THE FILM 

Teresa (the captivating, fearless Margarete Tiesel) is an overweight, middle-aged Middle-European divorcée with job duties, a home to keep, and a sullen teenage daughter — the of busy but lonely middle-class woman who’s watched too much of life pass her by when it hasn’t actively been treating her badly. She is, in short, the kind of character the Lifetime Channel or Cougar Town or The First Wives’ Club might hone in on as ripe for “empowerment,” someone who will finally learn to treat herself well and perhaps treat herself to a sensitive, beautiful younger man who sees and loves her for what she is. But, as that “empowerment” narrative transpires in Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love, there’s some vital piece of the puzzle missing, some important observations and understandings neglected, that cause our heroine to suffer in ways that go well beyond the grinding humdrum of her quotidian, drudging life in a nondescript lower-middle-class section of Vienna, and to cause others to suffer too, all inadvertently, because she is blissfully unaware — a state of being that, in Seidl’s world, is as widespread as it is wincingly consequential. If Eat, Pray, Love offered up a willfully myopic fantasy about a very special, very deep, yearning-filled Western white lady blithely getting the most from her privileged customer’s position in an “exotic,” “spiritual,” impoverished foreign place, Seidl’s film proposes a scenario of what it might look like if an ordinary, even typical woman tried to emulate that kind of journey of self-discovery. This means that Seidl takes a much longer view of Teresa and her search for fulfillment, encompassing in his wider perspective some unavoidable, if oft-overlooked factors — economics, social conditions, cultural misunderstandings, and baseline affluent-Westerner ignorance/arrogance — that tend to disempower and only stand in the way of genuine fulfillment or liberation, so that watching Teresa’s escapist struggle against the boredom of her prosaic, materially comfortable, vaguely disappointing life is like witnessing the kind of blind, futile thrashing that only makes an unyielding net or trap ensnare its victim even more tightly.

As in the greatest films of Seidl’s forebear, his fellow unfailingly critical Germanic director R.W. Fassbinder (Fox and his Friends, In a Year of 13 Moons), Seidl doesn’t skimp on the (melo)dramatic bait that gets us wrapped up in Teresa’s individual ill-fated quest, even as it points to some decisive factors of which the individual herself is barely aware. Teresa’s life story, her concerns, her problems, are interesting, relatable; she may be hapless, naïve, and ignorant, but she’s earnest and sweet, too, and she can hardly be said to mean anyone any harm. And if Seidl initially seems to be too easily or lazily indulging in mockery of her corpulent, affably insecure, bright-eyed-and-busy-tailed tourist’s persona as she eagerly leaves gray-skied, institutional Vienna behind for her long-anticipated package trip to a cordoned-off Kenyan resort, he never lets us entirely forget that Teresa — however much suffering she ends up inadvertently contributing to in her role as an economically necessary but despised well-off European interloper — suffers in ways that are real to her, too. By the end of her story — less a conclusion than an impasse at which we can’t be certain whether Teresa has experienced any realization, or whether one woman’s realization could ever mean much in the seemingly inexorable way people’s lives are ordered — she’s fallen in love with a much younger Kenyan man, the convincingly solicitous and tender Munga (Peter Kazungu), and when that delusion has been cruelly exposed, she’s fallen in with a group of jaded, seasoned fellow Austrian ladies who know and accept the terms of the “sex-tourist” game, and begins a cynical, humiliating cycle of relations with some of the other young, available African men to be found. But exploiting the real material desperation of these men, even under the hot, “romantic” Kenyan sun, with the intention of filling up the empty spot left by the cool, impersonal order and duties of home, proves not so very different from the inevitably unsatisfying consumer comforts/drudgery for which it’s supposed to be a cure.

Nor are these women, in their banal, dutifully acquisitive pleasure-seeking, so very different from the group of another kind of “tourist” — Down syndrome sufferers taken by Teresa, apparently their carer as her vocation, on a field trip to an amusement center on the outskirts of Vienna — with whose exploits Seidl strikingly opens the film. This opening salvo/comment encapsulates what could seem at first problematic (is Seidl indulging in cheap exploitation of Teresa’s cognitively impaired charges as they wail and scream in their bumper cars, terrified and/or overstimulated on the ill-advised ride Does he mean the implicit equivalency between this turbulent, commercialized escapism and that undertaken by Teresa on her trip to Kenya as an offensive insult, likening her to a “retarded” person) about the film: We’re not quite sure how to respond, how to take what we’re being shown. But Seidl is recruiting that uncomfortable tension for higher purposes, and in the end, he attains a panoramic enough view that it becomes clear that it’s not the unwilling, unprepared, special-needs bumper-car riders, or the hapless Teresa, or the necessarily opportunistic Kenyans who are the objects of the author’s scathing critique, mockery, and melancholy disillusion and pessimism. It is instead the invisible but omnipresent power of their circumstances, of their societies, of our pathologically disordered world and its insidious patterns over these individuals, all just weak human beings with unmet needs whom circumstance (and how did these circumstances arise, and why should things be this way, that is the important question) has led to prey, unconsciously, unquestioningly, upon each other.

Seidl’s visual approach — facilitated nicely here by the strong, prettily variegated, but usually naturalistic-feeling lighting of his two DPs, longtime Seidl collaborator Wolfgang Thaler and the American cinematographer Ed Lachman, best known for his collaborations with Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, I’m Not There, Mildred Pierce) — is somewhat reminiscent of that of his similarly-minded contemporary, Michael Haneke (Code Unknown), and instrumental in enlarging the film’s scope far beyond mere cheap shots or scapegoating: There’s a clear, calm, restrained, but extremely precise and diligent quality to the framings and the mise-en-scène, and a willingness to let moments play out slowly but with immediate realism, so that we have both the full picture — the characters in their environments, the quasi-segregated beaches, the clinically clean resort lodgings with their odd resemblance to Teresa’s own anonymous Vienna apartment block, the poor, hot, brightly painted local rooms where her trysts play out in all their awkwardness, self-conscious horror, and sadness — and the living through, the life-texture, of these “normal,” frequently awful interactions/transactions between the characters. It’s bracing, harrowing, relentlessly critical stuff: Those so inclined are sure to dismiss Seidl, as they’ve dismissed Fassbinder and Haneke before him, as a fashionable pessimist, a wallower, and a sadist. But in so skillfully showing us more of the picture, more of the story than perhaps flatters us or the characters, or is easy to swallow, Seidl creates an experience that marks you, stretches your perceptions, broadens your understanding of the complex, clashing intricacies of power that shape human life. It hardly leaves you with decisive diagnoses or prescriptions for the problems it astutely and rigorously delineates in involved, minute detail, but it does leave you deeply, bracingly aware of its people’s imposed, entrenched, unchallenged patterns. It’s a film whose very clear intent to provoke seems questionable at first, but by the time it’s over, is genuine seriousness and effectiveness are undeniable.

Love is only the first part of a “Paradise” trilogy, already shot in its entirety and ready for release, that will also see Seidl covering, through the stories of other members of Teresa’s family (whom we glimpse together briefly near the beginning of this film), other proposed escape routes from coddled but soulless contemporary Western life, Faith and Hope. This very successful first installment whets one’s appetite for seeing just how expansively Seidl will have probed, critiqued, and questioned our most vaunted and cherished heavens by the time the last panel of this intriguing, unsparing triptych has been mounted into place.

 

THE DVD
Strand Releasing has only provided a DVD-R copy of the retail disc for review, but even judging from that additional picture-quality distance, the transfer and sound (Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, in German with English subtitles, most likely to be non-optional) are at least decent, with no egregious compression artifacts (very little edge enhancement) and some nice retention of celluloid-like texture/no digital over-smoothing, and good, clear, rich, full surround sound with no distortions or imbalance.

 

FINAL THOUGHTSUnnervingly straddling the borders dividing critique, compassion, and satirical near-contempt (borders it’s aesthetically committed to proving mutable or false), Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love is the first part of a trilogy about three related Austrian women who are on quixotic bourgeois-European quests for their own versions of heaven on earth. This one starts it off with a bang: When Teresa, a middle-aged, middle-class European lady, sets off on her package vacation and lands in the glorious tropical “paradise” of…coastal Kenya, her dealings with the “natives” take a turn from annoyance at their friendly, incessant peddling to infatuation with what seems to be one young man’s sincerely tender feeling towards her. A group of more seasoned fellow female European visitors — more openly “sex tourists” who seem to know the rules of this game — is there to rally round and enfold her when she realizes her actual position, her inescapable customer’s role in this “paradise,” and that’s what Paradise: Love is about: The simple needs of regular people horrendously thwarted and warped by the false but very well-enforced identities of tourist/native, European/African, into which they so easily, so “naturally” fall, shaped as they are by economics, politics, and cultural and societal policies and norms. Like his forebear R.W. Fassbinder (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) or his contemporary Michael Haneke (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), Seidl is impassioned by, obsessed with showing us this strange world of ours with its skewed but well-accepted power relations in a way that provokes us to ponder what makes it tick (and to consider our own roles, too), and the picture they show us, however fascinating, is not at all pretty or comforting. Seidl, perhaps, brandishes his harsh but undeniable snapshot at us with a little too much glee at times, but that’s only the surface of his very fine film: He’s in it for the long haul, and he sticks with Teresa’s journey and all its implications right to the bitter-stalemate end, and ultimately, the film succeeds — through narrative, philosophical, and aesthetic pistons firing in wonderful tandem under Seidl’s quite masterful engineering — in making its point resonate deeply, indelibly: Leaving aside whether characters are “good” or “bad” individuals, one person’s emotion and pleasure are always someone else’s strictly-business concern, and any line distinguishing heaven, or “paradise,” from the other place is both very fine indeed and infinitely tricky to negotiate. Highly Recommended.

Zippy, often amusing (intentionally…most of the time) WWII espionage programmer. 20th Century-Fox’s Cinema Archives line of hard-to-find cult and library titles has released Berlin Correspondent, the 1942 “B” actioner from Fox starring Dana Andrews, Virginia Gilmore, Mona Maris, Martin Kosleck, and a whole slew of familiar wartime faces from Hollywood’s backbench: Sig Ruman, Kurt Katch Erwin Kalser, Hans Schumm, Leonard Mudie, Torben Meyer, and Henry Rowland. In and out in under 70 minutes, Berlin Correspondent does exactly what a B-programmer should do: it cleanly and efficiently tells a fast-moving, entertaining story in as few strokes as possible–not surprisingly, either, considering B-masters Bryan Foy and Eugene Forde are the producer and director here. No extras for this okay-looking fullscreen black and white transfer.

Berlin, November 1941. New York Chronicle war correspondent Bill Roberts (Dana Andrews) reads his Gestapo-approved copy over the radio air waves, where it is then decoded and re-broadcast in the Big Apple to give America and the rest of the world the real dope on the Nazis. Back in Gestapo headquarters, ice cold Captain Kurt von Rau (Martin Kosleck) is rapidly losing his patience with the various operatives who can’t keep an adequate tail on slippery Roberts. von Rau knows that Roberts is responsible for getting out damaging information about the Nazis’ military movements, but he simply can’t figure out where Roberts’ pipeline of info starts and ends. Enter pretty blond wienerschnitzel Karen Hauen (Virginia Gilmore), von Rau’s fiance, whom von Rau uses to entrap Roberts. When Roberts puts the moves on Karen and invites her back to his place, she discovers his spy secret: stamps with secret messages on the back. And who do you think is providing him with those stamps Rudolph Hauen (Erwin Kalser), Karen’s father. Arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, Hauen’s only hope lies with Roberts, who agrees to bust him out of an asylum where political prisoners are labeled insane and then “euthanized.” When Roberts himself is hauled off to a concentration camp after America declares war on Germany, it’s time for Karen to repay the favor.

 I just finished a fascinating new book, Hitler’s Charisma, that makes a clear case, among many other intriguing postulations, that the Allies and the German High Command already knew for certain by at least 1940 that Germany could not possibly win its world war: even before the Americans entered the fray late in 1941, it was only a matter of “when” for the fatally over-extended German military, not “if,” due to the impossible logistics of Hitler’s far-flung campaigns and lack of resources. However, the average American public certainly didn’t know that when Berlin Correspondent was released in the fall of 1942, particularly with frequent bad news in the headlines recounting American military setbacks during our first year of involvement. So B movie programmers like Berlin Correspondent were hastily manufactured to divert, however momentarily, the nervous moviegoing public away from the reality of their situation, while reassuring them through these simplified, sometimes even humorous, escapist adventures, that the bumbling Nazis and Japanese were no match for the wise-cracking, resourceful, brave American soldiers and spies.

 Written by Steve Fisher (everything from Johnny Angel and Lady in the Lake, to Have Gun, Will Travel and Kolchak: The Night Stalker) and Jack Andrews, Berlin Correspondent has more than its fair share of grimly humorous moments, from Andrews’ unsuccessful censors being sent to the Russian front, to all the spy shenanigans with Andrews losing his comically inept tail. Once Andrews shows up at the asylum dressed as Sgt. Major von Brickstein to scam huffing and puffing Sig Ruman, Berlin Correspondent almost takes on the air of a Prussian comic operetta version of Hogan’s Heroes, complete with disguises, goofball accents, and baggy pants (Andrews throws out a, “Heil, Hitler!” while trying to hold up his ballooning trousers). Even the final-twist ending is agreeably smartassed, when the American viewer is given the heartening (and entirely false) idea that everybody but everybody wants out of Germany–even its Luftwaffe pilots.

 Overall, the tone of Berlin Correspondent is an enjoyable mix of such fanciful moments–a savvy journalist like Andrews would never expect to be allowed to walk around freely after openly flaunting his espionage activities, while that “concentration camp” looks cleaner and more spacious than the summer camp I attended–and more coarse, downbeat moments where the audience is clued into how brutal their enemy the Nazis really are (was it common knowledge back in America, this early in the game, that the Nazis really were euthanizing political prisoners under the guise of their horrendous “medical programs” to wholesale eliminate the infirmed). Fisher and Andrews keep the frequently clever dialogue succinct and scrappy, while B-master Eugene Forde’s (countless efficient, fun Bs, including quite a few memorable Charlie Chan outings for Fox) ultra-smooth, anonymous style gives way occasionally to little moments that let you know he’s not on autopilot. Check out that bizarre, fetishistic shot of the two strapping Nazi guards, stripped to the waists and sweating, whipping a bound Erwin Kalser as Koslech is expressionistically lit from behind–all you need is a stacked, half-naked woman tied up in the foreground to give you a classic Argosy front cover. Top-billed Gilmore is hopeless as the Teutonic heroine (that severe lisp is quite distracting), but dapper Andrews, right on the cusp of major A-list stardom, is just right as the wise-cracking American spy, essaying that classic “smart-assed, self-assured, competent American adventurer who can handle anything” stereotype that used to dominate American pop culture. Sure it was fantasy…but it was potent, myth-shaping iconography, too, one that reached all over the world (god help us today with the oppressive number of self-doubting, self-hating, cynical, ignorant, impotent American caricatures that are routinely fostered onto ourselves and the world through our now-curdled pop culture). I miss that dream.

 The DVD:

The Video:
The fullscreen, 1.37:1 black and white transfer for Berlin Correspondent looked fairly good, with decent blacks and mostly nice contrast. A moderate amount of dirt and scratches.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English mono audio track is a bit squelchier than I care for, but you soon get used to it (…especially if you grew up on all movies sounding this way). No subtitles or closed-captions available.

The Extras:
No extras for Berlin Correspondent.

Final Thoughts:
Breezy little WWII espionage yarn, with more laughs than you’d expect. Director Eugene Forde could do this sort of thing with his eyes closed…but anything this invisibly well-directed would seem to indicate the opposite. I’m recommending Berlin Correspondent.

Paul Mavis is an internationally published movie and television historian, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and the author of The Espionage Filmography.

 

Doc Martin DVD 1 to 5 Review

Doc Martin is a popular British television series created by Dominic Minghella, who based the series upon the same character featured in the theatrical feature film Saving Grace (released in 2000), which was written by Mark Crowdy and Craig Ferguson. The television series is quite different in some respects and takes a much different approach for the character and the odd town he lives in the English called Portwenn. The show was also preceded by two made for television films based on the character, each offering a slightly different tune to this unique character.

The series has currently aired five series (or as we call them in America, seasons), and will return soon with a new and final sixth outing that has yet to air on British airwaves. The show began in 2004 and has continued through 2013 and despite production delays between seasons the show has continued to find an audience.

Martin Clunes is the lead actor portraying the character of Doc Martin. On the television series, this character is a grumpy Doctor with no bedside manner, who is often so matter-of-fact that many patients and townspeople find his attitude and general characteristics alarming. He’s not too terribly fond of the people of Portwenn, and as their only doctor he sees fit to just examine his patients and “get on with it”, so to speak. He doesn’t spend time trying to get to know most people and he keeps largely to himself while working to help the people with health issues. It’s largely a loner life for Dr. Martin Ellingham (the nickname of “Doc Martin” having been given to him by the people of Portwenn).

The series largely revolves around the medial needs of a towns-person in Portwenn and Doc Martin ultimately “saving the day” by the end of each of the episodes. The series is mostly episodic and while there are a few reoccurring plotlines and characters it’s mostly a health procedural show.

Over the course of the series, Doc Martin becomes friends with a local schoolteacher, Louisa Glasson (Caroline Catz), who first met Martin as a member of the board determining if Doc Martin would be a good fit for the community. She initially disapproves of his hiring and is surprised when she realizes an eye-gazing look he kept giving her had only to do with a eye condition she needed help with medically. The two become a “romantic” pairing over time.

The path to romantic happiness between Louisa and Martin is also interfered with my Martin’s unfailing ability to mention some random health or medical issue he sees fit to mention to her in an otherwise romantic moment (such as in mentioning an actual medical term which translates to “you need help with bad breath”). The show continues to teeter-totter back and forth between the concept of the two as a couple or as simply friends in a strange relationship to one another — and the show is sometimes less enjoyable, to some degree, because of its inability to let these unique characters simply be together.

The other main supporting characters on the show include a local mechanic that is often visiting Doc Martin or Louisa and who goes from being a plumber to local restaurant owner or “import water” drink-seller named Bert (Ian McNeice), and who is also frequently helped out through working with his son Al (Joe Absolom). There is also Martin’s aunt Joan (Stephanie Cole), a motherly figure in his life, and who is an emotional core of the show — that is, until a abrupt passing of the character between the season 4 finale and the season 5 premiere, in which her character dies and her storyline becomes badly resolved.

Season 1 introduced the first receptionist, Elaine Denham (Lucy Punch), who was a hilarious and fun supporting character as a somewhat inconsistent and “go-with-the-flow” type of receptionist. Her character (and the performance given by Lucy Punch) added a great deal to the production. In season two, her character was essentially replaced with another character in (predictably) the same kind of role as the receptionist. Pauline Lamb (Katherine Parkinson) replaces the character and we never get to revisit Elaine’s character again. Luckily, Pauline was a nice character to be able to get to know.

And then after a multiple year difference between seasons Pauline is a character dropped out of the show to introduce Morwenna Newcross (Jessica Ransom) as receptionist. The same sort of thing happened with other characters on the show, and it’s a frequent irritation for characters to essentially be dropped out of the show this way.

The show’s best season is probably the first year’s outing. That is when the show was mainly being written by the original television creator and producer Dominic Minghella (who also happens to be the brother to another  creative individual, Anthony Minghella). The show generally seemed more consistent in tone and style and it built to a high quality season conclusion that was one of the high-points of the show’s entire run to date.

As the show progresses there have been many different writers who have come and gone on the show and the same can be said for the characters (and the actors portraying them) as they have also gone through a number of significant changes over the seasons. It’s one of the things that prevents the series from ever reaching its full potential of creativity. The writing becomes so inconsistent in later seasons that many episodes simply seem more out-of-character than the series seemed before.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that director Ben Bolt (who has been the main series director for almost every single episode of the show throughout its five years) is one of the worst series writers. It surprised me because I think Ben Bolt has been a quality director for the series. It’s probably a much more consistent show than it would have been because of his directing.  Yet somehow he seemed to portray the characters quite differently through his writing. As director, Bolt made the actors give consistently good performances and the ebb and flow of the show is generally quite impressive throughout.

In creatively writing for the character of Doc Martin, however, Bolt makes him more unlikeable than he ever does while in the director’s chair alone, and the mean-spirit of these episodes was often causing the show to come to a halt creatively. Luckily, he only writes a fraction of these episodes, but they were often “prominent” ones that took the show in certain core directions. I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the writing on Doc Martin at all once Minghella left the show following its second season, and by the time Season 5 rolled around in 2011 there were five different writers on the show and things just seemed so much more inconsistent creatively: plotlines were sometimes introduced and then hazily dropped before being reintroduced much later and less effectively.

The show never managed effectively to transition between the loss of some of the characters that left the show and the gain of the new characters that seem to inhabit the same basic roles either, and the writing was often shrugging off the characters (and the actors) in a way that seemed at times both dismissive and unnecessary.

Unfortunately,  things on Doc Martin are somewhat bumpy between the seasons, and that is simply the matter of the show’s creative flow throughout the entire run of things. It makes it essentially flow as if it were a soap opera with actors replacing the same characters or parts, moving things along as if no actors or characters had even left the show during production, which makes the show feel less enjoyable.

The series always has the consistency of acting delivered exceptionally well by Martin Clunes and Caroline Catz but the writing isn’t really everything fans would hope to find and the series gradually becomes less and less entertaining. Going forward with the show will be interesting: only one season remains. Personally, I hope to discover returning cast members in guest parts and a solid conclusion for the ongoing cast members. As it stands now, Doc Martin isn’t great television at all — it’s merely a solid entertainment that gets less interesting each season as the writers change and characters you loved disappear without any proper conclusion or farewell.

The DVD:

Video:

Doc Martin is presented on DVD with a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer which retains the original television broadcast aspect ratio. The series looks rather mundane on DVD, and isn’t all that impressive visually. The colors are drab and detail is lacking. The series looks rather soft, hazy, and almost as if it was shot on video (even though the series was filmed on 35mm film). Unfortunately, it’s just not that great looking as a series and the transfers don’t help it out any.

Audio:

The series is presented on DVD with a standard Dolby Digital 2.0 audio presentation. It’s not a particularly engaging sound-field. It’s basically focused on bringing out the dialogue and that’s about it. Nothing is particularly stand-out at any given point in the show’s entire run, when the audio is considered. The music score sounds decent accompanying the show but doesn’t really stand out much.

Extras:

There aren’t any extras on any of the first four series. The fifth series set contains interviews and production footage, about forty minutes worth in total, which is a clear improvement, but still is not that much to get excited about.

The included television movies might be considered as supplemental to some viewers, but these films are not technically “extras”, per se, but to some degree it would have made more sense if Acorn Media had released them as such with the first season as they don’t have much to do in relation to the character archetype presented on the show.

In the first Doc Martin TV film, there seems to be more in common with the character from the original  theatrical film than the character on the show, and he is someone who has moved to a similar (albeit different) type of community after his wife’s extramarital affairs. In Doc Martin and The Legend of the Cloutie, none of the characters featured in the first film seem to be the same characters at all — even though they do appear as characters, and Doc Martin is trying somehow to scare some people out of a local house so that he can move in himself. It was somewhat interesting, in a bizarre way, but it felt like a total cash-in with no connection artistically to the first film (or the eventual series) at all.

Final Thoughts:

Doc Martin is a highly inconsistent series. It is at times greatly entertaining and at times highly aggravating. The fact that so many characters and actors come and go on the show and are in essence replaced with basic-archetypes that are incredibly similar makes the show feel like a soap-opera sometimes. While it’s a fun show at times (especially during the first two series), everything could have been better if the show had kept more of its actors around and if the romance between Doc Martin and Louisa had been allowed to happen in a more befitting manner. Creatively, the show becomes more disappointing as it goes on, and less and less involving. The fifth series is actually the weakest season to date. Longtime fans who are considering revisiting the show will probably like having the set, but I don’t think this is something worth revisiting much. I’m hopeful the sixth and final season, which is soon upcoming, will improve upon the last few seasons and end the show on a high(er) note.

Recommended, but only to fans who managed to enjoy all of the seasons and movies. Otherwise, consider getting the first season (or two) and wait and see if the show can successfully manage a good series conclusion.

Neil Lumbard is a lifelong fan of cinema, and a student who aspires to make movies. He loves writing, and currently does in Texas.

The Film:

Coming out alive from a life of mafia seems like a next to impossible task. For Michael Franzese, however, that task was accomplished… he just may be the luckiest man in the world. He not only made a name for himself in the mob, but also his post-mob life. Franzese is a former New York mobster with the Colombo crime family who was heavily involved in the gasoline tax rackets in the 1980’s. Since then, he has publicly renounced organized crime. He has found much success with publishing a novel and becoming a motivational speaker (quite a change of pace from mob life). I’ve always been more than fascinated with anything mob related. So this mob documentary seemed like the perfect opportunity to check out a story I was unfamiliar with. Does this make my passing grade Read on.

Through interviews with Michael and a few other experts on the subject, this documentary covers the intricacies on the inner workings of the mob. A great deal is explained of the various ranks of the organization. The culture and rules of mob life are divulged in just how one can move up and make money as well as handle matters with the law. We hear a bit about the infamous sit down. Part of what is great about this documentary is that it lacks biases. It never tries to glamorize life in the mafia nor does it pass judgement on Franzese.

Most of the documentary focuses on Michael’s first-hand experience with being in the mob. We hear much of the gasoline scandal of the 1980’s. It started off simple by avoiding the tax gas stations had to pay for gasoline. When the government got wise to their act, they started charging tax directly on the product instead of the stations. This only helped the mafia. They could just scrape the tax off of the gasoline suppliers instead. It was quite an ingenious scheme. This made loads of money for both the mafia and Franzese. If this makes you wonder why Franzese would ever give up such a good life, that is all explained here and in great detail.

I have often wondered about the danger of mob life and this documentary only reaffirms those fears. Michael was involved in various close calls during his mob life. He gives a haunting recollection of a meeting in which he was moments away from being killed. Michael’s father (who was also a mobster) wouldn’t do a thing to help him. Franzese did do time in prison during the 80’s. He is indicted on several racketeering, counterfeiting charges, in addition to his role in the gasoline scandal. It was in 1987 that he decided he had enough of the mob life. Michael Franzese would probably be dead today if not for his unpredictability. He constantly changed his routine to throw off any potential enemies that were out to get him. It’s refreshing to see a story like this have a happy ending. Usually with these stories, there isn’t a good ending. Death seems inevitable, but that’s not the case here. Michael’s story is inspiring, but also cautionary.

The DVD:

The Video: The 1.78:1 widescreen transfer is solid. Colors are detailed and accurate and the print used is free of dirt and other defects. We get various archival photos and clips, but they’re integrated nicely. This transfer should please fans.

The Audio: We get a Dolby 5.1 track and a standard 2.0 track as well. I sampled the latter as well and both are quite fine. The rear channels don’t get a lot of use, but when they do everything comes across nicely. Both tracks present the documentary well.

The Extras: Zilch, nothing here except for some trailers.

Final Thoughts:

The Definitive Guide to the Mob gives us a nice overview of life in the mafia. It shows the ups and downs and offers an honest look at what it takes to be in the mob. The 90 minute running time zipped by and held my interest. For those interested, it’s worth your time.

The Movie:

Made by director Julien Temple, he of The Great Rock N Roll Swindle and Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten fame, 2012’s London: The Modern Babylon is made up primarily of archival footage culled from the massive vaults of the BBC and the BFI. Narrated by Michael Gambon, this is one of many documentary films that Temple has made over the last ten years or so, and while many of his past documentary features have focused on bands and musicians, this time around he puts the city he calls home under the microscope.

The movie moves in chronological order, beginning with some of the earliest filmed footage of London ever made way back in the 1890s. From there, it follows various events and important people related to the city’s history to what is more or less the current day, right up to the beginning of the Olympic Games. Along the way we get glimpses of triumph and tragedy as pretty much every major event to affect the city in one way or another gets covered. We also get some face time with many of the denizens of the city, those people that give England’s metropolis its life blood.

So that’s what it is in a nutshell, a whole lot of archival footage from various sources and from various decades spliced together into one sprawling two hour and fifteen minute long socio-political history lesson. As all of this plays out, we get a visual sampler platter of the London that was and now is with maybe a little foreshadowing as to the London that might be down the road a few years. The documentary covers plenty of historical and political events, not the least of which are the two World Wars that the city suffered through, but also race riots and the rise of immigration and the subsequent effects on the city and events relating to the Royal Family as well. We see how the free love/hippy movement of the sixties hit the city that then segued into glam rock by way of David Bowie and then punk rock with a fair bit of focus on the Sex Pistols (including some great clips of the infamous boat performance that Temple filmed back in the seventies).

Temple being Temple and having such a prolific music related background, all of this is set to a pretty interesting soundtrack made up of London acts from throughout the years: The Pet Shop Boys, Bowie, X-Ray Specs, The Rolling Stones, T.Rex and the aforementioned Sex Pistols among many others. Temple times the music well, the songs chosen tending to compliment the events happening not just as to when and where they were recorded in terms of the city’s time line but also in terms of what the lyrics mean in correlation to the events taking place on screen. We also get some interesting film clips, which technically provides the movie with cameos from the likes of Oliver Reed and Carl Boehm from The Party’s Over and Peeping Tom respectively.

The archival footage keeps things interesting and the music makes it all feel fairly hip, but the heart of the piece really lies with the interview segments. It’s here that we learn about the people who call the city home, learn of their personal experiences and getter understand what it is that they like (and often times don’t like) about London. With input from everyone to artists and outcasts to seniors who have lived in the city for decades, we hear from those who have seen it all and lived to tell about it. The emphasis here is on the commoner rather than the wealthier type who live in the city for trendier reasons. This grounds the documentary on the human side of things and makes it more than just a serious of historical clips set to good music and lets the movie paint a broad and almost all encompassing portrait of the city and its people.

The DVD:

Video:

London: The Modern Babylon arrives on DVD in a transfer where, interestingly enough, aspect ratios shift a bit. The interview footage is framed at 1.78.1 while some of the other, mostly older archival footage is shown 1.33.1 as it was originally shot. This is nice to see when it’s all too common for fullframe material to be cropped to fit the 1.78.1 frame with little regard for the original material’s composition. With that said, video quality is generally very good here. Detail varies depending on the source, the new stuff looks nice and crisp and sharp whereas the older stock footage and archival inserts can be a bit rough around the edges. Overall though the video quality is fine and the movie looks quite nice on DVD.

Sound:

The only audio option on the disc is an English language Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track. No problems with the audio here, though some of the same thoughts apply in that depending on the source you’ll notice a difference in quality. All in all, however, the newly shot material is well balanced, clean and clear and the score used throughout the movie also sounds quite good.

Extras:

The only extra of much substance on the disc is A Conversation With Julien Temple in which the director sits down in front of the camera in the back of a car to talk about working on this project for just under seven minutes. Aside from that, we get menus and chapter selection.

Overall:

Julien Temple’s London: The Modern Babylon is an interesting look at how one of the most important cities in the history of the world has evolved, devolved and changed in numerous ways over the centuries. The wealth of fascinating archival footage alone makes this worth a watch for anyone with an interest in history, while Temple’s take on all of this gives it some welcome context. The Docurama DVD is short on extras but it looks good and sounds good and comes recommended.

Ian lives in NYC with his wife where he writes for DVD Talk, runs Rock! Shock! Pop!. He likes NYC a lot, even if it is expensive and loud.