Accompanying Dave Swarbrick

fine fiddling from the great Swarb
This is a short documentary of legendary English fiddler Dave Swarbrick touring Denmark in 2008 with a long-time friend and accompanist. This is a fine addition to the catalogue of Fairport Convention and Fairport-related dvds available, and has snippets of Swarb's playing with Fairport in the 1970s, as well as his later acoustic group Whippersnapper and his duo with guitarist and singer Martin Carthy.

Production values as such are simple but effective, the stories are endearing, the playing fluid, and the dvd comes with a couple of nice extras: an hour of uninterrupted concert footage, as well as a bonus cd that runs a little under an hour and apparently does not duplicate the material on the dvd.

All in all, Accompanying Dave Swarbrick is a pleasing short film that shows a brilliant artist back from the dead (a premature obituary in the Times and a double lung transplant behind him) and playing in his inimitable, nimble, warm-hearted way.





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Obsession [Blu-ray]

PALI(-N)MPS(-C)EST
Based on a very smart screenplay directly written for the screen by Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma, OBSESSION is, in my opinion, the masterpiece of the director of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. The movie can be read at several different levels but is primarily an excellent thriller treating of the guiltiness felt by a man who failed to rescue his wife and his daughter when kidnapped in New orleans.

The key of OBSESSION lies in the scene of the first encounter between Courtland and Sandra, in the medieval church in which the hero married his first wife. Sandra is trying to restore old paintings that happen to have been themselves painted over older paintings. Asked by Courtland if the new paintings will be erased, Sandra answers that it's not useful to destroy them in order to bring into light the original ones.

So OBSESSION is clearly an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO but is also a movie of its own who deserves credit. I remember that the sumptuous travellings of De Palma's camera...

NOISSESBO
Another excellent De Palma thriller, this time without the sex and violence. Even if you don't like his other movies like BODY DOUBLE, if you want an interesting and atmospheric thriller, get this. It is a much more subtle film some of ones that followed, partly a love story, partly a mystery and all class. I won't explain the story as it has already been explained here and elsewhere a million times, so on to the DVD.

The picture is a bit grainy(some parts look better than others), but although I hadn't seen the film before I have read that it has always looked grainy and washed out ever since it was first released. Still apart from the grain the picture is still sharp. You get 5.1, 2 channel and mono english sound tracks and they sounded good to me.

Also included on the disc is an excellent 35 minute documentary and a trailer(plus trailers of two other films).

DePalma - The Greatest of the Film School Brats
Brian DePalma directed a string of truly inspired films in the 1970s, from SISTERS to CARRIE, from the campy, baroque glam of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, to the decade-ending double shots of DRESSED TO KILL and BLOW OUT. In the middle, he directed OBSESSION, which upped the ante of perversity, beauty and lurid unpleasantness of Hitchcock's VERTIGO (with a dash of DIAL 'M' for good measure). What people dismiss as second-hand aping, I see as respectful homage, an updating of Hitchcock's perspective for the post-Vietnam, post-Beatles age. He was, after all, one of the leaders of the "film school brats" of the late 1960s (all members of which blatantly copied the masters of the previous generation), and, to my mind, was the most brilliant (at least technically), the most mature, and the most sensitive of his peers. Give me the twisted emotional and visual depths of OBSESSION over a malfunctioning mechanical shark or a juvenile "creature cantina" any day!

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