Amateur
Night At City Hall: The Story Of Frank L. Rizzo
(1977/Mugge/MVD Visual DVD)/Art
House (2015/First
Run DVD)/Drunk
Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story Of The National Lampoon
(2015/Magnolia Blu-ray)/Elstree
1976
(2016/MVD Visual DVD)/Making
Rounds (2015/First
Run DVD)/Steve
Jobs: The Man In The Machine
(2015/Magnolia
DVD)
Picture:
C+/C/B/C+/C+/C+ Sound: C+/C+/B/C+/C+/C+ Extras: D/C-/B/D/C-/C
Films: B/C+/B/B/B/B-
Here's
a really strong set of new documentary releases....
Robert
Mugge's Amateur
Night At City Hall: The Story Of Frank L. Rizzo
(1977) is another gem from the Mugge catalog as he goes to
Philadelphia where semi-inexperienced, beloved by many, loathed by
some and highly unusual Frank L. Rizzo becomes Police Commissioner
and then Mayor of the 4th
largest U.S. city and one of the greatest worldwide. This great mix
of interviews (including Andrea Mitchell early in her career handling
herself very well) deals with racism, sexism and the reactionary wave
happening against the later years of the counterculture in constantly
revealing footage more than worth revisiting.
More
raw than what you usually could or would see on TV at the time, this
is so long overdue for rediscovery that arriving as the 2016
Presidential campaign becomes a fiasco is only a plus for this fine
work. Needless to say the late mayor had issues, but at least he was
consistent and it is interesting the kinds of support he actually
got. Now, he also looks unwittingly like a test case for the Reagan
Era.
There
are sadly no extras.
Don
Freeman's Art
House (2015)
may have been the work I liked least here, but that is because 87
minutes is not long enough to cover all the architects thoroughly
enough the program features, so you get a good crash course of their
work through the years, but maybe it is biting off a bit more than in
chew. However, this First Run DVD release is showing off the very
homes of all these creative people. I just thought more exposition
and analysis was needed. The structures are always interesting, even
if you might like some more than others.
Text
artist & filmmaker bios, plus a Photo Gallery are the only
extras, but if ever a release needed more like a featurette or two or
an audio commentary track, this would have been the release to do it
on. Interesting just the same, though.
Douglas
Tirola's Drunk
Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story Of The National Lampoon
tells the tale of the rise, rise, rise, eventual political targeting
and fall of the bold, daring, innovative and often hilarious print
magazine that is now an overused commercial property on some really
bad comedy movies that usually (thankfully) go straight to video. It
did not start that way and this solid documentary traces the roots
and forerunners of the magazine, its brand of comedy, how the
magazine became a huge success and how this eventually led to success
in all kinds of other media.
It
is also a tale of excess, mismanagement, a little betrayal, the
counterculture at its best and a group of rising comedians who became
legends. NBC asked the magazine if they wanted to do a late night TV
comedy skit show, to which they said no. Not having signed any of
the talent they were working with on other projects to their magazine
and related projects, that flight of talent landed up becoming the
original seasons of Saturday
Night Live!
That
is among the many great stories we get in the loaded 95 minutes that
could have gone on longer (as the extras show) and results in a
long-overdue chronicle of one of the greatest moments of comedy ever.
See it!!!
Extras
include Additional Interview Footage, John Goodman Reads Doug Kenney,
Thoughts on Animal
House,
Drugs in the Office, the story of Jaws
3 People 0,
Working in NYC, Thoughts on ''SNL'', Favorite National Lampoon
Pieces, Reading John Hughes - Beverly D'Angelo, Kevin Bacon, Stephen
Furst, Anthony Michael Hall & Chevy Chase, Artists in National
Lampoon and Chevy Chase Pot Seeds Story.
If
you love films, especially those made in the U.K., you know how great
the Elstree Studios are and a place where so many classic were made.
Jon
Spira's Elstree
1976
(2016) focuses on one particular production and the mostly-unknown
people who made the film... George Lucas' original, only, 1977 Star
Wars.
This
starts with a montage of action figures as off-camera, we hear each
person talk about how they were immortalized. Then we start seeing
them talk on camera, more and more is slowly revealed and we get rare
insight into the film, the industry that made it, the time and how
something so simple becomes something so special. With no extras and
only so much time, there are stories we do not hear, parts of
Bullock's other work (like being in a few James Bond films) we don;t
hear about and questions that do not get asked, but this is very well
done and you will be very entertained if you check this one out,
guaranteed.
There
are very sadly no extras.
Muffie
Meyer's Making
Rounds
(2015)
is another big surprise in an era where healthcare for all being
rolled back since the 1980s (thanks in part to HMOs) of doctors who
have the vital, priceless approach of actually 'talking to their
patients' instead of just basing what they do on educated formulas,
resulting in much healthier people taken care of at much lower
expenses financially and personally. Leading the charge against
misdiagnosis are Dr. Herschel Sklaroff and Dr. Valetin Fuster,
leading cardiologists at Mount Sinai Hospital. The never-long-enough
88 minutes is a testimony to the talents of real medical
professionals and now more than ever, this should be required viewing
for just about everyone. Amazing!
A
trailer gallery is the only extra, but this deserves more too.
Alex
Gibney's Steve
Jobs: The Man In The Machine
(2015)
has
the exceptional documentary filmmaker tacking the life, career and
fandom around a technical innovator whose career saw some of the
greatest ups and downs ever. Lost too soon to a cancer he tried
erroneously to get rid of with lesser-proven methods, we start with
his sad death, the fans of his products holding eulogies
internationally and Gibney asking why so much loyalty to a man they
hardly knew?
He
then slowly reels out that he was not a man always on the up and up
financially, as well as not always treating people around him well,
as if he was a loner at war with the world. Should such a man be
respected, revered, loved or remembered? Yes is my answer because he
stuck to making products that would have been generic, stale and
impersonal easy to connect with way even his richest and most
talented rivals, frienemies, enemies and friends could not. He did
care enough to think these things through and that helped his
customer connect to things in a more human way if his ways seemed the
opposite of that a little more often than one might like to think.
Gibney
never answers his questions to rightly make the audience/viewer
think, along with the always key point of asking if people with so
much money and power have inarguable responsibilities to people, the
environment and the world around them. Ironically, though Gibney may
disagree, Jobs did have that responsibility where it counted to his
customers, not treating them just as disposable consumers in a way
that has been especially prominent since the early 1980s.
Sure,
he had problems and that's fine, plus I am not being an apologist,
but Gibney rightly adds if he accomplished all this with his landmark
work, imagine if he could have paralleled this more in his personal
and other business life. Definitely catch this one.
Extras
include an on-camera interview with Director Gibney, an
Original Theatrical Trailer and Deleted Scenes.
The
1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Lampoon
can show the age of the older materials used as expected, but even
with those limits (older analog
videotape flaws include video noise, video banding, tape scratching,
cross color, faded color and tape damage),
it is easily the best playback performer on the list as expected.
City
is here in a 1.33 X 1 transfer in the middle of a 16 X 9 frame and is
anamorphically enhanced, off of the 16mm footage as originally shot
(likely on Kodak film) and looks pretty good, enough to compete with
the newer
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on the rest of the DVDs. Too
bad House
is a bit weaker than the rest and the visual dud on the list.
As
for sound, Lampoon
wins again with a DTS-HD
MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix, even when so much of the older
audio is
monophonic. Background music is also decent. The DVDs are all on
par with each other, sharing second place including lossy Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono on City,
lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Jobs
and lossy
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on the rest of the releases.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
