Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, playing all week.

Jean Cocteau’s 1959 Film, ‘Testament of Orpheus’ is celebrated for many reasons, but did anybody stop to acknowledge quite how great the end title is? The sequence opens to a shot of an expectant knife, in slow motion a balloon falls onto the blade, popping open, and releasing its smoke bomb, slowly fading into Cocteau’s hand-written ‘fin’.

Two great short films. Both with kid leads, both set in earlier time periods than they were made and both have won the prestigious Palme D’Or prize, the highest honor given to a short film at the Cannes Film Festival. They’re also available to watch online.

Cracker bag, 2003 Australia Glendyn Ivin

This film was set in 1980 and its subtlety is beautiful.

Bean Cake, 2001 USA David Greenspan

Not many American films win at Cannes but this USC student film took the prize for its authentic 1950s Japanese video aesthetic and its folktale sourcing.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel with Archie Vogel and a wall of Richard Tuttle works. photo Ben Hoffmann

“MANY THINGS PLACED HERE AND THERE/TO FORM A PLACE CAPABLE OF SHELTERING/MANY THINGS PUT HERE AND THERE.”

The above text is from a Lawrence Weiner work that lives on the bathroom wall of the Vogels’ Manhattan apartment, next to a Sol Lewitt drawing on another wall. Richard Tuttle‘s “3rd Rope Piece” is installed next to their front door frame and light sensitive drawings are covered up with beach towels that hang down from the walls. These “artists’ collectors” are legends in the New York art world. For the last 30 years Herb and Dorothy Vogel have been growing a collection of art that’s reached nearly 5,000 from some of New York’s most avant-garde minimalists, abstractionists and conceptualists, all with care and concern for the artists themselves. In the documentary, Herb&Dorothy, you get an entertaining glimpse into their world, their passion and their complete devotion to art.

Pledging nearly their entire collection to The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Vogels never saw the buying of art as something to make profit from. They’ve never sold any of their collection, despite multiple offers and with an unspeakably high value, they’ve still decided to give it all away and continue living and buying from within their cramped rent-stable apartment. Their true connections with artists and their devotion to making it accessible to everyone is something to be greatly admired. Watching this documentary really shows how much the art world and New York has changed. They don’t come like the Vogels anymore.

Be sure and watch the documentary, available for free on Netflix Instant.

The Criterion Collection dvd is out for Ang Lee’s, Ride with the Devil.

Between The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Ang Lee made Ride with the Devil, a beautifully crafted and viscerally thrilling film about the American Civil War, told from an unorthodox point of view and starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, and Jeffrey Wright as conflicted Confederate sympathizers. At the time, however, Lee wasn’t able to see his vision all the way through. At the studio’s urging, he delivered a project that was more an action picture than the ruminative, idiosyncratic drama he’d intended; details were cut and the pacing of certain scenes (including the devastating Lawrence Massacre set piece) altered. Now, with the help of the Criterion Collection, Ang Lee presents Ride with the Devil the way he intended, in a restored director’s cut, available in both Blu-ray and DVD special editions. “Thanks to Criterion, I finally have the opportunity to do the material justice,” Lee says. “With the addition of eleven minutes of footage, it is what it’s supposed to be—a bigger movie. It really breathes like one, and the complex history comes to life. Ride with the Devil is a true American story, and I love it.”

Here’s a couple of films to catch this weekend, tonight or whenever…

The first film to see, very new to Netflix Instant Watch, is Mammoth, 2009. Directed by Swedish director Lukas Moodysson, this film is set in New York, Thailand, and the Philippines. It pulls the separate but connected lives of married couple Leo (Gael García Bernal) and Ellen (Michelle Williams), as well as the life of their daughter and her Filipino nanny, Gloria and the life she left behind in the Philippines. It’s not as complex as it sounds and by the end of the film you’ll find yourself unsure of which character you should be rooting for. The director also has two other films available on instant watcher, Show Me Love, 1998 and Together (Tillsammans), 2000.

György Pálfi’s Taxidermia, 2006. This Hungarian epic shouldn’t be viewed over chinese take-out. The grotesque is almost enough to overshadow the stunningly beautiful photography and sequences that connect this film to an imaginary world like no other. From WWII to present day, you’ll see the genetic make-up of a character who in the end will turn out to be far more bizarre and twisted than any of his ancestral counterparts. Netflix has put this film in the “Mind-Bending” category for a reason. And don’t worry, if you hated Sweet Movie, you might appreciate that this film actually goes places.

In, Memory of the Camps, graphic images of actual concentration camp footage from just 60 years ago is shown in four parts under the original direction of Alfred Hitchcock. A long series, originally aired on Frontline, its now available online at PBS and should remind people of how far we can go and perhaps how far we’ve come.

I’ve been with Netflix almost since the beginning. The changes over the years have kept Netflix relevant, necessary, especially with the development of Instant Watching with the addition of so many great films that brought me to Netflix all that time ago. They were the only rental service offering criterion films, early art house from the 80s… they carried almost everything that I’d always wanted to see but didn’t want to buy without watching first. Now a lot of those great films are available to watch instantly, without ever having to wait and send back a disc. The quality is great, HD sometimes. I’ve now dropped my three dvds to just one, and it usually sits on the kitchen counter for a month. Netflix is dominating the internet movie watching and if you haven’t gotten the Roku box for your television, you don’t know what you’re missing. Here are some picks for watching instantly.



A Nos Amours, 1983. Maurice Pialat





Slaves of New York, 1989. James Ivory



Revanche, 2008, Götz Spielmann



We Live in Public, 2008. Ondi Timoner



Fahrenheit 451, 1966. François Truffaut