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DVD Tanner '88 - Criterion Collection
It still looks like one of the most adventurous projects ever undertaken for television: to concoct a fictional presidential candidate and follow him as he mingles (often improvising) amongst the real-life candidates on the campaign trail. Tanner '88 was the brainchild of director Robert Altman and "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who executed this on-the-fly series for HBO during the 1988 primary season. Thus we get "former Michigan congressman" Jack Tanner (Altman regular Michael Murphy) sorting out his messy professional and personal life as he hobnobs with the likes of Bob Dole, Pat Robertson, Kitty Dukakis, and real-life journalists. Some of these meta-fictional encounters are cameos, but some are remarkable full-blown sequences, such as Tanner's heart-to-heart with Bruce Babbitt as they stroll beneath Washington's cherry trees. (But then you always knew politicians were basically actors.) The deft supporting cast includes Pamela Reed and Cynthia Nixon. For fans of satire, Tanner is smart and sometimes mind-bending; for fans of Altman, it's the director at the top of his characteristic game: a multi-layered, many-sided ensemble picture that happens to be all about America. --Robert Horton
Script by Gary Trudeau, directed by Robert Altman, shot on video with a small crew, improvising around real life Democratic Convention, bringing in real people from media and politics. And with a candidate, Jack Tanner, who was remarkably prescient of Clinton. The campaign slogan "For Real" had it's tongue firmly in it's cheek. All well ahead of the pack in terms of reality tv, dogme films and it's undertanding of the media.
Truly Excellent. I hope they do it justice in the DVD release.
A bravura performance by Philip Baker Hall and the probing eye of Robert Altman make Secret Honor a provocative--even haunting--speculation on history. The project originated as a one-man play, a fictional look at Richard Nixon dictating a lengthy monologue to a tape machine. The script offers some wild possibilities for explaining Watergate, but more importantly it attempts to understand Nixon the man (and succeeds far better than Oliver Stone's factual Nixon). Hall's flabbergasting performance, though it holds nothing back in its picture of a boozing, paranoid self-dramatist, manages to humanize Nixon. Altman's low-budget filming of the play tinkered little with the text or with Hall's performance, but the gliding camera, always picking out the telling angle or detail, is... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Philip Baker Hall Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 19 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"The cinema," Orson Welles famously noted, "is a ribbon of dream." 3 Women is one of few feature films on record as having taken form in a dream. The dreamer was Robert Altman, and although all his best work has an oneiric quality--the floaty zooms, the eerie pastels bleeding into one another, the slip and slide of characters' trajectories overlapping in the fluid accumulation of what passes for narrative--this last masterpiece in his amazing seven-year run of 1970s masterpieces is only more so. Shelly Duvall, that most unorthodox of Altman creatures, locks in the tone with her eerie portrayal of Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan hoyden whose nonstop prattle turns life into a stream-of-consciousness reverie even as most of the people in her vicinity studiously ignore her. Her... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Shelley Duvall - Sissy Spacek Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 20 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Director Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers concerns the violent struggle in the late 1950s for Algerian independence from France, where the film was banned on its release for fear of creating civil disturbances. Certainly, the heady, insurrectionary mood of the film, enhanced by a relentlessly pulsating Ennio Morricone soundtrack, makes for an emotionally high temperature throughout. Decades later, the advent of the "war against terror" has only intensified the film's relevance.
Shot in a gripping, quasi-documentary style, The Battle of Algiers uses a cast of untrained actors coupled with a stern voiceover. Initially, the film focuses on the conversion of young hoodlum Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) to F.L.N. (the Algerian Liberation Front). However,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Brahim Haggiag DVD Release Date: Released the 12 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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With this magnificent Criterion DVD release, Luchino Visconti's 1963 historical drama The Leopard will finally earn widespread recognition as one of the most beautiful epics ever produced. In adapting the popular novel by Giuseppe Tomassi di Lampedusa (an Italian equivalent to Gone with the Wind, set during the tumultuous Garibaldi revolution of 1860-62), Visconti was initially reluctant to cast Burt Lancaster as the melancholy Prince of Salina--the aging aristocrat "leopard" of the title--who accepts change as inevitable during the struggle for a unified Italy. But Lancaster (even with his voice dubbed in the fully restored Italian release) delivered one of his finest performances, modeled after Visconti himself, and reacting to political and familial upheavals with the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Burt Lancaster DVD Release Date: Released the 08 June 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Richard Linklater's debut feature is a comic kaleidoscopic portrait of the quirky characters stuck in a college town (it's Austin, Texas, but it could stand for hundreds of such places), a devilishly clever and endlessly inventive film that overcomes its nothing budget with scene after hilarious scene of short, sharp cinematic shots. Structured something like Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, Slacker is a comic series of character pieces, each lasting a few minutes before the camera picks up and follows someone, perhaps simply an extra in the scene, to the next conversation. Characters spout off theories on everything from JFK and Charles Whitman (we even get an eerie glimpse of the water tower he climbed for his killing spree) to Elvis and UFOs, and more (wanna buy a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Linklater Director(s): Richard Linklater DVD Release Date: Released the 14 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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