(Late) March, 2009

Auteur House customers,
Let us all agree not to mention how late this overview of March acquisitions is.  It can be a secret between us.

New Releases

A favourite at last year’s International Film Festival programme “Persepolis” has become one of our strongest rental items.  An animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical novel its coming of age tale is set against the backdrop of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Satrapi’s and her family’s initial joy at the fall of the Shah turns to dismay as the fundamentalist regime exerts its authority, leading to her self imposed exile in Vienna, and later France.  “Persepolis” breaks new ground in the use of animation to depict both the personal and the political, shedding light on recent historical events that few if any live action films have dealt with.

Also hailing from the Middle East is “The Band’s Visit”.  A charming comedy about an Egyptian brass band stranded in a small Israeli town, its humanist take on religious and geographic tensions in the region is refreshingly low key.

Another certain crowd pleaser is “Irina Palm”, a perfect vehicle for one time Rolling Stone concubine, ’60s flower power girl and sometime songstress Marianne Faithfull.  Mick Jagger’s former squeeze plays a retiring grandmother forced to extreme lengths to raise cash and potentially save her terminally ill grandson.

Considerably harder edged is “Mother of Tears”, the latest from Italian horror maestro Dario Argento.  Supposedly the concluding film in a trilogy that stretches back as far as the 1977 classic “Suspiria”, “Mother of Tears” stars Argento’s pouty daughter Asia as Sarah Mandy, an archaeologist who crosses paths with a coven of witches.  As ever Argento divides both critics and his fans.

A perhaps surer bet is “Concrete Romance”, a mafia thriller from an emerging Italian director, Marco Martani.  The story concerns a clash of wills between a small scale thug looking to establish a reputation and a gangster sensitive to social slights, whether they be real or imagined.

Madonna’s ex-husband also has another of his trade mark British gangster films out.  Not Guy Ritchie’s freshest work, “RockNRolla” at least offers up Thandie Newton as eye candy.  A review can be found below:

http://auteurhouse.com/blog/2009/03/12/rocknrolla-2008/

Somewhat more successful is the latest James Bond film “Quantum of Solace”, an unusually close followup to its predecessor, “Casino Royale”.  It has strengths and weakness as I note elsewhere:

http://auteurhouse.com/blog/2008/12/15/quantum-of-solace-2008/

Equally mainstream, the action film “Taken” stars a still muscular Liam Neeson as a retired hard man forced back into the game when his daughter is kidnapped.  Vengeance is likely to be sweet.

A much more contemplative examination of violence and its causes is to be found in “Shotgun Stories”.  The tale of two families linked by a common father and not much else, it gives new meaning to term blood feud.

Two final picks rank amongst the month’s better releases.  “The Visitor” is made by Thomas McCarthy, the writer/director of “The Station Agent”, and mines similar dramatic territory.  Richard Jenkins, a veteran actor best known for his work on the small screen’s “Six Feet Under” (which we also stock), was Oscar nominated for his role as a lonely university lecturer who makes an unlikely connection with a couple of squatters.

“Young @ Heart” is a crowd pleasing documentary in the best sense of the term.  It follows the bitter sweet fortunes of a most unusual choir group, one made up exclusively of folk in their seventies, eighties and nineties.  Rather than sing material contemporary to their age the Young@Hearters cover punk anthems, Jimi Hendrix, Cold Play and many others, giving each a reinterpretation untainted by knowledge of the original recordings.

New to DVD

As always our New to DVD shelf features an eclectic combination of cult items, established classics and challenging contemporary material.  Distinctly in the first category is “Baby Snakes”, the second feature  directed by musical iconoclast Frank Zappa.  Combining footage from his band’s 1977 Halloween concert at New York’s Palladium Theatre with their antics backstage and, unusually, stop motion clay animation from Bruce Bickford, Zappa’s film does its level best to live up to its explanatory subtitle: “A Movie About People Who Do Stuff That is Not Normal”.

Marginally more recent is an excellent Violent Femmes DVD, “Permanent Record: Live and Otherwise”.  It features an extended live set, dating from 1991, as well as collection of seven music videos and a historic street performance of the show stopper “Kiss Off”.

More recent still is “About a Son”, a documentary about Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain which uses twenty five hours of previously unheard interviews to give a unique insight into the grunge superstar.

Our own Howard Morrison could not be more different from Cobain if he tried.  “To Sir With Love: A Tribute to Sir Howard Morrison” is a recording of a 2008 concert in his honour.  The gathering together of several generations of musicians results in some inconsistencies - the less said about the godawful Spacifix the better - but the undoubted highlight is the last ever performance by the Howard Morrison Quartet.  The late Gerry Merito is outstanding both within the group and later dueting with personable host Pio Terei.

Another local offering is “The Big Picture”, Hamish Keith’s six part television documentary which surveys the history of New Zealand art.  It is directed by ex-Wintec lecturer Paul Swadel.

“Patrick” is a cult Australian horror about a comatose murderer with strange psychic powers directed by Hitchcock enthusiast and sometime friend Richard Franklin, a man who later in his sadly short career made “Psycho II”.

New British cinema and television to store ranges from Karel Reisz’s ground breaking ‘angry young man’ film, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”, which, amongst other things, made the young Albert Finney a star, to the first volume of the second series of the 1980s programme “Auf Wiedersehen Pet”.  In between we have the freshly remastered version of “Quadrophenia”, an imaginative narrative interpretation of The Who album of the same name name,  and the mid-80s Merchant Ivory film of Henry James’ “The Bostonians” featuring a great performance by Vanessa Redgrave and an underrated one by the late Christopher Reeve.

The French New Wave is represented by Claude Chabrol’s  first feature, 1958’s “Le Beau Serge”, as well as a late 1960s Catherine Deneuve vehicle, the erotic thriller “La Chamade”.  “The Story of My Life” is a more contemporary French romantic comedy.

Finland gets a look in with a box set which collects all entries in Aki Kaurismaki’s Leningrad Cowboys series.  Deadpan, like all his work, these films are Scandinavia’s answer to “This is Spinal Tap”, tracing the professional development of a talent challenged Finnish rock n roll band.  “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” dates from 1989 and is succinctly described thus on the slick: “…the Cowboy’s venture to the U.S. after their promoter advises, ‘Go to America.  They’ll swallow any shit there”.

A contender for best recent acquisition at Auteur House is Theo Angelopoulos’ “Eternity and a Day”, which some rank amongst the best films of all time.  Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival it dramatises the last days in the life of celebrated Greek author.  With a running time of 132 minutes it is one of Angelopoluos’ shorter efforts.

Also of gargantuan length is the unedited, supremely smutty 20th anniversary edition of “Caligula”.  Notorious for the underhand manner in which the Penthouse producer Bob Guccione shot and inserted hardcore sequences without the knowledge or approval of director Tinto Brass it has the distinction of having the best lit sapphic 69 of all time.  It is not one for the children.

Easily shading the carnal excesses of Bob and Tinto is another of Douglas Sirk’s 1950’s melodramatic masterpieces.  “There’s Always Tomorrow” reunites Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck ten years after “Double Indemnity”, examining the middle class life style like only Sirk could.  MacMurray plays a toy maker tycoon frustrated that neither his wife (Joan Bennett) nor his children bother to make time for him.  When he is reunited with Stanwyck, a former employee who has secretly been in love with him for years, the cracks in the marriage open up.  Things play out like an American version of “Brief Encounter”.