Photo courtesy of Magnolia Home Entertainment
Mike Wallace Is Here - Still 1
Mike Wallace Is Here (2019)
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Scared of Revolution, Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection, Mike Wallace is Here, Landscape Film: Roberto Burle Marx
Scared of Revolution (Film Movement)
Scared of Revolution, a close look at the life of Last Poet Umar Bin Hassan, goes back to a boyhood of shining shoes and making rhymes to draw customers. Formed in the late ’60s, The Last Poets tried to win minds and change the world with words. Their aggressive cadences were sampled by rappers in the ’80s and ’90s, but as one of Hassan’s partners-in-poetry points out, they mostly got the beat but missed the message.
“Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection” (Shout! Factory)
Abbott and Costello didn’t get top billing on this collection’s first film, One Night in the Tropics (1940). They elbow into a light romantic comedy and perform their most familiar routine, “Who’s on First?” Before long, they were the stars in a long-running sequence of movies featuring bumbling bully Bud Abbott and childlike Lou Costello. They fall from pratfall to pratfall on the 28 movies collected on this Blu-ray collection (plus commentary and other features).
Mike Wallace Is Here (Magnolia Home Entertainment)
Mike Wallace was visibly taken aback when Bill O’Reilly credited him as “the driving force of my career.” Wallace was never a belligerent jerk. And yet, his confrontational style and willingness to ask hard questions broke with the soft approach once prevalent in broadcasting. Avi Belkin’s documentary traces a career that included interviews with Salvador Dalí, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. “Oh yes, I’m probably a dead man already,” X famously told Wallace.
Landscape Film: Roberto Burle Marx (Kino Lorber)
Brazil’s Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) was 18 when he visited Berlin’s Botanical Gardens and discovered, for the first time, the natural wonders of his homeland. As his country’s foremost landscape architect, he left his mark on Rio’s Copacabana and the green spaces of Brasília. Using his words and archival footage, the documentary explains his view that “gardens are organized nature” composed in harmony and contrast. His devotion to native plants has had global influence.
