edited by Jonathan Doyle

Mafioso (The Criterion Collection, 3.18.2008) Nino Badalamenti is a supervisor in a car manufacturing plant who hasn't taken a vacation in over two years. On his way out the door to visit his beloved childhood hometown of Sicily -- with his blonde wife and daughters -- Nino is handed a package by his boss and asked to deliver it to a powerful and influential Sicilian gangster named Don Vincenzo. Once in Sicily, Nino has a hoot seeing friends and family, but his wife has trouble fitting in and is unfairly dismissed as a snob by Nino's family. Even more worrisome, Nino finds himself entangled in an intricate web of secret mafioso dealings and is eventually sent on an unexpectedly... elaborate errand. (continued)

Upcoming

July 2

Hancock

July 3

The Whackness

July 4

Diminished Capacity

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

Holding Trevor

Kabluey

We are Together

July 9

Full Battle Rattle

July 11

A Man Named Pearl

August

Eight Miles High

Garden Party

Harold

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Meet Dave

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

The Stone Angel

July 18

A Very British Gangster

Before I Forget

The Dark Knight

The Doorman

Felon

Lou Reed's Berlin

Transsiberian

July 22

Two Tickets to Paradise

July 23

Boy A

I failed to mention in

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I failed to mention in an earlier riff about Warner Home Video's All The President's Men double-disc special edition DVD that it contains three brilliant mini-documentaries by Los Angeles-based documentarian Gary Leva, and that two of these are especially valuable and noteworthy because they're serious looks at the state of U.S. journalism today rather than typical celebrate-the-movie puff pieces. They're basically about how journalism has gone downhill since the days of Watergate and, by implication, how attempts to muscle journalists under the Bush administration are just as bad if not worse today than they were under the Nixon administration in the early '70s. "Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire," which runs 18 minutes, is an indictment of the current chicken-hearted state of corporate- controlled journalism, which a complacent public doesn't seem to care very much about. The scariest remark comes from Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter, saying that if Watergate were to happen today the story probably would have never come out. The second doc, "Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat," starts as a look at Mark Felt, the #2 FBI guy back then who was revealed last year as "Deep Throat. But it gradually shifts into an examination of the importance of unnamed sources, and how most news stories would just be press releases and pablum without them. Peter Schweizer (author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty") laments that Felt never tried to fix the corruption from within. Alter calls this notion a "preposterous canard," explaining that "we simply can't do our jobs without anyonymous sources... people will often not tell the truth if they have to be on the record." Here's an excerpt from the doc's final moments. The talking heads appearing on both docs include Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Ben Bradley, Linda Ellberbee, Walter Cronkite, Oliver Stone, William Goldman and Oliver Stone. I spoke to Leva this afternoon about the unusually political and hard-hitting nature of these docs, and he said "it's always a lot more interesting looking at the issues raised by a film in a broader context...rather than simply in light of the physical production of the film." Leva says that apart from these docs, the piece he's proudest of is one about '70s filmmakers called "A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope." It can be found on the THX 1138: The George Lucas Directors Cut two-disc DVD that came out in September 2004.

Here's a gripping piece by<< previous | next >>Guy goes to see The

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on February 28, 2006 at 02:57 PM

comment #1