"We have a truck on fire ... we can't stop the dancing chicken..."In Werner Herzog's steady but bleak 1977 gaze at American badlands, Bruno S plays a Berlin street musician who goes in search of a better life in the US with hooker girlfriend (Eva Mattes) and mad old friend (Clemens Scheitz), but finds only the despairingly drab dead-end of rural Wisconsin. The movie lan Curtis watched the night he died.
Passport have secured neither the band's help nor their music rights, although they provide some irresistible highlights, specifically a TV appearance by the pre-pubescent Jimmy Page and excerpts from a John Bonham interview. Misty old chats with Zep members and Peter Grant are bolstered by the contemporary perceptions of Jeff Beck, Roy Harper, Terry Reid, Chris Dreja, Simon Kirke and Richard Cole.
Carol Clerk
Jerry Lewis comedy from 1963 in which he transforms Dr Jekyll-style from a geeky chemistry professor into a hip-but-obnoxious cabaret singer - fairly obviously based on Dean Martin - in order to woo Stella Stevens. It's gently likeable, and Lewis' most watchable movie this side of The King Of Comedy.
There's little original Dylan footage and no music in this unofficial bio co-produced by the fanzine Isis. But what we do get is a series of fascinating new interviews—with old school friends and teachers in Hibbing who describe a loner who gave little hint of the extraordinary gifts he was later to develop, early colleagues who played with him in Greenwich Village and leading Dylanologists such as Clinton Heylin and CP Lee.
NIGEL WILLIAMSON
Generic potboiler, and another easy rent cheque for De Niro. When Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos'young son is killed, he's the bulging-eyed scientist who says he can clone him back to life. All seems rosy, till the brat gets severely Damian (and then some) on their asses. Topical commentary on genetic engineering or The Omen Part 93? The latter, sadly.
Sadly not the classic'30s capers starring Warner Oland as the philosophical Chinese detective but those of his replacement Sidney Toler after the Chan franchise had been sold off to the poverty-stricken studios of Monogram. Of the six films here, 1944's mildly diverting chess murder mystery The Chinese Cat is the best of an admittedly ropey bunch, which also includes Meeting At Midnight and The Jade Mask.
FEW ARTISTS IN ANY MEDIUM?Bowie, maybe, or Scorsese?enjoyed such a terrific'70s as Woody Allen. This box comprises every comedy that Allen wrote, directed and starred in from 1971-'79?save 1972's Play It Again, Sam and 1978's psychodrama Interiors, neither of which are included here. Bananas was his second auteurist venture (1969's Take The Money And Run being the first) and saw him fusing the wisecracks of Bob Hope and slapstick of Buster Keaton to create this immortal nebbish New Yorker who bears as much relation to the real Allen Konigsberg as does Dylan to Robert Zimmerman.
