Eames: The Architect & The Painter (2011/First Run DVD) + Most Valuable Players (2010/Virgil DVD)
Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B-/C+ Documentaries: B/C+
Here are
two documentaries on the arts and how they play in our lives.
Jason
Cohn and Bill Jersey examine the work of Charles and Ray Eames in Eames: The Architect & The Painter
(2011) which traces their story back to Charles Eames co-creating a new kind of
chair that won an award, though he could not actually produce it. Ray is not his brother, but the woman who
would become his wife and creative partner for four innovative, groundbreaking,
landmark decades as they reinvented furniture, art, graphics, modernist design,
film and post-WWII Americana in ways as important as Andy Warhol’s interpretations
of them and was made permanent even more so when they started to work for big
corporations like IBM.
James
Franco narrates the 84 impressive (and not long enough) minutes of this long
overdue documentary look at the team that reinvented America and whose
influence is still with us today and will be for good. The makers also tell us about the people,
interview their friends, go to many locations, have secured the use of
priceless film footage and it is a must-see doc as much as Helvetica (reviewed on Blu-ray elsewhere on this site) is about a
dynamic era past, yet still with us.
Extras
include seven additional clips including Cranbrook,
Pilgrimage, What Do You Do For Fun?, L.A. Unrestrained, Scripts, Rat Driving
and Charles’ Uniform. I wish there were
more extras too.
Then we
have Matthew D. Kallis’ Most Valuable
Players (2010) about a group of high schools in and around Lehigh, Pennsylvania
that have their own awards show called The Freddie Awards that celebrate acting
in plays held by the various classes, sometimes doing the same musical. It is interesting, has some good moments, but
is more of a surface, let-the-camera run work (much like the recent documentary
on A Chorus Line) that simply does
not delve deeply enough into what is going on, who the people we see are or how
much they really know or understand what they are doing.
Though
the participants obviously are serious about this, it becomes no surprise as
this starts to drag that they finish a musical number and the director points
out that they look bored and do not believe anything they are doing. Why?
Because just performing this material and having fun doing it is not
sufficient in bringing it to life and there is a lack of excitement and energy
that holds back all the performances throughout with few exceptions. There is talent, but nothing and no one stuck
with me. I never said to myself that
anyone of these teens could be a star in the making, which makes watching this
so odd. Theater and musical fans will
find more in this than most, but something is missing here.
Extras
include a feature length audio commentary track by the makers, 12 additional
clips, a trailer and an outtake reel.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on both are shot on video sources,
likely HD, but also add some archival low def video and Eames adds plenty of 35mm, 16mm, Super 8mm and 8mm archival film
footage. The results are about
even. The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on
Valuable is barely better than the Dolby 2.0 Stereo mix and did not pay off on
the music moments like it could have, while the lossy Dolby 2.0 Stereo mix on Eames has its share of monophonic
archival audio, both again on par with each other.
- Nicholas Sheffo
