Home Media Magazine - February 3-9, 2008 - (Page 18)

REVIEWS Street 2/6 Own, NR. www.homemediamagazine.com I CITY UNPLUGGED IndiePixFilms.com, Thriller, $19.95 DVD, $14.95 Download to T I GREENAWAY: THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT/ A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS Street 2/12 Zeitgeist, Drama, $29.99 each DVD, NR. T he first two major feature films by British arthouse mainstay Peter Greenaway — The Draughtsman’s Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts — show a director who, looking back, seems to have emerged fully-formed from the beginning. His deliberate, baroquely detailed style is one of cinema’s most idiosyncratic, and it is with some relief that his early works have been given worthy treatment in these DVDs. Draughtsman’s Contract is a kind of Agatha Christie country house murder transplant- ed into the 17th century. An aristocratic wife commissions a brash young draughtsman for a series of 12 drawings, for which he will receive one sexual favor each. He is at first delighted, but his attitude changes as he gradually finds himself wrapped in a possible murder plot. A Zed and Two Noughts is the story of a fatal car accident, the twin brothers left bereaved by the deaths of their wives, and the one woman who survives, Alba. Both brothers are zoologists who share a morbid fascination with the details of their wives demise. Their obsession leads them into a bizarre study of evolution and decomposition that eventually leads them back to Alba. Both DVDs feature running commentary by Greenaway, as well as video introductions, which provide richly detailed and uncommonly revealing explanations of the director’s method. There are also behind-the-scenes featurettes, theatrical trailers, and new essays — by critic Jonathan Marlow and cinematographer Curtis Clark — that prove sufficiently illuminating to be included. Combined with beautiful anamorphic transfers, these elements create a package that will delight fans of Greenaway’s oeuvre. – Eddie Mullins here’s a strange appeal to City Unplugged, built partly on its ingenuousness and partly on its open satire of bureaucracies. In 1991, a much-too-big mob of fellas is planning to rob the Bank of Estonia as it takes possession of $970 million in gold, stored in Paris since the Nazis stormed the state. There are hints of how they plan to do it, but the central element is getting an electrical engineer, Toivo, to shut off the whole city’s power (hence the movie’s original title, Darkness in Tallinn). It borrows from some of the best American gangster and tough-guy films, but there’s an underlying wit in almost every encounter that comes from the state of available technology and goods in general. I THE JEWISH AMERICANS Street 1/5 Paramount/PBS, Documentary, $34.99 two-DVD set, NR. T wenty-three men, women, and children showed up at a Dutch colony on the East Coast of North America in 1654. The leader of the colony said they weren’t welcome, but word came down from Dutch royalty that these people would benefit the colony economically — and they would be staying. They were Jews, the first Jews to arrive in what would become Manhattan in the United States of America more than 100 years later. A nearly six-hour journey, The Jewish Americans chronicles the lives of those colonial Jews as well as Revolutionary War Jews, Civil War Jews, trade-unionizing Jews, musical-writing Jews, civil-rights-marching Jews, Hollywood-inventing Jews, persecuted Jews, proud Jews, assimilating Jews, Orthodox religious Jews, and so on. If any one of those adjectives sounds boring or uninteresting, don’t worry. The documentarians do an excellent job of leaping through the chronology from era to era, and theme to theme, never staying too long in any one place. As with many other exhaustive documentaries, The Jewish Americans weaves intensely personal stories with sweeping pastiches of the times. Talking-head interviews run the gamut, from rabbis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to comedians Jerry Stiller and Sid Caesar and playwright Tony Kushner. What holds true, though, for all speakers and all eras of JewishAmericans, is their simultaneous patriotism and love of this country — which became the largest con- centration of Jews in the world after the Holocaust — and their regular but diminishing persecution in this land of American dreams. This film’s unrivalled look at the subject has enough rich detail for Jewish scholars and enough edutainment for those who just want to learn a little more about this influential American religious and cultural minority. – Brendan Howard Even the crime itself, a plan for an unofficial night shift to melt stolen gold bars down at a cigarette factory and pour them into cigarette shapes to package and smuggle, is a bit of a reach. But it’s forgivable as a political jab. The crime story plods along, but that’s a creative decision to let the personal backstory unfold. Toivo is doing a job for money, but his employers are killers. Pregnant wife Maria wants the security the money would give their baby, but doesn’t realize the danger. A neighborhood tomboy, Terje, is a sort of hero for innocence. It’s not what Americans expect, but this film plays like many Asian gangland films, only without the gore. People do get shot (in fact, shooting in the eye is an obsession) but it’s much cleaner than in real life. Don’t adjust your set; most of the film is in black and white and film noir dark. It lends the appropriate air of austerity for the political statement. American viewers won’t recognize the actors in this film, but most of the performances are good. The ending is a bit too pat and sappy, but up to that point the plot holds interest. Even though the violence is often off-screen or sanitized, that and nudity make it unsuitable for youngsters. – Holly J. Wagner Dat e Change The street date for Naked Movie, distributed by Victory Multimedia, has changed to March 18 (prebook Feb. 19). 18 Home Media Magazine February 3–9, 2008 http://www.homemediamagazine.com

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Home Media Magazine - February 3-9, 2008

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