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DVD Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
This BBC production is a companion to Peter Biskind's 1998 book by the same name, an excellent dish on the 1970s American movie scene. It roughly follows the same path, tracing how maverick filmmakers revitalized Hollywood, from Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider to the triumphant quartet of Coppola/Lucas/Spielberg/Scorsese. Any fan will want to listen in as nearly 50 actors and artists remember the day. However, the star meter is on low wattage, with today's most successful directors only talked about, and seen in often bemusingly vintage clips. The better-produced, higher-star-wattage A Decade Under the Influence covers much of the same ground. An on-screen Biskind would have helped matters, but he is nowhere to be seen. Yet there are moments from the book that come to life, be it grainy home movies from Jennifer Salt and Margot Kidder's notorious beach house or Roman Polanski's emotional press conference after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate. The DVD boasts a second disc of extended interviews on numerous subjects, many of which were not covered in the 119-minute film. --Doug Thomas
Plodding Overview of a Unique Era in Hollywood History.
"Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is based on Peter Biskind's book of the same name which explored the rise and the fall of the director's era in Hollywood during the 1970s. The film actually starts in 1966, when the film industry was suffering low ticket sales under an obsolete studio system. The old studio bosses no longer understood their young audiences who frequented drive-ins and art house theaters. While the Nouvelle Vague raged in Europe, American movies weren't making money. A group of young filmmakers emerged, the first generation of directors to self-consciously view film as an art form: Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Warren Beatty, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Schrader, Robert Altman, Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Roger Corman, Roman Polanski. Through still photographs, film clips, interviews, and narration by William H. Macy, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" traces these filmmakers' rise to power in the 1970s under the wings of inspired producers like Robert Evans, Bert Schneider, and Peter Bart, through the Age of the Auteur, and to the eventual decline in directors' power in the late 1970s due to the rise of the special effects film and the consequences of the directors' own excesses.
Hollywood of the 1970s is certainly an interesting subject, populated with interesting characters. But "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is so plodding that it seems twice as long as it actually is. I'm fascinated by film history, but there was a point when I didn't think I'd make it through this film. And that was only half an hour into it. "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" covers a lot of ground, but it's really an overview of the changing Hollywood power structure 1966-1980 and the films that resulted. Nothing is discussed in much detail. It would have been a better film had it covered less territory in more depth. As it is, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" comes off as cursory, but long. There are a lot of interviews, but some of the most prominently featured personalities are: Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Bart, Paul Schrader, and Richard Dreyfuss. "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" isn't a bad film, but for a two-hour film that seems like four, it says very little.
A Dam! Good Documentry
~This documentry is an exellent pice of work like the book of the same title which i read while i was at college. The movie discusses the old movie system and how it was brought in to the 20th century, by a few directors such as Scorsese, Coppola, Peckinpah, Beaty, Penn and Denis Hopper. It shows how the directors like penn were influenced by french directors like Trafut etc. but what makes the film so good to watch is the interviews from the directors themselves. I would have liked a little more~~ information on Sam Peckinpah & John Cassevttes that would have given the movie 5 stars in my opinion.~
Absorbing documentary
First off, there's no way that a film adaptation can compare to the great book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. There's just so much detail and nuance in the book that can't be transalted to the silver screen. That said, this documentary is a valiant attempt to cover the period in which the new Hollywood (inspired largely by the French New Wave and the late-sixties counterculture in general) briefly rocked the boat before being absorbed by the moribund studio system that it revived.
Of particular interest are the complete interviews on the bonus disc. You get to here some of the main and supporting players give their take on that heady time. If you love Scorcese, Coppola, et al, this DVD is a must-see.
How did Hollywood make so many great, challenging, offbeat films in the 1970s? A Decade Under the Influence lists the reasons--or rather, lets the people who did the filmmaking list the reasons. The decade-shaping interviewees include Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Francis Coppola, et al. The film's argument has actually been conventional wisdom for at least 10 years, but it's well-supported by an abundance of clips, which should inspire even hardcore film buffs to seek out rarities such as Thunderbolt and Lightfoot or The King of Marvin Gardens. One might observe that the scarcity of women directors or black filmmakers suggests that the decade was not entirely golden, and the memories may be burnished a bit by nostalgia. But there's no question that the big studios... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): William Friedkin Director(s): Richard LaGravenese - Ted Demme DVD Release Date: Released the 30 September 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The Fog of War, the movie that finally won Errol Morris the best documentary Oscar, is a spellbinder. Morris interviews Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and finds a uniquely unsettling viewpoint on much of 20th-century American history. Employing a ton of archival material, including LBJ's fascinating taped conversations from the Oval Office, Morris probes the reasons behind the U.S. commitment to the Vietnam War--and finds a depressingly inconsistent policy. McNamara himself emerges as--well, not exactly apologetic, but clearly haunted by the what-ifs of Vietnam. He also mulls the bombing of Japan in World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis, raising more questions than he answers. The Fog of War has the usual inexorable... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): John F. Kennedy - Robert McNamara - Richard Nixon DVD Release Date: Released the 11 May 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vanessa Redgrave - David Hemmings Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A Sundance Grand Jury prize winner and a true conversation starter, Capturing the Friedmans travels into one apparently ordinary Long Island family's heart of darkness. Arnold and Elaine Friedman had a normal life with their three sons until Arnold was arrested on multiple (and increasingly lurid) charges of child abuse. Because the Friedmans had documented their own lives with copious home movies, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki is able to sift through their material looking for clues. Yet what emerges is more surreal than fiction: the youngest Friedman son went to jail, the eldest became a birthday-party clown. In the end, we can't be sure whether Arnold Friedman is a monstrous child molester or the victim of railroading. The portrait of a disconnected family is deeply disturbing,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Arnold Friedman (II) - Elaine Friedman - David Friedman (IX) - Jesse Friedman (II) Director(s): Andrew Jarecki DVD Release Date: Released the 27 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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