RBG
Decades before joining the U.S. Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued precedent-setting cases before the tribunal—and usually won. A child of immigrants, serious but with a sense of humor, Ginsburg graduated from Harvard Law School back when women were rare at the bar. Balancing the professional and the personal, Ginsburg raised a family at the same time that she was changing history.
This summer’s surprise hit, the documentary RBG, is out on DVD and offers many glimpses of Ginsburg’s happy marriage but focuses on the law. She believed in moving inch by inch, laying the stepping stones that led to the far horizon. Her greatest accomplishments concerned the status of men and women, placing the genders on a level legal field. Her nomination was approved 96-3 in the U.S. Senate in a less divisive time before the calm voice of consensus was drowned in the shrill whining of narcissism.
Revolution: New Art for a New World
Despite opening with a history lesson that could have been cribbed from late Soviet textbooks, this documentary comes alive when interviews with contemporary Russian scholars and artists complicate the picture of the fluorescence of art in the first years of Bolshevik Russia. Revolution explores artists who weren’t trying to paint a better world—they thought they were constructing it. Many of the best moments are filled with the art itself, including paintings unseen in the West.
“Hawaii Five-O: The Eighth Season”
Most attempts to resuscitate popular TV shows from the ’60s have ended in failure. And yet, season eight of the revamped “Hawaii Five-O” has been released on a six-disc collection. While the setting and the theme music remain the same, this “Five-O” is entirely contemporary: Fast, quippy, ironic, it stars terse-talking Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan as McGarrett and Danno. They break a few rules as they battle hackers, apocalyptic fires and hard-faced berserker psychopaths.
