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Reviews
Wiener Dog Nationals (2013)
great family movie
Our dachshunds really enjoyed seeing their friends, but our humans thought it was sweet and simple and charming, well above expectations. Morgan Fairchild was meant to be a pain, but the other actors were none of them famous but were surprisingly charming and relaxed and attractive. For a really simple, really inexpensively made, really predictable movie, this one turned out to be way better than we expected. It looks like the hot dog stand chain that is featured in the movie really exists and maybe even runs these races. But it was just a very happy movie to watch. We'd recommend it to anybody and maybe even watch it again if it turns up on an airplane.
Agostino d'Ippona (1972)
excellent and available
I have used this film in class as long ago as the 1970s and found it a very helpful visualization and supplement to textual study of the life and work of Augustine. There was a lot of imagination put into representing the later Roman empire as it really was, and even the specialist will find details to admire and little to quibble with. Having looked for it in VHS/DVD for years, I finally came upon a copy in a bookstore in the Vatican in October 2006 and now see that it can be ordered from the online Italian bookseller, bol.it -- dialogue in Italian and comes also with Italian subtitles. There *was* an English-subtitled film version, but that seems not now available. But if teacher or students have even a little Italian and teacher has a decent knowledge of Augustine, this is well worth it. As the other comment says, leisurely but gripping if you let it.
Jim O'Donnell Georgetown University
Il gattopardo (1963)
heartbreaking, gorgeous
To summarize, this film was released, dubbed and butchered, in the US in 1963/64, never released on video but occasionally seen in bootleg version. The British Film Institute did a restored print of the original Italian version in 2003. I saw it in a theater in London last summer and found it fabulous, not least for seeing it in the wide screen setting. It's now out on DVD on three disks: the restored print with Italian dialogue (Burt Lancaster dubbed into Italian -- it sounds wacky, but it works big time); a disk with the butchered English release version of forty years ago (valuable to see what they did, and also to hear Lancaster's own English); and a disk with supplementary materials including very interesting interviews with a wide variety of participants in the movie. Of the multi-hour blockbusters of the period, I'd put it behind Lawrence of Arabia, but very close to Doctor Zhivago and well ahead of Ryan's Daughter.
DvB