At TMV we try to do some DVD reviews ourselves, but due lack of time we don’t do it as often as we would like. Luckily there are other people who do write and publish reviews. Take a look at the following reviews by Dan Schneider:
In 2004 HBO Films decided to try their hand at the polemical subject of race in New York. Usually, this results in ill wrought PC crap like Spike Lee’s 1989 fantasy, Do The Right Thing. Instead, they crafted an improvisational workshop concoction called Everyday People, about the closing of a fictive Jewish deli and restaurant called Raskin’s in the heart of Brooklyn. And, the truth is, it’s not a bad film. Is it great? No. Is it in a league with such classic New York films as Manhattan or My Dinner With Andre? No. But it is Do The Right Thing admixed with last year’s Oscar winner, Crash; except that it’s better written. Yes, it is a film filled with vignettes, and some don’t work, but about three quarters of them work well enough for me to recommend the film.
In order to be a good critic one has to rise above one’s personal biases. Period. If one cannot get past hating love stories or action films, then one should not practice the craft, because there are good films that are mere love stories or action films. It is the excellence of the film, and how it achieves its excellence, that is more important than what sort of a film it is. This basic lack of understanding how to separate one’s likes from the objective ability of art to effectively communicate, is why most critics fail in their task. On a related plane is the inability of many critics to distinguish between when a film is something, and when it is merely about something. A good example of this is the 2001 independent film by actor/director Frank Whaley, called The Jimmy Show (nothing at all like the Jim Carrey vehicle, The Truman Show); his second directorial effort after 1999’s lauded Sundance Festival film Joe The King. It is a very good, albeit not great, film about the depressing life of a working class loser. Yet, the film itself is never depressing, despite its being damned to obscurity by critics for that very fact. Again, the point is that film critics claimed something about the film that is about what the film portrays, not how it portrays it…
The best way to understand director Federico Fellini’s audacious 1968 film Satyricon (also known as Fellini Satyricon, because 1967 saw the release of Satyricon by fellow Italian filmmaker Gian Luigi Polidoro) is within the context of its year of release. That pivotal year saw the release of such indelible film classics as The Graduate, Planet of the Apes, Night Of The Living Dead, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Satyricon is very much in league with all of those films. It is even more sexually daring than The Graduate (especially homosexually), as politically subversive as Planet Of The Apes, as relentless as Night Of The Living Dead, and as far out as 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would also add that it is as symbolic as that landmark of television from the U.K., The Prisoner. But, is it a great film? I’d say no, although it is a very intriguing film, and not nearly as bad a film as its worst critics claim. That said, it is not the cinematic masterpiece its boosters claim, even if it had undoubted influence on such later films as Bob Guccione’s sadomasochistic Caligula.
The Double Life Of Véronique
:
The Double Life Of Véronique (La Double Vie De Véronique) is the 1991 French-Polish film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, written by himself and Krzysztof Piesiewicz that was the presage for the greatness of the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), and was an international sensation at both the Cannes and New York film festivals, for here is where the gilt-hazed camera work of Slawomir Idziak, the music of Zbigniew Preisner (although slyly credited to the fictional Van den Budenmayer in the film- a running joke within Kieslowski’s later works), and Kieslowski’s own vision first touched greatness- even if it is a conditional greatness, more of sensuality than sense. The film has been rhapsodized by international film critics as Kieslowski’s ‘coming out’ film, but one can see it is clearly a bridge between the direction he was headed with his tv series The Decalogue, and where he ended up in the Trilogy.
Go check them out.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.