By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
DVD 5-4-3-2-1: new and recent releases
Among the best new and recent DVD releases: the six-hour epic Italian meller, The Best of Youth, plus more below, including Ryan, The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle, and The Constant Gardener.
5. Ryan, Chris Landreth (****, Rhino, $20). Last year’s more-than-deserving best animated short Oscar winner is a timely treat before this year’s kudos, a lysergic excursion literally into a man’s head: Landreth interviews 1960s Canadian animation great Ryan Larkin, whose career and life were marred by addictions, and now lives on streets and in shelters. The insecurities of the two men suggest Landreth’s brilliant breakthroughs in computerized animation; the DVD contains commentary, examples of Larkin’s earlier work and a documentary on the National Film Board’s investment in this new approach to animation.
4. The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle, Julien Temple (***, Shout Factory, $20) It’s been out for a while, but this long-out-of-reach screw-the-record-companies provocation has a newly timely quality to it. Ratty transfer, and certainly dated from the time Variety called it “the Citizen Kane of rock documentaries,” but there’s a time capsule worth of attitude in the movie (especially from manager and macher Malcolm MacLaren) and in director Julien Temple’s commentary.
3. The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles (*** ½, Universal, $30). Maybe it would have been better without such a darkly futile “romantic” ending, but there’s gentle beauty and terrible things throughout.
2. Thumbsucker, Mike Mills (*** ½, Sony, $25). Mike Mills has eyes and ears and intends to use them.
1. The Best of Youth (La Meglio gioventù), Marco Tullio Giordana (****, Miramax, $30). What television, what luxury, what cinema this is. Made for Italian TV and released only briefly in the waning days of Weinstein Miramax, this six hour telling of several lives over forty years of tumultuous Italian history deserves watching, not synopsis. This could have been one of my favorite films of 2005, if there had been more chances to see it on the big screen. Passionate, observant, tender and sad: it’s simply great.
OTHER RECENT RELEASES: Dave McKean’s intricately hand-made fable, Mirrormask (*** ½, Sony, $27); the Chris Gore-written topical comedy with few gags that actually work, My Big Fat Independent Movie (*, Anchor Bay, $20); Aardman’s arduous animation, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (**, DreamWorks, $20); Chris Columbus’ thin yet personal edition of the musical Rent (**, Sony, $29); All The President’s Men (*** 1/2, Warner, $27), with Robert Redford’s first commentary in this post-Deep Throat revelation 2-disc reissue; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s long-delayed but still chilling tech-horror Pulse (*** ½, Magnolia, $27); 
Claire Dolan (***, New Yorker, $30), obstinate Lodge Kerrigan’s cool, geometric take on an urban call girl’s life, with a stellar perf by the late Katrin Cartlidge; the comic Torremolinos 73 (***, First Run Features, $30) > about an encyclopedia salesman whose life is changed by giddy cinephilia; The Take (***, First Run Features, $30), Naomi Klein and Avi Lerner’s documentary about labor relations in one manufacturing plant in beleaguered Argentina; Michael Almereyda’s doc on the great photographer, William Eggleston In the Real World (*** ½, Palm, $27); and Jia Zhangke’s The World (*** ½, Zeitgeist Films, $30), a vast metaphor for globalization in the comings-and-goings of workers at a Beijing amusement park studded with scale replicas of world monuments. (“We’ve still got our Twin Towers,” one guide notes.)
