VHS of the Month: "San Francisco 49ers 1989 Video Yearbook"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

The 1989 San Francisco 49ers were perhaps the finest team ever assembled. It's rightfully remembered as an offensive juggernaut, having featured the game's smartest, most clutch quarterback and greatest ever wide receiver, both in their prime; a runningback/fullback duo that combined for over 2400 yards and 8 TDs; and a backup quarterback who threw for 1000 yards and 8 TDs. People forget, though, that they also featured a dominant defense, featuring stars Ronnie Lott, Charles Haley, Keena Turner, and Bill Romanowski, and ranking 3rd overall in the NFL that year. It's true that the team's explosive offense helped it score an astonishing 126 points in 3 playoff games, but it was the defense alone that yielded 100 fewer points - that's 26 in total - to opponents in those same contests. And of course, the year culminated in an unprecedented laugher of a Super Bowl, a 55-10 thrashing of John Elway's hopelessly outmatched Denver Broncos. The 1989 Video Yearbook presents a game-by-game recap of the 14-2 regular season, and a more in-depth look back at the 3 playoff games (including the Super Bowl XXIV highlights advertised on the cover). Featuring the same glorious melodrama that has endeared NFL Films to sports fans for generations, the Yearbook has nonetheless fallen out of print, like all of the original team videos celebrating the Team of the 80s. However, it's an excellent testament to a squad whose unbelievable prowess was poetry in motion and is ideal to track down for any hardcore football fan, whether a member of the success-starved 49er Faithful or not.

VHS of the Month: "The Magnificent Ambersons"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

Following Citizen Kane - a movie whose lavish acclaim has mostly been applied in retrospect, and whose controversy and unprofitability in 1941 destroyed its creator's career - Orson Welles directed 10 films whose production and distribution reflected Hollywood's distrust in him. The saddest casualty of this neglect was Kane's immediate successor, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's familial saga The Magnificent Ambersons. As originally made, the film was nearly 2½ hours long; however, after a few unenthusiastic screenings it was slashed by studio executives at RKO while Welles was directing a wartime documentary in South America. The resulting film runs a full hour shorter and features a happier ending to the story than Welles had intended. To make matters worse, the excised footage was burned by RKO (possibly to prevent Welles from tampering), thus dashing any chance of future reconstruction.

Yet the film that remains, like so many of the under-financed projects Welles would undertake in his later career, is nonetheless a remarkable piece of work. The deep focus and dramatic camera technique which had been so shocking in Kane were, if anything, even more fluid and confident in Ambersons, and Welles' inimitable touch leaves its mark on every scene (even the end credits are memorable!). The film presents Tarkington's story - which chronicles the decline and collapse of a Southern family after years of unchallenged prominence in its community - in suitably sweeping fashion, and contrasts the decline of the Ambersons with the rise of the automobile in a particularly moving fashion. Ambersons also features great performances from Kane/Mercury Theater holdovers Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, the latter of whom in particular is every bit as impressive as the spinster Fanny as she was in her extremely brief role as Charlie Kane's mother. Like far too much of Welles' filmography, factors including estate disputes have kept Ambersons from ever having been released on DVD; in fact, the most recent VHS was a Turner Classic Movies release in 1996 that was essentially the version they'd show on TV (including the TCM intro segment). Even chopped up and hard-to-find, though, Ambersons is still simply one of the best movies made by perhaps the greatest of all American directors.

[UPDATE: Spurred exclusively by my recent mention of the film, Warner Brothers has announced a pending DVD release of Ambersons - unadorned, but remastered and on DVD nonetheless. Coincidentally, the release also coincides with the BluRay release of Citizen Kane and the 70th anniversary of that landmark.  -5/20/11]

VHS of the Month: "Zelig"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

Woody Allen has always treated his work strangely by Hollywood standards: he usually refuses to talk about old films, and though his movies are often cited for their brilliant use of music, he generally hasn't sanctioned the release of soundtracks. Unsurprisingly, probably on his insistence, his classic movies have been sparsely issued on DVD. Most were simultaneously released in 3 volumes of box sets called "The Woody Allen Collection," each movie including a short booklet, a theatrical trailer, and French and Spanish subtitles. The transfer and packaging on the discs was uniformly fine, and it's probably a testament to the lavish treatment movies are accustomed to that his DVDs seem like a raw deal. That said, Annie Hall probably holds the unfortunate distinction of having the least supplemented DVD of any film to ever win Best Picture. (It's a shame, because even among Best Pictures it's a film of unusual quality.) Yet the Woody Allen movie that could most benefit from a lavish modern release has to be Zelig, an undeservedly overlooked masterwork in Allen's filmography.

The film, released in 1983, is a mockumentary centered around the phenomenon of Leonard Zelig, a man whose chameleon-like ability to physically and socially transform himself to blend in with any crowd in which he finds himself makes him an unlikely celebrity of the Roaring Twenties. In addition to being an extremely touching and funny movie, Zelig was a visual miracle, seamlessly integrating Zelig into archival photographic and video footage a decade before computer imagery made such a feat commonplace. Exploration of the technical achievements of a film like this is the very sort of thing special edition DVDs were designed for. Whether or not such a release will ever take place is hard to say. Until then, used VHS editions are not only absurdly cheap, but in many ways, even a more appropriate way to enjoy one of the last and greatest accomplishments to have been literally created on film.

VHS of the Month: "The Verve: The Video 96-98"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

The Verve: The Video 96-98 is what the title suggests: a compilation of various types of video of the band taken while the group was at its peak popularity. The content centers mostly around music from Urban Hymns, but earlier material is included as well. The first half of the program is based on studio recordings, including a Richard Ashcroft acoustic demo of "The Drugs Don't Work" and the music videos for each of the three hits from Urban Hymns. The latter half is comprised mostly of live footage unavailable elsewhere, including three powerhouse performances from an acclaimed show at Haigh Hall in Manchester. In all, the out-of-print tape offers a great insight into the life of the group at the time (minus the in-fighting and ecstasy consumption), and is a priceless piece of media from a band which has made very little available but the music. Besides, as the VHS tray in the box reminds you: