A little bit of music

This weekend we have a handful of reviews before our large Thursday upload.

- the superb, ebullient Berlin concert with the Oscar Peterson Trio, videotaped in 1985, and released by MVD Visual with a nice stereo & Dolby + DTS 5.1 remixes

- the latest volume in Quantum Leap/MVD Visual’s Live in Vienna series, with a 2005 concert featuring musicians Arni Egilsson, Niels-Henning Oersted Pedersen, Wayne Darling, John Hollenbeck, and Fritz Pauer

- a capsule review of Fantoma’s Hercules in the Haunted World DVD, which continues our archive of Mario Bava titles before Anchor Bay’s upcoming 6-disc box set April 3rd

- and a review of Armando Trovajoli’s moody score for Hercules in the Haunted World, released on CD by DigitMovies of Italy, in Vol. 5 of their Mario Bava Anthology series

Coming Thursday: an in-depth interview with writer/director Dante Tomaselli, in which he talks about his career as a successful independent filmmaker before production begins on his latest film, The Ocean.


- MRH


Technorati Tags: DVD Reviews

A month of history

This one’s quick, simple, and a fast tally of what’s been uploaded this week, as we’re finishing up on more stuff for a weekend upload:

- a capsule review of Clint Eastwood’s flawed but worthwhile Flags of Our Fathers, which examines the truths and factual tweaking done by the military to use a lucky photograph as an iconic image to motivate a nation’s support of its troops in Iwo Jima.

- The U.S. vs John Lennon, which makes for a more broad chronicle of how radicals and political activists were being targeted by the FBI and Nixon administration during the late sixties & early seventies. Though John Lennon is the key focus, this extraordinary documentary from Maple/Lions Gate is loaded with great interviews from the left, middle and right corners, and comes with an excellent archive of unused interview material. The perfect cousin to the previously mentioned (see prior blog) Black Panther archive, What We Want, What We Believe.

- U2 Achtung Baby – A Classic Album Under Review. Produced by Sexy Intellectual and distributed in the U.S. by MVD, this is another fact-packed profile of a classic rock album. The Under Review series has also done band profiles, including the early years of Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones

Also new are interviews with directors Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky, who’ve chosen to create their own distribution label and are releasing their first two films, the docu-dramas Half-Cocked (1994) and Radiation (1998); and a detailed interview with Jeff Grace. Having worked with Howard Shore on the Lord of the Rings films and expanded video editions, Grace scored a trio of horror films in 2006 (The Roost, Joshua, and Larry Fessenden's Last Winter), and we discuss some of his creative wizardry in crafting chilling music, and exploiting the skills of amazing musicians, like the Flux Quartet.


- MRH


Technorati Tags: DVD Reviews