DVDs, 6/30.

By David Hudson on 06/30/2009

"Seemingly nonchalant, impeccably crafted, borderline delirious, 'My Dinner with André' is the result of an inspired collaboration among its actor-writers, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, and its director, Louis Malle," writes Amy Taubin in Criterion's Current. "In the nearly three decades since its 1981 debut, this tiny independent movie has inspired myriad prose pieces and a slew of witticisms that riff on its title. Nothing, however, captures its eccentricity and perhaps the reason for its effect on viewers as neatly as this line from Vincent Canby's New York Times review: 'At times,' Canby wrote, '"My Dinner with André" suggests a reunion of Christopher Robin (Mr Gregory) and Winnie-the-Pooh (Mr Shawn) thirty years after each has left the nursery to pursue separate careers in the theater." And, indeed, the film evokes the exalted space of childhood friendship, where confidences are exchanged and imaginations run wild without fear of judgment."

"A decade ago, Cinemad was one of a small handful of publications chronicling new directions in visionary filmmaking - defined in the broadest sense by that staple-bound Xerox zine as anything on the fringes of independent cinema that struck the fancy of intrepid editor and writer Mike Plante," writes Ed Halter for Artforum. "Now Plante has released what one hopes to be the first in a series of DVD compilations, Cinemad: Almanac 2009."

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr's selected two titles this week whose back stories appear to be more intriguing than the end products. "The Strange One" features not only Ben Gazzara's feature debut but also "broad insinuations of homosexuality, at a time when any mention of the subject was forbidden by the Production Code" as well as "allegorical indictment of fascism." Then there's what might be called Hal Ashby's director's cut of "Lookin' to Get Out," discovered by Nick Dawson in the course of his research for Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel": "[W]hile it would be nice to report that a lost masterpiece has been reclaimed, it would be more accurate to say that this mildly enjoyable, frequently cloying comedy now moves at a leisurely pace that is slightly more conducive to its charms."

More on that one from Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times: "The obvious reason for its failure, as Dawson points out, is that the movie, a shaggy-dog farce with an unsympathetic, even pathetic protagonist, was conspicuously 'out of line with the popular cinema of the 1980s.' Even then, it must have seemed like a throwback. There are shades of Robert Altman's 1974 gambling buddy-movie 'California Split.' The pseudo-improvised macho theatrics, especially on [Jon] Voight's part, often suggest a lesser John Cassavetes film."

"The movie is fascinating, and undeniably entertaining from an archival point of view, but even for an offbeat director like Ashby it's a monotonously perplexing comedy," finds Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant.

"One of the lesser-known entries in the screwball cycle of the 1930s is not only arguably one of the best," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine, "but until recently also one of the most elusive. Warner Archive has solved that problem by giving 'It's Love I'm After' (1937) its first-ever home video release."

Michael Atkinson on "Last Year at Marienbad": "Famous as the über-art film openly mocked by Pauline Kael and the authors of 'The Fifty Worst Films of All Time,' Resnais's saturnine masterpiece remains exactly the film experience it was originally intended to be: a dream inside a puzzle inside a story that never actually takes place. Is there a better, more eloquent way to define movies?" More from Josef Braun, and earlier, last week's reviews. Also reviewed here at IFC: Amat Escalante's "Los Bastardos" is "a work of gripping concision, malevolent patience and queasy mystery."

"It's easy to see 'Killer of Sheep' as a social tract, a cinematic essay on the boredom and hopelessness of black families in crumbling, industrial 1970s Watts - a bit too easy." Colin Marshall at 3quarksdaily. "Though [Charles] Burnett's best-known film - and for 30 of the last 32 years, a seldom-seen one - provides a window of unparalleled clarity and style into its time and place, to read it as an elaborate argument about the entrapment of the urban black working class is to choose the most convenient but least interesting interpretation."

Glenn Kenny's "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" for The Auteurs' Notebook is "Lucky Luciano": "[T]he iconography of [Francesco] Rosi's film is squarely ensconced in the violent gangster exploitation ethos ushered in by 'The Godfather's' success." But there's a nifty, most likely "entirely deliberate 'gaffe'" here, too.

"'The Life and Death of King Richard III' is the oldest surviving American feature film (that is, a film longer than four reels)," notes Chris Edwards. It's "about spectacle, and its frames are filled with soldiers and nobles and horses bedecked in armaments and elaborate fashions. But the actor and the film have different goals, and they make 'Richard III' an uneven thing to watch."

Jonathan Rosenbaum runs his 2004 piece on Nicholas Ray's "Bitter Victory."

"All artists and actors want an audience for their work," writes Thomas Britt at PopMatters, "but Howard Johnson's 'Black Hollywood: Blaxploitation and Advancing an Independent Black Cinema' questions whether the available jobs are worth having at all. What is the value of being 'seen' if one has to sacrifice his/her spirit?"

Online viewing tip. The NYT's AO Scott on "Jaws." Steven Spielberg "can tell stories in moving pictures better than just about anyone."

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker, DVD Talk, Guru, Mark Kermode (Observer), Noel Murray (LAT), PopMatters, Slant and Michael Tully (Hammer to Nail).

[Photo: "My Dinner with André," Criterion Collection, 1981]

Tags: Alain Resnais, Andre Gregory, Ben Gazzara, Cinemad, Hal Ashby, Jon Voight, Louis Malle, Mike Plante, Nicholas Ray, Wallace Shawn