| Classics on DVD |
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| Written by Kevin Filipski | |
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Page 4 of 4  Saturday Night Live–Season 3 (Universal)SNL has been so bad for so long that it’s tough to imagine when it was actually good, week in and week out. This Third Season set will alleviate that problem—such immortal characters as the Wild & Crazy Guys and the Blues Brothers made their first of many appearances. Add to this the hilarious commercial spoofs, the true chemistry among these cast members, and several ace musical performances (i.e., Jackson Browne playing “Running on Empty,” Elvis Costello’s incendiary version of “Radio Radio”), and you have another invaluable SNL DVD set. The lone quibble: what’s taking so long to release these sets? EXTRAS: Things We Did Last Summer featurette; wardrobe tests with Belushi and Howard Shore.  Serial Mom (Universal)John Waters’ gleeful black comedy concerns a mild-mannered suburban housewife’s enchant for killing neighbors and others who get in her way. Being a Waters movie, of course, there’s a general air of silliness hanging over it, but Serial Mom escapes the usual John Waters dustbin by a versatile cast (Sam Waterston, Ricki Lake, Patty Hearst) that’s led by Kathleen Turner, who gives the kind of performance that her gifts for physical comedy in early films like The Man with Two Brains only hinted at. Hollywood has misused an actress who could have become our greatest madcap comedienne since Lucille Ball. EXTRAS: Waters and Turner commentary; retrospective interviews and featurettes.  Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Voiceprint)Polish composer Henryk Gorecki wrote his surprise hit Third Symphony in 1976, but it wasn’t until a 1992 recording with soprano Dawn Upshaw that it really took off. Tony Palmer’s film includes excerpts from an interview with Gorecki, who candidly discusses the genesis of his magnum opus, which have been edited into a filmed performance by Upshaw, conductor David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta. It’s too bad Palmer stoops to heart-tugging shots of starving children to parallel the emaciated figures in Nazi concentration camps (the original idea behind Gorecki’s work): this heartfelt symphony can emote on its own with no further prodding.  Thief of Baghdad (Criterion)Producer Alexander Korda’s ultimate fantasy is, by modern standards, lacking in the visual effects department—but that’s only because moviegoers today are inundated with CGI. At Thief of Baghdad’s 1940 release, it was state of the art, and its influence on other filmmakers and special-effects wizards has been incalculable. There’s been some argument over Criterion’s colors on this new disc—some prefer the original MGM disc—but that’s really nitpicking: the brilliantly eye-popping Technicolor photography still astonishes nearly 70 years later. EXTRAS: Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese commentary; historian Bruce Eder commentary; a documentary about the film’s special effects; producer Korda’s 1940 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings; excerpts from co-director Michael Powell’s audio dictations for his autobiography. |
