Notable new releases
CSNY/DÉJÀ VU (Maple) + THE LAST POGO (Independent) The age-old conflict of punks vs hippies will be stoked once again as these two music docs hit the shelves. This contest goes to the longhairs in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young for having the career-imperiling cojones to surprise nostalgic boomer fans with the anti-war and anti-Bush invective of Neil’s Living With War album during a 2006 tour. Directing the film under his nom de camera Bernard Shakey, Young obviously enjoyed the opportunity to piss off CSNY’s red-state constituency. At stake is the larger issue of how expressions of dissent are made, received and disseminated in today’s America. Young’s middle-finger salute rates as one of the ballsiest moves in his infamously rancorous career.
The audience also gets good and angry at the Horseshoe Tavern in The Last Pogo, Colin Brunton’s appropriately rough-hewn 27-minute film about the club’s last night as a punk venue in 1978. Too bad there isn’t more archival footage on this long-awaited DVD edition — it’s augmented only by a TV performance by VU revivalists The Scenics and a commentary by The Secrets’ Chris Haight that would be more useful if he remembered anything at all about the evening in question. Oh, well — that’s Hogtown rock ’n’ roll for ya.
The Mother of Tears (Alliance) The lurid and gruesome murder scenes in this belated follow-up to Suspiria and Inferno prove that Dario Argento’s imagination is as diseased as ever. But what we were really waiting all our lives to see was Dario’s daughter Asia getting menaced by an angry monkey. The abundance of naked goth chicks is surely the cherry on top of some sleazebag’s sundae. EXTRAS: interview, making-of featurette.
Also this week
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount) Spielberg and Lucas reached a collective new low when Indy dodged nuclear obliteration by diving into that fridge. The least they could have done after that was toss Shia LaBeouf into a volcano. EXTRAS: hours of featurettes, production diary, promotional material.
Standard Operating Procedure (Sony) Errol Morris looks beyond the edges of the frames of the new century’s most notorious photographs in his steely if excessively stylized look at the Abu Ghraib abuses. EXTRAS: additional scenes, filmmaker commentary.
The New World: Extended Cut (Alliance) Terrence Malick’s languorous and rapturous take on the Pocahontas story resurfaces in a 172-minute version, which is considerably longer than both the theatrical cut and the incarnation that was briefly released at the end of 2005. EXTRAS: making-of documentary.
MONGOL (Alliance) Genghis Khan? You know he khan. EXTRAS: none.
Out Oct 21
The Incredible Hulk, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the complete series of Starlost and Anaconda 3: The Offspring, starring David Hasselhoff, John Rhys-Davies and the best movie extras Romania has to offer!