Home Media Magazine - February 24, 2008 - (Page 28) REVIEWS I THE LAST EMPEROR: SPECIAL EDITION Street 2/26 Criterion, Drama, $59.95 four-DVD set, ‘PG-13.’ Stars John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole. D irector Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece about Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, had previously been available as a poorly received bare-bones extended edition. Criterion’s new “director-approved” edition corrects that oversight with a treasure trove of extras. The Last Emperor is presented in two beautifully remastered versions. Disc one includes the superior theatrical cut, which won nine Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. This version includes a new commentary assembled from separate interviews with Bertolucci and others, providing a rich mix of behind-the-scenes stories, historical discussions and analysis of the film itself. The second disc contains the previously available version listed erroneously as the director’s cut. This version, commissioned for television, is 53 minutes longer and has some interesting scenes, but most of the padding comes from longer takes that don’t benefit the story. If there is one quibble with the set, it’s that the extra footage isn’t included as isolated deleted scenes for easy reference. The remaining discs store a variety of featurettes — some new and some from the 1980s — that document the evolution of the film. Most interesting among the vintage programs is a 1988 episode of Britain’s “South Bank Show” that includes an interview with an elderly Pu Chieh, Pu Yi’s younger brother. History buffs will appreciate a new interview with cultural historian Ian Buruma that places the film in the context of China’s constant political flux during the first half of the 20th century. Named emperor before his third birthday, Pu Yi grew to become little more than a prisoner symbolically passed between governments, mirroring China’s transition from feudal to modernist society. These featurettes also fill in some periods glossed over in the movie, such as the five years Pu Yi spent as a Russian prisoner following World War II. Among the new retrospective featurettes, one chronicles the crafting of the film’s marvelous, Oscar-winning musical score, while the other details the film’s editing, set design and color palette. At one point, we learn Bertolucci had considered filming scenes in the Forbidden City — the most beautiful, colorful and ornate location in the film — in black and white. Combined with the set’s 100-page booklet, these recollections provide a wonderful template for the construction of an epic film. – John Latchem I RADIANT CITY Street 3/4 Koch Lorber, Documentary, B.O. $0.8 million, $26.98 DVD, NR. I KHADAK Street 3/4 Lifesize, Drama, B.O. $0.003 million, $24.98 DVD, NR. Stars Batzul Khayankhyarvaa, Tsetsegee Byamba. H ere’s one for the film-school crowd — a lush examination of Mongolian culture through the perspective of the shamanist tradition. Young Bagi is a nomadic shepherd living with his family on the barren frozen steppes of Mongolia. One day while pursuing a stray lamb, he suffers a seizure and has a vision of the future destruction of his family home. His grandfather informs him his destiny is to become a shaman, but Bagi will have none of it. Soon enough, government agents arrive with news of an animal plague, forcing the nomads to relocate to a mining town. There, Bagi befriends a girl after finding her buried in coal on a train. When authorities find them on the train, they are arrested and sent to a detention center and assigned menial tasks. Bagi’s seizures continue, and after more visions he slowly begins to accept his calling. Soon rumors start to spread that there was no animal plague, so Bagi and other detainees plan a revolt to not only escape, but also rescue the animals and restore some dignity to their way of life. The theme of mysticism vs. modernism is common enough in cinema, and through Bagi the film effectively connects concepts of past, present and future in a thought-provoking way. The writing and directing team of Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth has crafted a film brimming with symbolic imagery. Production values are high, but the story is told through quiet, drawn-out scenes conventional viewers may find tedious, with an ending filtered through a lens of surrealism that could be compared to Fellini or Kubrick. The DVD includes a short featurette that is mostly a look at the filming of a few scenes, with some quick narration that Khadak was the first film shot entirely in winter in Mongolia, where crews endured temperatures as low as –37°C. – John Latchem adiant City could be called Radial City because it’s all about the suburbia that sprawls out from urban centers. The film was made in Canada, and its defining image is the cookie-cutter tracts of McMansions that went wild during the real estate bubble. People in heavily populated urban centers started seeing them in the 1990s, but the rest of the country got a taste as builders went wild in a market that seemed limitless. Of course we know now it wasn’t, and the sprawl is what’s left behind. In some cases literally, as people walk away from deals going south. This is not a pure documentary; our tour guides are the Moss family, a composite whose members have mixed feelings about a recent move to the suburbs. Interspersed with their lives are comments from prominent planners and R scholars and graphics that help quantify urban sprawl: Author James Howard Kunstler tells us 80% of the building in North America has happened in the last 50 years. A graphic tells us the size of a suburban home in North America was 800 square feet in the 1950s and has grown to 2,286 square feet today. The planned communities that preserve peace by isolating residential, commercial and industrial uses (and stratify owners by income, by way of housing density) also prevent people from walking or bicycling to work. The message is that the suburbs we create to escape urban landscapes become the very things we fled, or worse: soulless dwellings with no community. The faux family is a little too pat to believe. A real family grappling with the same issues might have been more effective. Nonetheless, Radiant City is entertaining and informative and could provide useful talking points for evaluating how we live and interact. It should appeal to anyone who’s ever lived in a suburb, or wanted to. – Holly J. Wagner 28 Home Media Magazine February 24–March 1, 2008
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