Crazy Horse is the name of a famous French cabaret established in 1951. It boasts floorshows with nude dancers that are elaborate and, by some descriptions, tasteful and chic. The emphasis is on eroticism, not lewdness. The original owner, Alain Bernardin, committed suicide in the mid-90s, leaving a void in the operation. The 2011 documentary Crazy Horse documents a revival at the club, when choreographer Philippe Decouflé attempted to restage the Crazy Horse's original, influential program. There is also what are presumably new numbers, unless Britney Spears and Antony and the Johnsons are both older than we thought.

You see, I'm not entirely sure on the facts. Most of the above is information I gleaned from Wikipedia. The line that begins with "the 2011 documentary...Read the entire review

Few clichés are more shopworn than "I'm not a stripper, I'm a dancer," but the women who work at the Crazy Horse cabaret ("the best chic nude show on earth") are dancers, and good ones. It's not a bump-and-grind show; their routines are tightly choreographed and impressively produced, utilizing trick lighting and ingenious staging "to suggest, to seduce, without offering oneself."

Distinguished documentarian Frederick Wiseman shot Crazy Horse during a transitional period for the club, as director/choreographer Philippe Decouflé was greatly reworking and changing the nightly show, trying out new material while keeping the regular program in rotation (his plea that "a break is needed to ensure a classy premiere" is ignored). Wiseman's cameras observe ev...Read the entire review

Ballet is an art form of unparalleled beauty, bodily control, and stage precision. The Paris Opera Ballet company is the premiere house of dance, dating back over 400 years, creating a daunting reputation for the finest ballet in the world. Of course, there's no show without a profound collective effort from the entire company, its costumers, and backstage administration. Master documentarian Frederick Wiseman takes his camera to Paris, observing a few critical weeks in the life of the group as they prepare for a new season of dance.

Wiseman handles "La danse" like his previous documentary work, preferring to lead with minimal information -- no talking head interviews, no names or rank, and no artificial demands of drama. It's a verite approach that allows the viewer a choice ...Read the entire review

Regular readers of this site's DVD reviews probably know by now that we're been doing our own mini-retrospective of the works of documentarian Frederick Wiseman here of late. This review marks the thirteenth since May. The titles reviewed have ranged from Wiseman's seminal Titicut Follies (1967) to his most recent State Legislature (2006). We have selected four of these DVDs by Wiseman's independent distribution label Zipporah Films as DVD Talk Collector Series releases, highly recommended three others, and panned none; a record of success unrivaled by any other label based on so few reviews.

Over the course of these thirteen reviews we've covered the bases on Wiseman's biograph...Read the entire review

Is it possible to feel peace and unease at the same time? Watching Frederick Wiseman's 1987 documentary "Missile," my reactions kept contradicting each other: relief followed by doubt, pride followed by shame, boredom and then intrigue, and then back again.

Filmed in 1986 - just before the waning days of the Cold War - at Vandenberg Air Force Base, "Missile" follows the daily lives of those responsible for turning the keys in the event of a nuclear war. Most of the footage is that of the intense training required to secure such an important position, although, as with all Wiseman films, the camera repeatedly steps aside for smaller, personal moments as well as the tedious, businesslike staff meetings covering ridiculous minutia.

Which brings me to boredom and intrigue. For every scene of utter fascination - either at the skill and precision required to commit to such a task, or at the tec...Read the entire review

Of late, we here at DVDTalk have had the pleasure of reviewing a large number of DVDs from documentarian Frederick Wiseman. More than a dozen reviews of his work have been completed, or are presently in the works here by David Cornelius, Stuart Galbraith IV, Francis Rizzo III, and myself. The titles under review span Wiseman's career from his most recent film, State Legislature (2006), to this one for Titicut Follies (1967), his earliest and still most famous film.

Titicut Follies documents the treatment of inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Facility for the criminally insane, located 28 miles south of Boston in the town of Bridgewater. Filmed over 29 days in 1966, Titicut Follies provided a grimly stark exposé on the deplorable co...Read the entire review

After playing the New York Film Festival in 1967, Frederick Wiseman's first film, Titicut Follies, which exposed the dehumanizing conditions to which inmates in the Bridgeport, Massachusetts Correctional Facility for the criminally insane were subjected, was banned from general distribution by order of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court. Though this ban remained in place until 1991, the controversy surrounding Titicut Follies appears to have had little or no adverse effect on Wiseman's ability to obtain permission to film within other American institutions. Between 1968 and 1979, Wiseman completed documentaries with the cooperation of a public high school, a city police department, an inner-city hospital, a monastery, a juvenile court system, a university primate research facility, the New York City Department of Welfare, a slaughter house, U.S. Government operations in the Panama Ca...Read the entire review

A follow-up to director-editor Frederick Wiseman's documentary Domestic Violence (2001), Part Two contrasts the nurturing, small group and individual attention dished out at the first film's women's shelter with an overwhelmed judicial system where the complex problems of domestic violence are processed like SUVs on the assembly line. It's frightening and disheartening, but also fascinating and informative.

The all-region two-disc DVD runs 160 minutes. The IMDb lists alternate running times up to 196 minutes but this may be incorrect, and anyway as this disc comes from Wiseman's own self-distributing DVD label so it's pretty safe to assume that the film is his preferred cut. The first disc runs 110 minutes, with disc two the remaining 50.

As with its predecessor, Domestic Violence 2 opens and closes with ...Read the entire review

Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has completed three dozen documentaries to date, several exceeding three hours in length. Most of Wiseman's films are so much of a kind that it could be said he has for four decades been making one very long movie in installments. That movie is the story of contemporary America as told through its public and private institutions. Through roughly six dozen hours of screen time, Wiseman has documented hospitals, an institute for the criminally insane, public housing, welfare, domestic violence social services, public high school education, law enforcement, juvenile courts, a Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
A long look at the business of being beautiful

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Good documentaries
Likes:
Dislikes: The modeling industry
Hates: Movies that are just too long

The Movie
Like the majority of Frederick Wiseman's documentaries (or at least the ones I've seen,) Model has no narration, no talking head segments and no true story. What it does is drop you right into a world you don't know and lets you experience a day in the life (more or less.) It's about as observational as a documentary can get without simply being a security camera.

Here, we get to see a bit of t...Read the entire review

In an age where documentaries strive to be showier and snakier - "docu-tainment," if you will - along comes Frederick Wiseman to remind us of the importance of a simpler approach. Wiseman, a workhorse who's churned out 37 films in 41 years (many of which stretch to 4 hours or more), is considered by many to be a legend in his field, a filmmaking brand all his own. Wiseman's style is fly-on-the-wall, often using long, unbroken takes to merely record events as they unfold, refusing to enhance the moment with music or narration in post-production. And while Wiseman himself has shunned such film school terms as "cinema verité" and "observational cinema" (he insists that any editing adds enough of a point-of-view to demolish the purity such tags imply), his films have become recognized as top examples of the form.

Wiseman's latest work is "State Legislature," a three-and-a-half-hour opus that follow...Read the entire review

Some documentaries are designed primarily to educate, some to persuade and others, like Frederick Wiseman's Domestic Violence (2001), to show. In a current field of documentaries littered with socio-political treatises from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Wiseman's long but uncluttered film is refreshingly distilled and essentially apolitical. Domestic Violence's subject is The Spring of Tampa, a large shelter for battered women (and, albeit rarely, men) along with their children. The film does nothing more or less than present illustrative vignettes, typically running eight-ten minutes apiece, of practically every facet of life inside the shelter from the perspective of the abused women, the kids, and the various case workers and administrators.

The three-hour and sixteen-minute film debuted on the festival circuit before turning up on PBS. The two-disc DVD is probabl...Read the entire review

Like many of Frederick Wiseman's documentaries, High School (1968) makes for fascinating viewing even if when it's over you're not entirely sure what the sum of all its parts add up to. Wiseman's early films, most notably Titicut Follies (1967), had recognizable agenda, at least more so than his later, deliberately ambiguous work, where Wiseman clearly is inviting viewers to draw their own conclusions. High School is vaguely critical of an educational system dominated by discipline and conformity, where the disconnect between students and teachers is profound. In the four decades since, public schools have in some ways gotten better, and in others are much worse. Would a high school student in 2008 recognize the environment of Philadelphia's Northeast High of 40 years ago, or would it seem totally alien? I have no idea, but I saw a lot of the Michigan high school I attended ...Read the entire review

A typically superb documentary by Frederick Wiseman, the made-for-TV Law and Order (1969) is a portrait of weary, sometimes testy Kansas City, Missouri police officers in the wake of the April 1968 riots there. Television producer John Langley, in his audio commentary accompanying the pilot for his show COPS, talks about seeing Wiseman's film many years later joking (I paraphrase), "Here I was being incredibly innovative - 20 years late!" Though Law and Order and COPS are different in subtle if fundamental ways, stylistically they're quite similar and Langley is right: just about everything good about COPS Wiseman was doing two decades before.

Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/33210 Wed, 14 May 2008 00:38:46 UTC Recommended

In 1975, when PBS first aired Frederick Wiseman's documentary, Welfare, examining the war on poverty from the trenches of a New York City welfare office, no contextual explanation was needed. Everybody in America was as familiar then with the war on poverty as we are now with the war in Iraq. More than thirty years on though, a bit of contextual knowledge may be needed to fully appreciate this documentary.

In 1964, President Johnson declared a war on poverty in the United States. He pushed through legislation to establish social security for the aged and infirmed and welfare programs for the poor. Collectively, social security and welfare halved the poverty rate in the United States from historic levels of 20-25% prior to 1964, to 10-13% by 1975. Though many of Johnson's welfare programs were attacked for incentivizing single parent households and endemic multi-generational poverty, th...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/33202 Mon, 12 May 2008 21:31:46 UTC Highly Recommended

Since publication of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle in 1906, the conditions in slaughterhouses have been a source of concern and fascination to North Americans and Europeans. From Georges Franju's starkly beautiful and gruesome short documentary, Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des Bêtes) in 1949, to Richard Linklater's recent fictionalized film adaptation of Eric Schlosser's exposé Fast Food Nation, animal slaughter has frequently been the focus of documentary and popular film. In fact, I've reviewed three other new DVD releases documenting the use of animals in industrialized food production since January: King Corn, I am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA, and Read the entire review

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