DVDs: Shoot First, Ask Questions Later

David Hemmings' untimely death last December reminded audiences of a certain age that his signature role, as the mod photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, was as yet unavailable in DVD. It was in that study of swinging '60s London that the actor gave a performance which not only confirmed his place among the leading actors of his day, but also prompted thousands of hipsters to invest in Nikons, if only as a tool for picking up "birds."

After completing an assignment involving London's homeless, Hemming's increasingly cynical and obsessive Thomas returns to the world of supermodels and fashion photography. In the course of developing pictures of a couple involved in a tryst, Thomas suspects he has inadvertently captured images of a murder. Although it's never made clear exactly what Thomas sees in the negatives, his obsession becomes ours, too. Through Thomas, Antonioni asked viewers how far they were willing to trust their eyes and ears when it came to art and the illusory pleasures of the times, including rock 'n' roll, as embodied by a live performance by the Yardbirds.

In a recent re-evaluation of the picture, Roger Ebert wrote, "Blowup opened in America two months before I became a film critic, and colored my first years on the job with its lingering influence. It was the opening salvo of the emerging 'film generation,' which quickly lined up outside Bonnie and Clyde, Weekend, Battle of Algiers, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. It was the highest-grossing art film to date, was picked as the best film of 1967 by the National Society of Film Critics, and got Oscar nominations for screenplay and direction. Today, you rarely hear it mentioned."

Maybe that's because American audiences then weren't nearly as frightened by the thought of having to read subtitles as they are now. Any new picture by Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Bunuel, Godard, Kurosawa and Truffaut was welcomed with great anticipation not only by highbrow audiences, but all students of film. Today, as Ebert suggests, they'd be fortunate to find an empty theater in 30-screen multiplex.

Blow-Up arrives concurrently with Luchino Visconti's Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971) and La Caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), both starring the great Dirk Bogarde. The extra material isn't much to shout about, but having the movies on DVD is bonus enough, for now. By contrast, the Criterion Collection editions of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau (The Raven, 1943), Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, and especially its two-disc edition of Jean Renoir's La Regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), practically offer graduate courses in each film.

Movies starring David Spade, on the other hand, have no problem finding screens on which to play. In Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, the malevolent pixie plays a has-been actor now struggling to make ends meet as a parking valet. After being turned down for a part in a Rob Reiner movie, not such a bad thing these days, Roberts decides to start over, new family and all. It's a one-joke movie, to be sure, but his scenes with real-life child stars Danny Bonaduce, Todd Bridges, Gary Coleman, Tony Dow, Corey Feldman, Leif Garrett, Jay North, Butch Patrick and Barry Williams almost redeem the conceit.

Movies about authors who become reclusive after publishing one or two works of great importance to one generation or another come and go every so often. The most recent was the Sean Connery vehicle Finding Forrester. In his intriguing documentary, Stone Reader, Mark Moskowitz attempts to track down Dow Mossman, author of The Stones of Summer, who vanished after the novel's release in 1972. Moskowitz' quest took him through New York's insular publishing community, where he discussed writing and the book biz with the likes of critic Leslie Fiedler and John Seelye, editor Robert Gottlieb, and in bonus material, writers Toni Morrison and A.S. Byatt. This movie is about the joys of reading as much as it is about finding a specific author. In Sylvia, Gwyneth Paltrow portrays troubled American author and poet Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), whose tragic love affair with the late Brit poet Ted Hughes has kept literary tongues wagging for decades. Not exactly the feel-good movie of 2003.

Helen Stickler's fascinating documentary, Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, extends the occasionally sordid history of SoCal skateboarding, which began in 2001 with Stacy Peralta's Dogtown and Z-Boys. By focusing on star skater Mark "Gator" Rogowski, and such fellow San Diego flashes as Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain and Steve Caballero, Stickler is able both to chronicle the birth of the extreme-sports industry, and explain what happened when one talented, if unstable, teenager was handed the keys to paradise. For a contemporary view of the skateboarding scene, there's Spike Jonze and Ty Evans' Yeah Right!, which takes an experimental punk-art approach to the aesthetics of the sport.