The
First World War: The Complete Series
(2002/E1 DVD)/The Great
Flood (2013/Icarus
DVD)/Ride Report: 10,000
Miles To Rio (2014/Cinema
Libre DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: D/C/C Main Programs: B/B-/B-
Here's
our latest combination of documentary and special interest releases
you should know about...
The
First World War: The Complete Series
(2002) is a still-impressive look at The
Great War
that was to end all wars with plenty of key footage in its 10
episodes (300 minutes!) made in England and covering every major
aspect of WWI you could ask for. It is not a subject we get to cover
enough and one that definitely does not get discussed enough, but
this is one of the key entries on the subject finally hitting home
video and one more than worth your time.
There
are no extras.
Decasia
(see the review elsewhere on this site) director Bill Morrison is
back with The
Great Flood
(2013) silently showing us the whole story with actual archival film
footage of the ugly, unfortunate Mississippi River Flood of 1927.
More forgotten than WWI, uglier as this history has repeated itself
despite how preventable that was, this is a stunning, effective,
ironic portrait of the events and how it hurt everyone and is not the
kind of thing a great country should tolerate or allow to happen.
This runs a rich 80 minutes and I wished it were longer, but Morrison
makes his points very clear as I believe he is getting better and
better at what he does.
A
booklet on the film inside the DVD case is the only extra.
Last
but not least is Ride
Report: 10,000 Miles To Rio
(2014) in which two friends (Tiernan Turner and Matt Kendall) decide
to attend Carnival in Rio, but instead of flying, they are big
motorcycle fans and decide to take a long bike trip to get there!
They use the Internet and sites of fellow bike riders in the biking
community (the parts that apparently are not about gangs and fights)
and take a long, long, long ride there. A risky idea, the idea is to
have fun, but it is a road trip just the same and once I started
watching, I could not stop. The guys are serious about this, go out
of their way for this and the results (no matter the problems they do
run into) are as interesting as the solutions that follow.
Goes
to show you the value of road trips, fact or fiction, but it also is
one of the first (even more than the great documentary Y.E.R.T.
Reviewed elsewhere on this site) how the concept, idea and actual
taking of a road trip has changed and why it is as desirable as ever
to do. This was so good, I hope they get even more ambitious and try
something even more surprising. It also reminds us how awesome Rio
is.
Extras
include the Original Theatrical Trailer and Bonus Interviews.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on all three DVDs are decent
and what you would expect from documentary releases. War has
some older graphics that date it as much as its stock footage, Flood
has stock footage almost as old as War and fading even more in
some cases and Ride is the newest production with the newest
footage, but the limits of the digital video have their some motion
blur and distortion here and there. Still, in spite of the noted
flaws, all make for very compelling viewing just the same. All three
also offer lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo tracks, with War
made of interviews and music since its footage is silent archive
stock, as is the footage on Flood, but that (including a
clever montage of Sears catalog pages of the time) is set to Bill
Frizell's effective score and Ride has location audio that is
usually fine throughout. I love the color-background captions they
use when the audio is hard to hear. Very clever and I wish more
people would try their approach.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
