Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/52547 Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:41:25 UTC Highly Recommended

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

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/50119 Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:51:12 UTC Skip It

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

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/50909 Tue, 05 Jul 2011 01:14:19 UTC Highly Recommended

THE FILM:

I have always been fairly ignorant about any sort of art-world who's-who there might be, so Claudia Müller'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 clichés, maxims, soundbytes, or slogans, and then runs them in public spaces that usua...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/49693 Wed, 04 May 2011 19:17:38 UTC Skip It

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

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/49572 Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:00:45 UTC Recommended

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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46777 Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:50:36 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44914 Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:25:54 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46773 Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:22:08 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46591 Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:24:05 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46960 Thu, 02 Dec 2010 23:24:57 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45979 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:29:02 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44908 Tue, 05 Oct 2010 02:28:57 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44909 Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:01:08 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45731 Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:22:53 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/45195 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:02:49 UTC Rent It

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

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44471 Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:37:19 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/44765 Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:16:57 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43884 Tue, 25 May 2010 12:11:59 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41811 Tue, 18 May 2010 12:16:37 UTC 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, Hélène 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 Bee...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43555 Tue, 04 May 2010 01:05:52 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41812 Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:18:36 UTC 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 pietà he has begun (the Rondanini Pietà). From here, the narration consists of more or less chronological biographical information in "flashback" form, as Michelangel...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41813 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:14:25 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41818 Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:07:27 UTC 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 https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/40308 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:37:10 UTC 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

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