Arts Movie Reviews

While searching Amazon for an HBO special Billy did back in the 80s, I stumbled on this little gem. I ordered it immediately and my husband was thrilled when I gave it to him.

This DVD starts out with early Billy in the 1970s and moves chronologically through his stand up career ending with a last show in the late 1990s. Each tour is a different chapter although there is no chapter listing on the DVD - my one complaint if you can call it that. A cartoon Billy displays where and when each live show is recorded, then you are thrown into a routine or two from that tour. You do not get the entire stand up show - just snippets, presumably, the "best of" from each. Having seen both HBO routines back in the 80s I can say that certainly not all of "the best" has been included because you just can't get that much info on a single DVD. Still, you will get 2 hours of Billy Connolly at his best with this one DVD - not too shabby.

A word of caution though: Billy's style may not be for everyone. There is plenty of foul language as well as subject matter that some find offensive - like "jobbies" that won't flush or how it feels to have your prostate examined - to name a few. NO ONE can accuse Billy Connolly about being shy!
Of course you also get such subjects as being a parent, visiting with friends in pubs and airlines so do not feel it is all toilet humor (no pun intended). If this DVD doesn't make you laugh then I seriously do not know what will.

Also may I suggest that you do not watch all of this DVD in one sitting. My husband and I tried it and were sorry for days afterward as the pain in our stomach muscles from laughing so hard just lingered on and on. I have yet to find anyone who does not enjoy Connolly's take on things and I'm betting that you will enjoy it too.

After searching on-line stores for hours looking for a DVD of Billy's stand up material, I was incredibly happy when I found one.
This is the best DVD of Billy's stand up material you will find to date.
The DVD consists of portions from his live shows throughout his long career.
If you're a long-time fan of the big-yin, or have never even heard of him before, this DVD will provide you with great laughs.

Great DVD! Billy is hilarious!!

Mats Ek has done it again! I've watched this ballet about 10 times over and have never stopped loving it. Because of this ballet, I fell in love with the Shchedrin version of "Carmen". Marc Hwang (Jose) and Ana Laguna (Carmen) delivered exceptional performances, to say the least. I cannot think of any dancers who fit the roles as well as they did. The choreography was definitely one of its kind, and brings the viewer into a refreshing new world. I'm glad that I was able to see it on dvd where not a single gesture or facial twitch was missed. A DEFINITE MUST for all modern ballet lovers, and a great buy for anyone who is even mildly interested in dance. You need to see it to believe it.

...sounds pretty stupid, but seeing this performance on Bravo several years ago completely turned me inside out. It's fresh, virtuosic, and utterly spectacular. I had never seen anything like it and haven't seen anything remotely like it since--and I see a lot of dance, including Bourne. Have even thought about flying cross country to see them when they were touring. Btw, make no mistake, Cullberg's fresh take does not at all subvert the story of Carmen. It's the most close-to-the-bone retelling I've ever seen. I am beside myself that this is now on dvd.

I love to see people obviously relishing what they do, so it was a delight to watch Levine conducting and Baltsa singing this wonderful music. This supreme opera, however, also brings regret that Bizet's life was so brief and his marvelous works were so few. Bizet perhaps envisioned a 20-something Carmen, but I bet that Baltsa, 45-ish at the time of this performance, would have seduced him just as she did me and Carreras's hapless Don Jose'. Of course, Baltsa and Levine have the best parts, but that also means they carry major responsibility. A video production needs more than just their great singing and musicianship, and those extras are not lacking. The costumes do a lot for Baltsa, and Baltsa does a lot for the costumes. It's not just the provocative display of cleavage, either (and Baltsa knows how to use every jiggle to get her way), but the sheer force of a powerful female personality that integrates with voice and sex to dominate the stage, as Carmen must. Carreras is a little TOO overwhelmed, and I would have preferred one of the other two tenors, probably Domingo (Luciano, you're just too fat for this role!). However, Carreras does pretty well, given that he plays a man powerless to escape the femaelstrom that is Carmen. Mitchell and especially Ramey are excellent, given that all roles revolve around Carmen. At least Ramey gets to sing about being a toreador, and he takes every advantage of the opportunity to shine.

All the while, Levine and his fine orchestra make me rejoice that I plugged the DVD player's audio cables into my stereo. It costs NOTHING to do this, folks, and it isn't difficult, either -- why pop for $400 for a "home theatre" kit? No stereo? Forty bucks or so will get you a subwoofer and two good speakers to plug into your TV's (or laptop's!) earphone jack.

I disagree with reviewers who liked the video quality. In many parts of this production, the dark picture areas have lots of light-colored noise about every dozen frames or so, with less pronounced noisy frames in between, producing a flicker about two or three times every second. I find this annoying and distracting. Something similar happens when I am not careful how I scan a dark 35mm slide with my film scanner, but I know how to deal with it. The Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft certainly also knows how to deal with it, so why didn't they? Sehr schlampig, meine Herrn! It's also not all that hard to write a program to help eliminate pixels that misbehave (see, DG, some opera freaks are computer freaks, too). The extras, as on all DG oper(ett)a DVD's are pretty limited. The choices for menu languages are limited to English and . . . (are you ready for this?) . . . (Are you sure?) . . . CHINESE! Wer zum Teufel hat sich denn DAS ausgedacht?!

The artistic aspects, happily, still make this a great DVD. I have not seen the Domingo / Migenes production, and it may be even better, but you'll probably like this one quite a bit.

This outstanding work is given no better a performance than here from the principles and the fine Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus. The role of Carmen is sung with a fiery passion by the very powerful mezzo of Agnes Baltsa. Her interaction with Carreras is emotionally powerful as well as musically satisfying. Special mention must be given to the wonderful interpretation of the role of Don Jose by Carreras- the best interpretation available in audio today( note the brilliant recording with Karajan). He is vocally poweful in the finale of Act three as well as exquisite in the Flower Song with a soaring B-flat sung pianissimo. He totally identifies with the character( as in all his roles really). James Levine and the Orchestra provide impressive accompaniment, providing a pillow for the principles(Levine's interpretation is less rigid than Maazel but not as creative as Karajan). Regardless of this , the performance is indicative of what a night at the opera should be.

I love this opera. I watch it about twice a year. Whatever Baltsa's technical imperfections (she doesn't have that divine, superlative clarity of Callas), she has an earthy, almost motherly tone I could listen to all day. Mitchell and Ramey both had their intense emotional range as usual and the charisma of these two singers is nearly palpable. I only wish they had been able to get on-stage with one another. Carreras' consciousness of his star power seemed to pop up inopportunely, usually at some moment of character-driven agonizing. He aquitted himself very well however, considering the fact that the part of Don Jose is, in terms of interpretation, sometimes much harder to do than Carmen.

Everybody's got their own idea of which opera singer's performance takes her part to the point where she becomes Carmen. For me, this performance is the one. About two minutes into her first appearance, I didn't care that Baltsa was physically plain -- she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The fact that she was beautiful, not pretty, added strongly to the poignant flavor of the story. I loved her, but that's just a personal preference. You may hate her as some other reviewers did. But whichever way it goes, you will have a strong impression.

Levine, with his half-open mouth, wild, unselfconscious gesticulating (okay, it's called conducting and I've done it a little, myself), and gleeful fascination with his work is sometimes more interesting to watch than the opera itself.

I bought this DVD thinking that it was a "Greatest Hits" type collection of performances -- but instead it was retrospective/tribute to Billy Connolly -- with a few bits of his live performances sprinkled throughout. There is about half an hour of standup at the end - but it's really not Billy's best stuff.

As a documentary, it's very, very good. Eddie Izzard, Parkinson, Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Dame Judi Dench and Billy, himself, turn up in interviews here.
But don't buy it if you are wanting to just see his standup.

The staging is cramped. The sets are stupid. The whole first act looks like it takes place in some kind of prison. The children's chorus bangs on the bars.

Everybody is miscast and the acting is pure ham.

There are many available recordings of Carmen, but this has just become my favorite. Anne Sofie von Otter gives us the Carmen which I believe Bizet intended: a sensuous, titillating, sexy woman of every man's dreams, who warns all men that she lives for "right now"--don't try to change her or possess her.

Von Otter remains in character throughout, singing to the characters on the stage, rather than to the audience, as so many singers do. This is both a good introduction to Carmen, in that it stays true to the story and faithful in its performance. It is also a fanatastic Carmen for those who think they know Carmen--that there's nothing more to add to it. Indeed, there is: This Carmen will knock your socks off. She is involved in all the action on stage, reacting to all the other characters. We may have thought we knew Carmen, but Von Otter shows us we hadn't seen nothin' yet.

The one negative I found in this production was the fault of the sound engineers. Sometimes I had to turn up the volume to hear some of the singers. Yet, considering the overall impression of the performance, this was a fault which was not intrusive. There were several good extras in this DVD set, including a tour of Glyndebourne Gardens, a primer on staging fights in operas (the difficulties of singing while wrestling), and a feature on how the costumes were made and chosen. There is also an illustrated synopsis, which makes it easy to introduce the story to new viewers.

For those who enjoy watching conductors, you're in for a treat with this Carmen. Phillipe Jordan conducts with almost incredible bombast and dramatic flair--you'd swear he might spear his other hand with the sword-thrusts of his baton. It might be out of place elsewhere, but it seems strikingly appropriate in the eptiome of drama: Carmen.

I've enjoyed lots of performances of Carmen, but if I could see just one Carmen production, this would clearly be the one. It won't disappoint you.

Collectors of opera on dvd will definitely have to take a very attentive look at the BBC Opus Arte releases. This Carmen is a complete knock-out, looked at whatever angle you wish: musically, visually, presentation-wise, you name it. The performance was taped during last year's Glyndebourne Festival, Anne-Sofie von Otter was 46 (she was born in 1955) and at that wondrous age of feminine attractiveness, she became a tigress of a Carmen, a rÃ'le few expected her to take on so successfully at that stage in her impeccable career.

To begin with, forget about the classic dark-haired and -eyed castanets and peineta-clad cliché we've been seeing since time immemorial, as regards the Carmen character, and forget also about any misgivings you might have had on this hitherto often called "swedish ice queen" taking on a rÃ'le so many supposedly "warmer-blooded" singers have so successfully brought on stage since the work saw the light over a century ago. What you have here is a fiery red-haired, blue-eyed, erotically super-charged whirlwind of a woman, on whom the world is centred since the very first moment we see her bursting on the upper part of the stage with a sonorous whistle. Von Otter is not only physically stunning to look at throughout, she'll also amaze you vocally and absolutely reinvents the character, a Carmen wholly of her own. I guess David McVicar, the enfant terrible of theatrical stages both sides of the Atlantic, has had his fair share in this rethinking of the character, but I doubt he'd been so successful had he had any other singer at hand.

The other singers are no less good. I've read some complaints on Naouri's alleged aloofness as a signature of his Escamillo, to me he assumes dead-centre the characteristic pose and attitude any successful spanish bullfighter worth his salt will assume once his hitting it big-time, he really seems to know how a successful spanish bullfighter ought to behave. And he ends up thus being a truly superior impersonator of the rÃ'le, impeccable also from the vocal side. The Don José is also very well characterised and sung, Haddock not only conveys the character's indecision, on one side longing for the world he left behind in his home town in Navarre and on the other this lustful, lascivous temptation of a new world Carmen offers for him to dip into. Micaela is proposed here as some sort of very proper and petite-bourgeois or middle class woman, somewhat past her best years and on her way to becoming some sort of spinster, a sincere and good-hearted human being but in the end the loser, the woman left behind by perhaps her own doing or as a consequence of her conventions, as the spanish saying goes, "left over to dress up images in the local church". You may prefer other impersonations that show her as a pure soul ready to sacrifice herself for the man she's loved for so long, but I'm perfectly ready to buy this variant. The other supporting rÃ'les are well taken, the chorus work very well, even the kids who so noisily mock the troops' changing of the guards in the first act.

The work is given in its original, Opéra Comique version, that is, with spoken dialogue between sung segments instead of the recitatives added later. This may prove a dangerous decision in non-french speaking countries, because if your singers are non-native speakers of the language, or at least have a better-than-average command of it, you may end up having them speaking some horrendously-sounding patois, and on the other hand having the audience left out in limbo, not understanding what's happening on stage. But here, o wonders of the new integrated Europe, you have a bunch of mostly british singers who surprisingly do achieve a more than passable utterance of one of those incomprehensible languages spoken beyond the channel, and on top of it, an audience who appear to actually understand! Naouri is of course a native french speaker, and french is one of the languages the versatile Von Otter speaks as fluently as her native swedish.

Jordan's conducting is very much to the point throughout, with an acute sense of tempo and dynamics inffusing the performance from beginning to end, you'll have a hard time finding a better-conducted Carmen on shop shelves. Visually he's very distractive, recalling Georges Prêtre in his dancing, he makes faces, frowns, stops dead suddenly beating time or weaves the baton frantically, Furtwängler-like, opens his eyes as in utter wonderment whilst holding the baton like some sort of weapon. His stick technique looks erratic sometimes and must have been confusing to the musicians, who usually tend to take a cavalier look at these podium antics; I presume these LPO members must have had a difficult time getting used to that. But the end result is impeccable.

Sound take is superior, as seems to be customary from this source, very realistic and theatre-like (some critics have complained on the singers being at times overshadowed by the orchestra, but isn't that what you do encounter when you listen to opera in the theatre and not just from recordings?), as is the video presentation. In sum, then, a must.

There are three other Carmens on DVD and all of them are better than this one. Even better is the Karajan that was released on laser and will perhaps make it to DVD. If you insist on Maria Ewing get her other one.The staging is not misguided and I think the singing and her supporting cast is better. I prefer Carreras and Baltsa and Ramey and the Metropolitian Opera who give a great performance. The movie with Raimondi and Mignes Johnson and Domingo and is terrific. Both also have great Michaelas. Both of these DVD's also provide French as well as English subtitles,and wouldn't it be nice if original language subtitles were available for all opera DVD releases. They all CAN do it but they all don't because they are just not willing to put in the little bit of extra effort that makes the difference. 2 stars instead of 1 just out of respect for the music. Better to have this Carmen than no Carmen.

When looking for Carmen on DVD I read the reviews and picked this one because of the special staging ant the flamenco extra and I was not disappointed!
A grand-scale production with a large cast of 80,beautifully staged and with an extra 10 minutes flamenco dance.
Maria Ewing combines great singing with powerful acting.Her Carmen is vivid,sensual and full of passion.
The best Carmen I have seen.
If you want to "hear" the opera then you may find better versions on CD,but if you want to"see" the opera, this is the DVD to buy!
I liked the staging,the choreography and the acting.
I give it only 4 stars because of the supporting casting which is good but no more.

"Black Tights" belongs to an exciting part of my childhood which helped create a great love for ballet, opera and film art. So naturally, a DVD presentation of this rare - and at least for me - almost mythical film was something to look forward to! But unfortunately, this KINO presentation leaves much to be desired. I guess that this film is now a public domain title, which means that a negative or at least a perfect print might not be available anywhere. But the print used for DVD-transfer by KINO is often badly worn, especially at the reel change points appearing about every tenth minute - proof that a 70mm print was the base for the transfer. Considering this, the sound quality is surprisingly bad and the aspect ratio is not correct. (It should measure 2,2:1 if properly made.)Thankfully, the colors have not faded too badly (some reels display quite a gorgeous palette), but contrasts are weak, and scratches and dirt sometimes overwhelm the image to a point where you almost feel like throwing the disc in the nearest garbage can! But...it's still a rare and nostalgic film with lots of camp value and some very charismatic dancing stars, so it stays in the collection, if reluctantly. It will be interesting to see what the upcoming version from VCI will look like. I have no high hopes this time though! There surely must exist a better kept print somewhere in the world! Shame on KINO! They should have included a warning sticker on the package: For die-hard fans and fools only!

I was really looking forward to the DVD version of this film. Too bad Kino didn't take the time to clean the picture and fix the audio. I guess I shouldn't complain. Ballet is so rare on DVD, I will grab any I can find. But a film with Cyd Charisse, Moira Shearer, Zizi Jeanmarie and Roland Petit deserves a better presentation.