Cynical Cinema

I have always wanted to get onto Jeopardy, but the biggest problem I have is that I just don’t know enough about American politics and history. At least twice a week, there is a category on American Presidents where I am unable to answer any questions at all. But now my problems have been solved. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing The Presidents on Tuesday August 26th. This is a massive PBS box set from their series The American Experience that features 10 20th century presidents, from Teddy Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush. Massive doesn’t begin to describe this box. Ten presidents on fifteen discs, each one exhaustively researched and incredibly complete. Their early lives and their post-presidential lives are shown in great detail, but the most information, appropriately, is reserved for their presidencies themselves. Each disc features in-depth interviews with the people closest to that president, and each is an in-depth examination worthy of Ken Burns (who, incidentally, does most of his work with PBS as well).

Some of the presidents get two discs, others just one. Some get just three hours worth of film, others get four and a half. (FDR and Truman each get 4 ½ hours, I suppose because more happened during their presidencies than during others.) If, after 35 hours of learning about presidents, and a further ten plus hours of special features, you are not ready to take on Jeopardy, then you never will be. And even if you don’t care at all about Jeopardy, pick this box set up anyway if you have even a passing interest in American history. It could give you something to watch for a whole year.

Muhammad Ali: Made In Miami is a PBS documentary that comes out today, August 12th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. It deals with the Greatest’s time in Miami, which was really the place which was the starting point of his career. He went there to train with Angelo Dundee, the man who would be his trainer and mentor throughout his career. The movie talks about the racism that Ali (then Cassius Clay) and other black men had to deal with in the city. It takes us through his Miami years thoroughly and compellingly in a packed sixty minutes.

His first title fight with Sonny Liston, when Clay sounded off in interviews before fighting the world’s most dangerous man. “Ain’t he ugly?” He asks. And he ends up being right on the money, when Liston tries to blind him as soon as he starts losing the fight. Liston has come from prison, where he was as feared as he is in the boxing ring. But the one guy no one in prison (even Sonny Liston) wants to fight is the guy who’s squirrels-in-the-banana-house crazy. And Cassius Clay, with his boastful, over the top interviews and afraid-of-nothing personality, came off as certifiable nuthouse material. And Liston, in the end, succumbed to that intellectual warfare for which he was definitely not prepared.

The movie goes on to detail Clay’s relationship with Malcolm X, the split that occurred in the Nation Of Islam, and his casting off of his “slave name” to assume the moniker of Muhammad Ali, a name bestowed upon him by Elijah Muhammad as a way of pushing Malcolm X further out of the Nation. The movie continues through Ali’s second fight with Liston, the one where many boxing historians think Liston threw in the towel, and of course goes right up to his refusal to fight in Vietnam. An incredible document of the most important athlete the world has ever seen, Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami is more than worth picking up on DVD.

Persepolis is the story of a young girl named Marjane growing up in Iran, under the regime of the Shah.  She is precocious, cute, and to a degree bilssfully unaware of the repression that surrounds her.  Her family is a fairly forward-thinking one, with strict ideas of honour and morals, but not one of those crazy-religious repressive families that have become the stereotype.  Her mother is a free-thinker and a stong, independant woman, as is her grandmother.  Her father and his brothers are tough-minded, and willing to take their beliefs to the limit.  When the war with Iraq begins, however, and the Islamic revolution takes over, Marjane’s world view is drastically altered.

 An outspoken girl, there are some scenes which resonate powerfully.  There is one where she speaks out in her university about the new rules that are all of a sudden penetrating into higher education.  If girls can’t wear makeup, because it might arouse the boys, why can’t they wear baggy pants either?  Baggy pants are the fashion right now, and they hide the female form, whereas tight pants show it off.  So is mandating tight pants a decision that was made based on the proper way for girls to behave, or is it because they are against fashion in principle?  A simple, yet powerful scene in a movie that is absolutely crammed with simple and powerful scenes.

The cartoon is almost entirely in black-and-white, which is terrific.  It creates a sort of oppressive atmosphere in a place and time where oppression is the order of the day.  As Marjane grows into womanhood, and starts to question the world around her more and more, she starts to listen to music.  Music that has been banned by the government - it starts with ABBA.  Then ABBA sucks, you gotta hear the Bee Gees.  Eventually this grows into a love for Iron Maiden, perhaps informed more by a form of conscious rebellion at the oppressive society than by an actual love for heavy metal.

Marjane moves to Europe to escape the Iranian craziness, and quickly finds that the nuns she lives with there are, in their own way, as repressive as the Iranians.  A real fish out of water in Europe, she finds that it is tougher to be a stranger in a free land she doesn’t know than it is to live in oppressed land that she does.  Upon her return to Iran, she reconnects with her family, especially her grandmother, who imparts many wise life lessons, and enables Marjane to define herself in terms of her heritage and sociocultural identity. 

Since the whole movie is told through the eyes of this young girl, and then the young woman, hers is the only perspective we see, and it is fairly bleak.  Her perspective, in turn, is informed only by her own personal history, and the cultural and religious background of her upbringing.  Through war, turmoil, executions and horrible oppression, we get two stories, both of them harsh, but both of them fantastic.  The one of the horrors visited upon Iran by the Islamic revolution, and one of a young girl trying desperately to find her place in the world - her world and also a foreign world. 

Something I feel I should add - she has a few experiences with men throughout the film, and I felt, in watching it, that the end could be irritating.  Like, one of those endings where if she just finds the right man, everything will be OK.  And thankfully, the movie does not go down this obnoxious path.  It remains as constant in it’s themes and purpose as Marjane would herself hope to be.  Persepolis is based on the autobiographical graphic novel written by Marjane Satrapi, and she collaborated on the screenplay as well.  She shows herself to be a very courageous woman, laying her sould completely bare, warts and all, up on the screen to tell a story.  A wonderful, smart, funny, poignant and powerful story.  Rent this movie.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is one of the most unfortunately-named movies in recent memory.  It conveys some sort of sweeping romantic epic that will likely involve intricate costumes and poems read to a lady from over a hedge of some kind.  And, in a way, it actually is.  But it’s an epic love affair between Irishmen and their country.  It’s actually the story of the beginnings of the IRA, as the British government holds Ireland in a grip of terror.  The British soldiers are beating Irish citizens, enforcing apartheid-type laws against the citizens of the country.  And the Irish have had enough.  They form a group to fight back against the British military. 

Cillian Murphy is terrific as Damien O’Donovan, a doctor who gets caught up in the resistance along with his brother Teddy, the de-facto leader of the resistance movement.  Orla Fitzgerald is wonderful as Damien’s love interest, and the rest of the cast is fantastic as well.  The movie is long - more than two hours - but it has a lot of story to tell.  The Irish resistance finds guns and weapons to drive out the British, but once they start becoming successful, they begin fighting amongst themselves, over political and territorial issues.  The IRA is split into two basic factions, the one that is willing to accept a compromise with the British and become a free state of the British Empire, and the one that will accept nothing less than total freedom from Great Britain.

The tension between the brothers, the warring factions, the passion of the resistance fighters and the palpable love of their country are all themes and moments that are expertly handled by the director, Ken Loach.  As the movie draws to an end, we see the issues that not only divided the IRA at the beginning, but also divided the country itself.  A fascinating and powerful look at the nascent years of one of the most famous (and infamous) fighting forces in the world, as well as the politics that divided Ireland, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an epic, beautifully filmed tale of struggle, triumph and tragedy.

With the release of Control on DVD June 17th, there is a market for all things Joy Division, at least for a time. So Alliance Films is releasing a documentary film the same day, simply called Joy Division. Control is a fantastic film about Ian Curtis, the tragic lead singer of Joy Division in the late 70s and early 80s. And while it’s terrific in the way it focuses on Curtis himself, the rest of this powerful and influential band gets pushed aside in favour of the compelling story of their lead singer. Joy Division is the story of the rest of that band, and it’s more a celebration of the band’s history than it is a eulogy for Curtis himself. It features interviews with tons of the great movers and shakers in the Manchester music scene of the time.

Tony Wilson, the now-deceased founder of Factory records, is a big part of the film, and was an even bigger part of the scene in Manchester at the time. He’s the guy who broke Joy Division big in 1978, and was the subject of the terrific 2002 movie 24 Hour Party People. The other band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris make appearances here too, talking about their memories of fame and the beginnings of Joy Division, as well as reminiscing about Ian Curtis and his death. Of course, the three of them achieved far greater stardom than Curtis ever did. After his death, they would reform as New Order, and become internationally recognized pop stars.

But it was Joy Division that started it all. To be a little more accurate, the Buzzcocks really started it all in the late-70s Manchester scene, but Joy Division soon became the shining light of that group with the release of their first true album, Unknown Pleasures. That then paved the way for New Order, The Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, the Inspiral Carpets, and countless other Manchester bands who would all, at the very least, achieve a cult following the world over. But this film doesn’t deal with the legacy of Joy Division, just the moment in music history that was theirs and theirs alone. As the other band members remember Ian Curtis toward the end, you get some lines that were actually used in Control as well. No one, at the time, thought that Curtis’ lyrics were anything more than art. That he, like Neil Young or Bob Dylan, was singing about things that he created as an art form. It was only too late, however, that they discovered that when he sang lyrics like; Mother, I tried, please believe me
I’m doing the best that I can
I’m ashamed of the things
I’ve been put through
I’m ashamed of the person I am

on “Isolation”, he wasn’t just creating art, he really meant it. One of his bandmates calls Curtis’s story “one of the last true stories in pop”, and he is absolutely right.

The whole story of Joy Division in general IS one of the last true stories in popular music. And it’s laid out for us here in stark terms, with an eye to historic relevance and to the feel of the times and the city. The influences on Joy Division that came from the Buzzcocks and, more directly, the Sex Pistols. The brilliance of the music, the effect it had on people, and the legacy the band left in just two staggeringly brilliant albums. Also appearing as interview subjects are producer Martin Hannett and Curtis’ Belgian girlfriend Annik Honore. His wife, Debbie, does not appear in the film, but text shows up on the screen from her biography Touching From A Distance, so her presence is felt throughout the film.

A wonderful retrospective on one of the great unknown bands of our time, Joy Division is essential for lovers of British music, a wonderful companion DVD to those of you who are going to buy Control, and simply well worth watching for anyone else. A fascinating story about a fascinating time, place, and band. If you’re a music lover, pick it up.

The opening scene to For The Bible Tells Me So is great.  It’s a little scary at first.  I was watching, thinking “what have I got myself into?”  It appeared as though the film was going to be a bunch of anti-gay Christian propaganda.  It was an old news clip of a woman talking on television about how homosexuality was a terrible thing, and that she and her associates were not there to condemn the gay folk, but rather to help them by changing their lifestyle and “curing” them.  Then, out of nowhere, a guy shows up and slams her in the face with a pie.  Hilarious!  As it turns out, the film is not anti-gay propaganda, but rather anti-anti-gay propaganda.  It examines the way fundamentalist, right-wing Christians have distorted the meaning of the words in the Bible to further a bizarrely conceived anti-homosexual agenda.

People are quoted everywhere in this movie saying that the bible says homosexuality is “an abomination”.  And many of them can, indeed, quote chapter and verse.  However, the gay-bashers and anti-homosexual preachers and pastors and rabbis are using a very convenient interpretation of the bible.  Of course, we all know that the bible is interpreted very differently by many people.  Which is why some Christians are catholics and others knock on my door to give me pamphlets about doomsday that feature creepy pictures of children feeding goats.  But everyone who has chosen to engage in this crusade against homosexuality is doing more than interpreting the bible differently than sane people.  They are purposely ignoring large portions of the book.

You see, if you took the one passage from Leviticus that homophobes have used as their shining example of God’s hatred of homosexuality, and you took it at face value, you would be entirely missing the point.  This is the passage:  “You shall not lie with a male as those who lie with a female; it is an abomination.”  If that was the only passage you read, and you were a bible-thumping nutjob, you might think God was anti-gay.  But if you read the rest of Leviticus, you would realize that the word “abomination” is not nearly as harsh as it seems.  In fact, anything the least bit out of the ordinary is, in this chapter, an “abomination”.  Like eating shrimp.  Abomination.  Eating rabbit.  Abomination.  Eating bacon, oysters, ham, pork chops, lobster and crab.  Abominations.  But you are allowed to eat locusts.  Huzzah for the bible!  I don’t see Fred Phelps holding rallies outside seafood restaurants or pig farms.  Or eating locusts.  Although I would very much like to see Fred Phelps eat locusts.

Actually, Phelps is not in this movie, amazingly.  Which is kind of great, because he represents the extreme.  The really out-to-lunch lunatic fringe of the church and Christianity in general.  And that isn’t what the movie is about.  It’s about the opinions of regular, ordinary Christians, and how they are affected by those around them.  We meet many devoted religious believers who have had to deal with gay children.  Some are more tolerant than others, some actually became estranged from their children while others became activists for gay rights themselves.  The film also deals with the idea of ordaining gay ministers.  The backlash against those who have become ordained, and the support they received from other parts of the Christian community. 

And this is what makes this movie wonderful.  It is certainly a movie that takes sides - It has chosen to take the side of common sense over the side of rabid homphobic insanity.  But the fact that it stays right in the middle, with average Christians of all denominations - catholic, baptist, lutheran, you name it - and examine their beliefs and the origin of those beliefs.  And for the most part, these beliefs originate with the ignorance of others.  If your priest is constantly telling you that homosexuality is unnatural and evil, and you have built your life on following the bible and the teachings of your church, then it only stands to reason that you will have a difficult time reconciling those deeply-held beliefs with the truth when you are presented with the real facts.

After watching the film, I wanted to read more about the church and the crazy divide that has been caused by support for, and opposition to, the gay and lesbian community.  In fact, I have done considerable research just for this review.  Here is a great website that examines all six bible chapters that homophobes cite when condemning the gay lifestyle, and explanations for why it’s a little nuts.

http://www.otkenyer.hu/truluck/six_bible_passages.html

And that’s the last thing that makes this movie great.  It knows exactly where it’s going.  It doesn’t talk at all about non-religious people.  And I am most assuredly a non-religious person.  But I found it fascinating nonetheless.  It never makes the easy point that blindly following the bible is a poor way to make any decision.  It never takes the easy road that is constantly presented by fervent religious believers with their crazy behaviour and antics.  It takes on those beliefs at the very root, and presents the facts in such a way that almost any religious person, with the possible exception of the most rabid homophobic ones, would have to really think about their views in the context of this film.  A powerful statement on an important subject.

          Just putting Will Ferrell in a comedy means a few things.  First, it will do decent bank at the box-office at worst, and massive bank at best.  Secondly, even if it sucks, it will feature a few great laughs somewhere in the film.  And Semi-Pro has both.  A decent bank at the box office for a crappy comedy, and some seriously great laughs in an otherwise crappy comedy.  Will Ferrell is Jackie Moon, a one-hit-wonder singer with a song called “Love Me Sexy”, which is kind of funny, but not as funny as it should be.  He made enough money with that song that he is able to buy a team in the fledgling American Basketball Association, the Flint Tropics.  The team is playing in a tiny market, to few fans, and Ferrell is constantly dreaming up bizarre promotions to get more fans out to the games.  Since this is a second-rate basketball league, he is also able to play on the team.  As the owner of the team, he can decide this for himself, and he does. 

          The rest of the team doesn’t seem to resent this, however, because they really don’t care about their careers or the game.  They just want to be minor-level local celebrities, which gets them the occasional free beer and every now and then gets them laid.  Which, for them, is good enough.  They do have a substantial talent on the team, however, in Clarence “Downtown” Withers, a Dr. J type player who changes his name before just about every game.  And when it is announced that the
ABA is going to be merging with the NBA, and that the top four teams in the league will get to join while the others will fold, the Tropics all of a sudden have something to play for.  Inclusion in the NBA, which is everyone’s dream.  So Ferrell hires a loose-cannon ex-NBA player (Woody Harrelson) to help get the team over the hump. 

          In the meantime, he keeps devising these crazy promotional schemes to draw people to the arena to watch the games.  These schemes provide the bulk of the laughs in the film, especially the scene where Ferrell wrestles the bear.  This scene (to start out, anyway) is remarkably underplayed by Ferrell, and really works.  So do a few others, but overall the movie doesn’t.  It doesn’t work because it doesn’t do anything.  It doesn’t go anywhere, it just muddles it’s way through a story we’ve all seen a thousand times - an underdog misfit team decides to play well, and fights their way to glory…with hilarious results.  And in doing so, they throw in a bunch of used-up sports movie cliches from Slapshot, Major League, Bull Durham, and a host of other sports comedies that are much better than this one. 

          In the end, I would actually recommend this movie, because the few laughs that are in there are very good, and because Ferrell, Harrellson and Andre Benjamin (who plays Clarence Withers) all do extremely well with the thin comedy they are handed.  And also because, on some level, this movie is interesting, historically.  Semi-Pro actually seems to feel some empathy and some reverence for the
ABA, which merged with the NBA in 1976 and saw the Spurs, the Nuggets, the Pacers and the Nets join the big league.  And although Semi-Pro seems to think that just having an afro in the 70s is funny, it still manages to find some kind of a heart under the poorly executed comedy.  Not a great movie, but not Ferrell’s worst by a long shot.  Semi-Pro is being released tomorrow, June 3rd, by Alliance Films.

          Spike Lee made a fairly lousy movie a few years ago.  It was called Summer of Sam and starred John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino, and it pretty well sucked.  It was all about New York, in the summer of 1977, when Son of Sam was terrifying the people.  And although it was a fairly bad movie, it did one thing very well.  That being the fact that the movie didn’t really focus on Son of Sam at all.  Oh, he was there, killing people with his pistol, and showing up now and again.  But the movie dealt with a bunch of young people doing a bunch of stupid young-people things while the killings just happened to be going on at the same time.  It was a nice device to put the serial killer in the right perspective.  People talked about it, they worried about it a little, but it existed on the periphery.  And a new TV miniseries called The Bronx is Burning does the same thing.  It will be released tomorrow, June 3rd, by Alliance Films, and it’s all about the New York Yankees in the summer of 1977. 

          Now, before I start my review, I must state, for the record, that I am a Red Sox fan.  A big fan.  And I therefore am against everything Yankees-related.  However, I still enjoy John Goodman as The Babe, and I still cry at Pride of the Yankees, and I really enjoyed this miniseries.  I can still revel in the successes and the history of the enemy.  I would love to see an interesting documentary on Rush, or a fascinating retrospective on Coldplay’s career, such as it has been.  And it was with great pleasure that I watched the behind-the-scenes 1977 Yankees season.  Some great actors came together for this ESPN special series, including John Turturro as oft-fired and oft-rehired Yankees manager Billy Martin, and Oliver Platt as oft-insane Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.   

          Now, I must say it’s a bit tough to watch Platt’s Steinbrenner, because he seems to be channeling the “George Stenbrenner” of Seinfeld fame.  And every time he talks, or makes a big speech, I’m always a little surprised when the camera turns away and George Costanza isn’t shaking his head and waving his hand and walking out of the room.  The combustible and crazy relationship between him and Martin forms the dramatic centre of the series, but there are other story lines at play here as well.  The friction between Reggie Jackson and the rest of the team, particularly Thurmon Munson, is a big one.  And then there are the
New York-in-1977 stories that set the Yankees story in context.  The Son Of Sam.  The devastating power blackout.  The hotly contested mayoral race.  And the fires and looting and violence that plagued the streets of the Big Apple that year. 

          Steinbrenner comes off as the villain of the piece, with his craziness and his impossible demands and his need to control everything that goes on within the organization.  Turturro’s Martin, in an odd way, despite his lascivious and fractious behaviour and volatile temper, therefore becomes the hero of the show.  And Reggie Jackson, although in real life his transformation may not have been so dramatic, is the person who grows the most over the course of the season and this six-hour miniseries.  Now, I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying the Yankees won the World Series in 1977.  I think most people who were alive at that time know this.  And those who weren’t, like me, also know this if we are baseball fans. 

          Although me, being a baseball fan, and having six hours to watch, I would have liked to see a little more baseball.  I would have liked to see more players than just Munson and Jackson and Bucky Dent.  I was hoping to learn more about Catfish Hunter, Ron Guidry, and Dock Ellis (who is of particular interest, because on June the 12th, 1970, pitching for the Pirates against the Padres, he threw a no-hitter while completely bombed on LSD.  See - fun baseball stuff.)  Also fun stuff - Graig Nettles, who was with the Yankees that year, said in 1977 “the best thing about playing for the New York Yankees is that you get to see Reggie Jackson play every day”.  Nettles (played by Alex Cranmer) is barely mentioned in the series, but
Jackson is portrayed excellently by Daniel Sunjata as he really was.  More of a Star than a great player, a larger-than-life sports figure.  While exceptionally talented and passionate about baseball,
Jackson was always more of a Star than he was a great player.  He was the Joan Crawford of baseball. 

          But what makes The Bronx Is Burning great is that you don’t need to be a baseball fan to appreciate it, (although it helps), and you don’t need to be a New Yorker either.  You don’t need to have lived through it, and you don’t need to know anything about the city, the summer, the team or the sport to enjoy it.  The actors are very good, the dynamics on the team are believable and rarely stray into the realm of cheesy re-enactment, and the characters are well drawn.  And the Ramones-intensive soundtrack is both awesome and a-propos.  The
Bronx is Burning comes out June 3rd, from Alliance Films, and it is worth the trip to the video store.

Alliance Films is on a roll with their epic films. A few months ago, they released a magnificent three-disc Limited Collector’s edition of El Cid to DVD, one of the great but forgotten Charlton Heston epics. It came with cards and comic books and dozens of special features and booklets and all kinds of trinkets. Today, May 27th, Alliance is releasing the next in this epic series, a Limited Collector’s Edition of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. The three-disc set is almost identical to El Cid in terms of the goodies that come inside. And the two films are very similar as well, in that they are massive military epics with casts of thousands, enormous sets, and Sophia Loren. Starring with Loren in The Fall of the Roman Empire is Alec Guinness, one of the most under-rated actors in history, as the reasonable and wise Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He may well be one of the three greatest to ever live, up there with Brando and Olivier and Nicholson and DeNiro and Bogart.

The movie begins with Marcus Aurelius calling together the representatives of all the nations within the Roman Empire in order to secure peace and prosperity for the known world. Of course, this does not take place over the course of the film, and when it ends three hours later, it is with the Fall of the Roman Empire. This disaster comes about when Aurelius’ son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer), gets wind of his father’s decision to turn over the throne to his adopted son Livius instead of him. So Commodus decides to kill his own father in order to take the throne. And that leaves Rome in the hands of a childish, foolish man, who refuses to negotiate with his enemies or listen to other opinions, and thereby dooms the entire empire quite quickly. Well, in three hours.

This movie is famous now more as the movie that caused the fall of Samuel Bronfman’s cinematic empire, moreso than as a film. But as a film, it stands the test of time. The “Battle of the Four Armies” is as impressive a set piece as anything staged in The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. 8,000 soldiers and 1,200 horses were used for the production, which was shot on a massive plain in Madrid. And the detailed reconstruction of the Roman Forum remains, to this day, the largest ever outdoor film set. With set pieces and sets like these, it’s easy to see how the movie cost a massive amount to produce. And when it became a gargantuan financial failure, it took Bronfman’s empire with it. He had previously been responsible for some of the massive films of the era - El Cid, King of Kings - but after this one he never made another. It was more his business plan than the failure of this film, however, that did him in. He had spent so much creating the sets for these epic movies that he overextended himself, and owed millions of dollars when he became financially destitute and shut down operations.

The Fall of the Roman Empire plays a little fast and loose with actual, factual, history. But the tone, the costumes, the sets and the structure of the armies and the senate are all perfect. The Battle of the Four Armies, while an impressive scene, never actually took place. But the scene toward the end where the senators attempt to bribe the military into making one of them emperor is taken from historical fact. But in the end, you don’t watch a movie like this to learn specific facts about world history. You watch it to be entertained. And The Fall of the Roman Empire IS entertaining. Livius is played by Stephen Boyd, who does a terrific job in a role that was first offered to (of course) his Ben-Hur co-star, Charlton Heston. Sophia Loren is great as always, and of course smoking hot. The role of Commodus was only the third movie role for Christopher Plummer, and it’s the role that propelled him to stardom. And Alec Guinness is simply magnificent as Marcus Aurelius, a role that sadly ends halfway through the movie with his death.

There are many similarities to Gladiator in this film, and indeed a few people have suggested that on many levels Gladiator was actually a remake of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that is the case, but the stories certainly approximate one another. They occur at the same epoch in history, they deal with the same characters and the same downward spiral that consumed Rome in all her glory, and certainly the final scene is almost identical in both films. But Gladiator is a little more fanciful, and The Fall of the Roman Empire is way bigger in scale.

Now - while I certainly do recommend picking up this film, and this three-disc edition is wonderfully done, you might want to wait. For true rabid fans of this film, there is another edition coming out later, possibly as much as a year later. This edition features the standard two hour and 52 minute theatrical version that has been around for years. However, there was some lost footage that was discovered, too late to be included in this particular edition, that will be added to a later set. This will, though, likely be the only set with the poster-cards and the booklets that are included here. So perhaps, if you are a hardcore fan of The Fall of the Roman Empire, you could well do both. Like my nerd-buddy Dave, who owns all thirty-four different editions of the Star Wars trilogy. On VHS and DVD and LaserDisc and reel-to-reel and so forth. If only he had a laser disc player.

Holocaust is a now-legendary miniseries that ran on NBC’s Big Event series in the late 70s. Starring Meryl Streep, James Woods, and a ton of other stars, this is a seven-and-a-half hour marathon of remarkable brilliance. Streep and Woods are terrific as a German woman and her Jewish husband. They get married at the beginning of the film, just before the Nazis start rounding up Jews for the ghettos and for executions. The series follows their story, as well as many others. Woods’ family plays a big part too. His father, a doctor, is played by Fritz Weaver, and his mother is Rosemary Harris. We follow them all the way to the Polish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. Woods’ brother, Joseph Bottoms, witnesses and then escapes from the 1941 Baba Yar massacre, and with his girlfriend joins up with the Russian partisans in their battle against the Nazis.

Also a big story in Holocaust, Michael Moriarty is absolutely great as Erik Dorf, a German lawyer pressured by his ambitious wife to join the Nazi party. Although he is initially conflicted about the inhuman treatment of the Jews, he quickly loses his humanity and rises through the ranks of the SS to become a key architect of Auschwitz and the gas chambers. His story, while initially sympathetic, becomes more and more unpalatable as the film moves on, and eventually Dorf becomes the face of the evil that was the Nazis. He manages to justify his ideas and his involvement in the slaughter of so many innocents by thinking of it as just a job. He’s just following orders. His position is just a job. And his job is to find more efficient ways to slaughter Jews and better methods to explain it to the rest of the world. The Dorf we meet at the beginning of Holocaust would have recoiled in horror at the things done by the Dorf we see at the end.

Throughout, Holocaust is (of course) devastating and horrific. While we can celebrate the love between Bottoms and his girlfriend as they get married, and we can feel a certain amount of satisfaction and inspiration from the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the story is so well-known and so bleak that it’s tough to lose oneself in the nice moments. But that is as it should be. You don’t watch a series like Holocaust expecting comedy and love stories. But it needs some (relatively) light-hearted moments to alleviate that crushing sense of dread and depression one will feel while watching. Of course, the people who really went through this have no respite, but that’s no reason not to give us one as we watch. After all, you want people to actually watch this, if for no other reason than it’s an event we, as people, should never forget.

Holocaust won several Emmy awards, being ineligible for Oscars. One of the most decorated TV miniseries of all time, it won for Outstanding Limited Series, whatever that meant in 1978. Streep, Woods and Moriarty all won acting Emmys, as did Blanche Baker. Five other actors were nominated, without winning. The direction, by Marvin J. Chomsky, won, as did the script by Gerald Green. Morton Gould’s musical score was nominated for an Emmy AND a Grammy, and Moriarty and Rosemary Harris both won acting Golden Globe awards. In short, Holocaust won every award that was available to it at the time, everything short of the Oscars. Which makes it TV’s equivalent of Schindler’s List, an apt comparison in that it stands right up there with that film as the two greatest documents of the most horrific events in modern history. It comes out on DVD for the first time tomorrow, May 27th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.