseph Campbell following the airing of a six-part series of interviews with him conducted by Bill Moyers entitled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Though Campbell had died of esophageal cancer several months before the series aired, the resulting acclaim for the series prompted a best-selling accompanying book of the transcripts, and tremendously boosted sales for Campbell's older books on comparative mythology and religion, especially his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949.

Over the course of six hour-long episodes, noted journal...Read the entire review

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The Exploding Girl DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45755 Fri, 10 Sep 2010 22:37:53 UTC Recommended

College freshmen Ivy (Zoe Kazan) and Al (Mark Rendall), friends since eighth grade, are back home in New York for spring break. Inexplicably, Al's parents have rented his room out, prompting him to crash on Ivy's mother's couch for the break. Over the course of the break, Ivy is dumped by her first college beau via cell phone, Ivy and Al are left to their own devices by Ivy's inattentive mother to attend parties and jaunt through the public spaces of New York, Al gets high a lot, Ivy and Al watch some birds and reconsider the nature of their relationship, and that's about it.

Written and directed by Bradley Rust Gray specifically for Kazan, The Exploding Girl is a character study firmly grounded in the low-budget, minimalist genre tagged mumblecore. Shot in real locatio...Read the entire review

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Sunrise/Sunset DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45673 Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:02:15 UTC Recommended

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th incarnation of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism's most revered leader, spends five months a year in isolated study and contemplation. During the other seven months though, he's engaged in near-constant advocacy for a myriad of global human rights-related issues including wealth redistribution, public health initiatives, disarmament, climate change, women's rights, literacy, fisheries management, religious toleration, and especially, political and religious autonomy from China for Tibet. The Dalai Lama pursues his agenda through one-on-one meetings with world leaders, larger audiences with the international political class at home and on a global lecture circuit abroad, and by reaching even wider audiences through media, especially television and home video. In addition to countless interviews for television news and public affairs programs, since 2000, the Dalai Lama has appe...Read the entire review

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Sweetgrass DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43814 Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:58:55 UTC Highly Recommended

The final sheep drive into Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth mountains is the subject of Lucien Taylor and Llisa Barbash's 2009 documentary Sweetgrass. Competition from cheap imports and increased operating costs have compelled the Allesteds, a Norwegian-American ranching family that has had a permit to graze their sheep on federal land since 1900, to go out of business, but these worldly matters which would be the focus of a documentary like The Farmer's Wife or Food, Inc. are only eluded to here. Sweetgrass isn't that kind of documentary, but neither is it an overly-sentimental, cuddly animal documentary like March of the Penguins. Instead, Sweetgrass blends the ethnographic filmmaking pioneered by Robert Flaherty with the observational vérité filmmaking of Frederick Wiseman.

Read the entire review

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First-time filmmaker Amy Grill's 2009 documentary Speaking in Code is a character-driven vérité 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 tak...Read the entire review

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The First Films of Akira Kurosawa - Eclipse Series 23 DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43940 Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:09:04 UTC Recommended

Western cinephiles first took note of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in 1951 when Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In following years, Kurosawa would earn international accolades for films such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), and Kagemusha (1980), and international distribution for all of the nineteen films he directed between 1951 and 1993. However, it is only in recent years that many Americans have had the opportunity to explore much of Kurosawa's pre-Rashomon oeuvre.

Last year, the Criterion Collection released AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa, a massive DVD box set providing a retrospective of the filmmaker's career from his first film in 1943 through his last fifty years later, including the four films now re-released in this current box set. But for consumers who already had many of the Criterion Collection's pri...Read the entire review

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Terribly Happy DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44759 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:09:53 UTC Recommended

Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig), Denmark's official submission to the 2010 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, is a black comedy steepped in the neo-noir of the Coen brothers' Blood Simple and David Lynch's Blue Velvet. On probation following a lapse of judgment he'd prefer not to discuss, Copenhagen cop Robert Hansen (Jakob Cedergren) is reassigned to Skarrild, a remote town in barren, bog-infested South Jutland where "everyone knows everything but says nothing." Estranged from his wife and daughter, Robert hopes to pass an uneventful tour of duty as town marshal and then return to Copenhagen, but his attempt to present himself as a professionally-remote, by-the-book lawman comes undone when he's pulled into a complicated domestic dispute between femme fatale Ingelise Buhl (Lene Maria Christensen) and her husband, town bully Jørgen Buhl (Kim Bodnia).

...Read the entire review

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Rembetiko DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44647 Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:28:35 UTC Recommended

Greek filmmaker Costa Ferris's 1983 feature Rembetiko is one part national epic, one part populist melodrama, and one part musical showcase. Through a highly-fictionalized biography of folk singer Marika Ninou (1922-1957), Rembetiko follows the fortunes of Greece from the evacuation of more than a million resident Greeks from Asia Minor in 1922 following the nation's defeat in the Greko-Turkish War, through the Axis occupation in World War II, and the subsequent civil war.

Marika (played as an adult by Sotiria Leonardou) is the daughter of itinerant musicians who fled to the slums of mainland Greece from Asia Minor following the Greko-Turkish War. While still a young girl, she sees her drunken father pimp her mother and then kill her when she falls for her...Read the entire review

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Animating Reality: A Collection of Short Documentaries DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44261 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:12:50 UTC Rent It

The inaugural release of the independent DVD distributor A Million Movies a Minute (AMMAM), a micro-label professedly dedicated to short documentaries, was last year's After the War: Life Post-Yogoslavia, an uneven collection of nine shorts about the titular subject which was damned by poor video and audio quality. Taking a lesson from that one, AMMAM's second release, Animating Reality: A Collection of Short Documentaries, offers far better video and audio quality through the content remains just as uneven.

A trickle of documentaries utilizing animation to supplement or replace traditional film and video has become a torrent since the release of the critically-acclaimed feature-length animated documentary Waltz with Bashir in 2008. Material that once would have been confined to rad...Read the entire review

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Survivors: Complete Seasons One & Two DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44020 Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:42:18 UTC Rent It

Survivors, a British television series which ran for twelve episodes from November 2008 to February 2010, is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure yarn about a misfit group who band together when civilization collapses. Survivors shares its name with a prior television series which ran from 1975-1977, and a 1976 novel, all of which were created by science fiction novelist and screenwriter Terry Nation, who is perhaps best known for his work on the seminal British sci-fi television series Doctor Who.

The premise of Survivors is that a super-virulent flu virus wipes out 99% of the world's population in a matter of days. Civilization collapses as essential government services such as police and utilities, as well as ordinary commercial distribution systems, fail for lack of manpower. For the few survivors who were naturally immune from the virus, the post-apocalyptic world...Read the entire review

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Diamonds of the Night DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43897 Wed, 26 May 2010 19:03:42 UTC Recommended

The Czech New Wave classic Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, 1964) is a study in minimalism. Though based on a conventional novella written by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig, first-time filmmaker Jan Němec stripped the screenplay down to the bone. Excised are the protagonists' backstories save for a few repeated snippets of wordless images. Gone also is nearly all the dialogue. What remains is a story of two nameless, nearly wordless, young concentration camp escapees on the run, chased by the authorities and a posse of old men.

With no more than twenty lines of dialogue retained, the viewer is compelled to intuit the story almost entirely through visual cues. The film begins with the protagonists, two teenage boys, sprinting up a wooded hill w...Read the entire review

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Happy Together (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/42644 Tue, 25 May 2010 12:11:59 UTC Highly Recommended

"When routine bites hard and ambitions are low
And resentments ride high but emotions won't grow
And we're changing our ways, taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again"
- Joy Division, 1979

In writer/director Wong Kar-Wai's melancholy homosexual-romance Happy Together (Chun gwong cha sit, 1997), Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chui-Wai) fly from their native Hong Kong looking for distraction to balm their troubled relationship. The couple comes to ground in Argentina. On a road in the Argentine outback, somewhere between Buenos Aires and the impossibly-beautiful Iguazu Falls, things fall apart. Their heap of a car won't go, but Ho does.

Sometime later, Lai is working as a doorman at a marginal tango bar in Buenos Aires trying to earn enough money to return to Hong Kong, when Ho, now a hustler, arrives...Read the entire review

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Hamlet (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43775 Mon, 17 May 2010 17:47:27 UTC Highly Recommended

A cornerstone of English theater and literature for four hundred years, William Shakespeare's Hamlet has for the past century been a touchstone of cinema, and more recently, television. Though this seminal revenge tragedy has been staged or adapted for the screen no less than seventy times, the material is so deep and rich a font as to supply a steady stream of new films and teleplays, whether rigorously faithful or fancifully interpretive. This 2009 production, created for British television by the Royal Shakespeare Company, is among the best.

Fresh from staging the play for theater audiences in 2008, director Gregory Doran and his cast, led by David Tennant (in the titular role) and Patrick Stewart (doing double duty as Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's father), adapted their production for television. Though filmed on location in a de-consecrated Catholic church, the production purposef...Read the entire review

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One Peace at a Time DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43467 Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:43:28 UTC Rent It

There's no end to the stream of politically-liberal documentaries detailing sad tales of human misery and global catastrophes in the offing. As a rule, these documentaries spend most of their runtime expounding on the problem de juor before halfheartedly rushing through a laundry list of possible remedies. Not so with One Peace at a Time (2009), Turk Pipkin's follow-up to Nobelity (2006).

In Nobelity, Pipkin sat down with Nobel Prize winners to discuss the means of tackling chronic global problems. Now in One Peace at a Time, Pipkin features non-profit organizations at the forefront of these efforts to fulfill basic human needs for clean water, food, education, medical care, a sustainable livelihood, and care for orphaned children. Pipkin pitches for viewers to make a difference by contributing resources either to these organizations or others like them, while...Read the entire review

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Shiva Rea: Daily Energy - Vinyasa Flow Yoga DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43285 Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:56:04 UTC Highly Recommended

With nearly 2000 yoga-related titles available on DVD, consumers are empowered to easily select a product that matches their fitness level, and complexity and style preferences. While some consumers may prefer rather no-nonsense yoga instruction from the likes of Karen Voight (e.g., Yoga Power), others favor instructors that blend new-age spiritualism, and/or eastern mysticism into their yoga instruction. Among the better known yogi in this later camp is Shiva Rea.

With more than a dozen DVD releases to date, including the best-selling title Yoga Shakti (2004), the California native and the self-described mystic, has distinguished herself as a guru of Vinyasa Flow; a yoga practice which emphasizes fluid motion synchronized with breath. Rea's latest DVD release, Daily FlowRead the entire review

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Meditate and Destroy DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43219 Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:16:46 UTC Recommended

Sarah Fisher's documentary about Buddhist teacher and ex-addict Noah Levine, Meditate and Destroy, answers a question I've long had. As a longtime non-believer in a god or gods who answer prayers, I've frequently wondered where atheist and agnostic alcoholics and drug addicts could turn for help overcoming their addictions when so much of the treatment available in the United States relies on the principles of the 12-step program. You see, six of those 12 steps explicitly involve acknowledging a higher power, confiding in God one's woes, and praying for divine assistance. While well-heeled addicts can turn to secular psychotherapy or other treatment options, where can working-class teens and young-adults turn for encouragement, I wondered; enter Noah Levine.

Born in 19...Read the entire review

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Gaea Girls / Shinjuku Boys DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/42981 Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:28:04 UTC Recommended

Women marginalized by patriarchal society is a reoccurring subject in the documentaries of Kim Longinotto. In the prior double-feature DVD release from UK's Second Run label, Divorce Iranian Style / Runaway, Longinotto examined customary and legal inequality imposed on Iranian women in their familial relations with fathers, brothers, and husbands. In Second Run's most recent double-feature DVD release of her work, Gaea Girls / Shinjuku Boys, Longinotto and co-director Jano Williams document Japanese women who dare to step beyond the rigid patriarchal social norms of their homeland.

The hour-long Shinjuku Boys (1995) follows three onnabe (female-to-male transsexuals) who work in a nightclub catering to a female clientele looking for escape from their daily lives of domineering husbands and ...Read the entire review

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The People Speak DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/40756 Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:11:45 UTC Rent It

An axiom often attributed to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill holds that history is written by the victors. In other words, our collective understanding of the past is shaped by the histories handed down and retold by the groups in power, i.e., the dominate race, gender, religion, nation, ideology, social class, and cultural clique. The vanquished and oppressed are misrepresented, minimized, or simply missing from the victors' histories.

American historian and political activist, professor of political science Howard Zinn (1922-2010) through his popular text book A People's History of the United States has arguably done more than any American academic to correct the record. Having sold more than a million copies since 1980 and widely assigned on college campuses across the United States, A People's History of the United States recounts the struggles of the oppressed i...Read the entire review

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Examined Life DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41061 Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:47:30 UTC Highly Recommended

Canadian-American filmmaker Astra Taylor's second feature-length documentary takes philosophy out of the classroom and into the streets. According to Taylor, The Examined Life's ideal viewer is a 16-year-old with an open mind who stumbles upon it on TV. Charged with making philosophy accessible, Taylor gives eight philosophers/academics ten minutes each to convey a big idea. To charm her audience and disarm her subjects, she films them in motion as they stroll, row a boat, or ride in a car.

The most recognizable of Taylor's subjects to average viewers is likely Princeton philosopher and social-critic Cornel West who's given pride of place by appearing at the beginning, middle and end of documentary. West sits in the backseat of Taylor's old Saab as she chauffeurs him through the streets of New York. Leaning over the seat, rattling off ideas in furious bursts reminiscent of Charlie Parker...Read the entire review

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Act of God DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/39432 Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:34:58 UTC Rent It

So much of our daily lives are predictably routine to the point in which we can operate more or less by rote that when we are confronted with unexpected randomness we are startled. Few events are more psychologically jarring than witnessing, or worse yet personally suffering, a lighting strike. While cancer and car wrecks can cause us to question why us and wonder whether there's a meaning or agency behind it, being struck by lightning is the quintessential manifestation of this metaphysical quandary -- is it randomness incarnate or supernatural will?

Canadian documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal has been interested in the intersection between art and philosophy since graduating from Montreal's McGill University with a master's degree in philosophy and theology. Since turni...Read the entire review

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Blissfully Yours DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41570 Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:37:36 UTC Recommended

While Apichatpong Weerasethakul may never become a household name, it's one that's become well recognized among cinephiles, even if most can't pronounce it. The 39-year-old Thai writer, director, and producer of indie art films, who goes by Joe and is a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, has completed five feature films and more than two dozen shorts to date. A darling of the festival circuit, Weerasethakul has earned numerous accolades, most notably the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004 for Tropical Malady (Sud pralad), and Cannes' award for young talent, the Prize Un Certain Regard for Blissfully Yours (Sud senaeha) in 2002.

Blissfully Yours, Weerasethakul's second feature film, was the first to receive a limited theatrical release throughout much of...Read the entire review

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Know Your Mushrooms DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/40943 Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:13:22 UTC Rent It

Did you know that the largest living organism on earth is a 3.4 square mile fungus in Oregon, or that beneath the earth's landmasses a dense forest of fungus is responsible for decomposing bio-matter, or that mushrooms can clean up oil spills, or that Shitake mushrooms may lower blood pressure, or that Jesus Christ might have been an advanced form of intelligent fungus?

Well the first four are true enough anyway, while the last point is a debatable theory advocated by John Allegro author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970). By comparision the late fungophile-philosopher and psychonaut Terence Kemp McKenna's "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution which holds that mushrooms provided certain proto-humans with an evolutionary edge by increasing visual acuity, fertility, and mental capacity sounds perfectly reasonable. All these facts and theories are but a small part of that availa...Read the entire review

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