Acoustic Alchemy: Best Kept Secret

You looking to find the "Acoustic Alchemy: Best Kept Secret" Good news! You can purchase Acoustic Alchemy: Best Kept Secret with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

Price: $199.99   

Product Description

DVD release of the 1998 VHS from this fine acoustic jazz/new age group fronted by 3 guitars and backed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra.

Acoustic Alchemy: Best Kept Secret Review

i LOVE Acoustic Alchemy...and dearly miss Nick Webb...its founder and lead steel player who sadly passed away a few years back.

GOOD NEWS..this is a nice program and features the dear departed Mr Webb. This is a fun program with some exciting footage from a special session at Pinewood studios shot with an expert director and lit like a top notch hollywood production...mixed in with backstage footage etc....

BAD NEWS...this DVD is merely a transfer from the before released VHS (with the addition of two videos which are nice). I should add that CASINO is presented WITH TIMECODE on the image..very sloppy nobody checked this and the documentary/show has NO chapter stops...just a sloppy quick cheap transfer from video...really low rent and AA is the opposite of that..so BOO to GRP Universal.

MY COMPLAINT? In the world of DVD we have sooo much potential..the concert that was exquisitely lit and filmed (oh and recorded a whole AAlchemy CD came from it!) should have been presented as an extra feature on this ....so we would have the PBS Style pledge drive program with the concert interrupted by the interviews etc and the CONCERT as a standalone...THAT is the way to make it something to watch over and over and cherish while toasting the late Mr Webb and smiling that his dream did come true.

what we have is nice...and certainly better than the other DVD post NICK with the clownhouse stage set...but what a missed opportunity...I'm surprised that AA's management didn't think of doing this right...instead a scant hour and where is all that great concert footage...on a shelf?

RIP Nick Webb and thanks for going forward Greg!

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Acoustic Alchemy: Best Kept Secret" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Acoustic Alchemy: Best Kept Secret ...

Frasier - The Complete Seasons 1-8, Season 11 (The Final Season)

You looking to find the "Frasier - The Complete Seasons 1-8, Season 11 (The Final Season)" Good news! You can purchase Frasier - The Complete Seasons 1-8, Season 11 (The Final Season) with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

Price: $195.00   

Product Description

This DVD set includes:
The Complete First through Eighth Seasons
The Complete Eleventh Season (The Final Season)

This DVD set does NOT include Seasons 9-10.

Frasier - The Complete Seasons 1-8, Season 11 (The Final Season) Review

The whole set is just great! I love the show. The set is as showed in the pictures, each set has its own box with fold-in 4 disc holders.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Frasier - The Complete Seasons 1-8, Season 11 (The Final Season)" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Frasier - The Complete Seasons 1-8, Season 11 (The Final Season) ...

Joel Schlemowitz - Short Experimental Films: 3-Disc Set

You looking to find the "Joel Schlemowitz - Short Experimental Films: 3-Disc Set" Good news! You can purchase Joel Schlemowitz - Short Experimental Films: 3-Disc Set with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

   

Product Description

Joel Schlemowitz is a wizard of cinema, and this collection of short experimental films is a marvel to behold. Each piece is a unique gem quirky, provocative, playful, often handmade, and always daring celebrating Joel's astonishing mastery of the tools of filmmaking, and his poetic grasp on the art of cinema. Alan Berliner Joel creates cinema-poems that crack open the infinite. Tracing the jeweled veins of Gustave Moreau, J.K. Huysmans, and Gerard de Nerval, his work eludes the dark shadows of night & illuminates the evening with cascading colors and flickering dreamscapes. Jennifer MacMillan, Curator, Invisible Film Series Disc 1 - Short Experimental Films 1 through 20 1734 40/4000 Abrasions Angelbubble Bacchanale Bagatelle Biologique Bagatelle in Neon Birds of Prey Birth of Eros Channeled Energies Dame Darcy - a film portrait Doris' Garden Extemporized Eye Music Film Poem Filmpoem for Wanda Phipps Fogg For Joe The Glowing Woman In the Orbit of Marie Menken Disc 2 - Short Experimental Films 21 through 40 Invitation to a Voyage Little Nothings morning poem #38 morning poem #40 morning poem #43 Morris Engel Time Sculpture Pillowbook Poem for the Past Purple Candle Poem Reverie Rip Silo Tombeau for Arnold Eagle Typeoclavecin Film - Variations on the Blues for JoJo #10 �bel Unmeasured Prelude for Kerry Laitala we came... we filmed... we left... Weeping Film Weimar When He Leaves Disc 3 - Collaborations and Experimental Documentaries All Saints Day Boulder-Brooklyn Moving Images - the Film-Makers' Cooperative relocates Loudmouth Collective/Ugly Duckling Presse Teslamania Bonus footage: the Film-Makers Coop's move by Brian Frye ""Grand Magic Lantern Exhibition!"" documentation by Jeanne Liotta

Joel Schlemowitz - Short Experimental Films: 3-Disc Set Review

Length:: 1:08 Mins

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Joel Schlemowitz - Short Experimental Films: 3-Disc Set" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Joel Schlemowitz - Short Experimental Films: 3-Disc Set ...

The Satyajit Ray Collection - Vol. 1 3-DVD Set ( The Big City / The Lonely Wife / The Hero ) ( Mahanagar / Charulata / Nayak ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ]

You looking to find the "The Satyajit Ray Collection - Vol. 1 3-DVD Set ( The Big City / The Lonely Wife / The Hero ) ( Mahanagar / Charulata / Nayak ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ]" Good news! You can purchase The Satyajit Ray Collection - Vol. 1 3-DVD Set ( The Big City / The Lonely Wife / The Hero ) ( Mahanagar / Charulata / Nayak ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ] with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

Price: $114.01   

Product Description

PAL (NON USA FORMAT IMPORT DVDS) THIS PRODUCT REQUIRES A MULTI REGION/CODE FREE/REGION FREE/ALL REGION OR PAL FORMAT DVDS PLAYER IN ORDER TO WATcH THEM.

The Satyajit Ray Collection - Vol. 1 3-DVD Set ( The Big City / The Lonely Wife / The Hero ) ( Mahanagar / Charulata / Nayak ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ] Review

One of the interesting aspects of watching people's reactions to one another when they meet is to see the extent these reactions are shaped by unacknowledged emotions: tiredness, prejudice, suppressed resentment lead to condescension, flattery, anger and other subtexts which colour the consciously controlled verbal exchange.

While some great writers (Flaubert for instance) have examined these subtleties, very few film makers have. Even the great Junichiro Ozu steps back, as it were, and observes personal interactions in a social context. Satyajit Ray is almost alone in presenting what goes on beneath the surface of a persona, and as a result his characters are among the most richly realised in cinema.

This explains partly the comparative neglect that Ray's films have suffered. Many of them have never been available on disk. (True, this neglect is also partly due to Ray's carelessness about preserving his work, over which he had almost complete artistic control). But consider the context in which we see films. Action dominates the cinema world: our powerful reactions of fear, anger and lust are well catered to. On the sidelines are the human emotions, with actors registering the basic ones: love, fear, joy, despair, hate ' and this is seen as an accomplishment, made by those actors who can act. And then there is the cinema of Satyajit Ray, where a commonplace phrase can say so much, and a dozen expressions cross an actor's face before they reply. Ray is not more realistic than others, he just shows more. We may know this is happening with the people around us; we're not used to seeing it in films.

So a plot summary of a Ray film will often not tell us what it is about. In Charulata, a good, intelligent, politically involved but emotionally obtuse man gives his wife's brother the opportunity to steal from him because he wants to trust him, feeling that responsibility will steady the man. And he throws his lonely wife together with his young cousin so that their shared literary interests will give them companionship. The man, Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee), feels he is doing good, but because he is only aware of his own benevolence he becomes horribly disillusioned by the end of the film.

Everybody acts in ways they can justify to themselves. Even the thief feels he is stealing from a fool. There is no betrayal except of illusions, no passion that is not disguised as friendship. The husband Bhupati hides his tears behind his kindness. The only casuality is trust. Yet how much is being said!

The film is doubly qualified in terms of context. We are watching Bengali upper class people in the late nineteenth century go about their relationships. We may be unsure if what goes on is uniquely Bengali, whether it relates to other Indian cultures, how much it reflects the morality of the 1870s or the customs of the wealthy. Gradually we see that what is depicted is the constants in human nature, unchanged since the Stone Age perhaps. Sidestepping the usual method of holding our interest in matters such as these by means of melodrama, Ray shows us how a human being can feel two powerful emotions at the same time, how our intellect can misinform our brain what our heart is feeling.

Ray was a consummate film maker with an uncommon command of the elements of film making. Charulata excels in its sets, lighting, camera movements and music. But the chief resource Ray has is the faces of his actors, and in particular that of Madhabi Mukherjee.

Madhabi is best remembered for her role as Charu. She started as a child actor and is a famous Bengali actor with many roles to her credit, including ones in two other Ray films, 'Mahanagar' and 'Kapurush'. How often in Charulata the screen is filled by a close up of this face, and the tumult of emotions crossing it. This is no virtuoso act; Madhabi always remains in character, and when she doesn't know what she is feeling, neither do we the viewers, yet we are moved just the same. I wonder if Ray directed Madhabi in this role the same way he reportedly directed the 14 year old Sharmila Tagore in Apur Sansar, telling Sharmila, lean this way, hold your head to the light, narrow your eyes ' be damned to the Method and all its actors when doing things this way gets such results.

Despite other elements in Charulata: the vividly realised and perhaps excoriated milieu; the use of symbolism ' we see Charu on a swing several times, one of which is also a famous virtuoso camera sequence; the satire of gender roles ' all, including Charu, think she would be more satisfied had she had children, yet in a passion she easily excels Amal as a published writer; experimental sequences, such as the montage of images from Charu's childhood, which were new in the 60s and unfamiliar to Ray; some of Ray's finest music, and charming songs by Rabindranath Tagore (whose novella Nastanirh is the source of Ray's screenplay and which has reputedly autobiographical elements); still the play of human emotions, and the way people become aware of them, remain the focus of Ray's work, in Charulata as elsewhere.

Perhaps this is why there is no resolution to the story in Charulata. Plots and the other devices of drama are a psychic necessity for us precisely because they don't exist in real life. We separate good and evil into heroes and villains in a story precisely because good and evil are confusedly mixed in real life. So anyone who wants to depict human emotions must deal with ambiguity. In a way emotions cannot be resolved: they just are. Does Charu love Amal or is she just lonely? Is Amal dutifully following Bhupati's instruction in encouraging Charu to write or just preening himself on his own literary abilities, or trying to seduce her? What does Amal's departure reveal about his feelings for Charu or is it merely cowardice? When Bhupati and Charu reach hands towards each other at the end of the film will those hands touch? We can't know any of this, just as the characters cannot and this tells us more than any resolution could.

One of the words used to describe Ray's films is humanistic, referring to an old and now somewhat outmoded philosophy which hasn't worn too well after two world wars and the dominance of media generated opinion all over the world. In fact the word humanism is most often used now pejoratively by those who think they have a radical political agenda. The basis of all institutions however, political or religious or social, is human nature. The examination of human nature is the business of any art worthy of the name and the films of Satyajit Ray are an outstanding contribution to this activity.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "The Satyajit Ray Collection - Vol. 1 3-DVD Set ( The Big City / The Lonely Wife / The Hero ) ( Mahanagar / Charulata / Nayak ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ]" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from The Satyajit Ray Collection - Vol. 1 3-DVD Set ( The Big City / The Lonely Wife / The Hero ) ( Mahanagar / Charulata / Nayak ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ] ...

Full Throttle - 1971 Datsun 240Z (History Channel)

You looking to find the "Full Throttle - 1971 Datsun 240Z (History Channel)" Good news! You can purchase Full Throttle - 1971 Datsun 240Z (History Channel) with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

Price: $118.03   

Product Description

In this episode, Japanese hustle meets American muscle! The Datsun 240Z was the first affordable people's sports car. We get an up-close look at the 1971 Datsun design engineering that proved light years ahead of its American competitors. Diving into their overhead cam engine, we tear it down and build it back up for a head-to-head drag race at full throttle! After supplying two teams with the classic cars, garages, tools, parts, and 20 hours of repair time, we hold an old-fashioned drag race on a legal, certified track with safety devices for the drivers. As we follow the teams, we interject history at each step they take, including factory footage and interviews with the legends behind the vintage vehicles.

Full Throttle - 1971 Datsun 240Z (History Channel) Review

An excellent DVD for Datsun Z enthusiasts. I bought this as a present for my Dad. He really enjoyed it although the disc jumped in places and was not a good quality at time.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Full Throttle - 1971 Datsun 240Z (History Channel)" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Full Throttle - 1971 Datsun 240Z (History Channel) ...