The New York Times
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November 25, 2008
Best Video Games By SETH SCHIESEL
In these challenging economic times, it may come as a surprise that a well-chosen video game can be one of the most cost-effective gifts possible. Sure, the $60 price tag on some top games can be daunting, but when you realize that the right one can wrangle dozens or even hundreds of hours out of the right player, games can start to look like the smart entertainment investments they are.
Here are some of the best games of the year, each of which could be the perfect gift for the right person. The shrewd will notice no sports or music games on this list. That is because those are easier to shop for: pick the desired sport or tunes and go.
Amazon
GRAND THEFT AUTO IV
DVD
Ideal audience: well-adjusted adults who want to explore a rich, intelligent, politically incorrect digital rendition of New York City. As long as you can accept that a great work of modern entertainment can revolve around criminals — something long assumed in television and films — then it is almost impossible to deny that G.T.A. IV is one of the most compelling games in recent years. The driving and shooting is fun, but the real star of the game is the city itself, rendered with a loving sense of decay and populated with perhaps the best cast of dysfunctional characters to grace a pixel. For Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 (PC version coming in December). Rating: M for Mature.
Amazon
SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION REVOLUTION
Ideal audience: families interested in fostering an appreciation of both global history and strategic thinking; also, commuters looking to upgrade from Tetris. Civilization is the top strategy franchise in the history of video games. With Revolution the series moves beyond PCs and arrives on consoles and the hand-held Nintendo DS. The premise remains the same: guide a historical culture from the dawn of history to the space age. Nothing feels better than dominating Genghis Khan and Napoleon at the same time. For Xbox 360, PS3 and DS. Rating: E10+ for Everyone 10 and older.
Amazon
WARHAMMER ONLINE
Video Game
Ideal audience: massively multiplayer online gamers who cannot satisfy their bloodlust in World of Warcraft. Don’t get me wrong; like more than 10 million other people, I love World of Warcraft. But great games can stand some competition, and Warhammer Online, the new online version of the decades-old British fantasy universe, provides it. Warhammer employs many conventions from Warcraft but gives them a new twist in a game that focuses largely on player-versus-player combat, rather than on battling computer-controlled foes. For PC. Rating: T for Teen.
Amazon
WII FIT
Ideal audience: couch produce of all ages. Nintendo’s best game of the year is not really a game. It’s a light exercise system meant to take just a few calories off. The most surprising thing: it works. For Wii. Rating: E for Everyone.
Amazon
LITTLEBIGPLANET
Video Game
Ideal audience: aspiring game designers and anyone else with excellent eye-hand coordination. Th breakout title this year for Sony’s PlayStation 3, LittleBigPlanet is in some ways as close to YouTube as games have come. In its essence it is merely a “platformer”: you navigate your little beanbag character mostly by running and jumping. The secret sauce is that the game allows users to create their own levels and share them easily with other players online. Rating: E.
Amazon
DEAD SPACE
Ideal audience: people who like being scared. Dead Space is a straight-ahead science fiction survival-horror experience. You, the player, are trapped on a spooky spaceship with a horde of space zombies who want to eat you, or turn you into one of them, or something. You wade through them while engaging in what is charmingly referred to as “strategic dismemberment.” For what it is, though, Dead Space is both conceived and executed at a high level. For Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Rating: M.
Amazon
FALLOUT 3
Video Game
Ideal audience: old-school role-playing gamers and anyone who wants to see Washington in ashes. The return of the classic Fallout series is a sprawling re-creation of the Capitol area after a nuclear war. The tone is darker and less slyly humorous than previous Fallout games, but the sheer size and ambition of the game impress. For Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Rating: M.
Amazon
PROFESSOR LAYTON AND THE CURIOUS VILLAGE
Ideal audience: puzzle fans. One of the sleepers of 2008, Professor Layton ties together more than 100 beautifully designed brainteasers with an endearing anime-style story. The puzzles themselves are perfectly intelligible to nongamers. For Nintendo DS. Rating: E.
Amazon
GEARS OF WAR 2
Ideal audience: testosterone-fueled core gamers who like chain saws. When you think about the stereotypical video game, this is what you’re thinking about: big guns, voracious alien bad guys, great graphics, huge explosions, cardboard-cutout characters, silly dialogue and cheap thrills all around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. For Xbox 360. Rating: M.
Amazon
FABLE II
Video Game
Ideal audience: emotionally mature children and most fans of delicate entertainment design. This game is rated M not because it is especially violent or profane. It is rated M because in between casting spells and swinging swords you can have children, you can get married (and have affairs if you choose), and you can buy condoms. Shocking, I know. For children who are comfortable with the basic facts of life, there is no reason not to share Fable II. It’s a wonderful game on its own, and it beats handing a child a virtual machine gun. For Xbox 360.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Best TV on DVD By GINIA BELLAFANTE
The New York Times
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November 25, 2008
Best TV on DVD By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Each week seems to bring more and more releases of television series and specials on DVD. Are you hankering to relive the complete first season of “Spin City”? It’s just out. While it is impossible to see everything, a critic can still cull the best of the year, even if from a vaguely arbitrary list. So here we go:
Amazon
STATE OF PLAY
DVD
This political thriller, produced as a mini-series for British television a few years ago, won multiple awards in its homeland, including a Bafta prize for the incomparably sardonic Bill Nighy. Here he sheds his patrician inflections for the near-Cockney pronunciations of a newspaper editor overseeing the investigation of two seemingly unrelated murders — the death of a black teenager at gunpoint and the mysterious fall of a research assistant on the tracks of the London Underground — that ultimately hint at significant connection. The assistant belongs to an ambitious member of Parliament in both the professional and biblical senses. Anonymous faxes are sent, lives are endangered and marriages crumble in what amounts to six sublime hours of diversion from holiday whining and madness. (BBC Video, $34.98.)
Amazon
THE SOPRANOS: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Why? Because you have “Moby-Dick” in your library, don’t you? Individual seasons of “The Sopranos” are available, of course, but this set, just released, brings together all 86 episodes on 28 discs, with the added value of a conversation between Alec Baldwin and David Chase. (Mr. Baldwin had hoped for a role but never got one.) Other features include a photo album, CD soundtracks and a filmed dinner with cast members. For $399.99, and especially in the current climate, we might want the recipes for every plate of veal Carmella ever produced — no, actually, the veal itself — but still, a complete set of one of the greatest series television has ever produced seems to fall in the ranks of cultural essentials. (HBO Video, $399.99.)
Amazon
MAD MEN, SEASON ONE
DVD
You have friends, cousins, brothers-in-law, ex-girlfriends — maybe in Denver, maybe around the block — who have yet to experience the exquisite historicism of “Mad Men,” Matthew Weiner’s series about consumer glorification and marital malfeasance in the New York of the early 1960s. Even though it seems as if everyone is watching, very few people actually are, so it is incumbent on viewers in the know to serve as cultural ambassadors and spread the word through gift giving. The first 13 episodes make up a season nearly as perfect as any that have come around. (Lionsgate, $39.99.)
Amazon
FORTYSOMETHING
Before he starred as a dyspeptic genius physician on “House,” Hugh Laurie starred as a dyspeptic physician in the thrall of a midlife crisis in the British comedy “Fortysomething.” Here he plays Paul Slippery, a man dealing with his wife’s professional turnaround and her possible wandering eye. At work he is mired in bureaucracy and at home he is given little reprieve, tortured as he is by his three sex-obsessed sons. The series, which was shown in 2003, is six episodes long; Mr. Laurie directed the first three. What “House” fan is likely to return it? (Acorn, $39.99.)
Amazon
FREAKS AND GEEKS: THE YEARBOOK EDITION
DVD
Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, this short-lived dramatic comedy about the politics of a suburban Detroit high school in the 1980s can be given to just about anyone from 38 to 50 with a nostalgia for paneling, army jackets, ski coats and other signifiers of early-’80s slackerdom. It is almost guaranteed to elicit a wistful, enthusiastic response. The current collection is a revamped version of one that preceded it in 2004, with two bonus DVDs and six hours of supplemental commentary and interviews. It also comes with a book — a yearbook, as it were — of essays and memorabilia. “Freaks and Geeks” is sweet and quietly funny, and it gave rise to the careers, as its devoted fans will remind you, of Seth Rogen, James Franco and Jason Segel, essential purveyors of the Apatow ethos. (Shout! Factory, $169.99.)
Amazon
FOYLE’S WAR, SET 5
This set contains three separate but related 100-minute films commissioned by the ITV network and revolving around the assignments that land on the desk of Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (played just short of ornery by the talented Michael Kitchen) during World War II. Closed off from the action on the front lines, Foyle is sent to Hastings, on the south coast of England, to battle the war’s residual wrongdoing: the murder and bribery committed by the politically ambitious and the profiteering. Foyle doesn’t drink, yell or tomcat — he’s been given none of the detective’s standard character flaws — but he is still riveting at every step of his crime solving. The visual pleasures are there, too: “Foyle’s War” is exacting in its period details of wartime English countryside. (Acorn, $49.99.)
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November 25, 2008
Best TV on DVD By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Each week seems to bring more and more releases of television series and specials on DVD. Are you hankering to relive the complete first season of “Spin City”? It’s just out. While it is impossible to see everything, a critic can still cull the best of the year, even if from a vaguely arbitrary list. So here we go:
Amazon
STATE OF PLAY
DVD
This political thriller, produced as a mini-series for British television a few years ago, won multiple awards in its homeland, including a Bafta prize for the incomparably sardonic Bill Nighy. Here he sheds his patrician inflections for the near-Cockney pronunciations of a newspaper editor overseeing the investigation of two seemingly unrelated murders — the death of a black teenager at gunpoint and the mysterious fall of a research assistant on the tracks of the London Underground — that ultimately hint at significant connection. The assistant belongs to an ambitious member of Parliament in both the professional and biblical senses. Anonymous faxes are sent, lives are endangered and marriages crumble in what amounts to six sublime hours of diversion from holiday whining and madness. (BBC Video, $34.98.)
Amazon
THE SOPRANOS: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Why? Because you have “Moby-Dick” in your library, don’t you? Individual seasons of “The Sopranos” are available, of course, but this set, just released, brings together all 86 episodes on 28 discs, with the added value of a conversation between Alec Baldwin and David Chase. (Mr. Baldwin had hoped for a role but never got one.) Other features include a photo album, CD soundtracks and a filmed dinner with cast members. For $399.99, and especially in the current climate, we might want the recipes for every plate of veal Carmella ever produced — no, actually, the veal itself — but still, a complete set of one of the greatest series television has ever produced seems to fall in the ranks of cultural essentials. (HBO Video, $399.99.)
Amazon
MAD MEN, SEASON ONE
DVD
You have friends, cousins, brothers-in-law, ex-girlfriends — maybe in Denver, maybe around the block — who have yet to experience the exquisite historicism of “Mad Men,” Matthew Weiner’s series about consumer glorification and marital malfeasance in the New York of the early 1960s. Even though it seems as if everyone is watching, very few people actually are, so it is incumbent on viewers in the know to serve as cultural ambassadors and spread the word through gift giving. The first 13 episodes make up a season nearly as perfect as any that have come around. (Lionsgate, $39.99.)
Amazon
FORTYSOMETHING
Before he starred as a dyspeptic genius physician on “House,” Hugh Laurie starred as a dyspeptic physician in the thrall of a midlife crisis in the British comedy “Fortysomething.” Here he plays Paul Slippery, a man dealing with his wife’s professional turnaround and her possible wandering eye. At work he is mired in bureaucracy and at home he is given little reprieve, tortured as he is by his three sex-obsessed sons. The series, which was shown in 2003, is six episodes long; Mr. Laurie directed the first three. What “House” fan is likely to return it? (Acorn, $39.99.)
Amazon
FREAKS AND GEEKS: THE YEARBOOK EDITION
DVD
Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, this short-lived dramatic comedy about the politics of a suburban Detroit high school in the 1980s can be given to just about anyone from 38 to 50 with a nostalgia for paneling, army jackets, ski coats and other signifiers of early-’80s slackerdom. It is almost guaranteed to elicit a wistful, enthusiastic response. The current collection is a revamped version of one that preceded it in 2004, with two bonus DVDs and six hours of supplemental commentary and interviews. It also comes with a book — a yearbook, as it were — of essays and memorabilia. “Freaks and Geeks” is sweet and quietly funny, and it gave rise to the careers, as its devoted fans will remind you, of Seth Rogen, James Franco and Jason Segel, essential purveyors of the Apatow ethos. (Shout! Factory, $169.99.)
Amazon
FOYLE’S WAR, SET 5
This set contains three separate but related 100-minute films commissioned by the ITV network and revolving around the assignments that land on the desk of Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (played just short of ornery by the talented Michael Kitchen) during World War II. Closed off from the action on the front lines, Foyle is sent to Hastings, on the south coast of England, to battle the war’s residual wrongdoing: the murder and bribery committed by the politically ambitious and the profiteering. Foyle doesn’t drink, yell or tomcat — he’s been given none of the detective’s standard character flaws — but he is still riveting at every step of his crime solving. The visual pleasures are there, too: “Foyle’s War” is exacting in its period details of wartime English countryside. (Acorn, $49.99.)
Best Movies on DVD By DAVE KEHR
The New York Times
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November 25, 2008
Best Movies on DVD
By DAVE KEHR
DVD sales might have slumped recently, but you’d never know it from the super-duper collectors’ editions and cunningly packaged boxed sets coming out this season.
Amazon
A CHRISTMAS STORY ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Adapted from the gently satiric writings of Jean Shepherd (who narrates the film), this 1983 movie about of a near-disastrous holiday in small-town Indiana, around 1940, has become the popular choice for secular, unsentimental seasonal entertainment. The new editions from Warner Home Video (Blu-ray $49.99, standard definition $39.98) come packaged in cookie tins with assorted holiday trinkets.
Amazon
HOLIDAY INN 3-DISC COLLECTOR’S SET
DVD
Christmas is only one episode in this Irving Berlin musical about a pair of song (Bing Crosby) and dance (Fred Astaire) men and a country inn that is open only for major holidays, but it gave Crosby the occasion to introduce “White Christmas.” This three-disc set includes the original black-and-white film directed by Mark Sandrich, as well as a colorized version and a CD of the soundtrack. (Universal, $26.98, not rated)
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
Ron Howard’s very busy live-action interpretation of the Dr. Seuss story features Jim Carrey as the embittered title character; the new two-disc edition includes a snow globe. (Universal, $34.98, PG)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Amazon
POLAR EXPRESS: 3-D
DVD
Robert Zemeckis brings Chris Van Allsburg’s beloved children’s book to life. The film offers classic Christmas imagery, rendered in glorious digital animation, subtly undermined by a theme of antimaterialism. Tom Hanks plays several different characters, including the young hero, through the technique of “performance capture” computer animation. The 3-D versions ($34.99 Blu-ray, $20.98 standard) use the long outmoded red-and-green glasses technology, so don’t expect an IMAX experience. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: The Polar Express
Amazon
THE RED BALLOON/WHITE MANE
No real holiday content at all here, just a pair of seasonally appropriate child-friendly 1950s art-house classics from France, directed by Albert Lamorisse. He won an Oscar for “The Red Balloon,” in which a lonely Parisian boy (the director’s son, Pascal) is befriended by a helium balloon with a heart and mind of its own. (Criterion Collection, $19.95, not rated)
Amazon
WARNER BROTHERS CLASSIC HOLIDAY COLLECTION, VOLUME 2
“Classic” is probably overstating the case for these four lesser-known films, each with a holiday connection — “All Mine to Give” (1957), “Holiday Affair” (1949), “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” (1947) and “Blossoms in the Dust” (1941) — but on the other hand, you can’t say they suffer from overexposure. (Warner Home Video, $29.98, not rated)
Amazon
THE DARK KNIGHT
DVD
Christian Bale plays a Bush-era Batman not ashamed to use wiretapping, torture and rendition in his battle against a giggling nihilist: Heath Ledger’s Joker, who steals the show. Available in a range of editions, from the “Limited Edition Blu-ray with Batpod” ($64.98) to the humble single-disc standard definition ($28.98). (Warner Home Video, PG-13)
Trailer: The Dark Knight
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HORTON HEARS A WHO! (DVD GIFT SET)
Jim Carrey lends his voice to Dr. Seuss’s compassionate elephant in a computer-animated version of the 1954 children’s book, with other characters interpreted by Steve Carell, Carol Burnett and Seth Rogen. The different versions in the marketplace run from an Amazon-exclusive gift set that includes a plush toy and an audio storybook ($46.98), to a modest single-disc edition ($29.98). (Fox Home Entertainment, G)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
Amazon
I AM LEGEND ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Will Smith stars as the (almost) last man on earth, who uses an abandoned Manhattan as his personal playground. Francis Lawrence directed this third, and most cuddly, version of the Richard Matheson story. The three-disc collector’s edition comes with a 44-page book and “six art cards of devastated cities.” (Warner Home Video, $49.98, PG-13)
Trailer: I Am Legend
Amazon
MAMMA MIA! THE MOVIE
DVD
A score of Abba standards wedded to a plot seemingly inspired by the largely forgotten 1968 film “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” with Meryl Streep as a single mom reunited with three past loves — Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth — one of whom is the father of her daughter (Amanda Seyfried). (Universal, Blu-ray $39.98, two-disc special edition $34.98, single disc $29.98, PG-13)
Trailer: Mamma Mia!
Amazon
300 LIMITED COLLECTOR’S EDITION
When the kids have had enough good will toward men, it’s time to slap on this extravagantly stylized representation of the Battle of Thermopylae, starring Gerard Butler as the leader of the Spartans and Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, the Persian king. The director Zack Snyder uses digital technology to give the proceedings the airbrushed look of a graphic novel. The collector’s edition includes a 52-page hardcover book and an awesome Lucite paperweight. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, R)
Trailer: 300
Amazon
WALL-E
DVD
The lovably unstoppable custodial robot counts a string of Christmas lights among his souvenirs of a planet earth lost to pollution, but Andrew Stanton’s digitally animated film lies beyond seasonal categorization. It’s available in several different iterations, from a Blu-ray three-disc special edition ($40.99) to a plain vanilla single disc standard DVD ($29.99), all of which include a new short film, “Burn-E.” (Disney DVD, G)
Trailer: WALL-E
Amazon
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO: THE COMPLETE UNIVERSAL PICTURES COLLECTION
All 28 of the feature films that the burlesque comedians made for their home studio, from “One Night in the Tropics” (1940) to “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy” (1955). Includes a 44-page book. (Universal, $119.98, not rated)
Amazon
CASABLANCA: ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Warner’s latest edition of the studio’s signature title comes in both Blu-ray ($64.98) and standard ($59.98) versions in boxes packed with extras, including a 48-page photo book and a luggage tag. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: Casablanca
Amazon
COLUMBIA BEST PICTURES COLLECTION
All but one (“The Last Emperor”) of Columbia’s Oscar-winning features, from “It Happened One Night” (1934) to “Gandhi” (1982). Mostly these 11 films seem to be repressings of Sony’s previous DVD releases, with the important exception of Robert Rossen’s 1949 “All the King’s Men,” which has been remastered and much improved over the initial release. (Sony, $135.95) .
Amazon
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION
DVD
Robert Wise’s cold war science fiction classic of 1951, with Michael Rennie as an interplanetary visitor with a message for humanity (a role played by Keanu Reeves in this season’s remake). (Fox Home Entertainment, Blu-ray $34.99, standard two-disc edition $19.98, G)
Trailer: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Amazon
THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION GIFTSET
Contains the gorgeous new restorations of the first two films (1972 and 1974) as well as the disappointing Part 3 (1990) and a wealth of supplementary material. (Paramount, Blu-ray $124.99, standard definition $69.99, R)
Trailer: The Godfather (1972)
Amazon
HEATHERS: LIMITED EDITION BOX SET
Michael Lehmann’s black comedy of high school life with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, now packaged in a miniature metal locker with souvenir magnets and a T-shirt. Includes both standard and Blu-ray versions. (Anchor Bay, $89.97, R)
Trailer: Heathers
Amazon
HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS COLLECTION
DVD
Fifty musicals on 61 discs drawn from the combined holdings of MGM and 20th Century Fox. It’s an eccentric assortment, featuring everything from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Elvis Presley and “Moulin Rouge!,” though not the classic MGM productions of the ’40s and ’50s (which are now controlled by Warner Brothers). For hard-core collectors, the highlights will probably be three long out-of-print features from the Samuel Goldwyn Company: “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938), “Kid Millions” (1934) and the beautiful two-strip Technicolor restoration of Eddie Cantor’s 1930 “Whoopee!,” featuring Busby Berkeley’s first choreography for film. (MGM DVD/Fox Home Entertainment, $499.98, various ratings)
Amazon
JAMES BOND BLU-RAY COLLECTION SIX PACK
MGM begins rolling out the Bond films on Blu-ray with an initial selection of six — “Dr. No,” “Die Another Day,” “Live and Let Die,” “For Your Eyes Only,” “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball” — and they look very nice indeed. The individual titles are priced at $34.98; Amazon offers an exclusive bundle of all six for $179.96.
Amazon
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE — 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION GIFT SET
John Landis’s enduring college comedy of 1978, now available in a box shaped like a house. Includes a new “making of” documentary with a running time of 98 minutes — only 11 minutes shorter than the film itself. (Universal, $34.98, R).
Trailer: National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
Amazon
PARAMOUNT CENTENNIAL COLLECTION
Paramount timidly observes its 100th anniversary by upgrading some of its most popular library titles, including “Sunset Boulevard” (a big improvement over the botched 2002 release), “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina.” (Paramount, $24.99 each, not rated)
Amazon
PINK PANTHER ULTIMATE COLLECTION
Nine of the 10 “Pink Panther” features (the 10th, “Return of the Pink Panther,” is owned by another studio), featuring Inspector Clouseau as interpreted by Peter Sellers (1963-1982), Alan Arkin (1968), Roger Moore (fleetingly, in the 1983 “Curse of the Pink Panther”) and Steve Martin (2006), as well as Roberto Benigni’s 1993 turn as Clouseau’s illegitimate Italian son. All this, and 190 “Pink Panther” cartoons to boot. (MGM DVD, $199.98)
Amazon
PLANET OF THE APES 40TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
DVD
Fox upgrades its 2006 “Planet of the Apes — The Legacy Collection” to Blu-ray. Includes all five films beginning with Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 original. (Fox Home Entertainment, $139.99, not rated)
Trailer: Planet of the Apes (1968)
Amazon
SLEEPING BEAUTY TWO-DISC PLATINUM EDITION
The first of the classic Disney features (1959) to come to Blu-ray ($34.99); also available in a very handsome standard definition transfer ($29.99). (Disney DVD, G).
Trailer: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Amazon
CRITERION BLU-RAY
Home theater enthusiasts have been waiting for the Criterion Collection, long the standard-setting company for video presentation of significant classic and foreign films, to dip its corporate toe into the new high-definition format; the first four titles will appear on Dec. 16: Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express,” Carol Reed’s “Third Man,” Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” and Nicolas Roeg’s “Man Who Fell to Earth.” They don’t disappoint. (Criterion Collection, $39.95 each, various ratings)
Amazon
DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS: A MODERN MUSKETEER
DVD
It was Douglas Fairbanks who, in a series of films beginning in 1915, created the go-getting American action hero, along with a large portion of our national identity. This collection has restored versions of 11 films, emphasizing his contemporary comedies like Allan Dwan’s “Modern Musketeer” (1917), but also including his first costume swashbuckler, the 1920 “Mark of Zorro.” (Flicker Alley, $89.99, not rated)
Amazon
GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS 2
Five features by the great form-giver of the early American cinema, D. W. Griffith, including the Museum of Modern Art’s restoration of the (nearly) complete “Way Down East” (1920) and Griffith’s underrated final feature, the brutally realistic “Struggle” (1931). (Kino International, $89.95, not rated)
Amazon
HOW THE WEST WAS WON ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
One of only two fiction films made in the enveloping widescreen three-strip Cinerama process, “How the West Was Won” has been restored by Warner Home Video to a dazzling approximation of its original grandeur. The highlight of this 1962 production is John Ford’s “Civil War” sequence, a complex blend of lyricism and bitter disillusionment. (Warner Home Video, Blu-ray $34.99, three-disc standard definition collector’s edition $59.98, G)
Amazon
MURNAU, BORZAGE AND FOX
Fox remains the only major studio to demonstrate a commitment to its silent features, and this follow-up to last year’s John Ford collection is a must-have anthology. It contains the two surviving films the great German director F. W. Murnau made for the studio, “Sunrise” (1927) and “City Girl” (1930), as well as 10 silent and early sound features by the incomparable Frank Borzage, the greatest romantic poet of the medium. (Fox Home Video, $239.98, not rated)
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November 25, 2008
Best Movies on DVD
By DAVE KEHR
DVD sales might have slumped recently, but you’d never know it from the super-duper collectors’ editions and cunningly packaged boxed sets coming out this season.
Amazon
A CHRISTMAS STORY ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Adapted from the gently satiric writings of Jean Shepherd (who narrates the film), this 1983 movie about of a near-disastrous holiday in small-town Indiana, around 1940, has become the popular choice for secular, unsentimental seasonal entertainment. The new editions from Warner Home Video (Blu-ray $49.99, standard definition $39.98) come packaged in cookie tins with assorted holiday trinkets.
Amazon
HOLIDAY INN 3-DISC COLLECTOR’S SET
DVD
Christmas is only one episode in this Irving Berlin musical about a pair of song (Bing Crosby) and dance (Fred Astaire) men and a country inn that is open only for major holidays, but it gave Crosby the occasion to introduce “White Christmas.” This three-disc set includes the original black-and-white film directed by Mark Sandrich, as well as a colorized version and a CD of the soundtrack. (Universal, $26.98, not rated)
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
Ron Howard’s very busy live-action interpretation of the Dr. Seuss story features Jim Carrey as the embittered title character; the new two-disc edition includes a snow globe. (Universal, $34.98, PG)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Amazon
POLAR EXPRESS: 3-D
DVD
Robert Zemeckis brings Chris Van Allsburg’s beloved children’s book to life. The film offers classic Christmas imagery, rendered in glorious digital animation, subtly undermined by a theme of antimaterialism. Tom Hanks plays several different characters, including the young hero, through the technique of “performance capture” computer animation. The 3-D versions ($34.99 Blu-ray, $20.98 standard) use the long outmoded red-and-green glasses technology, so don’t expect an IMAX experience. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: The Polar Express
Amazon
THE RED BALLOON/WHITE MANE
No real holiday content at all here, just a pair of seasonally appropriate child-friendly 1950s art-house classics from France, directed by Albert Lamorisse. He won an Oscar for “The Red Balloon,” in which a lonely Parisian boy (the director’s son, Pascal) is befriended by a helium balloon with a heart and mind of its own. (Criterion Collection, $19.95, not rated)
Amazon
WARNER BROTHERS CLASSIC HOLIDAY COLLECTION, VOLUME 2
“Classic” is probably overstating the case for these four lesser-known films, each with a holiday connection — “All Mine to Give” (1957), “Holiday Affair” (1949), “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” (1947) and “Blossoms in the Dust” (1941) — but on the other hand, you can’t say they suffer from overexposure. (Warner Home Video, $29.98, not rated)
Amazon
THE DARK KNIGHT
DVD
Christian Bale plays a Bush-era Batman not ashamed to use wiretapping, torture and rendition in his battle against a giggling nihilist: Heath Ledger’s Joker, who steals the show. Available in a range of editions, from the “Limited Edition Blu-ray with Batpod” ($64.98) to the humble single-disc standard definition ($28.98). (Warner Home Video, PG-13)
Trailer: The Dark Knight
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HORTON HEARS A WHO! (DVD GIFT SET)
Jim Carrey lends his voice to Dr. Seuss’s compassionate elephant in a computer-animated version of the 1954 children’s book, with other characters interpreted by Steve Carell, Carol Burnett and Seth Rogen. The different versions in the marketplace run from an Amazon-exclusive gift set that includes a plush toy and an audio storybook ($46.98), to a modest single-disc edition ($29.98). (Fox Home Entertainment, G)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
Amazon
I AM LEGEND ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Will Smith stars as the (almost) last man on earth, who uses an abandoned Manhattan as his personal playground. Francis Lawrence directed this third, and most cuddly, version of the Richard Matheson story. The three-disc collector’s edition comes with a 44-page book and “six art cards of devastated cities.” (Warner Home Video, $49.98, PG-13)
Trailer: I Am Legend
Amazon
MAMMA MIA! THE MOVIE
DVD
A score of Abba standards wedded to a plot seemingly inspired by the largely forgotten 1968 film “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” with Meryl Streep as a single mom reunited with three past loves — Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth — one of whom is the father of her daughter (Amanda Seyfried). (Universal, Blu-ray $39.98, two-disc special edition $34.98, single disc $29.98, PG-13)
Trailer: Mamma Mia!
Amazon
300 LIMITED COLLECTOR’S EDITION
When the kids have had enough good will toward men, it’s time to slap on this extravagantly stylized representation of the Battle of Thermopylae, starring Gerard Butler as the leader of the Spartans and Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, the Persian king. The director Zack Snyder uses digital technology to give the proceedings the airbrushed look of a graphic novel. The collector’s edition includes a 52-page hardcover book and an awesome Lucite paperweight. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, R)
Trailer: 300
Amazon
WALL-E
DVD
The lovably unstoppable custodial robot counts a string of Christmas lights among his souvenirs of a planet earth lost to pollution, but Andrew Stanton’s digitally animated film lies beyond seasonal categorization. It’s available in several different iterations, from a Blu-ray three-disc special edition ($40.99) to a plain vanilla single disc standard DVD ($29.99), all of which include a new short film, “Burn-E.” (Disney DVD, G)
Trailer: WALL-E
Amazon
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO: THE COMPLETE UNIVERSAL PICTURES COLLECTION
All 28 of the feature films that the burlesque comedians made for their home studio, from “One Night in the Tropics” (1940) to “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy” (1955). Includes a 44-page book. (Universal, $119.98, not rated)
Amazon
CASABLANCA: ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Warner’s latest edition of the studio’s signature title comes in both Blu-ray ($64.98) and standard ($59.98) versions in boxes packed with extras, including a 48-page photo book and a luggage tag. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: Casablanca
Amazon
COLUMBIA BEST PICTURES COLLECTION
All but one (“The Last Emperor”) of Columbia’s Oscar-winning features, from “It Happened One Night” (1934) to “Gandhi” (1982). Mostly these 11 films seem to be repressings of Sony’s previous DVD releases, with the important exception of Robert Rossen’s 1949 “All the King’s Men,” which has been remastered and much improved over the initial release. (Sony, $135.95) .
Amazon
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION
DVD
Robert Wise’s cold war science fiction classic of 1951, with Michael Rennie as an interplanetary visitor with a message for humanity (a role played by Keanu Reeves in this season’s remake). (Fox Home Entertainment, Blu-ray $34.99, standard two-disc edition $19.98, G)
Trailer: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Amazon
THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION GIFTSET
Contains the gorgeous new restorations of the first two films (1972 and 1974) as well as the disappointing Part 3 (1990) and a wealth of supplementary material. (Paramount, Blu-ray $124.99, standard definition $69.99, R)
Trailer: The Godfather (1972)
Amazon
HEATHERS: LIMITED EDITION BOX SET
Michael Lehmann’s black comedy of high school life with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, now packaged in a miniature metal locker with souvenir magnets and a T-shirt. Includes both standard and Blu-ray versions. (Anchor Bay, $89.97, R)
Trailer: Heathers
Amazon
HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS COLLECTION
DVD
Fifty musicals on 61 discs drawn from the combined holdings of MGM and 20th Century Fox. It’s an eccentric assortment, featuring everything from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Elvis Presley and “Moulin Rouge!,” though not the classic MGM productions of the ’40s and ’50s (which are now controlled by Warner Brothers). For hard-core collectors, the highlights will probably be three long out-of-print features from the Samuel Goldwyn Company: “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938), “Kid Millions” (1934) and the beautiful two-strip Technicolor restoration of Eddie Cantor’s 1930 “Whoopee!,” featuring Busby Berkeley’s first choreography for film. (MGM DVD/Fox Home Entertainment, $499.98, various ratings)
Amazon
JAMES BOND BLU-RAY COLLECTION SIX PACK
MGM begins rolling out the Bond films on Blu-ray with an initial selection of six — “Dr. No,” “Die Another Day,” “Live and Let Die,” “For Your Eyes Only,” “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball” — and they look very nice indeed. The individual titles are priced at $34.98; Amazon offers an exclusive bundle of all six for $179.96.
Amazon
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE — 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION GIFT SET
John Landis’s enduring college comedy of 1978, now available in a box shaped like a house. Includes a new “making of” documentary with a running time of 98 minutes — only 11 minutes shorter than the film itself. (Universal, $34.98, R).
Trailer: National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
Amazon
PARAMOUNT CENTENNIAL COLLECTION
Paramount timidly observes its 100th anniversary by upgrading some of its most popular library titles, including “Sunset Boulevard” (a big improvement over the botched 2002 release), “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina.” (Paramount, $24.99 each, not rated)
Amazon
PINK PANTHER ULTIMATE COLLECTION
Nine of the 10 “Pink Panther” features (the 10th, “Return of the Pink Panther,” is owned by another studio), featuring Inspector Clouseau as interpreted by Peter Sellers (1963-1982), Alan Arkin (1968), Roger Moore (fleetingly, in the 1983 “Curse of the Pink Panther”) and Steve Martin (2006), as well as Roberto Benigni’s 1993 turn as Clouseau’s illegitimate Italian son. All this, and 190 “Pink Panther” cartoons to boot. (MGM DVD, $199.98)
Amazon
PLANET OF THE APES 40TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
DVD
Fox upgrades its 2006 “Planet of the Apes — The Legacy Collection” to Blu-ray. Includes all five films beginning with Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 original. (Fox Home Entertainment, $139.99, not rated)
Trailer: Planet of the Apes (1968)
Amazon
SLEEPING BEAUTY TWO-DISC PLATINUM EDITION
The first of the classic Disney features (1959) to come to Blu-ray ($34.99); also available in a very handsome standard definition transfer ($29.99). (Disney DVD, G).
Trailer: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Amazon
CRITERION BLU-RAY
Home theater enthusiasts have been waiting for the Criterion Collection, long the standard-setting company for video presentation of significant classic and foreign films, to dip its corporate toe into the new high-definition format; the first four titles will appear on Dec. 16: Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express,” Carol Reed’s “Third Man,” Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” and Nicolas Roeg’s “Man Who Fell to Earth.” They don’t disappoint. (Criterion Collection, $39.95 each, various ratings)
Amazon
DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS: A MODERN MUSKETEER
DVD
It was Douglas Fairbanks who, in a series of films beginning in 1915, created the go-getting American action hero, along with a large portion of our national identity. This collection has restored versions of 11 films, emphasizing his contemporary comedies like Allan Dwan’s “Modern Musketeer” (1917), but also including his first costume swashbuckler, the 1920 “Mark of Zorro.” (Flicker Alley, $89.99, not rated)
Amazon
GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS 2
Five features by the great form-giver of the early American cinema, D. W. Griffith, including the Museum of Modern Art’s restoration of the (nearly) complete “Way Down East” (1920) and Griffith’s underrated final feature, the brutally realistic “Struggle” (1931). (Kino International, $89.95, not rated)
Amazon
HOW THE WEST WAS WON ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
One of only two fiction films made in the enveloping widescreen three-strip Cinerama process, “How the West Was Won” has been restored by Warner Home Video to a dazzling approximation of its original grandeur. The highlight of this 1962 production is John Ford’s “Civil War” sequence, a complex blend of lyricism and bitter disillusionment. (Warner Home Video, Blu-ray $34.99, three-disc standard definition collector’s edition $59.98, G)
Amazon
MURNAU, BORZAGE AND FOX
Fox remains the only major studio to demonstrate a commitment to its silent features, and this follow-up to last year’s John Ford collection is a must-have anthology. It contains the two surviving films the great German director F. W. Murnau made for the studio, “Sunrise” (1927) and “City Girl” (1930), as well as 10 silent and early sound features by the incomparable Frank Borzage, the greatest romantic poet of the medium. (Fox Home Video, $239.98, not rated)
Best Movies on DVD By DAVE KEHR
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 25, 2008
Best Movies on DVD By DAVE KEHR
DVD sales might have slumped recently, but you’d never know it from the super-duper collectors’ editions and cunningly packaged boxed sets coming out this season.
Amazon
A CHRISTMAS STORY ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Adapted from the gently satiric writings of Jean Shepherd (who narrates the film), this 1983 movie about of a near-disastrous holiday in small-town Indiana, around 1940, has become the popular choice for secular, unsentimental seasonal entertainment. The new editions from Warner Home Video (Blu-ray $49.99, standard definition $39.98) come packaged in cookie tins with assorted holiday trinkets.
Amazon
HOLIDAY INN 3-DISC COLLECTOR’S SET
DVD
Christmas is only one episode in this Irving Berlin musical about a pair of song (Bing Crosby) and dance (Fred Astaire) men and a country inn that is open only for major holidays, but it gave Crosby the occasion to introduce “White Christmas.” This three-disc set includes the original black-and-white film directed by Mark Sandrich, as well as a colorized version and a CD of the soundtrack. (Universal, $26.98, not rated)
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
Ron Howard’s very busy live-action interpretation of the Dr. Seuss story features Jim Carrey as the embittered title character; the new two-disc edition includes a snow globe. (Universal, $34.98, PG)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Amazon
POLAR EXPRESS: 3-D
DVD
Robert Zemeckis brings Chris Van Allsburg’s beloved children’s book to life. The film offers classic Christmas imagery, rendered in glorious digital animation, subtly undermined by a theme of antimaterialism. Tom Hanks plays several different characters, including the young hero, through the technique of “performance capture” computer animation. The 3-D versions ($34.99 Blu-ray, $20.98 standard) use the long outmoded red-and-green glasses technology, so don’t expect an IMAX experience. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: The Polar Express
Amazon
THE RED BALLOON/WHITE MANE
No real holiday content at all here, just a pair of seasonally appropriate child-friendly 1950s art-house classics from France, directed by Albert Lamorisse. He won an Oscar for “The Red Balloon,” in which a lonely Parisian boy (the director’s son, Pascal) is befriended by a helium balloon with a heart and mind of its own. (Criterion Collection, $19.95, not rated)
Amazon
WARNER BROTHERS CLASSIC HOLIDAY COLLECTION, VOLUME 2
“Classic” is probably overstating the case for these four lesser-known films, each with a holiday connection — “All Mine to Give” (1957), “Holiday Affair” (1949), “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” (1947) and “Blossoms in the Dust” (1941) — but on the other hand, you can’t say they suffer from overexposure. (Warner Home Video, $29.98, not rated)
Amazon
THE DARK KNIGHT
DVD
Christian Bale plays a Bush-era Batman not ashamed to use wiretapping, torture and rendition in his battle against a giggling nihilist: Heath Ledger’s Joker, who steals the show. Available in a range of editions, from the “Limited Edition Blu-ray with Batpod” ($64.98) to the humble single-disc standard definition ($28.98). (Warner Home Video, PG-13)
Trailer: The Dark Knight
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HORTON HEARS A WHO! (DVD GIFT SET)
Jim Carrey lends his voice to Dr. Seuss’s compassionate elephant in a computer-animated version of the 1954 children’s book, with other characters interpreted by Steve Carell, Carol Burnett and Seth Rogen. The different versions in the marketplace run from an Amazon-exclusive gift set that includes a plush toy and an audio storybook ($46.98), to a modest single-disc edition ($29.98). (Fox Home Entertainment, G)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
Amazon
I AM LEGEND ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Will Smith stars as the (almost) last man on earth, who uses an abandoned Manhattan as his personal playground. Francis Lawrence directed this third, and most cuddly, version of the Richard Matheson story. The three-disc collector’s edition comes with a 44-page book and “six art cards of devastated cities.” (Warner Home Video, $49.98, PG-13)
Trailer: I Am Legend
Amazon
MAMMA MIA! THE MOVIE
DVD
A score of Abba standards wedded to a plot seemingly inspired by the largely forgotten 1968 film “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” with Meryl Streep as a single mom reunited with three past loves — Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth — one of whom is the father of her daughter (Amanda Seyfried). (Universal, Blu-ray $39.98, two-disc special edition $34.98, single disc $29.98, PG-13)
Trailer: Mamma Mia!
Amazon
300 LIMITED COLLECTOR’S EDITION
When the kids have had enough good will toward men, it’s time to slap on this extravagantly stylized representation of the Battle of Thermopylae, starring Gerard Butler as the leader of the Spartans and Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, the Persian king. The director Zack Snyder uses digital technology to give the proceedings the airbrushed look of a graphic novel. The collector’s edition includes a 52-page hardcover book and an awesome Lucite paperweight. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, R)
Trailer: 300
Amazon
WALL-E
DVD
The lovably unstoppable custodial robot counts a string of Christmas lights among his souvenirs of a planet earth lost to pollution, but Andrew Stanton’s digitally animated film lies beyond seasonal categorization. It’s available in several different iterations, from a Blu-ray three-disc special edition ($40.99) to a plain vanilla single disc standard DVD ($29.99), all of which include a new short film, “Burn-E.” (Disney DVD, G)
Trailer: WALL-E
Amazon
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO: THE COMPLETE UNIVERSAL PICTURES COLLECTION
All 28 of the feature films that the burlesque comedians made for their home studio, from “One Night in the Tropics” (1940) to “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy” (1955). Includes a 44-page book. (Universal, $119.98, not rated)
Amazon
CASABLANCA: ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Warner’s latest edition of the studio’s signature title comes in both Blu-ray ($64.98) and standard ($59.98) versions in boxes packed with extras, including a 48-page photo book and a luggage tag. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: Casablanca
Amazon
COLUMBIA BEST PICTURES COLLECTION
All but one (“The Last Emperor”) of Columbia’s Oscar-winning features, from “It Happened One Night” (1934) to “Gandhi” (1982). Mostly these 11 films seem to be repressings of Sony’s previous DVD releases, with the important exception of Robert Rossen’s 1949 “All the King’s Men,” which has been remastered and much improved over the initial release. (Sony, $135.95) .
Amazon
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION
DVD
Robert Wise’s cold war science fiction classic of 1951, with Michael Rennie as an interplanetary visitor with a message for humanity (a role played by Keanu Reeves in this season’s remake). (Fox Home Entertainment, Blu-ray $34.99, standard two-disc edition $19.98, G)
Trailer: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Amazon
THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION GIFTSET
Contains the gorgeous new restorations of the first two films (1972 and 1974) as well as the disappointing Part 3 (1990) and a wealth of supplementary material. (Paramount, Blu-ray $124.99, standard definition $69.99, R)
Trailer: The Godfather (1972)
Amazon
HEATHERS: LIMITED EDITION BOX SET
Michael Lehmann’s black comedy of high school life with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, now packaged in a miniature metal locker with souvenir magnets and a T-shirt. Includes both standard and Blu-ray versions. (Anchor Bay, $89.97, R)
Trailer: Heathers
Amazon
HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS COLLECTION
DVD
Fifty musicals on 61 discs drawn from the combined holdings of MGM and 20th Century Fox. It’s an eccentric assortment, featuring everything from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Elvis Presley and “Moulin Rouge!,” though not the classic MGM productions of the ’40s and ’50s (which are now controlled by Warner Brothers). For hard-core collectors, the highlights will probably be three long out-of-print features from the Samuel Goldwyn Company: “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938), “Kid Millions” (1934) and the beautiful two-strip Technicolor restoration of Eddie Cantor’s 1930 “Whoopee!,” featuring Busby Berkeley’s first choreography for film. (MGM DVD/Fox Home Entertainment, $499.98, various ratings)
Amazon
JAMES BOND BLU-RAY COLLECTION SIX PACK
MGM begins rolling out the Bond films on Blu-ray with an initial selection of six — “Dr. No,” “Die Another Day,” “Live and Let Die,” “For Your Eyes Only,” “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball” — and they look very nice indeed. The individual titles are priced at $34.98; Amazon offers an exclusive bundle of all six for $179.96.
Amazon
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE — 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION GIFT SET
John Landis’s enduring college comedy of 1978, now available in a box shaped like a house. Includes a new “making of” documentary with a running time of 98 minutes — only 11 minutes shorter than the film itself. (Universal, $34.98, R).
Trailer: National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
Amazon
PARAMOUNT CENTENNIAL COLLECTION
Paramount timidly observes its 100th anniversary by upgrading some of its most popular library titles, including “Sunset Boulevard” (a big improvement over the botched 2002 release), “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina.” (Paramount, $24.99 each, not rated)
Amazon
PINK PANTHER ULTIMATE COLLECTION
Nine of the 10 “Pink Panther” features (the 10th, “Return of the Pink Panther,” is owned by another studio), featuring Inspector Clouseau as interpreted by Peter Sellers (1963-1982), Alan Arkin (1968), Roger Moore (fleetingly, in the 1983 “Curse of the Pink Panther”) and Steve Martin (2006), as well as Roberto Benigni’s 1993 turn as Clouseau’s illegitimate Italian son. All this, and 190 “Pink Panther” cartoons to boot. (MGM DVD, $199.98)
Amazon
PLANET OF THE APES 40TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
DVD
Fox upgrades its 2006 “Planet of the Apes — The Legacy Collection” to Blu-ray. Includes all five films beginning with Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 original. (Fox Home Entertainment, $139.99, not rated)
Trailer: Planet of the Apes (1968)
Amazon
SLEEPING BEAUTY TWO-DISC PLATINUM EDITION
The first of the classic Disney features (1959) to come to Blu-ray ($34.99); also available in a very handsome standard definition transfer ($29.99). (Disney DVD, G).
Trailer: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Amazon
CRITERION BLU-RAY
Home theater enthusiasts have been waiting for the Criterion Collection, long the standard-setting company for video presentation of significant classic and foreign films, to dip its corporate toe into the new high-definition format; the first four titles will appear on Dec. 16: Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express,” Carol Reed’s “Third Man,” Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” and Nicolas Roeg’s “Man Who Fell to Earth.” They don’t disappoint. (Criterion Collection, $39.95 each, various ratings)
Amazon
DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS: A MODERN MUSKETEER
DVD
It was Douglas Fairbanks who, in a series of films beginning in 1915, created the go-getting American action hero, along with a large portion of our national identity. This collection has restored versions of 11 films, emphasizing his contemporary comedies like Allan Dwan’s “Modern Musketeer” (1917), but also including his first costume swashbuckler, the 1920 “Mark of Zorro.” (Flicker Alley, $89.99, not rated)
Amazon
GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS 2
Five features by the great form-giver of the early American cinema, D. W. Griffith, including the Museum of Modern Art’s restoration of the (nearly) complete “Way Down East” (1920) and Griffith’s underrated final feature, the brutally realistic “Struggle” (1931). (Kino International, $89.95, not rated)
Amazon
HOW THE WEST WAS WON ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
One of only two fiction films made in the enveloping widescreen three-strip Cinerama process, “How the West Was Won” has been restored by Warner Home Video to a dazzling approximation of its original grandeur. The highlight of this 1962 production is John Ford’s “Civil War” sequence, a complex blend of lyricism and bitter disillusionment. (Warner Home Video, Blu-ray $34.99, three-disc standard definition collector’s edition $59.98, G)
Amazon
MURNAU, BORZAGE AND FOX
Fox remains the only major studio to demonstrate a commitment to its silent features, and this follow-up to last year’s John Ford collection is a must-have anthology. It contains the two surviving films the great German director F. W. Murnau made for the studio, “Sunrise” (1927) and “City Girl” (1930), as well as 10 silent and early sound features by the incomparable Frank Borzage, the greatest romantic poet of the medium. (Fox Home Video, $239.98, not rated)
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 25, 2008
Best Movies on DVD By DAVE KEHR
DVD sales might have slumped recently, but you’d never know it from the super-duper collectors’ editions and cunningly packaged boxed sets coming out this season.
Amazon
A CHRISTMAS STORY ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Adapted from the gently satiric writings of Jean Shepherd (who narrates the film), this 1983 movie about of a near-disastrous holiday in small-town Indiana, around 1940, has become the popular choice for secular, unsentimental seasonal entertainment. The new editions from Warner Home Video (Blu-ray $49.99, standard definition $39.98) come packaged in cookie tins with assorted holiday trinkets.
Amazon
HOLIDAY INN 3-DISC COLLECTOR’S SET
DVD
Christmas is only one episode in this Irving Berlin musical about a pair of song (Bing Crosby) and dance (Fred Astaire) men and a country inn that is open only for major holidays, but it gave Crosby the occasion to introduce “White Christmas.” This three-disc set includes the original black-and-white film directed by Mark Sandrich, as well as a colorized version and a CD of the soundtrack. (Universal, $26.98, not rated)
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
Ron Howard’s very busy live-action interpretation of the Dr. Seuss story features Jim Carrey as the embittered title character; the new two-disc edition includes a snow globe. (Universal, $34.98, PG)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Amazon
POLAR EXPRESS: 3-D
DVD
Robert Zemeckis brings Chris Van Allsburg’s beloved children’s book to life. The film offers classic Christmas imagery, rendered in glorious digital animation, subtly undermined by a theme of antimaterialism. Tom Hanks plays several different characters, including the young hero, through the technique of “performance capture” computer animation. The 3-D versions ($34.99 Blu-ray, $20.98 standard) use the long outmoded red-and-green glasses technology, so don’t expect an IMAX experience. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: The Polar Express
Amazon
THE RED BALLOON/WHITE MANE
No real holiday content at all here, just a pair of seasonally appropriate child-friendly 1950s art-house classics from France, directed by Albert Lamorisse. He won an Oscar for “The Red Balloon,” in which a lonely Parisian boy (the director’s son, Pascal) is befriended by a helium balloon with a heart and mind of its own. (Criterion Collection, $19.95, not rated)
Amazon
WARNER BROTHERS CLASSIC HOLIDAY COLLECTION, VOLUME 2
“Classic” is probably overstating the case for these four lesser-known films, each with a holiday connection — “All Mine to Give” (1957), “Holiday Affair” (1949), “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” (1947) and “Blossoms in the Dust” (1941) — but on the other hand, you can’t say they suffer from overexposure. (Warner Home Video, $29.98, not rated)
Amazon
THE DARK KNIGHT
DVD
Christian Bale plays a Bush-era Batman not ashamed to use wiretapping, torture and rendition in his battle against a giggling nihilist: Heath Ledger’s Joker, who steals the show. Available in a range of editions, from the “Limited Edition Blu-ray with Batpod” ($64.98) to the humble single-disc standard definition ($28.98). (Warner Home Video, PG-13)
Trailer: The Dark Knight
Amazon
DR. SEUSS’ HORTON HEARS A WHO! (DVD GIFT SET)
Jim Carrey lends his voice to Dr. Seuss’s compassionate elephant in a computer-animated version of the 1954 children’s book, with other characters interpreted by Steve Carell, Carol Burnett and Seth Rogen. The different versions in the marketplace run from an Amazon-exclusive gift set that includes a plush toy and an audio storybook ($46.98), to a modest single-disc edition ($29.98). (Fox Home Entertainment, G)
Trailer: Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
Amazon
I AM LEGEND ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Will Smith stars as the (almost) last man on earth, who uses an abandoned Manhattan as his personal playground. Francis Lawrence directed this third, and most cuddly, version of the Richard Matheson story. The three-disc collector’s edition comes with a 44-page book and “six art cards of devastated cities.” (Warner Home Video, $49.98, PG-13)
Trailer: I Am Legend
Amazon
MAMMA MIA! THE MOVIE
DVD
A score of Abba standards wedded to a plot seemingly inspired by the largely forgotten 1968 film “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” with Meryl Streep as a single mom reunited with three past loves — Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth — one of whom is the father of her daughter (Amanda Seyfried). (Universal, Blu-ray $39.98, two-disc special edition $34.98, single disc $29.98, PG-13)
Trailer: Mamma Mia!
Amazon
300 LIMITED COLLECTOR’S EDITION
When the kids have had enough good will toward men, it’s time to slap on this extravagantly stylized representation of the Battle of Thermopylae, starring Gerard Butler as the leader of the Spartans and Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, the Persian king. The director Zack Snyder uses digital technology to give the proceedings the airbrushed look of a graphic novel. The collector’s edition includes a 52-page hardcover book and an awesome Lucite paperweight. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, R)
Trailer: 300
Amazon
WALL-E
DVD
The lovably unstoppable custodial robot counts a string of Christmas lights among his souvenirs of a planet earth lost to pollution, but Andrew Stanton’s digitally animated film lies beyond seasonal categorization. It’s available in several different iterations, from a Blu-ray three-disc special edition ($40.99) to a plain vanilla single disc standard DVD ($29.99), all of which include a new short film, “Burn-E.” (Disney DVD, G)
Trailer: WALL-E
Amazon
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO: THE COMPLETE UNIVERSAL PICTURES COLLECTION
All 28 of the feature films that the burlesque comedians made for their home studio, from “One Night in the Tropics” (1940) to “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy” (1955). Includes a 44-page book. (Universal, $119.98, not rated)
Amazon
CASABLANCA: ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Warner’s latest edition of the studio’s signature title comes in both Blu-ray ($64.98) and standard ($59.98) versions in boxes packed with extras, including a 48-page photo book and a luggage tag. (Warner Home Video, not rated)
Trailer: Casablanca
Amazon
COLUMBIA BEST PICTURES COLLECTION
All but one (“The Last Emperor”) of Columbia’s Oscar-winning features, from “It Happened One Night” (1934) to “Gandhi” (1982). Mostly these 11 films seem to be repressings of Sony’s previous DVD releases, with the important exception of Robert Rossen’s 1949 “All the King’s Men,” which has been remastered and much improved over the initial release. (Sony, $135.95) .
Amazon
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION
DVD
Robert Wise’s cold war science fiction classic of 1951, with Michael Rennie as an interplanetary visitor with a message for humanity (a role played by Keanu Reeves in this season’s remake). (Fox Home Entertainment, Blu-ray $34.99, standard two-disc edition $19.98, G)
Trailer: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Amazon
THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION GIFTSET
Contains the gorgeous new restorations of the first two films (1972 and 1974) as well as the disappointing Part 3 (1990) and a wealth of supplementary material. (Paramount, Blu-ray $124.99, standard definition $69.99, R)
Trailer: The Godfather (1972)
Amazon
HEATHERS: LIMITED EDITION BOX SET
Michael Lehmann’s black comedy of high school life with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, now packaged in a miniature metal locker with souvenir magnets and a T-shirt. Includes both standard and Blu-ray versions. (Anchor Bay, $89.97, R)
Trailer: Heathers
Amazon
HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS COLLECTION
DVD
Fifty musicals on 61 discs drawn from the combined holdings of MGM and 20th Century Fox. It’s an eccentric assortment, featuring everything from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Elvis Presley and “Moulin Rouge!,” though not the classic MGM productions of the ’40s and ’50s (which are now controlled by Warner Brothers). For hard-core collectors, the highlights will probably be three long out-of-print features from the Samuel Goldwyn Company: “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938), “Kid Millions” (1934) and the beautiful two-strip Technicolor restoration of Eddie Cantor’s 1930 “Whoopee!,” featuring Busby Berkeley’s first choreography for film. (MGM DVD/Fox Home Entertainment, $499.98, various ratings)
Amazon
JAMES BOND BLU-RAY COLLECTION SIX PACK
MGM begins rolling out the Bond films on Blu-ray with an initial selection of six — “Dr. No,” “Die Another Day,” “Live and Let Die,” “For Your Eyes Only,” “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball” — and they look very nice indeed. The individual titles are priced at $34.98; Amazon offers an exclusive bundle of all six for $179.96.
Amazon
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE — 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION GIFT SET
John Landis’s enduring college comedy of 1978, now available in a box shaped like a house. Includes a new “making of” documentary with a running time of 98 minutes — only 11 minutes shorter than the film itself. (Universal, $34.98, R).
Trailer: National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
Amazon
PARAMOUNT CENTENNIAL COLLECTION
Paramount timidly observes its 100th anniversary by upgrading some of its most popular library titles, including “Sunset Boulevard” (a big improvement over the botched 2002 release), “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina.” (Paramount, $24.99 each, not rated)
Amazon
PINK PANTHER ULTIMATE COLLECTION
Nine of the 10 “Pink Panther” features (the 10th, “Return of the Pink Panther,” is owned by another studio), featuring Inspector Clouseau as interpreted by Peter Sellers (1963-1982), Alan Arkin (1968), Roger Moore (fleetingly, in the 1983 “Curse of the Pink Panther”) and Steve Martin (2006), as well as Roberto Benigni’s 1993 turn as Clouseau’s illegitimate Italian son. All this, and 190 “Pink Panther” cartoons to boot. (MGM DVD, $199.98)
Amazon
PLANET OF THE APES 40TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
DVD
Fox upgrades its 2006 “Planet of the Apes — The Legacy Collection” to Blu-ray. Includes all five films beginning with Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 original. (Fox Home Entertainment, $139.99, not rated)
Trailer: Planet of the Apes (1968)
Amazon
SLEEPING BEAUTY TWO-DISC PLATINUM EDITION
The first of the classic Disney features (1959) to come to Blu-ray ($34.99); also available in a very handsome standard definition transfer ($29.99). (Disney DVD, G).
Trailer: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Amazon
CRITERION BLU-RAY
Home theater enthusiasts have been waiting for the Criterion Collection, long the standard-setting company for video presentation of significant classic and foreign films, to dip its corporate toe into the new high-definition format; the first four titles will appear on Dec. 16: Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express,” Carol Reed’s “Third Man,” Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” and Nicolas Roeg’s “Man Who Fell to Earth.” They don’t disappoint. (Criterion Collection, $39.95 each, various ratings)
Amazon
DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS: A MODERN MUSKETEER
DVD
It was Douglas Fairbanks who, in a series of films beginning in 1915, created the go-getting American action hero, along with a large portion of our national identity. This collection has restored versions of 11 films, emphasizing his contemporary comedies like Allan Dwan’s “Modern Musketeer” (1917), but also including his first costume swashbuckler, the 1920 “Mark of Zorro.” (Flicker Alley, $89.99, not rated)
Amazon
GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS 2
Five features by the great form-giver of the early American cinema, D. W. Griffith, including the Museum of Modern Art’s restoration of the (nearly) complete “Way Down East” (1920) and Griffith’s underrated final feature, the brutally realistic “Struggle” (1931). (Kino International, $89.95, not rated)
Amazon
HOW THE WEST WAS WON ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION
One of only two fiction films made in the enveloping widescreen three-strip Cinerama process, “How the West Was Won” has been restored by Warner Home Video to a dazzling approximation of its original grandeur. The highlight of this 1962 production is John Ford’s “Civil War” sequence, a complex blend of lyricism and bitter disillusionment. (Warner Home Video, Blu-ray $34.99, three-disc standard definition collector’s edition $59.98, G)
Amazon
MURNAU, BORZAGE AND FOX
Fox remains the only major studio to demonstrate a commitment to its silent features, and this follow-up to last year’s John Ford collection is a must-have anthology. It contains the two surviving films the great German director F. W. Murnau made for the studio, “Sunrise” (1927) and “City Girl” (1930), as well as 10 silent and early sound features by the incomparable Frank Borzage, the greatest romantic poet of the medium. (Fox Home Video, $239.98, not rated)
The Best Gift Books of 2008 By DWIGHT GARNER
The Best Gift Books of 2008 By DWIGHT GARNER
“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” James Agee declared in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his 1941 classic about tenant farmers in Alabama. “It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron.”
Mr. Agee, an extremist in all things, meant what he wrote. But there is a similar impulse at work in all the best art and photography books, as well as in those unclassifiable volumes we call “gift books,” as if no sane mortal would purchase them for himself. These outsize and piquing books wish to be sensory experiences; they work to bring the world into our hands in such a way that text is, largely, superfluous.
Scrapbooks: An American History
Book Cover
By Jessica Helfand (Yale University Press/Winterhouse Editions, $45). The best of this year’s gift books, “Scrapbooks” would make Agee — whose quotation above she approvingly cites — very happy. Ms. Helfand’s soulful volume is a sampling of some 200 historical scrapbooks, a few from famous personages (Anne Sexton, Lillian Hellman), but most the work of forgotten romantics and obsessives, who filled their scrapbooks with evocative artifacts like menus, telegrams, pressed flowers, ticket stubs, firecrackers, soap labels and locks of hair.
These scrapbooks, beautifully presented here, are “unauthorized one-offs,” Ms. Helfand writes in her hyperarticulate introduction. They represent a “virtually unexplored visual vernacular, a world of makeshift means and primitive methods, of gestural madness and unruly visions, of piety and poetry and a million private plagiarisms.” (Warning: Do not get Ms. Helfand started on the current scrapbooking fad, a perky and homogenized “memory industry” she deplores.)
Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop
Edited by Emma Pettit (Black Dog Publishing, $29.95). This is another book I fell hard for this year, and it feels like a kind of scrapbook itself. The book is an elegiac love poem to the vanishing independent record shops in the United States and Britain, which are being killed off by the Internet and one of its many demon spawn, the MP3. “Old Rare New” is not an especially lovely thing to look at; it’s got the hodge-podge visual sensibility of a 1980s ’zine. But it is stuffed with photographs, interviews and images of weird old album covers, and it expertly captures “the madness that oozes” out of a record owner’s skin and “perfumes their shops.”
If you’re over a certain age and own (or owned) a lot of vinyl, “Old Rare New” will be a heartbreaker. Here is one store owner, David Lashmar, talking about today’s iPod generation, in language you practically want to declaim, as if it were Whitman: “They will never know the joy of flicking through a rack of records, being captivated by cover artwork and reading the sleeve notes. Of getting the record home, sliding it reverentially out of its cover and then out of its inner sleeve, marveling at the luster of the grooves. The sacrificial offering onto the altar of the turntable, the gentle penetration of the spindle, the lowering of the arm and the total bliss of being part of an actual performance that you have helped to complete. This baptismal immersion into sonic joy will never leave you. The day you bought the record, where you were, what you were wearing and who was in your heart, will be etched into your soul, as well defined as the grooves that are pressed into your record.” Mr. Lashmar’s reference to “who was in your heart” — man, that gets me every time. Can I get an “Amen” while I wipe a tear onto the sleeve of my torn J. Geils Band concert T-shirt?
Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript
Book Cover
Text by Bob Dylan and photographs by Barry Feinstein (Simon & Schuster, $30). “Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric” is another book with a strange, scarred, resonating old soul. This book is made up of 23 of Mr. Dylan’s cosmic prose poems, written in the 1960s, inspired by a series of Mr. Feinstein’s moody black-and-white photographs of movie stars, casting couches and back lots. As Luc Sante writes in his introduction, “Although the photographs were made for a variety of assignments and in a number of different contexts, they have a remarkable consistency and a clearly identifiable theme: the passing of old Hollywood.” Mr. Feinstein’s pictures, reminiscent of both Robert Frank’s and Diane Arbus’s, are impossible to turn away from. And Mr. Dylan’s poems? Well, they aren’t totally unreadable. But they will not send you rushing back for a critical reconsideration of “Tarantula.”
Annie Leibovitz: At Work
(Random House, $40). This small, elegant volume is in many ways among Ms. Leibovitz's most personal books; in it she reprints some of her most famous images and tells the stories behind them, and she speaks of her photographic philosophy. There are good stories here about taking mescaline with Hunter S. Thompson and attending NASA parties with Tom Wolfe while he was reporting “The Right Stuff.” And there are little surprises scattered along the trail. When Ms. Leibovitz, who has created portraits of nearly every well-known person on the planet, talks about charisma, the first name she conjures up is Nicole Kidman’s. “There’s not a bad way to photograph her,” Ms. Leibovitz writes, adding that quirky things add to her allure: “The way Nicole Kidman looks from behind when she walks away, for instance. The way she stands. Not many people are good at standing.”
Richard Avedon Performance
(Abrams, $75). This is a well-chosen retrospective from a photographer whose long career enabled him to take important photographs of culturally distant figures like Buster Keaton (in 1952) and Cat Power (in 2003). In his essay John Lahr says it all: “Shut your eyes and think of the following people: Marilyn Monroe, Jean Renoir, Truman Capote, Buster Keaton, Bert Lahr, Bob Dylan, Katharine Hepburn, Igor Stravinsky, Lena Horne, Oscar Levant, Ezra Pound, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Chicago Seven, Marianne Moore, Robert Frank, Willem de Kooning, Audrey Hepburn, Rudolf Nureyev, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Bette Midler, Francis Bacon, Dorothy Parker, the Beatles. Chances are that what you first see in your mind’s eye is a photograph taken by Richard Avedon: crisp, scalpel-sharp, electric, an iconic distillation of the subject’s public persona or of his internal drama.” The photographs included here put me in mind of something Kenneth Tynan wrote, in the introduction to his profile collection “Show People,” about why he picked the essays he did: “Last and far from least, they all rank high on the list of people whom I would invite to an ideal dinner party.”
Athlete
Book Cover
Photographs by Walter Iooss (Sports Illustrated, $34.95). This book is an ultraglossy, color-saturated, wide-format selection of images from America’s best-known sports photographer. His career has nearly been as long as Mr. Avedon’s; Mr. Iooss, who is still working, received his first assignment from Sports Illustrated in 1961, at the age of 16. There are classic and revealing shots here of people from Walt Frazier, Carl Yastrzemski, Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali to Tom Brady, David Beckham and Tiger Woods. It’s a book that bears out this contention, from Michael Jordan, in the book’s introduction: “From what I can tell, Walter has never taken a bad shot of anybody or anything.” Mr. Iooss’s stuff pops.
Library of Dust
Photographs by David Maisel. (Chronicle Books, $80). “Library of Dust” may well be this year’s most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel’s book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.
Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds
(Chronicle Books, $50). Then there is this volume, which commences with Marilyn Monroe (Miss December, 1953) and closes with Sasckya Porto (Miss December, 2007). Along the way, we chart the changing trends in hairstyles, lighting techniques, bikini bottoms, living room décor and depilation. Wedged among the smiling naked women are essays by Robert Coover, Paul Theroux, Robert Stone, Jay McInerney, Daphne Merkin and Maureen Gibbon. About the centerfolds of the 1960s, Mr. Theroux writes: “In many cases these centerfolds are the epitome of American loveliness, our very own apsaras, with their creamy skins and bright smiles, the almost-awkward willingness in their postures, not hookers but prom queens and biker babes. For Americans who came of age in the 1960s, they are the girls of your dreams.”
Paper Illusions: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave
Book Cover
By Barbara and René Stoeltie (Abrams, $75). This is among the most unusual and fascinating fashion books I’ve seen in a long time. Ms. de Borchgrave works an unusual form of magic: she creates dresses, representative of almost every era, from the courts of the Medici onward, from paper. These intricate paper dresses are not to be worn; they are to be astonished by. Even the purple prose of Barbara Stoeltie’s introduction (“Paper crackles and trembles. It whispers and rustles. It whistles and coos.” Coos?) is not enough to make you put this book down.
The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008
(Black Dog & Leventhal; $60). In terms of size and historical sweep, The New York Times has a mighty entry in this year’s gift book sweepstakes. It’s a volume that reproduces more than 300 of the most significant front pages of the past century and a half, and also contains 3 DVD-ROMs with all of the newspaper’s 54,267 front pages with links to the full articles.
Classic headlines like “OUR GREAT LOSS: Death of President Lincoln” and “ALLIED ARMIES LAND IN FRANCE IN THE HAVRE-CHERBOURG AREA; GREAT INVASION IS UNDER WAY” and “MEN WALK ON MOON” convey a remarkable historical immediacy. In the era before 24-hour cable news and countless Web sites, a newspaper headline was often the first public report of an event, and it could hit home like a happy telegram or a punch in the stomach.
Even in the Internet age, Bill Keller, The Times’s executive editor, writes in his introduction to “The Complete Front Pages,” “Page One is still what most stirs our ambition. Editors assure reporters that each page of the paper is precious, even those consisting of a narrow gutter alongside a department-store ad, but the front page is the showcase every reporter aspires to. Whether it comes shouted across a newsroom, telexed to a foreign bureau or in an e-mail message, there are few more satisfying phrases in our business than ‘You are fronted.’ ”
And as Mr. Keller notes, sometimes the more minor and more quixotic banner headlines are the most interesting, like this one from 1912: “MANIAC IN MILWAUKEE SHOOTS COL. ROOSEVELT; HE IGNORES WOUND, SPEAKS AN HOUR, GOES TO HOSPITAL.”
Additional Recommendations
I am out of space. Here are seven more books that impressed me, and I’d like to at least list their titles. So, in a sentence that’s about as long as a Twitter post, here goes: On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition, by Charles Darwin, edited and with an introduction by David Quammen (Sterling, $35); The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, by Neil Harris (University of Chicago Press, $65); Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound, by Miyoko Chu with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (Chronicle Books, $60); The Harley-Davidson Motor Co. Archive Collection, by Randy Leffingwell and Darwin Holmstrom (Motorbooks, $60); You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, by Richard Schickel and George Perry (Running Press, $50); With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars, by the novelist Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine Books, $75); and The DC Vault, by Martin Pasko (Running Press, $49.95), a kind of bootleg archive of blissful ephemera from the DC Comics archives.
“When I get a little money, I buy books,” Erasmus said. “And if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” Times are tough; big lavish books aren’t inexpensive; we can’t always shop with Erasmus’s high-minded priorities. But some of the titles included here are manageable on tight budgets. And even the luxe volumes are probably still cheaper than clothes and will last longer than food; and if for some reason they don’t appeal to the gift recipient, they’re easier than either to rewrap and put under someone else’s tree.
“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” James Agee declared in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his 1941 classic about tenant farmers in Alabama. “It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron.”
Mr. Agee, an extremist in all things, meant what he wrote. But there is a similar impulse at work in all the best art and photography books, as well as in those unclassifiable volumes we call “gift books,” as if no sane mortal would purchase them for himself. These outsize and piquing books wish to be sensory experiences; they work to bring the world into our hands in such a way that text is, largely, superfluous.
Scrapbooks: An American History
Book Cover
By Jessica Helfand (Yale University Press/Winterhouse Editions, $45). The best of this year’s gift books, “Scrapbooks” would make Agee — whose quotation above she approvingly cites — very happy. Ms. Helfand’s soulful volume is a sampling of some 200 historical scrapbooks, a few from famous personages (Anne Sexton, Lillian Hellman), but most the work of forgotten romantics and obsessives, who filled their scrapbooks with evocative artifacts like menus, telegrams, pressed flowers, ticket stubs, firecrackers, soap labels and locks of hair.
These scrapbooks, beautifully presented here, are “unauthorized one-offs,” Ms. Helfand writes in her hyperarticulate introduction. They represent a “virtually unexplored visual vernacular, a world of makeshift means and primitive methods, of gestural madness and unruly visions, of piety and poetry and a million private plagiarisms.” (Warning: Do not get Ms. Helfand started on the current scrapbooking fad, a perky and homogenized “memory industry” she deplores.)
Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop
Edited by Emma Pettit (Black Dog Publishing, $29.95). This is another book I fell hard for this year, and it feels like a kind of scrapbook itself. The book is an elegiac love poem to the vanishing independent record shops in the United States and Britain, which are being killed off by the Internet and one of its many demon spawn, the MP3. “Old Rare New” is not an especially lovely thing to look at; it’s got the hodge-podge visual sensibility of a 1980s ’zine. But it is stuffed with photographs, interviews and images of weird old album covers, and it expertly captures “the madness that oozes” out of a record owner’s skin and “perfumes their shops.”
If you’re over a certain age and own (or owned) a lot of vinyl, “Old Rare New” will be a heartbreaker. Here is one store owner, David Lashmar, talking about today’s iPod generation, in language you practically want to declaim, as if it were Whitman: “They will never know the joy of flicking through a rack of records, being captivated by cover artwork and reading the sleeve notes. Of getting the record home, sliding it reverentially out of its cover and then out of its inner sleeve, marveling at the luster of the grooves. The sacrificial offering onto the altar of the turntable, the gentle penetration of the spindle, the lowering of the arm and the total bliss of being part of an actual performance that you have helped to complete. This baptismal immersion into sonic joy will never leave you. The day you bought the record, where you were, what you were wearing and who was in your heart, will be etched into your soul, as well defined as the grooves that are pressed into your record.” Mr. Lashmar’s reference to “who was in your heart” — man, that gets me every time. Can I get an “Amen” while I wipe a tear onto the sleeve of my torn J. Geils Band concert T-shirt?
Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript
Book Cover
Text by Bob Dylan and photographs by Barry Feinstein (Simon & Schuster, $30). “Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric” is another book with a strange, scarred, resonating old soul. This book is made up of 23 of Mr. Dylan’s cosmic prose poems, written in the 1960s, inspired by a series of Mr. Feinstein’s moody black-and-white photographs of movie stars, casting couches and back lots. As Luc Sante writes in his introduction, “Although the photographs were made for a variety of assignments and in a number of different contexts, they have a remarkable consistency and a clearly identifiable theme: the passing of old Hollywood.” Mr. Feinstein’s pictures, reminiscent of both Robert Frank’s and Diane Arbus’s, are impossible to turn away from. And Mr. Dylan’s poems? Well, they aren’t totally unreadable. But they will not send you rushing back for a critical reconsideration of “Tarantula.”
Annie Leibovitz: At Work
(Random House, $40). This small, elegant volume is in many ways among Ms. Leibovitz's most personal books; in it she reprints some of her most famous images and tells the stories behind them, and she speaks of her photographic philosophy. There are good stories here about taking mescaline with Hunter S. Thompson and attending NASA parties with Tom Wolfe while he was reporting “The Right Stuff.” And there are little surprises scattered along the trail. When Ms. Leibovitz, who has created portraits of nearly every well-known person on the planet, talks about charisma, the first name she conjures up is Nicole Kidman’s. “There’s not a bad way to photograph her,” Ms. Leibovitz writes, adding that quirky things add to her allure: “The way Nicole Kidman looks from behind when she walks away, for instance. The way she stands. Not many people are good at standing.”
Richard Avedon Performance
(Abrams, $75). This is a well-chosen retrospective from a photographer whose long career enabled him to take important photographs of culturally distant figures like Buster Keaton (in 1952) and Cat Power (in 2003). In his essay John Lahr says it all: “Shut your eyes and think of the following people: Marilyn Monroe, Jean Renoir, Truman Capote, Buster Keaton, Bert Lahr, Bob Dylan, Katharine Hepburn, Igor Stravinsky, Lena Horne, Oscar Levant, Ezra Pound, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Chicago Seven, Marianne Moore, Robert Frank, Willem de Kooning, Audrey Hepburn, Rudolf Nureyev, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Bette Midler, Francis Bacon, Dorothy Parker, the Beatles. Chances are that what you first see in your mind’s eye is a photograph taken by Richard Avedon: crisp, scalpel-sharp, electric, an iconic distillation of the subject’s public persona or of his internal drama.” The photographs included here put me in mind of something Kenneth Tynan wrote, in the introduction to his profile collection “Show People,” about why he picked the essays he did: “Last and far from least, they all rank high on the list of people whom I would invite to an ideal dinner party.”
Athlete
Book Cover
Photographs by Walter Iooss (Sports Illustrated, $34.95). This book is an ultraglossy, color-saturated, wide-format selection of images from America’s best-known sports photographer. His career has nearly been as long as Mr. Avedon’s; Mr. Iooss, who is still working, received his first assignment from Sports Illustrated in 1961, at the age of 16. There are classic and revealing shots here of people from Walt Frazier, Carl Yastrzemski, Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali to Tom Brady, David Beckham and Tiger Woods. It’s a book that bears out this contention, from Michael Jordan, in the book’s introduction: “From what I can tell, Walter has never taken a bad shot of anybody or anything.” Mr. Iooss’s stuff pops.
Library of Dust
Photographs by David Maisel. (Chronicle Books, $80). “Library of Dust” may well be this year’s most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel’s book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.
Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds
(Chronicle Books, $50). Then there is this volume, which commences with Marilyn Monroe (Miss December, 1953) and closes with Sasckya Porto (Miss December, 2007). Along the way, we chart the changing trends in hairstyles, lighting techniques, bikini bottoms, living room décor and depilation. Wedged among the smiling naked women are essays by Robert Coover, Paul Theroux, Robert Stone, Jay McInerney, Daphne Merkin and Maureen Gibbon. About the centerfolds of the 1960s, Mr. Theroux writes: “In many cases these centerfolds are the epitome of American loveliness, our very own apsaras, with their creamy skins and bright smiles, the almost-awkward willingness in their postures, not hookers but prom queens and biker babes. For Americans who came of age in the 1960s, they are the girls of your dreams.”
Paper Illusions: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave
Book Cover
By Barbara and René Stoeltie (Abrams, $75). This is among the most unusual and fascinating fashion books I’ve seen in a long time. Ms. de Borchgrave works an unusual form of magic: she creates dresses, representative of almost every era, from the courts of the Medici onward, from paper. These intricate paper dresses are not to be worn; they are to be astonished by. Even the purple prose of Barbara Stoeltie’s introduction (“Paper crackles and trembles. It whispers and rustles. It whistles and coos.” Coos?) is not enough to make you put this book down.
The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008
(Black Dog & Leventhal; $60). In terms of size and historical sweep, The New York Times has a mighty entry in this year’s gift book sweepstakes. It’s a volume that reproduces more than 300 of the most significant front pages of the past century and a half, and also contains 3 DVD-ROMs with all of the newspaper’s 54,267 front pages with links to the full articles.
Classic headlines like “OUR GREAT LOSS: Death of President Lincoln” and “ALLIED ARMIES LAND IN FRANCE IN THE HAVRE-CHERBOURG AREA; GREAT INVASION IS UNDER WAY” and “MEN WALK ON MOON” convey a remarkable historical immediacy. In the era before 24-hour cable news and countless Web sites, a newspaper headline was often the first public report of an event, and it could hit home like a happy telegram or a punch in the stomach.
Even in the Internet age, Bill Keller, The Times’s executive editor, writes in his introduction to “The Complete Front Pages,” “Page One is still what most stirs our ambition. Editors assure reporters that each page of the paper is precious, even those consisting of a narrow gutter alongside a department-store ad, but the front page is the showcase every reporter aspires to. Whether it comes shouted across a newsroom, telexed to a foreign bureau or in an e-mail message, there are few more satisfying phrases in our business than ‘You are fronted.’ ”
And as Mr. Keller notes, sometimes the more minor and more quixotic banner headlines are the most interesting, like this one from 1912: “MANIAC IN MILWAUKEE SHOOTS COL. ROOSEVELT; HE IGNORES WOUND, SPEAKS AN HOUR, GOES TO HOSPITAL.”
Additional Recommendations
I am out of space. Here are seven more books that impressed me, and I’d like to at least list their titles. So, in a sentence that’s about as long as a Twitter post, here goes: On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition, by Charles Darwin, edited and with an introduction by David Quammen (Sterling, $35); The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, by Neil Harris (University of Chicago Press, $65); Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound, by Miyoko Chu with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (Chronicle Books, $60); The Harley-Davidson Motor Co. Archive Collection, by Randy Leffingwell and Darwin Holmstrom (Motorbooks, $60); You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, by Richard Schickel and George Perry (Running Press, $50); With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars, by the novelist Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine Books, $75); and The DC Vault, by Martin Pasko (Running Press, $49.95), a kind of bootleg archive of blissful ephemera from the DC Comics archives.
“When I get a little money, I buy books,” Erasmus said. “And if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” Times are tough; big lavish books aren’t inexpensive; we can’t always shop with Erasmus’s high-minded priorities. But some of the titles included here are manageable on tight budgets. And even the luxe volumes are probably still cheaper than clothes and will last longer than food; and if for some reason they don’t appeal to the gift recipient, they’re easier than either to rewrap and put under someone else’s tree.
The Best Art, Architecture and Design Books By HOLLAND COTTER, ROBERTA SMITH, KEN JOHNSON, KAREN ROSENBERG and NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 25, 2008
The Best Art, Architecture and Design Books By HOLLAND COTTER, ROBERTA SMITH, KEN JOHNSON, KAREN ROSENBERG and NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
There is nothing like art itself when it comes to appreciating art, but books are good too. They convey all kinds of information regarding the making, showing, meaning and experience of art. With that in mind, The Times’s art and architecture critics have chosen these as the most notable volumes published this year.
HOLLAND COTTER
Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926-1933
Book Cover
(Yale University Press, $60). The most charming of fall exhibitions, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, comes with one of the year’s most appealing catalogs. Like the show, with its pull-toys, midair drawings and balancing-act sculptures, the book is adult entertainment that children will probably adore, as much for its strangeness as for its sweetness.
Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937
(Museum of Modern Art, $50). I also recommend the catalog for this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which traces another familiar artist’s walk on the wild side of modernism as he overturns monuments and makes art from the creepy-crawlies he finds underneath. The text by the curator Anne Umland is excellent, but the pictures really tell the tale. If you tend to think of Miró as an old darling, you won’t anymore.
Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj
By Vidya Dehejia (Mapin Publishing, $65). Deeply researched, engagingly written, handsomely produced, this design book focuses on the amazing silverware produced by Indian craftsmen for a European cliental during the British Raj. On tea caddies, claret jugs and beer mugs, gardens bloom, Hindu gods walk and cultures gorgeously converge. The book accompanies a show at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University (through Dec. 16) but is a scholarly keeper on its own.
Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art
(Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, $44.62). Cultures and epochs also meet in , which, in a very contemporary way, explores the written word in African art from ancient Egypt to the present, including sculptures, Korans and tattoos from Zanzibar to New York. Eye-opener studies like this are among multiculturalism’s great gifts: art history for a globally tuned-in world.
Additional Recommendations
If you are an art lover for whom pictures and words have equal weight, you’ll want to consider three new text-intensive offerings. Part memoir, part theoretical tract, part queer manifesto, Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions by the French photographer and performance artist Claude Cahun, born Lucie Schwob (1894-1964), is making a first-time appearance in English in a paperback edition peppered with photomontages. It’s an event. (The MIT Press, $29.95)
So are two reappearances. The words of a major poet-critic-curator are back, fresher than ever, in Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems, edited by Mark Ford. (Alfred A. Knopf, $30)
And the influential painter-critic, Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975, reissued by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the year’s outstanding book of art criticism, a rich read, a goal for some of us to shoot for. (MFA Publications, $22.50)
ROBERTA SMITH
Salon to Biennial — Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959
Book Cover
(Phaidon, $90). There is nothing like art when it comes to teaching us about art, but books aren’t bad either. They convey all kinds of information regarding the making, showing, meaning and experience of works of art. One of the most interesting books of the season takes a nothing-but-the-facts bead on a subject of increasing art historical study: the exhibitions that have introduced most modern art to the public. Thick and very orange, “Salon to Biennial,” is a marvel of information, organization and design. Largely the work of Bruce Altshuler, an independent scholar, in collaboration with Phaidon’s editors, it combines engaging analysis with myriad details to create in-depth portraits of exhibitions that are known, but not well. These shows range from the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863 to “The New American Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959; the data provided includes lists of participants, installation shots (when possible), color photographs of the individual works in the show (and often the exhibition brochures), and lengthy excerpts from reviews. “Salon to Biennial” is a shoe-in for any art-obsessive’s Christmas stocking; the main drawback is that it only covers 24 shows.
Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007
By Mel Bochner (MIT Press, $39.95). Artist’s writings are another source of on-the-spot historical information, and the new collection of Mr. Bochner’s writings does not disappoint. This volume brings together reviews, lectures, catalog statements, essays (published and unpublished) and raw notes by this leading Conceptualist turned painter. The title is taken from a sign at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and first appeared in “The Domain of the Great Bear,” a famous article written with the artist Robert Smithson in 1966. The book is part artifact, part self-portrait and part memoir. It includes an interview in which Mr. Bochner discusses his return to painting and his enduring interest in language as an artistic material.
Van Gogh and the Sunflowers
By Louis van Tilborgh (Van Gogh Museum, $19.32). As time, wallets and attention spans contract, more art books zero in on single works or on thin slices of a great artist’s career. This book is an excellent case in point: a rather lavishly illustrated 86-page volume by a research curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Its focus is van Gogh’s 1888 “Sunflowers,” a painting he liked so much that he copied it twice, with slight adjustments in color. The essay follows the course of his lifelong love of flowers and his gradual warming to flower still lifes and their role in the explosion of paint and color in his mature work. Mr. van Tilborgh also touches on the popularity of “Sunflowers,” ending with a large photograph of a studio in China where hand-painted copies are churned out. Dozens of them are hung up to dry, a field in itself.
KEN JOHNSON
Black: The History of a Color
By Michel Pastoureau (Princeton University Press, $35). Who would have thought the history of a single color could be so fascinating? “Black” proceeds chronologically from cave painting to modern fashion and focuses on mythology, heraldry, religion, science and painting along the way. The author, a historian at the Sorbonne, narrates developments in the material, aesthetic and sociological dimensions of the color black with infectious, wide-ranging curiosity and easy-going erudition. After this you’ll want to read his previous book, from the same publisher, Blue: The History of a Color ($39.95).
Lives of the Artists
Book Cover
By Calvin Tomkins (Henry Holt & Company, $26). In this volume, Mr. Tomkins profiles 10 living artists. Veteran art followers will find much that is familiar in his portraits of Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and others, and some may regret that only one of his subjects, Cindy Sherman, is a woman. But for newcomers this compendium of articles that first appeared in The New Yorker will serve as an entertaining and informative initiation into the mysteries of contemporary art.
Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties
By Alastair Gordon (Rizzoli, $65). In the 1960s psychedelic drugs altered the consciousness of a generation. This big, richly illustrated book vividly recalls a time when boundaries of art, architecture and life were dissolving in a trippy haze, and utopia seemed but a stone’s throw away. Geodesic domes, magic buses, hobbity houses in the woods, mind-bending sculptures and light shows: Mr. Gordon chronicles these and other manifestations of the Aquarian revolution in an engaging style and with a generous spirit.
KAREN ROSENBERG
Seven Days in the Art World
By Sarah Thornton (W. W. Norton & Company, $24.95). A field guide to the insular, nomadic tribes of the contemporary art world, this book was reported and written in a heated market, but it is poised to endure as a work of sociology. Ms. Thornton, the author of a previous book chronicling the rave subculture, shadows high-level artists, curators, critics and dealers from studio to fair to auction to biennale. The interviews, like the book’s title, collapse time — follow-up quotes are woven into on-site chitchat — but Ms. Thornton deftly navigates competing agendas. Where others would be content to gawk and gossip, she pushes her well-chosen subjects to explore the questions “What is an artist?” and “What makes a work of art great?”
Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’
By Eric Karpeles (Thames & Hudson, $45). To read Proust is to become ensnared in a web of images, unless you happen to be an art historian with a photographic memory. Performing a valuable service to the rest of us, the painter Eric Karpeles has thoughtfully tracked down every painting or artist mentioned by name in Proust’s masterpiece: the 206 illustrations in this volume are accompanied by the relevant passages of text, each with a brief, unobtrusive introduction. Even casual readers of the literature will appreciate the conspiratorial relationship between Proust’s words and his favorite artworks. It doesn’t hurt that Proust had excellent taste: Mantegna, Manet and Vermeer (then-obscure) are just a few of the artists in his virtual gallery.
A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World
By Marcia Tucker (University of California Press, $27.50). As museums prepare for the lean years ahead, this memoir by the founder and longtime director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art offers some much-needed inspiration. Edited by the artist Liza Lou after Tucker’s death in 2006, the book meanders in places but offers ample evidence of Tucker’s take-no-prisoners attitude and passion for “difficult” art (a show called “ ‘Bad’ Painting”; a notoriously ephemeral Richard Tuttle survey). Although the founding of the New Museum is technically the book’s climax, the most interesting section explores Tucker’s formative years as the first female curator at the Whitney. There, she confronted institutional politics, including gender discrimination, to become a powerful advocate for contemporary art.
NICOLAI OUROUSOFF
Le Corbusier: A Life
Book Cover
Nicholas Fox Weber (Alfred A. Knopf, $45). Even among the giants of 20th-century Modernism, Le Corbusier stands apart for the breadth of his vision. The publication of the first full-scale biography of the architect allows us to place this work in a more personal context for the first time. Mr. Weber’s book is a bit weak on architectural insights, and he likes to dwell on salacious details (repeated references to masturbation and visits to brothels), but he helps round out our understanding of one of the greatest architectural minds of any era. By allowing us to see Le Corbusier’s work in a wider context, he also makes the man’s strengths and weaknesses seem more human.
On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
By Ada Louise Huxtable (Walker & Company, $35). This release is cause for joy. As a crusading architecture critic for The New York Times in the 1960s and ’70s, and the first full-time architecture critic at any newspaper in the United States, Ms. Huxtable invented architecture criticism as we know it. In the process she brought architecture out into the public consciousness with articles that were invested with an unflappable moral authority. Read here, they seem as sharp and piercing today as ever.
Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000
By Peter Eisenman (Rizzoli, $60). This is the kind of brash, cheeky work we have come to expect from one of architecture’s most irascible contrarians. Its laserlike focus on architectural form, to the exclusion of any social or physical context, may irritate the politically correct. But Mr. Eisenman also has a nice way of upending received wisdom. His penetrating, sometimes brilliant analysis will prod you to see even the most celebrated of these buildings with fresh eyes. The power of his arguments will challenge some of your most dearly held architectural beliefs.
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 25, 2008
The Best Art, Architecture and Design Books By HOLLAND COTTER, ROBERTA SMITH, KEN JOHNSON, KAREN ROSENBERG and NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
There is nothing like art itself when it comes to appreciating art, but books are good too. They convey all kinds of information regarding the making, showing, meaning and experience of art. With that in mind, The Times’s art and architecture critics have chosen these as the most notable volumes published this year.
HOLLAND COTTER
Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926-1933
Book Cover
(Yale University Press, $60). The most charming of fall exhibitions, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, comes with one of the year’s most appealing catalogs. Like the show, with its pull-toys, midair drawings and balancing-act sculptures, the book is adult entertainment that children will probably adore, as much for its strangeness as for its sweetness.
Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937
(Museum of Modern Art, $50). I also recommend the catalog for this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which traces another familiar artist’s walk on the wild side of modernism as he overturns monuments and makes art from the creepy-crawlies he finds underneath. The text by the curator Anne Umland is excellent, but the pictures really tell the tale. If you tend to think of Miró as an old darling, you won’t anymore.
Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj
By Vidya Dehejia (Mapin Publishing, $65). Deeply researched, engagingly written, handsomely produced, this design book focuses on the amazing silverware produced by Indian craftsmen for a European cliental during the British Raj. On tea caddies, claret jugs and beer mugs, gardens bloom, Hindu gods walk and cultures gorgeously converge. The book accompanies a show at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University (through Dec. 16) but is a scholarly keeper on its own.
Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art
(Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, $44.62). Cultures and epochs also meet in , which, in a very contemporary way, explores the written word in African art from ancient Egypt to the present, including sculptures, Korans and tattoos from Zanzibar to New York. Eye-opener studies like this are among multiculturalism’s great gifts: art history for a globally tuned-in world.
Additional Recommendations
If you are an art lover for whom pictures and words have equal weight, you’ll want to consider three new text-intensive offerings. Part memoir, part theoretical tract, part queer manifesto, Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions by the French photographer and performance artist Claude Cahun, born Lucie Schwob (1894-1964), is making a first-time appearance in English in a paperback edition peppered with photomontages. It’s an event. (The MIT Press, $29.95)
So are two reappearances. The words of a major poet-critic-curator are back, fresher than ever, in Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems, edited by Mark Ford. (Alfred A. Knopf, $30)
And the influential painter-critic, Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975, reissued by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the year’s outstanding book of art criticism, a rich read, a goal for some of us to shoot for. (MFA Publications, $22.50)
ROBERTA SMITH
Salon to Biennial — Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959
Book Cover
(Phaidon, $90). There is nothing like art when it comes to teaching us about art, but books aren’t bad either. They convey all kinds of information regarding the making, showing, meaning and experience of works of art. One of the most interesting books of the season takes a nothing-but-the-facts bead on a subject of increasing art historical study: the exhibitions that have introduced most modern art to the public. Thick and very orange, “Salon to Biennial,” is a marvel of information, organization and design. Largely the work of Bruce Altshuler, an independent scholar, in collaboration with Phaidon’s editors, it combines engaging analysis with myriad details to create in-depth portraits of exhibitions that are known, but not well. These shows range from the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863 to “The New American Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959; the data provided includes lists of participants, installation shots (when possible), color photographs of the individual works in the show (and often the exhibition brochures), and lengthy excerpts from reviews. “Salon to Biennial” is a shoe-in for any art-obsessive’s Christmas stocking; the main drawback is that it only covers 24 shows.
Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007
By Mel Bochner (MIT Press, $39.95). Artist’s writings are another source of on-the-spot historical information, and the new collection of Mr. Bochner’s writings does not disappoint. This volume brings together reviews, lectures, catalog statements, essays (published and unpublished) and raw notes by this leading Conceptualist turned painter. The title is taken from a sign at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and first appeared in “The Domain of the Great Bear,” a famous article written with the artist Robert Smithson in 1966. The book is part artifact, part self-portrait and part memoir. It includes an interview in which Mr. Bochner discusses his return to painting and his enduring interest in language as an artistic material.
Van Gogh and the Sunflowers
By Louis van Tilborgh (Van Gogh Museum, $19.32). As time, wallets and attention spans contract, more art books zero in on single works or on thin slices of a great artist’s career. This book is an excellent case in point: a rather lavishly illustrated 86-page volume by a research curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Its focus is van Gogh’s 1888 “Sunflowers,” a painting he liked so much that he copied it twice, with slight adjustments in color. The essay follows the course of his lifelong love of flowers and his gradual warming to flower still lifes and their role in the explosion of paint and color in his mature work. Mr. van Tilborgh also touches on the popularity of “Sunflowers,” ending with a large photograph of a studio in China where hand-painted copies are churned out. Dozens of them are hung up to dry, a field in itself.
KEN JOHNSON
Black: The History of a Color
By Michel Pastoureau (Princeton University Press, $35). Who would have thought the history of a single color could be so fascinating? “Black” proceeds chronologically from cave painting to modern fashion and focuses on mythology, heraldry, religion, science and painting along the way. The author, a historian at the Sorbonne, narrates developments in the material, aesthetic and sociological dimensions of the color black with infectious, wide-ranging curiosity and easy-going erudition. After this you’ll want to read his previous book, from the same publisher, Blue: The History of a Color ($39.95).
Lives of the Artists
Book Cover
By Calvin Tomkins (Henry Holt & Company, $26). In this volume, Mr. Tomkins profiles 10 living artists. Veteran art followers will find much that is familiar in his portraits of Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and others, and some may regret that only one of his subjects, Cindy Sherman, is a woman. But for newcomers this compendium of articles that first appeared in The New Yorker will serve as an entertaining and informative initiation into the mysteries of contemporary art.
Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties
By Alastair Gordon (Rizzoli, $65). In the 1960s psychedelic drugs altered the consciousness of a generation. This big, richly illustrated book vividly recalls a time when boundaries of art, architecture and life were dissolving in a trippy haze, and utopia seemed but a stone’s throw away. Geodesic domes, magic buses, hobbity houses in the woods, mind-bending sculptures and light shows: Mr. Gordon chronicles these and other manifestations of the Aquarian revolution in an engaging style and with a generous spirit.
KAREN ROSENBERG
Seven Days in the Art World
By Sarah Thornton (W. W. Norton & Company, $24.95). A field guide to the insular, nomadic tribes of the contemporary art world, this book was reported and written in a heated market, but it is poised to endure as a work of sociology. Ms. Thornton, the author of a previous book chronicling the rave subculture, shadows high-level artists, curators, critics and dealers from studio to fair to auction to biennale. The interviews, like the book’s title, collapse time — follow-up quotes are woven into on-site chitchat — but Ms. Thornton deftly navigates competing agendas. Where others would be content to gawk and gossip, she pushes her well-chosen subjects to explore the questions “What is an artist?” and “What makes a work of art great?”
Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’
By Eric Karpeles (Thames & Hudson, $45). To read Proust is to become ensnared in a web of images, unless you happen to be an art historian with a photographic memory. Performing a valuable service to the rest of us, the painter Eric Karpeles has thoughtfully tracked down every painting or artist mentioned by name in Proust’s masterpiece: the 206 illustrations in this volume are accompanied by the relevant passages of text, each with a brief, unobtrusive introduction. Even casual readers of the literature will appreciate the conspiratorial relationship between Proust’s words and his favorite artworks. It doesn’t hurt that Proust had excellent taste: Mantegna, Manet and Vermeer (then-obscure) are just a few of the artists in his virtual gallery.
A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World
By Marcia Tucker (University of California Press, $27.50). As museums prepare for the lean years ahead, this memoir by the founder and longtime director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art offers some much-needed inspiration. Edited by the artist Liza Lou after Tucker’s death in 2006, the book meanders in places but offers ample evidence of Tucker’s take-no-prisoners attitude and passion for “difficult” art (a show called “ ‘Bad’ Painting”; a notoriously ephemeral Richard Tuttle survey). Although the founding of the New Museum is technically the book’s climax, the most interesting section explores Tucker’s formative years as the first female curator at the Whitney. There, she confronted institutional politics, including gender discrimination, to become a powerful advocate for contemporary art.
NICOLAI OUROUSOFF
Le Corbusier: A Life
Book Cover
Nicholas Fox Weber (Alfred A. Knopf, $45). Even among the giants of 20th-century Modernism, Le Corbusier stands apart for the breadth of his vision. The publication of the first full-scale biography of the architect allows us to place this work in a more personal context for the first time. Mr. Weber’s book is a bit weak on architectural insights, and he likes to dwell on salacious details (repeated references to masturbation and visits to brothels), but he helps round out our understanding of one of the greatest architectural minds of any era. By allowing us to see Le Corbusier’s work in a wider context, he also makes the man’s strengths and weaknesses seem more human.
On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
By Ada Louise Huxtable (Walker & Company, $35). This release is cause for joy. As a crusading architecture critic for The New York Times in the 1960s and ’70s, and the first full-time architecture critic at any newspaper in the United States, Ms. Huxtable invented architecture criticism as we know it. In the process she brought architecture out into the public consciousness with articles that were invested with an unflappable moral authority. Read here, they seem as sharp and piercing today as ever.
Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000
By Peter Eisenman (Rizzoli, $60). This is the kind of brash, cheeky work we have come to expect from one of architecture’s most irascible contrarians. Its laserlike focus on architectural form, to the exclusion of any social or physical context, may irritate the politically correct. But Mr. Eisenman also has a nice way of upending received wisdom. His penetrating, sometimes brilliant analysis will prod you to see even the most celebrated of these buildings with fresh eyes. The power of his arguments will challenge some of your most dearly held architectural beliefs.
Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of 2008
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 25, 2008
Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of 2008
Each book on these following lists is something that the critic, after praising, went out and Johnny Appleseeded, so to speak. These are our 10-Favorites lists of books that we enjoyed enough to buy for friends. In that spirit we recommend them to you. -- Janet Maslin
Amazon
WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS?
Book Cover
By Kate Atkinson. Another smart, tricky expansion on the mystery format from an author whose doppelgängers, parallel plots and beguiling characters keep her on a winning streak.
Amazon
2666
By Roberto Bolaño. A maddening, alluring, wild and woolly five-part magnum opus from a Chilean-born literary superstar who wrote as if his life depended on it — and then died, in 2003. Posthumous English-language versions of his work have made him a legitimate sensation.
Excerpt
Amazon
CHARLATAN: AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS HUCKSTER, THE MAN WHO PURSUED HIM, AND THE AGE OF FLIMFLAM
By Pope Brock. Medical quackery at its most heavenly, thanks to the wryly hilarious tone with which the true story of the virility expert Dr. John R. Brinkley is told. A “can you top this?” wealth of outlandish stories (in 1930 Brinkley began running for governor of Kansas three days after being stripped of his medical license) makes this a delight.
Amazon
PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD
Book Cover
By Mark Harris. With unusual overarching wisdom, this film book captures the cultural volatility of 1967 by tracking five very different contenders — including “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Bonnie and Clyde” — for the best picture Oscar.
Amazon
THE GIVEN DAY
By Dennis Lehane. Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser color this fierce, sweeping historical drama, set in 1919 and told by the bard of Irish Boston. Mr. Lehane, the author of “Mystic River,” outdoes himself with something even bigger than a great detective tale.
Amazon
SERENA
Book Cover
By Ron Rash. A stunningly effective novel that is stark, fierce, dramatic and gripping from its unforgettable opening paragraph. A woman of frighteningly indomitable ambition wreaks havoc on her husband’s Appalachian business empire. Equal parts myth, poetry and folklore.
Amazon
THE SNOWBALL: WARREN BUFFETT AND THE BUSINESS OF LIFE
By Alice Schroeder. The self-made über-investor turns out to be as interestingly eccentric as he is rich. And he was savvy enough to have owned a tenant farm while he was in high school. Find out how.
Amazon
FINAL SALUTE: A STORY OF UNFINISHED LIVES
By Jim Sheeler. Why do we know so little about what happens when fallen American troops come home? One of the great underreported stories of the Iraq war is told with heartbreaking pride and acuity.
Amazon
AUDITION: A MEMOIR
Book Cover
By Barbara Walters. She’s been there, done that, met everyone and seen everything in the course of a 50-year television career. Despite its dignified tone, this is the year’s dishiest memoir.
Amazon
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
By David Wroblewski. A boy and his dogs — as well as a mother, father and uncle who are surprisingly like Hamlet’s — are presented with utter, seamless naturalism and grace by Mr. Wroblewski, an author who became (I’d say) 2008’s happiest surprise.
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 25, 2008
Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of 2008
Each book on these following lists is something that the critic, after praising, went out and Johnny Appleseeded, so to speak. These are our 10-Favorites lists of books that we enjoyed enough to buy for friends. In that spirit we recommend them to you. -- Janet Maslin
Amazon
WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS?
Book Cover
By Kate Atkinson. Another smart, tricky expansion on the mystery format from an author whose doppelgängers, parallel plots and beguiling characters keep her on a winning streak.
Amazon
2666
By Roberto Bolaño. A maddening, alluring, wild and woolly five-part magnum opus from a Chilean-born literary superstar who wrote as if his life depended on it — and then died, in 2003. Posthumous English-language versions of his work have made him a legitimate sensation.
Excerpt
Amazon
CHARLATAN: AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS HUCKSTER, THE MAN WHO PURSUED HIM, AND THE AGE OF FLIMFLAM
By Pope Brock. Medical quackery at its most heavenly, thanks to the wryly hilarious tone with which the true story of the virility expert Dr. John R. Brinkley is told. A “can you top this?” wealth of outlandish stories (in 1930 Brinkley began running for governor of Kansas three days after being stripped of his medical license) makes this a delight.
Amazon
PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD
Book Cover
By Mark Harris. With unusual overarching wisdom, this film book captures the cultural volatility of 1967 by tracking five very different contenders — including “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Bonnie and Clyde” — for the best picture Oscar.
Amazon
THE GIVEN DAY
By Dennis Lehane. Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser color this fierce, sweeping historical drama, set in 1919 and told by the bard of Irish Boston. Mr. Lehane, the author of “Mystic River,” outdoes himself with something even bigger than a great detective tale.
Amazon
SERENA
Book Cover
By Ron Rash. A stunningly effective novel that is stark, fierce, dramatic and gripping from its unforgettable opening paragraph. A woman of frighteningly indomitable ambition wreaks havoc on her husband’s Appalachian business empire. Equal parts myth, poetry and folklore.
Amazon
THE SNOWBALL: WARREN BUFFETT AND THE BUSINESS OF LIFE
By Alice Schroeder. The self-made über-investor turns out to be as interestingly eccentric as he is rich. And he was savvy enough to have owned a tenant farm while he was in high school. Find out how.
Amazon
FINAL SALUTE: A STORY OF UNFINISHED LIVES
By Jim Sheeler. Why do we know so little about what happens when fallen American troops come home? One of the great underreported stories of the Iraq war is told with heartbreaking pride and acuity.
Amazon
AUDITION: A MEMOIR
Book Cover
By Barbara Walters. She’s been there, done that, met everyone and seen everything in the course of a 50-year television career. Despite its dignified tone, this is the year’s dishiest memoir.
Amazon
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
By David Wroblewski. A boy and his dogs — as well as a mother, father and uncle who are surprisingly like Hamlet’s — are presented with utter, seamless naturalism and grace by Mr. Wroblewski, an author who became (I’d say) 2008’s happiest surprise.
Michiko Kakutani's 10 Favorite Books of 2008
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 27, 2008 Michiko Kakutani's 10 Favorite Books of 2008
Each book on these following lists is something that the critic, after praising, went out and Johnny Appleseeded, so to speak. These are our 10-Favorites lists of books that we enjoyed enough to buy for friends. In that spirit we recommend them to you. -- Janet Maslin
Amazon
APPLES & ORANGES
Book Cover
By Marie Brenner. In this deeply affecting memoir, a journalist uses the prism of her love and grief for her dead brother — and her bewilderment over the twists and turns of his eccentric life — to create a haunting portrait of him and their uncommon family.
Amazon
AMERICA AND THE WORLD: CONVERSATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
By Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft; moderated by David Ignatius. Two former national security advisers, a Democrat and a Republican, offer astute assessments of the daunting challenges — terrorism, nuclear proliferation and a globalized economy, for starters — that will face Barack Obama when he becomes president.
Amazon
THE BIN LADENS: AN ARABIAN FAMILY IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY
Book Cover
By Steve Coll. This riveting book not only provides a psychologically detailed portrait of Osama bin Laden, but in recounting the story of his extended family it also underscores the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal House of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions and his technical expertise.
Excerpt
Amazon
THE PLAGUE OF DOVES
By Louise Erdrich. Arguably the author’s most ambitious book, this novel examines the fallout that the vigilante hanging of several innocents will have on three generations of people, who live on the margins of a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.
Excerpt
Amazon
LINCOLN: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A WRITER
By Fred Kaplan. This resonant biography looks at the role that Lincoln’s avid reading of the Bible, Shakespeare and other works played in shaping his gifts as a writer, and how his literary skills in turn helped him articulate — and promote — his vision of a new America rising from the ashes of the Civil War.
Amazon
A MERCY
Book Cover
By Toni Morrison. Set in 17th-century America, this small jewel of a story is at once a kind of prelude to the author’s masterwork, “Beloved,” and a variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs of slavery.
Amazon
NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill. Filled with echoes of Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby,” this stunning novel about a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur and a Dutch-born banker explores the American Dream as its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York.
Amazon
ALEX & ME: HOW A SCIENTIST AND A PARROT UNCOVERED A HIDDEN WORLD OF ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE — AND FORMED A DEEP BOND IN THE PROCESS
By Irene M. Pepperberg. A charming portrait of Alex the gray parrot — whose linguistic and cognitive skills impressed the world, before his death in 2007 — by the scientist who worked with him for three decades.
Excerpt
Amazon
LUSH LIFE
Book Cover
By Richard Price. Offering the reader a wide-screen, 3-D Imax portrait of a corner of New York, this police procedural brilliantly transcends its genre thanks to its author’s pitch-perfect dialogue, his journalistic eye for detail and his understanding of how people navigate the social and cultural mazes of a big city.
Excerpt
Amazon
MILLENNIAL MAKEOVER: MYSPACE, YOUTUBE, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS
By Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais. In what turns out to have been a highly prescient book, the two authors predicted that 2008 would be a “change” election, informed by new technology and by the outlook of a new generation of millennial voters, who tend to be more inclusive, optimistic and tech-savvy than their elders.
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
November 27, 2008 Michiko Kakutani's 10 Favorite Books of 2008
Each book on these following lists is something that the critic, after praising, went out and Johnny Appleseeded, so to speak. These are our 10-Favorites lists of books that we enjoyed enough to buy for friends. In that spirit we recommend them to you. -- Janet Maslin
Amazon
APPLES & ORANGES
Book Cover
By Marie Brenner. In this deeply affecting memoir, a journalist uses the prism of her love and grief for her dead brother — and her bewilderment over the twists and turns of his eccentric life — to create a haunting portrait of him and their uncommon family.
Amazon
AMERICA AND THE WORLD: CONVERSATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
By Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft; moderated by David Ignatius. Two former national security advisers, a Democrat and a Republican, offer astute assessments of the daunting challenges — terrorism, nuclear proliferation and a globalized economy, for starters — that will face Barack Obama when he becomes president.
Amazon
THE BIN LADENS: AN ARABIAN FAMILY IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY
Book Cover
By Steve Coll. This riveting book not only provides a psychologically detailed portrait of Osama bin Laden, but in recounting the story of his extended family it also underscores the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal House of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions and his technical expertise.
Excerpt
Amazon
THE PLAGUE OF DOVES
By Louise Erdrich. Arguably the author’s most ambitious book, this novel examines the fallout that the vigilante hanging of several innocents will have on three generations of people, who live on the margins of a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.
Excerpt
Amazon
LINCOLN: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A WRITER
By Fred Kaplan. This resonant biography looks at the role that Lincoln’s avid reading of the Bible, Shakespeare and other works played in shaping his gifts as a writer, and how his literary skills in turn helped him articulate — and promote — his vision of a new America rising from the ashes of the Civil War.
Amazon
A MERCY
Book Cover
By Toni Morrison. Set in 17th-century America, this small jewel of a story is at once a kind of prelude to the author’s masterwork, “Beloved,” and a variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs of slavery.
Amazon
NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill. Filled with echoes of Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby,” this stunning novel about a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur and a Dutch-born banker explores the American Dream as its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York.
Amazon
ALEX & ME: HOW A SCIENTIST AND A PARROT UNCOVERED A HIDDEN WORLD OF ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE — AND FORMED A DEEP BOND IN THE PROCESS
By Irene M. Pepperberg. A charming portrait of Alex the gray parrot — whose linguistic and cognitive skills impressed the world, before his death in 2007 — by the scientist who worked with him for three decades.
Excerpt
Amazon
LUSH LIFE
Book Cover
By Richard Price. Offering the reader a wide-screen, 3-D Imax portrait of a corner of New York, this police procedural brilliantly transcends its genre thanks to its author’s pitch-perfect dialogue, his journalistic eye for detail and his understanding of how people navigate the social and cultural mazes of a big city.
Excerpt
Amazon
MILLENNIAL MAKEOVER: MYSPACE, YOUTUBE, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS
By Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais. In what turns out to have been a highly prescient book, the two authors predicted that 2008 would be a “change” election, informed by new technology and by the outlook of a new generation of millennial voters, who tend to be more inclusive, optimistic and tech-savvy than their elders.
Best Classical CDs By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, JAMES R. OESTREICH, ANTHONY TOMMASINI and ALLAN KOZINN
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
Best Classical CDs By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, JAMES R. OESTREICH, ANTHONY TOMMASINI and ALLAN KOZINN
The end of the CD era, we have long been told, is near. And it’s true that the onetime flood has narrowed to a flow, sometimes steady, sometimes faltering. But a few major labels and many small ones keep putting out many excellent recordings, as represented by the two dozen examples here, chosen by classical critics of The New York Times as records of the year.
Amazon
BACH: ‘ ART OF FUGUE’
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon).
In his first Bach recording, the superb French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard demonstrates the same intelligent musicianship that has made him a respected performer of contemporary music. His powerful rendition of Bach’s soulful “Art of Fugue,” both fiery and introspective, illuminates the richness of the counterpoint with potent clarity. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
'The Art of Fugue, BMV 1080' by Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Amazon
BACH, GUBAIDULINA: VIOLIN CONCERTOS
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violinist and conductor; Trondheim Soloists; London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Deutsche Grammophon).
The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter plays with zest and conducts the Trondheim Soloists in lively performances of two Bach violin concertos (BWV 1041 and 1042). But the real gem here is “In Tempus Praesens,” a luminous and deeply expressive new concerto by Sofia Gubaidulina, performed with the London Symphony led by Valery Gergiev. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
BACH, HANDEL: VOCAL WORKS
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano; Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, conducted by Craig Smith and John Harbison (Avie).
No year that brings a posthumous release of performances by the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson can be all bad, and this year brought two. “Lorraine at Emmanuel,” with arias from two Bach cantatas and extended excerpts from Handel’s oratorio “Hercules,” all from the 1990s, is easy to recommend. A later release of Brahms and Schumann song performances from 1999 with the pianist Julius Drake on the Wigmore Hall Live label would have been just as easy. JAMES R. OESTREICH
Amazon
BEETHOVEN: PIANO SONATAS, VOLUME 4
Paul Lewis, pianist (Harmonia Mundi France, three CDs).
Amazon
BEETHOVEN: PIANO SONATAS, VOLUMES 6-8
Andras Schiff, pianist (ECM New Series, three CDs).
The 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven are bedrocks, perhaps the bedrock, of the piano literature. This year two remarkable pianists have completed multiyear releases of the complete sonatas. Andras Schiff’s survey is available in eight single-disc volumes. Paul Lewis’s set is in four volumes totaling 10 CDs. Mr. Schiff plays with unerring taste and elegance. That nearly all of the individual recordings were taken from live performances enhances the spontaneity of the results. Mr. Lewis brings a combination of keen insight and bold adventure to his work that I find especially exciting. Both projects are major achievements. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
BERLIOZ: ‘BENVENUTO CELLINI’
Soloists; London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Colin Davis (LSO Live, two CDs).
Berlioz’s unconventional opera “Benvenuto Cellini” curiously mixes the heroic and the farcical. Still, the composer thought it one of his most original scores. Colin Davis is a renowned Berlioz interpreter, and this new recording, taken from live performances with the London Symphony, makes the strongest case for this fascinating work. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
BRAHMS: CLARINET SONATAS
Jon Manasse, clarinetist; Jon Nakamatsu, pianist (Harmonia Mundi France).
The musicians of the rich New York freelance pool are typically heard in the various standing or pickup orchestras they make up. But Jon Manasse, one of the finest, rightly takes center stage in the two Brahms sonatas, peaks of the clarinet literature, offering warm, sensitive performances. Jon Nakamatsu completes the partnership in the expansive piano parts, so crucial to Brahms’s chamber idiom. JAMES R. OESTREICH
Amazon
CARTER: PIANO WORKS
Ursula Oppens, pianist (Cedille).
Elliott Carter’s piano works have had many eloquent champions, but few have tapped into both its poetry and its explosive energy as fully as Ursula Oppens. In this contribution to the Carter centenary, she plays the big works — the Sonata and “Night Fantasies” — as briskly unfolding dramas and illuminates the chiseled pointillism and hard-driven virtuosity in miniatures like “90+” and “Caténaires.” ALLAN KOZINN
Amazon
CHOPIN, MOMPOU: PIANO WORKS
Alexandre Tharaud, pianist (Harmonia Mundi France).
The idiosyncratic French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, best known for his luminous collections of Baroque works, proves an inventive, forceful Chopin pianist. But you’ll have to set aside any preconceptions about the Opus 28 Preludes: his assertive traversal is cast in dark hues and grand, ominous gestures. It’s an acquired taste, perhaps, but it affords a thoroughly fresh view of these familiar works. Also included are Chopinesque miniatures by Mompou. ALLAN KOZINN
Amazon
GANDOLFI: ‘Y2K COMPLIANT’
Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose (BMOP/sound).
The Boston composer Michael Gandolfi is drawn to both the rigor of the mid-20th-century atonalists and the melodic breadth and textural lushness of the neo-Romantics. The tension between those qualities, along with a wry sense of humor and an ear for striking timbres, makes the works on this disc irresistible; but more striking, the title piece and “Points of Departure” show that angularity can be beautiful. ALLAN KOZINN
'Points of Departure: I. Spirale' by Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Amazon
HANDEL: ‘TOLOMEO’
Soloists; Il Complesso Barocco, conducted by Alan Curtis (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, three discs).
The Handel specialist Alan Curtis leads the ensemble Il Complesso Barocco in a buoyant, colorful and ideally paced performance of “Tolomeo,” Handel’s seldom performed opera about lust, revenge, heartache and false identities. The outstanding cast includes the mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg in the title role and the soprano Karina Gauvin as Seleuce. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
KIRCHNER: STRING QUARTETS
Orion String Quartet (Albany).
Leon Kirchner’s four string quartets span 57 years. The First, from 1950, presents a young American awash in Bartok. The Second is steeped in Schoenberg. The Third, incorporating electronic tape, was awarded a 1967 Pulitzer Prize. The Fourth offers an autumnal synthesis of styles. The Orion String Quartet’s brilliant recording anticipates the composer’s 90th birthday next year. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
LINDBERG: ORCHESTRAL WORKS
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo (Ondine).
“Sculpture,” “Campana in Aria” for horn and orchestra and the Concerto for Orchestra, three recent harmonically vibrant and sonically adventurous works by the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, receive dynamic readings from Sakari Oramo and the Finnish Radio Symphony. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
LUTOSLAWSKI, SALONEN, STUCKY: PIANO WORKS
Gloria Cheng, pianist (Telarc).
A recording of six contemporary piano pieces, four of them from the last 10 years, may seem pretty intimidating. But the dynamic pianist Gloria Cheng’s program of works byEsa-Pekka Salonen, Steven Stucky and Witold Lutoslawski is by turns rhapsodically beautiful and utterly exhilarating. You will not believe her account of Mr. Salonen’s crazed and fearsomely difficult “Dichotomie.” ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
MESSIAEN: PIANO WORKS
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon).
The formidable French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a champion of contemporary music, is an ideal performer ofMessiaen’s ecstatic piano works. Indeed, as a teenager, while studying with Messiaen’s wife, Yvonne Loriod, Mr. Aimard was almost a surrogate son to the couple. His “Hommage à Messiaen” on the composer’s centenary includes astonishing performances of works seldom heard. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
MOZART, SCHUBERT: WORKS FOR TWO PIANOS
Katia and Marielle Labèque, pianists (KML Recordings).
The French duo-pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque, now based in Italy and running their own eclectic record label, play Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos (K. 448) with elegance and vitality. And in Schubert’s “Andantino Varié” (D. 823) their gestures and timbres are so closely matched that they sound like a single player. ALLAN KOZINN
Amazon
PURCELL: KEYBOARD SUITES AND GROUNDS
Richard Egarr, harpsichordist (Harmonia Mundi France).
The harpsichordist Richard Egarr reveals the sensuality of little-known keyboard suites by Purcell, a composer known primarily for his songs, stage works and opera. The music, wistfully melodic and full of extravagant ornamentation, is elegantly rendered in Mr. Egarr’s imaginative, sparkling performances. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
ALISON BALSOM PLAYS TRUMPET CONCERTOS
Alison Balsom, trumpeter Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, conducted by Thomas Klug (EMI Classics).
Those who associate the trumpet with brash fanfares should listen to Alison Balsom’s poetic renditions of concertos by Hummel, Haydn, Torelli and Johann Baptist Georg Neruda, all performed with a clear, soaring tone, virtuosic technique and elegant phrasing. Ms. Balsom is effectively matched by the vigorous playing of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
‘D’AMORE’
Garth Knox, violist d’amore; Agnès Vesterman, cellist (ECM New Series).
The combination of the viola d’amore and the cello is magical, and the richness of the recorded sound (a characteristic of Manfred Eicher’s ECM productions) makes this duo sound almost orchestral. More striking still is the program, which moves freely between Baroque and contemporary works, with Garth Knox’s own “Malor Me Bat” (2004) and Marin Marais’s “Folies d’Espagne” (1685) among the highlights. ALLAN KOZINN
'Malor Me Bat' by Garth Knox & Agnès Vesterman
Amazon
‘FRANCISCO JAVIER: THE ROUTE TO THE ORIENT’
Hespèrion XXI, Capella Reial de Catalunya, directed by Jordi Savall (Alia Vox, two CDs).
Happily, releases by Jordi Savall, the master violist da gamba and conductor, come out almost by the month on his Alia Vox label. His recordings have been particularly revelatory in exploring possible and proven interchanges between early music in Europe and music of the Middle East. The musical selections in this lush package trace Francis Xavier’s footsteps on his 1594 journey to Japan, where he founded a Jesuit mission, in quick, kaleidoscopic fashion. JAMES R. OESTREICH
Amazon
‘GO CRYSTAL TEARS’
Andreas Scholl, countertenor; Julian Behr, lutenist; Concerto di Viole (Harmonia Mundi France).
In this magnificent collaboration, a half dozen elegantly turned lute solos and consort fantasias are interspersed among Andreas Scholl’s nuanced, coloristically flexible accounts of Dowland’s supremely melancholy lute songs and earthier, more exotic works (most notably John Bennet’s exotically chromatic “Venus’ Birds Whose Mournful Tunes”) by Dowland’s contemporaries. ALLAN KOZINN
'Points of Departure: I. Spirale' by Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Amazon
‘GODS, KINGS AND DEMONS’
René Pape, bass; Staatskapelle Dresden, conducted by Sebastian Weigle (Deutsche Grammophon).
That the German bass René Pape is one of the most compelling artists to have emerged internationally in the last 15 years is proved again by his phenomenal singing on his new recording of arias by Gounod, Boito, Berlioz,Verdi, Wagner and others. This imaginative program allows Mr. Pape to portray, chillingly, various gods, kings and demons, as the title suggests. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
‘KAPELL REDISCOVERED’
William Kapell, pianist (RCA Red Seal, two CDs).
Though his career was cut short by his death in an airplane crash in 1953 when he was 31, William Kapell is regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. So this two-disc set of recently discovered live performances from his final tour in Australia is a precious addition to his discography. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
‘WALLED GARDENS’
itsnotyouitsme (New Amsterdam).
Reasonable listeners may disagree as to whether the ambient, post-Minimalist music produced by the duo itsnotyouitsme — Caleb Burhans, violinist, and Grey McMurray, guitarist — is chamber music or rock. But that’s beside the point: these musicians live in both worlds, and their instrumental meditations are structurally fascinating and at times meltingly beautiful. ALLAN KOZINN
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
Best Classical CDs By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, JAMES R. OESTREICH, ANTHONY TOMMASINI and ALLAN KOZINN
The end of the CD era, we have long been told, is near. And it’s true that the onetime flood has narrowed to a flow, sometimes steady, sometimes faltering. But a few major labels and many small ones keep putting out many excellent recordings, as represented by the two dozen examples here, chosen by classical critics of The New York Times as records of the year.
Amazon
BACH: ‘ ART OF FUGUE’
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon).
In his first Bach recording, the superb French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard demonstrates the same intelligent musicianship that has made him a respected performer of contemporary music. His powerful rendition of Bach’s soulful “Art of Fugue,” both fiery and introspective, illuminates the richness of the counterpoint with potent clarity. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
'The Art of Fugue, BMV 1080' by Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Amazon
BACH, GUBAIDULINA: VIOLIN CONCERTOS
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violinist and conductor; Trondheim Soloists; London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Deutsche Grammophon).
The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter plays with zest and conducts the Trondheim Soloists in lively performances of two Bach violin concertos (BWV 1041 and 1042). But the real gem here is “In Tempus Praesens,” a luminous and deeply expressive new concerto by Sofia Gubaidulina, performed with the London Symphony led by Valery Gergiev. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
BACH, HANDEL: VOCAL WORKS
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano; Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, conducted by Craig Smith and John Harbison (Avie).
No year that brings a posthumous release of performances by the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson can be all bad, and this year brought two. “Lorraine at Emmanuel,” with arias from two Bach cantatas and extended excerpts from Handel’s oratorio “Hercules,” all from the 1990s, is easy to recommend. A later release of Brahms and Schumann song performances from 1999 with the pianist Julius Drake on the Wigmore Hall Live label would have been just as easy. JAMES R. OESTREICH
Amazon
BEETHOVEN: PIANO SONATAS, VOLUME 4
Paul Lewis, pianist (Harmonia Mundi France, three CDs).
Amazon
BEETHOVEN: PIANO SONATAS, VOLUMES 6-8
Andras Schiff, pianist (ECM New Series, three CDs).
The 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven are bedrocks, perhaps the bedrock, of the piano literature. This year two remarkable pianists have completed multiyear releases of the complete sonatas. Andras Schiff’s survey is available in eight single-disc volumes. Paul Lewis’s set is in four volumes totaling 10 CDs. Mr. Schiff plays with unerring taste and elegance. That nearly all of the individual recordings were taken from live performances enhances the spontaneity of the results. Mr. Lewis brings a combination of keen insight and bold adventure to his work that I find especially exciting. Both projects are major achievements. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
BERLIOZ: ‘BENVENUTO CELLINI’
Soloists; London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Colin Davis (LSO Live, two CDs).
Berlioz’s unconventional opera “Benvenuto Cellini” curiously mixes the heroic and the farcical. Still, the composer thought it one of his most original scores. Colin Davis is a renowned Berlioz interpreter, and this new recording, taken from live performances with the London Symphony, makes the strongest case for this fascinating work. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
BRAHMS: CLARINET SONATAS
Jon Manasse, clarinetist; Jon Nakamatsu, pianist (Harmonia Mundi France).
The musicians of the rich New York freelance pool are typically heard in the various standing or pickup orchestras they make up. But Jon Manasse, one of the finest, rightly takes center stage in the two Brahms sonatas, peaks of the clarinet literature, offering warm, sensitive performances. Jon Nakamatsu completes the partnership in the expansive piano parts, so crucial to Brahms’s chamber idiom. JAMES R. OESTREICH
Amazon
CARTER: PIANO WORKS
Ursula Oppens, pianist (Cedille).
Elliott Carter’s piano works have had many eloquent champions, but few have tapped into both its poetry and its explosive energy as fully as Ursula Oppens. In this contribution to the Carter centenary, she plays the big works — the Sonata and “Night Fantasies” — as briskly unfolding dramas and illuminates the chiseled pointillism and hard-driven virtuosity in miniatures like “90+” and “Caténaires.” ALLAN KOZINN
Amazon
CHOPIN, MOMPOU: PIANO WORKS
Alexandre Tharaud, pianist (Harmonia Mundi France).
The idiosyncratic French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, best known for his luminous collections of Baroque works, proves an inventive, forceful Chopin pianist. But you’ll have to set aside any preconceptions about the Opus 28 Preludes: his assertive traversal is cast in dark hues and grand, ominous gestures. It’s an acquired taste, perhaps, but it affords a thoroughly fresh view of these familiar works. Also included are Chopinesque miniatures by Mompou. ALLAN KOZINN
Amazon
GANDOLFI: ‘Y2K COMPLIANT’
Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose (BMOP/sound).
The Boston composer Michael Gandolfi is drawn to both the rigor of the mid-20th-century atonalists and the melodic breadth and textural lushness of the neo-Romantics. The tension between those qualities, along with a wry sense of humor and an ear for striking timbres, makes the works on this disc irresistible; but more striking, the title piece and “Points of Departure” show that angularity can be beautiful. ALLAN KOZINN
'Points of Departure: I. Spirale' by Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Amazon
HANDEL: ‘TOLOMEO’
Soloists; Il Complesso Barocco, conducted by Alan Curtis (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, three discs).
The Handel specialist Alan Curtis leads the ensemble Il Complesso Barocco in a buoyant, colorful and ideally paced performance of “Tolomeo,” Handel’s seldom performed opera about lust, revenge, heartache and false identities. The outstanding cast includes the mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg in the title role and the soprano Karina Gauvin as Seleuce. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
KIRCHNER: STRING QUARTETS
Orion String Quartet (Albany).
Leon Kirchner’s four string quartets span 57 years. The First, from 1950, presents a young American awash in Bartok. The Second is steeped in Schoenberg. The Third, incorporating electronic tape, was awarded a 1967 Pulitzer Prize. The Fourth offers an autumnal synthesis of styles. The Orion String Quartet’s brilliant recording anticipates the composer’s 90th birthday next year. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
LINDBERG: ORCHESTRAL WORKS
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo (Ondine).
“Sculpture,” “Campana in Aria” for horn and orchestra and the Concerto for Orchestra, three recent harmonically vibrant and sonically adventurous works by the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, receive dynamic readings from Sakari Oramo and the Finnish Radio Symphony. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
LUTOSLAWSKI, SALONEN, STUCKY: PIANO WORKS
Gloria Cheng, pianist (Telarc).
A recording of six contemporary piano pieces, four of them from the last 10 years, may seem pretty intimidating. But the dynamic pianist Gloria Cheng’s program of works byEsa-Pekka Salonen, Steven Stucky and Witold Lutoslawski is by turns rhapsodically beautiful and utterly exhilarating. You will not believe her account of Mr. Salonen’s crazed and fearsomely difficult “Dichotomie.” ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
MESSIAEN: PIANO WORKS
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon).
The formidable French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a champion of contemporary music, is an ideal performer ofMessiaen’s ecstatic piano works. Indeed, as a teenager, while studying with Messiaen’s wife, Yvonne Loriod, Mr. Aimard was almost a surrogate son to the couple. His “Hommage à Messiaen” on the composer’s centenary includes astonishing performances of works seldom heard. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
MOZART, SCHUBERT: WORKS FOR TWO PIANOS
Katia and Marielle Labèque, pianists (KML Recordings).
The French duo-pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque, now based in Italy and running their own eclectic record label, play Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos (K. 448) with elegance and vitality. And in Schubert’s “Andantino Varié” (D. 823) their gestures and timbres are so closely matched that they sound like a single player. ALLAN KOZINN
Amazon
PURCELL: KEYBOARD SUITES AND GROUNDS
Richard Egarr, harpsichordist (Harmonia Mundi France).
The harpsichordist Richard Egarr reveals the sensuality of little-known keyboard suites by Purcell, a composer known primarily for his songs, stage works and opera. The music, wistfully melodic and full of extravagant ornamentation, is elegantly rendered in Mr. Egarr’s imaginative, sparkling performances. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
ALISON BALSOM PLAYS TRUMPET CONCERTOS
Alison Balsom, trumpeter Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, conducted by Thomas Klug (EMI Classics).
Those who associate the trumpet with brash fanfares should listen to Alison Balsom’s poetic renditions of concertos by Hummel, Haydn, Torelli and Johann Baptist Georg Neruda, all performed with a clear, soaring tone, virtuosic technique and elegant phrasing. Ms. Balsom is effectively matched by the vigorous playing of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Amazon
‘D’AMORE’
Garth Knox, violist d’amore; Agnès Vesterman, cellist (ECM New Series).
The combination of the viola d’amore and the cello is magical, and the richness of the recorded sound (a characteristic of Manfred Eicher’s ECM productions) makes this duo sound almost orchestral. More striking still is the program, which moves freely between Baroque and contemporary works, with Garth Knox’s own “Malor Me Bat” (2004) and Marin Marais’s “Folies d’Espagne” (1685) among the highlights. ALLAN KOZINN
'Malor Me Bat' by Garth Knox & Agnès Vesterman
Amazon
‘FRANCISCO JAVIER: THE ROUTE TO THE ORIENT’
Hespèrion XXI, Capella Reial de Catalunya, directed by Jordi Savall (Alia Vox, two CDs).
Happily, releases by Jordi Savall, the master violist da gamba and conductor, come out almost by the month on his Alia Vox label. His recordings have been particularly revelatory in exploring possible and proven interchanges between early music in Europe and music of the Middle East. The musical selections in this lush package trace Francis Xavier’s footsteps on his 1594 journey to Japan, where he founded a Jesuit mission, in quick, kaleidoscopic fashion. JAMES R. OESTREICH
Amazon
‘GO CRYSTAL TEARS’
Andreas Scholl, countertenor; Julian Behr, lutenist; Concerto di Viole (Harmonia Mundi France).
In this magnificent collaboration, a half dozen elegantly turned lute solos and consort fantasias are interspersed among Andreas Scholl’s nuanced, coloristically flexible accounts of Dowland’s supremely melancholy lute songs and earthier, more exotic works (most notably John Bennet’s exotically chromatic “Venus’ Birds Whose Mournful Tunes”) by Dowland’s contemporaries. ALLAN KOZINN
'Points of Departure: I. Spirale' by Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Amazon
‘GODS, KINGS AND DEMONS’
René Pape, bass; Staatskapelle Dresden, conducted by Sebastian Weigle (Deutsche Grammophon).
That the German bass René Pape is one of the most compelling artists to have emerged internationally in the last 15 years is proved again by his phenomenal singing on his new recording of arias by Gounod, Boito, Berlioz,Verdi, Wagner and others. This imaginative program allows Mr. Pape to portray, chillingly, various gods, kings and demons, as the title suggests. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
‘KAPELL REDISCOVERED’
William Kapell, pianist (RCA Red Seal, two CDs).
Though his career was cut short by his death in an airplane crash in 1953 when he was 31, William Kapell is regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. So this two-disc set of recently discovered live performances from his final tour in Australia is a precious addition to his discography. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Amazon
‘WALLED GARDENS’
itsnotyouitsme (New Amsterdam).
Reasonable listeners may disagree as to whether the ambient, post-Minimalist music produced by the duo itsnotyouitsme — Caleb Burhans, violinist, and Grey McMurray, guitarist — is chamber music or rock. But that’s beside the point: these musicians live in both worlds, and their instrumental meditations are structurally fascinating and at times meltingly beautiful. ALLAN KOZINN
Friday, November 21, 2008
10 Unconventional Winter Holiday Movies By Matt Blum November 21, 2008 | 9:00:00 AMCategories: Movies
10 Unconventional Winter Holiday Movies By Matt Blum November 21, 2008 | 9:00:00 AMCategories: Movies
Everybody knows the classic winter holiday movies, from older ones like It's a Wonderful Life to newer ones like A Christmas Story, to ones that get remade over and over again like A Christmas Carol. Whether or not you like such movies, you must admit that it does get a bit repetitive watching the same stories over and over again every year, with the possible exception of the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Here, then, are ten holiday movies (in no particular order) that aren't on most people's list to watch with the family, some of them for very good reasons.
1. Die Hard - You can't get much less traditional than a movie with people being shot, blown up, dropped out of high windows, and killed in various other ways. But, even if you don't want to watch it with your little kids, considering the violence and the language, it is a Christmas movie, and it does show how the forces of good can triumph over the forces of evil even when all of the good guys but two are completely incompetent. Right?
2. The Hebrew Hammer - Not only is this one of the few Hanukkah-related movies in existence, but it's also hysterically funny. Unless you watch the version that Comedy Central shows, it's not appropriate for young kids, but every Jew (of which I'm one) with a sense of humor will love this movie, and gentiles with any knowledge of Judaism will get a huge kick out of it, too. Honestly, I think it's worth watching if only to see Andy Dick get the tar beaten out of him.
3. Desk Set - This is a classic movie, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, that takes place during the holiday season, but for some reason isn't known as a classic holiday film. It's got Hepburn & Tracy, romance, humor, and a main character who's a geek! And it's as family-friendly as just about anything you're likely to find on the Disney Channel, only several orders of magnitude better. What more could you ask for?
4. The Nightmare Before Christmas - This is a classic holiday movie, but the holiday is Halloween, so I'm including it. What could be better at evoking the true spirit of Christmas than the song "Kidnap the Sandy Claws?" The only part of the movie I don't quite understand is why all the kids who get the shrunken heads for Christmas scream; surely some of them should've thought it was cool, no?
5. The Lion in Winter (1968 version) - I will never understand how Oliver! beat this movie out for the Best Picture Oscar, but Katharine Hepburn won for her role as Eleanor of Aquitaine. The movie stars Hepburn, along with Peter O'Toole as King Henry II of England, at a fictional Christmas Court in 1183. A very young Anthony Hopkins (making his film debut) plays one of their sons, the future King Richard. It is truly a brilliant film, one of the few showing castle life in the Middle Ages as it really was: cold, filthy, and dark. It's definitely not your usual family film, unless you watch it so you can make your family look functional and loving by comparison, since the members of the royal family are all conspiring against each other.
6. The Thin Man - This is one of the best detective movies of all time, and one of the funniest. The Christmas part of the movie is pretty much incidental to the plot, but it has what is probably the best Christmas morning scene ever filmed, in which Nick Charles (played brilliantly by William Powell), trying out the air gun he's received as a gift, shoots ornaments off the tree. There's a reason this film inspired five sequels: Powell and Myrna Loy's Nick and Nora Charles are among the best film characters ever.
7. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians - I'll be honest: I've never actually seen the whole movie, just the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of it. But every sci-fi geek should see this film in one form or another, because it's so terrible it's hysterically funny. I wasn't going to list it, seeing as how the original film isn't out on DVD, and neither is the MST3K episode, but Joel Hodgson and his new Cinematic Titanic effort have come to the rescue—I haven't seen it yet, but based on the trailer I'm sure it's great.
8. Gremlins - This is a classic light horror film from the '80s that probably takes place at Christmas only to give the main character's father a reason why he buys the first Mogwai, Gizmo, for him. It's not a great film, but it has some surprisingly good special effects for a 1984 film, and has a lot of really good scenes. I don't advise showing it to little kids if they're at all prone to nightmares, but older kids should be fine with it.
9. Batman Returns - The Batman films made by Tim Burton weren't as good as the two most recent films, to be sure, for a variety of reasons. But they were very well made nonetheless, and still have a great deal to recommend them. This, the second one, happens to take place at Christmastime, providing for a good scene in which the Penguin disrupts the lighting of Gotham City's Christmas tree. I honestly could've done without Danny DeVito as the Penguin, and Christopher Walken isn't quite as good as usual, but Michelle Pfieffer more than makes up for them both, and not just because of the way she looks as Catwoman.
10. Blackadder's Christmas Carol - I know I'm cheating a bit here, since this is a TV show and not a movie. But I love it so much I really can't leave it off, and besides, it has Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Jim Broadbent, and Miranda Richardson in it (among others). With a cast like that, it can stand up to most movies. It takes the classic Dickens tale and flips it 180 degrees, so that the main character, Ebenezer Blackadder, starts out a man who is kind and generous to a fault and ends up a cruel and bitter miser.
Everybody knows the classic winter holiday movies, from older ones like It's a Wonderful Life to newer ones like A Christmas Story, to ones that get remade over and over again like A Christmas Carol. Whether or not you like such movies, you must admit that it does get a bit repetitive watching the same stories over and over again every year, with the possible exception of the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Here, then, are ten holiday movies (in no particular order) that aren't on most people's list to watch with the family, some of them for very good reasons.
1. Die Hard - You can't get much less traditional than a movie with people being shot, blown up, dropped out of high windows, and killed in various other ways. But, even if you don't want to watch it with your little kids, considering the violence and the language, it is a Christmas movie, and it does show how the forces of good can triumph over the forces of evil even when all of the good guys but two are completely incompetent. Right?
2. The Hebrew Hammer - Not only is this one of the few Hanukkah-related movies in existence, but it's also hysterically funny. Unless you watch the version that Comedy Central shows, it's not appropriate for young kids, but every Jew (of which I'm one) with a sense of humor will love this movie, and gentiles with any knowledge of Judaism will get a huge kick out of it, too. Honestly, I think it's worth watching if only to see Andy Dick get the tar beaten out of him.
3. Desk Set - This is a classic movie, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, that takes place during the holiday season, but for some reason isn't known as a classic holiday film. It's got Hepburn & Tracy, romance, humor, and a main character who's a geek! And it's as family-friendly as just about anything you're likely to find on the Disney Channel, only several orders of magnitude better. What more could you ask for?
4. The Nightmare Before Christmas - This is a classic holiday movie, but the holiday is Halloween, so I'm including it. What could be better at evoking the true spirit of Christmas than the song "Kidnap the Sandy Claws?" The only part of the movie I don't quite understand is why all the kids who get the shrunken heads for Christmas scream; surely some of them should've thought it was cool, no?
5. The Lion in Winter (1968 version) - I will never understand how Oliver! beat this movie out for the Best Picture Oscar, but Katharine Hepburn won for her role as Eleanor of Aquitaine. The movie stars Hepburn, along with Peter O'Toole as King Henry II of England, at a fictional Christmas Court in 1183. A very young Anthony Hopkins (making his film debut) plays one of their sons, the future King Richard. It is truly a brilliant film, one of the few showing castle life in the Middle Ages as it really was: cold, filthy, and dark. It's definitely not your usual family film, unless you watch it so you can make your family look functional and loving by comparison, since the members of the royal family are all conspiring against each other.
6. The Thin Man - This is one of the best detective movies of all time, and one of the funniest. The Christmas part of the movie is pretty much incidental to the plot, but it has what is probably the best Christmas morning scene ever filmed, in which Nick Charles (played brilliantly by William Powell), trying out the air gun he's received as a gift, shoots ornaments off the tree. There's a reason this film inspired five sequels: Powell and Myrna Loy's Nick and Nora Charles are among the best film characters ever.
7. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians - I'll be honest: I've never actually seen the whole movie, just the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of it. But every sci-fi geek should see this film in one form or another, because it's so terrible it's hysterically funny. I wasn't going to list it, seeing as how the original film isn't out on DVD, and neither is the MST3K episode, but Joel Hodgson and his new Cinematic Titanic effort have come to the rescue—I haven't seen it yet, but based on the trailer I'm sure it's great.
8. Gremlins - This is a classic light horror film from the '80s that probably takes place at Christmas only to give the main character's father a reason why he buys the first Mogwai, Gizmo, for him. It's not a great film, but it has some surprisingly good special effects for a 1984 film, and has a lot of really good scenes. I don't advise showing it to little kids if they're at all prone to nightmares, but older kids should be fine with it.
9. Batman Returns - The Batman films made by Tim Burton weren't as good as the two most recent films, to be sure, for a variety of reasons. But they were very well made nonetheless, and still have a great deal to recommend them. This, the second one, happens to take place at Christmastime, providing for a good scene in which the Penguin disrupts the lighting of Gotham City's Christmas tree. I honestly could've done without Danny DeVito as the Penguin, and Christopher Walken isn't quite as good as usual, but Michelle Pfieffer more than makes up for them both, and not just because of the way she looks as Catwoman.
10. Blackadder's Christmas Carol - I know I'm cheating a bit here, since this is a TV show and not a movie. But I love it so much I really can't leave it off, and besides, it has Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Jim Broadbent, and Miranda Richardson in it (among others). With a cast like that, it can stand up to most movies. It takes the classic Dickens tale and flips it 180 degrees, so that the main character, Ebenezer Blackadder, starts out a man who is kind and generous to a fault and ends up a cruel and bitter miser.
National Book Award Winners 2008
Fiction: Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library) - Interview
Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company) -Interview
Young People's Literature: Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic) - Interview
Poetry: Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems
(HarperCollins) - Interview
Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company) -Interview
Young People's Literature: Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic) - Interview
Poetry: Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems
(HarperCollins) - Interview
Best Books of 2008 Top Five Crime And Mystery Novels Of 2008 by Maureen Corrigan
What is this?
Best Books of 2008 Top Five Crime And Mystery Novels Of 2008 by Maureen Corrigan
iStockphoto.com
NPR.org, November 18, 2008 · To swipe the immortal lines uttered by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a great mystery should take "the lid off life and let [you] look at the works." Sure, entertainment is important; if these stories weren't fun, who would read them?
But the corpses, stolen gems and purloined letters that litter the pages of the classic detective tale are just excuses to set the plot in motion; they're not the point. A great crime story also tackles the big mysteries: love, death, the problem of God, the presence of evil in the world. This year's top five mysteries all provide suspenseful plots with satisfying solutions while also affirming that the eternal enigmas can't be cracked.
'Small Crimes'
Read an excerpt: 'Small Crimes'
Small Crimes, by Dave Zeltserman, paperback, 272 pages
With the world in financial freefall, there's only one type of mystery that captures the anxiety of the times, and that's crime noir: the jittery genre born during the Great Depression about saps, grifters and sad sacks who ain't got a barrel of money. James M. Cain is king of this genre, but there's a new name to add to the pantheon of the sons and daughters of Cain: Dave Zeltserman. His new novel, Small Crimes, is ingeniously twisted and imbued with a glossy coating of black humor.
This tale is told by one of fortune's fools: Joe Denton is a crooked ex-cop in Vermont who's just been released from jail after serving seven years for stabbing the local district attorney in the face. Since what's past is never truly past in crime noir, no sooner does Joe step out of the slammer than cosmic IOU's begin to rain down on his head. First, the disfigured DA cheerfully greets Joe outside the prison and announces that a local crime kingpin (and Joe's secret boss) is dying of cancer and has found religion. The kingpin's expected confession should send Joe straight back behind bars. Then, the local sheriff (also crooked) orders Joe to murder the DA before the crime kingpin can confess. The plot of Small Crimes ricochets out from this claustrophobic opening, and it's a thing of sordid beauty.
'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'
Read an excerpt: 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland, hardcover, 463 pages
For the past decade or so, Sweden has been a popular pick for crime capital of the literary world, thanks to Henning Mankell and his fellow practitioners of noir on ice. The newest name in mystery to emerge out of the frozen north is that of the late journalist-turned-novelist Stieg Larsson. His debut novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was a blockbuster when it was debuted in Europe; this past fall, an English-language version was published in the United States. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a super-smart amalgam of the corporate corruption tale, the legal thriller, the Agatha Christie-type "locked room" puzzle, and the dysfunctional family suspense story. Reporter Mikael Blomkvist is hired by an elderly mogul to solve the "cold case" disappearance of his niece, 40 years ago, from the family compound.
Blomkvist is aided in his investigation by a 24-year-old computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander. Salander is a pierced and tattooed Goth with major attitude problems. She's also one of the most invigorating women to come along in detective fiction since Miss Marple.
'The Chinaman'
The Chinaman, by Friedrich Glauser, translated from the German by Mike Mitchell, paperback, 186 pages
The Bitter Lemon Press has been doing serious mystery readers in America a service by translating and reprinting the work of Friedrich Glauser, who was born in Vienna in 1896 and died at the age of 42. Glauser spent much of his adult life in psychiatric wards and prisons, but he somehow managed to write a hypnotic series of crime novels featuring a Swiss policeman named Sergeant Studer. (In recognition of Glauser's achievement, Germany has dubbed its most prestigious crime fiction award the Glauser Prize.)
This year, Bitter Lemon brought out the fourth Studer adventure, The Chinaman, which was first published in 1939. The murky and absolutely compelling plot has something to do with a happenstance meeting between Studer and a stranger at a glum Swiss inn. Months later, the stranger's corpse is found lying on the fresh grave of a woman who also turns out to be a murder victim. Maybe it's the portentous original publication date — 1939 — that makes readers pay attention to the suspicion of the Swiss villagers, the coarseness of the apartment dwellers in a Bern tenement, the edginess everywhere. (In January, Bitter Lemon will bring out another Studer classic, The Spoke.)
'Death Vows'
Death Vows, by Richard Stevenson, paperback, 212 pages
In Glauser's books, enlightenment arises out of an atmosphere of fog and gloom. Richard Stevenson reminds his readers that there's plenty of streetwise wisdom to be found in wisecracks. Stevenson's long-running series featuring gay detective Donald Strachey confronts the mystery of homophobia in all its many guises. His ninth outing is called Death Vows, and its timely topic is gay marriage. As Strachey quips at the beginning of the novel, "The well-known enduring features of legal marriage [are] adultery, divorce, excess kitchenware [and] perpetuating the patriarchy." He neglects to add that, sometimes, those nearest and dearest to the betrothed couple may send ill tidings instead of crockpots.
Strachey is hired by the concerned pals of a man named Bill Moore, who lives in the Berkshires, to suss out his suspiciously slick, much-younger groom-to-be. But before anyone can cancel the canapes, one of the busybody friends turns into a plain old dead body, and Strachey feels compelled to clear the Lothario he first was hired to investigate. As always with the Strachey novels — which are being filmed by the gay cable network Here! — the murder and mayhem takes a back seat to the keen social criticism and defiant wit of our detective. Strachey's comic targets range from Mapquest to Edith Wharton; not much is sacred to him — except the hard-won right to utter marriage vows.
'The Long Embrace'
Read an excerpt: 'The Long Embrace'
The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, by Judith Freeman, paperback, 368 pages
Judith Freeman's atmospheric book, The Long Embrace, has just come out in paperback and, while it isn't technically a mystery novel, it delves deeply into the puzzling marriage of the man who is arguably America's greatest writer of detective fiction: Raymond Chandler. Chandler was married for almost 30 years to Cissy Pascal, who was 18 years his senior. Throughout their restless life together in and around Los Angeles, the Chandlers moved almost every year, and Freeman tries to visit all the apartments, hotels and dumps the couple once called home.
Looking out at the view of the one and only house they owned, Freeman recalls morose Chandler's famous pronouncement on the ocean: "Too much water. Too many drowned men." Throughout The Long Embrace, Freeman manages the near impossible feat of paying homage to Chandler without being swallowed up in his trademark wisecracks and gorgeous language. Like Cissy Pascal before her, Freeman is a dame who knows how to hold her own with a man who's trouble.
E-mail|Share|Comments (2)|Recommend (33)
Best Books of 2008 Top Five Crime And Mystery Novels Of 2008 by Maureen Corrigan
iStockphoto.com
NPR.org, November 18, 2008 · To swipe the immortal lines uttered by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a great mystery should take "the lid off life and let [you] look at the works." Sure, entertainment is important; if these stories weren't fun, who would read them?
But the corpses, stolen gems and purloined letters that litter the pages of the classic detective tale are just excuses to set the plot in motion; they're not the point. A great crime story also tackles the big mysteries: love, death, the problem of God, the presence of evil in the world. This year's top five mysteries all provide suspenseful plots with satisfying solutions while also affirming that the eternal enigmas can't be cracked.
'Small Crimes'
Read an excerpt: 'Small Crimes'
Small Crimes, by Dave Zeltserman, paperback, 272 pages
With the world in financial freefall, there's only one type of mystery that captures the anxiety of the times, and that's crime noir: the jittery genre born during the Great Depression about saps, grifters and sad sacks who ain't got a barrel of money. James M. Cain is king of this genre, but there's a new name to add to the pantheon of the sons and daughters of Cain: Dave Zeltserman. His new novel, Small Crimes, is ingeniously twisted and imbued with a glossy coating of black humor.
This tale is told by one of fortune's fools: Joe Denton is a crooked ex-cop in Vermont who's just been released from jail after serving seven years for stabbing the local district attorney in the face. Since what's past is never truly past in crime noir, no sooner does Joe step out of the slammer than cosmic IOU's begin to rain down on his head. First, the disfigured DA cheerfully greets Joe outside the prison and announces that a local crime kingpin (and Joe's secret boss) is dying of cancer and has found religion. The kingpin's expected confession should send Joe straight back behind bars. Then, the local sheriff (also crooked) orders Joe to murder the DA before the crime kingpin can confess. The plot of Small Crimes ricochets out from this claustrophobic opening, and it's a thing of sordid beauty.
'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'
Read an excerpt: 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland, hardcover, 463 pages
For the past decade or so, Sweden has been a popular pick for crime capital of the literary world, thanks to Henning Mankell and his fellow practitioners of noir on ice. The newest name in mystery to emerge out of the frozen north is that of the late journalist-turned-novelist Stieg Larsson. His debut novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was a blockbuster when it was debuted in Europe; this past fall, an English-language version was published in the United States. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a super-smart amalgam of the corporate corruption tale, the legal thriller, the Agatha Christie-type "locked room" puzzle, and the dysfunctional family suspense story. Reporter Mikael Blomkvist is hired by an elderly mogul to solve the "cold case" disappearance of his niece, 40 years ago, from the family compound.
Blomkvist is aided in his investigation by a 24-year-old computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander. Salander is a pierced and tattooed Goth with major attitude problems. She's also one of the most invigorating women to come along in detective fiction since Miss Marple.
'The Chinaman'
The Chinaman, by Friedrich Glauser, translated from the German by Mike Mitchell, paperback, 186 pages
The Bitter Lemon Press has been doing serious mystery readers in America a service by translating and reprinting the work of Friedrich Glauser, who was born in Vienna in 1896 and died at the age of 42. Glauser spent much of his adult life in psychiatric wards and prisons, but he somehow managed to write a hypnotic series of crime novels featuring a Swiss policeman named Sergeant Studer. (In recognition of Glauser's achievement, Germany has dubbed its most prestigious crime fiction award the Glauser Prize.)
This year, Bitter Lemon brought out the fourth Studer adventure, The Chinaman, which was first published in 1939. The murky and absolutely compelling plot has something to do with a happenstance meeting between Studer and a stranger at a glum Swiss inn. Months later, the stranger's corpse is found lying on the fresh grave of a woman who also turns out to be a murder victim. Maybe it's the portentous original publication date — 1939 — that makes readers pay attention to the suspicion of the Swiss villagers, the coarseness of the apartment dwellers in a Bern tenement, the edginess everywhere. (In January, Bitter Lemon will bring out another Studer classic, The Spoke.)
'Death Vows'
Death Vows, by Richard Stevenson, paperback, 212 pages
In Glauser's books, enlightenment arises out of an atmosphere of fog and gloom. Richard Stevenson reminds his readers that there's plenty of streetwise wisdom to be found in wisecracks. Stevenson's long-running series featuring gay detective Donald Strachey confronts the mystery of homophobia in all its many guises. His ninth outing is called Death Vows, and its timely topic is gay marriage. As Strachey quips at the beginning of the novel, "The well-known enduring features of legal marriage [are] adultery, divorce, excess kitchenware [and] perpetuating the patriarchy." He neglects to add that, sometimes, those nearest and dearest to the betrothed couple may send ill tidings instead of crockpots.
Strachey is hired by the concerned pals of a man named Bill Moore, who lives in the Berkshires, to suss out his suspiciously slick, much-younger groom-to-be. But before anyone can cancel the canapes, one of the busybody friends turns into a plain old dead body, and Strachey feels compelled to clear the Lothario he first was hired to investigate. As always with the Strachey novels — which are being filmed by the gay cable network Here! — the murder and mayhem takes a back seat to the keen social criticism and defiant wit of our detective. Strachey's comic targets range from Mapquest to Edith Wharton; not much is sacred to him — except the hard-won right to utter marriage vows.
'The Long Embrace'
Read an excerpt: 'The Long Embrace'
The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, by Judith Freeman, paperback, 368 pages
Judith Freeman's atmospheric book, The Long Embrace, has just come out in paperback and, while it isn't technically a mystery novel, it delves deeply into the puzzling marriage of the man who is arguably America's greatest writer of detective fiction: Raymond Chandler. Chandler was married for almost 30 years to Cissy Pascal, who was 18 years his senior. Throughout their restless life together in and around Los Angeles, the Chandlers moved almost every year, and Freeman tries to visit all the apartments, hotels and dumps the couple once called home.
Looking out at the view of the one and only house they owned, Freeman recalls morose Chandler's famous pronouncement on the ocean: "Too much water. Too many drowned men." Throughout The Long Embrace, Freeman manages the near impossible feat of paying homage to Chandler without being swallowed up in his trademark wisecracks and gorgeous language. Like Cissy Pascal before her, Freeman is a dame who knows how to hold her own with a man who's trouble.
E-mail|Share|Comments (2)|Recommend (33)
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Making Use of Public Domain By J.D. BIERSDORFER
November 20, 2008
Q & A
Making Use of Public Domain By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Q. What does it mean when a Web site says a picture or document is in the public domain? Does that mean I can use it for my own purposes?
A. The public domain is a category of works made up of text, images and documents that are not protected by an active legal copyright. On the Internet, material in the public domain can be freely downloaded, copied and reused.
Just because a photo or document is available online does not mean it is automatically in the public domain, so check for copyright notices or a Creative Commons license before grabbing something to reuse. (A Creative Commons license works alongside a copyright and allows writers and artists more flexibility in sharing their creations with the world; more information is at www.creativecommons.org.)
Creative material usually ends up in the public domain in one of two ways. Some creators give up their copyright and donate their work to the public domain. For example, there are several picture sites around the Web like www.burningwell.org that offer collections of public domain photographs. Wikipedia has a list of links to copyright-free images at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources.
Works can also fall into the public domain if their copyright has expired. In general, books published before 1923 in the United States are considered in the public domain. The Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare’s plays, essays by Samuel Johnson and novels by Jane Austen are among the free literary offerings at Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.us) and other sites devoted to sharing public domain text. Federal publications and other government documents are not copyrighted and are also in the public domain.
The Incredible Art Department site has a page of links to public domain text and images (as well as links to several sites devoted to copyright law) at www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/links/clipart.html. A chart at www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain explains copyright term and the public domain as of Jan. 1, 2008.
Q & A
Making Use of Public Domain By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Q. What does it mean when a Web site says a picture or document is in the public domain? Does that mean I can use it for my own purposes?
A. The public domain is a category of works made up of text, images and documents that are not protected by an active legal copyright. On the Internet, material in the public domain can be freely downloaded, copied and reused.
Just because a photo or document is available online does not mean it is automatically in the public domain, so check for copyright notices or a Creative Commons license before grabbing something to reuse. (A Creative Commons license works alongside a copyright and allows writers and artists more flexibility in sharing their creations with the world; more information is at www.creativecommons.org.)
Creative material usually ends up in the public domain in one of two ways. Some creators give up their copyright and donate their work to the public domain. For example, there are several picture sites around the Web like www.burningwell.org that offer collections of public domain photographs. Wikipedia has a list of links to copyright-free images at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources.
Works can also fall into the public domain if their copyright has expired. In general, books published before 1923 in the United States are considered in the public domain. The Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare’s plays, essays by Samuel Johnson and novels by Jane Austen are among the free literary offerings at Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.us) and other sites devoted to sharing public domain text. Federal publications and other government documents are not copyrighted and are also in the public domain.
The Incredible Art Department site has a page of links to public domain text and images (as well as links to several sites devoted to copyright law) at www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/links/clipart.html. A chart at www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain explains copyright term and the public domain as of Jan. 1, 2008.
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