I wish I'd taken the

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I wish I'd taken the time today to write something longer about the coolest and classiest DVD out there right now...one of the most disturbing, penetrating, transcendent art films ever made: Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse, which the Criterion Collection has just brought out on a special double-disc edition. I'm not an Antonioni scholar (I've never even seen La Notte), but this 1962 film -- the conclusion of his Italian alienation-and-desire trilogy -- is flat-out masterful. The genius element? There's no story whatsoever. It's purely a meditation about indifference, drifting, emptiness, ennui. I have never felt such a profound sense of nothingness -- such an immaculate, beautifully composed void -- from any other film, ever. L'eclisse is nominally about Vittoria (Monica Vitti)breaking up with her brooding novelist boyfriend (Francisco Rabal) and drifting into a new relationship with an attractive stock trader (Alain Delon). The film's seven-minute finale -- a succession of locations where Vitti and Delon have met and shared whatever during their brief affair -- is justifiably famous. On the second disc there's an excellent 60-minute documentary called "Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema."