Film and Television
COMEDY DRAMA SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY DOCUMENTARIES 
 | Fawlty Towers: the complete series Monty Python's John Cleese as the neurotic Basil Fawlty, the brilliantly incompetent and agonizingly offensive owner of a struggling resort hotel on the English coast. Each half-hour episode escalates into pure madness. Buy this DVD |
 | Ed Wood Ed Wood was arguably the worst Hollywood director in history, but his cult classics like "Plan Nine from Outer Space" are cherished for the sheer bravado of their incompetence. Incredibly, this loving tribute by director Tim Burton is pure biography: nothing is exaggerated. Martin Landau's Oscar-winning performance as the elderly Bela Lugosi—cast by Wood for the last role of his career—gives the film the quality of a serious character study as well as an over-the-top spoof of Hollywood's demimonde. Johnny Depp plays the clueless director whose ambitions exceed his talent by several light-years: he embodies the invincibly cheerful optimism of the Dale Carnegie generation, but his secret (and the film's) is that he succeeds, like an affable cult leader, in surrounding himself with a cast of co-dependent weirdos drawn from Hollywood's various subcultures who protect his faith in his own star. Buy this DVD |
 | Coming Out The first and only film on a gay theme produced in East Germany, its opening night would have been a sensation—except that a few blocks away, East Germans were streaming into West Berlin for the first time. Bad timing. But this highly-praised drama is a remarkable document of a young man's experience owning up to his sexuality in a society where the subject was still taboo. The movie also serves as a rare visual record of what East Berlin and East Berliners looked like—just before everything changed. Buy this DVD |
 | DEFA Sci Fi Collection One of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War was East Germany's state film company, DEFA. Occupying the Babelsberg campus of the famous UFA studio (which launched the careers of Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Marlene Dietrich), its directors and actors were among the best in Europe. The three science fiction films in this collection, according to Dave Kehr of the New York Times, range from "relative sobriety" to "screaming camp." DEFA "continued the UFA tradition of meticulous craftsmanship," Kehr wrote. "Some effects shots suggest the matte images created for Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' (1926), and may well have been created by some of the same staff technicians, working for new masters 34 years later." Buy this DVD |
 | Night and Fog Alain Resnais' documentary, filmed just ten years after the end of World War II, was the first to expose the full extent of the Holocaust at a time when, as now, some denied the mass murder of European Jews ever happened. Resnais' style and treatment of the subject influenced almost every Holocaust film that followed: from "Judgment at Nuremburg" to "Shoah" and "Schindler's List." This DVD includes a video essay on composer Hanns Eisler. Buy this DVD |
posted by Andy Lang @ 10:11 AM
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