DVD OF THE WEEK

WOODSTOCK - 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION *****
Dir: Michael Wadleigh
Starring: Jimi Hendrix, Ritchie Havens, Joe Cocker, Sly and the Family Stone

It's 40 years since what has become regarded as the ultimate outpouring of the sixties explosion of musical freedom and creativity. So what does the film of the event look like after all this time? In a word, sensational.
If you have never seen the movie Woodstock and you have even a passing interest in music then you are in for a treat. If you saw it decades ago you will be amazed at the (not inconsiderable) amount of extra footage here. Even if you saw the 1994 'director's cut” you will be blown away by the improvement of the film image and music quality. This is, by any standards, the definitive version (and it looks and sounds even better on Blu-Ray).
Remember, this film won the Best Documentary Oscar, and with good reason. It is a brilliantly constructed piece of work, benefiting hugely from the then-radical decision to break from the order of the concert and create what is more a document of both the festival and the politics and mood of the time. A lot of the credit must go to two of the film's editors, both then young unknowns: Martin Scorsese and the woman who has edited all his films since, Thelma Schoonmaker.
And the music? Brilliant. Ritchie Havens is the epitome of passion, Joe Cocker is still as mad as a meat axe, Hendrix is revelatory, Country Joe and the Fish are a gas, and Carlos Santana astounds, but there's a lot here that wasn't in the original movie, including The Who, Janis Joplin, more Canned Heat, and a pile of others. This is an absolutely essential viewing experience.

The boys are back for Fast and Furious (**) and, as the fourth in a series, it's about as good as you'd expect. Forget the risible plot (outlaw Vin Diesel's girl is killed by the same man Paul Walker's cop is investigating - reluctantly they team up to get him), what is really important here is of a more mechanical nature and, yes, muscle cars of every variety are present and correct. All get driven very fast and many get destroyed. Purists, however, will be unimpressed with the obvious CGI enhancements to most of the stunts.

Mutant Chronicles (**) looks like a whole bunch of fun but turns out to be not so. It posits a dystopian future with a complex and uninvolving backstory: basically the whole world, under the guise of four giant corporations, is at war when someone foolishly opens a long-lost hatch and out comes an endless plague of deadly mutants. So it's up to a small squad of specially-picked soldiers to kill ‘em all and seal the hole. All this takes place in irritatingly underlit conditions with mutants that just aren't very interesting. Ron (Hellboy) Perlman and Thomas (The Mist) Jane do good work but it doesn't help much.

Yet another remake of a classic horror comes along every week so it was with some trepidation that I tried Last House on the Left (***). But it's actually pretty good. A escaped killer and his creepy 'family” kidnap and torture two girls before coincidentally ending up at the house of one of the girls' parents where bloody vengeance ensues. It's not nice, but then it's not meant to be. The violence is truly unpleasant without descending into Hostel's torture porn territory and the characters actually have character. Better than three quarters of the recent horror output around.

Depressingly, Watchmen is still unavailable on DVD in New Zealand because its distributor went belly-up. It has been out overseas since July leading, no doubt, to much internet piracy. However, obsessives can try Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic (**) which adds voices and sounds to the original comic frames. While this might hold interest for those who haven't read the graphic novel it is, in all honesty, a rather tedious experience.