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DVD Secret Honor - Criterion Collection
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 pure Altman. It received a tiny release in 1984, but Secret Honor now looks like a key American political fantasia, like The Manchurian Candidate wrought on a single set. --Robert Horton
Review(s): DVD Secret Honor - Criterion Collection
Very mental
Compared to the kind of intellectual history of the 20th century which the last few years have produced, or even compared to the order imposed on ideas in such mammoth books as THE SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHIES: A GLOBAL THEORY OF INTELLECTUAL CHANGE by Randall Collins, the movie "Secret Honor" offers a picture of a man thinking about a pardon in a legal and political situation that combines bits and pieces of thoughts in agonizing glory. I probably wouldn't be writing this review, except that this videotape is one of the few in my collection which I consider watching all over again whenever I can't quite remember what is on this videotape. The line I have been trying to pinpoint most is, "I'm not saying that two rights don't make a wrong." I had originally heard this as a punch line for a Nixon joke, in which someone told Nixon that Ruby shot Oswald, and Nixon merely said, "Well, um, [muffled clearing of throat], like my mother always said, two rights don't make a wrong." In the joke, it was obvious that Nixon was wrong about what his mother always said, but in the movie, "I'm not saying that two rights don't make a wrong" approaches the complexity of legal argument. This movie is evidence that comedy and law play to the same audience.
A masterful one-man performance
I saw this movie on cable the year it came out. Although I was only 16 at the time and knew almost nothing about Watergate, I was absolutely awe-struck by Philip Baker Hall's riveting portrayal of Richard Nixon. There are no car chases, no love scenes, no special effects -- just one actor relying solely on raw acting talent to tell a complicated story in a way that is so powerful, so multilayered, that it holds your attention for over an hour.
Now that I have a fuller knowledge and understanding of political scandals in general, I'm equally impressed with the alarming depth and accuracy of this movie's "fictional" script writing. The writers obviously had inside knowledge of the plutocratic string pulling that goes on in Washington.
It is puzzling, to say the least, why a movie this good is so hard to come by, especially when one considers how well-known the director is.
"Secret Honor" - best kept secret in Nixon films!
Philip Baker Hall's performance as Richard Milhous Nixon rates as my favorite among Nixon films. His portrayal of Nixon covers all the bases, from quiet obedience to his beloved mother to the snarling, foul mouthed paranoiac we've all come to love (or hate). The film is riveting as Hall's Nixon drags the audience deeper and deeper into his harsh world view and finally brings us to the very edge of his despair. The end will have you laughing, cringing or both. Brings into sharp relief the concept that we are all heroes in our own mind, and it will make you wonder what sort of spirit dwells in the leaders we currently elect if a man this twisted with hate, self loathing and paranoia could be elected president twice. Just an amazing film. Even if you don't subscribe to Hall's portrayal as reality you can't deny that this a talented and powerful performance. This film should be a must have among the "conspiracy" minded.
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... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 05 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Georges Franju brings a haunting poetry to this lyrical and horrifying 1959 French classic. Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur), a famed plastic surgeon, lures a young woman to his secluded mansion with the help of his mistress Louise (Alida Valli), where he proceeds to remove their faces in an attempt to restore his daughter's scarred visage. Christiane (Edith Scob), disfigured in car accident caused by her guilt-ridden father, hides behind a spooky blank mask that exposes only her sad, lonely eyes, which seem to lose a little more life after each failed graft. Franju's cool presentation gives an unsettling edge to the picture, from the uncomfortably quiet family dinners to Christiane's hesitant explorations of her father's laboratory to the unflinching views of Genessier's bloody... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Georges Franju DVD Release Date: Released the 19 October 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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"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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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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