Salon.com > The White Ribbon

DVDs you should have seen — but didn’t

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Let me save you some time, along with wear and tear on those e-mailin' fingers. Yes, the title of this sporadic feature is obnoxious, and the DVDs reviewed are (in some but not all cases) almost willfully obscure. That's pretty much the point! I mean, look: "Kick-Ass" is out on DVD too. But let's think about that for a second: You don't care what I think about that movie, and neither do I. Are we clear?

I've neglected this franchise for so long that I had to winnow down insanely to get to an initial list of 25 or 30, and then just pick the final 10 (actually 11) by pure whim and/or recent release date. I could do an entirely different list of DVDs released before May, not to mention the veritable gold mine that lies ahead of us in August. I could have done a list that read even more like an infomercial for the Criterion Collection than this one does. So ritual apologies to the publicists who torment my mail carrier, and we'll get to some more discs soon.

“Ajami”: Israel’s gritty answer to “Crash”

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

I'm afraid it sounds like damning with faint praise to compare the Israeli Oscar-nominated film "Ajami" to Paul Haggis' "Crash," but, honestly, it's just a frame of reference. (Fernando Meirelles' "City of God" will do almost as well.) "Ajami" is almost entirely free of the coruscating sentimentality and absurd coincidence that defined Haggis' Oscar sweeper, and its intimate vision of lives lived on both sides of the Arab-Jewish dividing line is sympathetic but overwhelmingly tragic. Set mainly in the eponymous neighborhood of Jaffa, the largely Arab town just south of Tel Aviv, "Ajami" uses its episodic structure, overlapping chronologies and large ensemble cast to depict interlocking communities that live in close physical proximity yet remain alien to each other and trapped in a cycle of pointless, bitter violence.

Oscar overload — with six weeks to go!

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:20:00 +0000

I'm not going to write about the Oscars. I refuse to do it. It's all too much. Seven full weeks before the Academy Awards and the New York Times dedicates an entire section to the Oscars (in an attempt to attract additional ad revenues). How will they ever top that? What's going to happen on the day of the Oscars? Will its news section be festooned with nothing but Oscar coverage? And why even muse about the telecast, since the best choice as host, Ricky Gervais, is emceeing the Golden Globes this weekend instead?

And why aren't any pundits (well, hardly any) bemoaning the fact that the year's most riveting and satisfying acting discovery, Catalina Saavedra of "The Maid," doesn't stand a ghost of a chance of being nominated for a best-actress Oscar? ("The Maid" is, ironically, nominated for a Golden Globe. It doesn't even qualify for the foreign-language Oscar. And the Golden Globes are less significant than the Oscars why, exactly?)