 Presumably capitalizing
on all the hoopla surrounding the release
of Volver,
Viva Pedro: The Pedro Almodóvar
Classics Collection is a nice box set containing eight of the
director’s major works. It’s got a really strong line-up, ranging from
across his career: Women on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Live
Flesh, Talk to Her, The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother, Bad Education, Matador and Law of Desire, the last two on DVD
for the first time. A ninth bonus disc includes three featurettes on the man: Deconstructing Pedro, Experiencing Almodóvar and
Viva Pedro. The set is
housed in one of those long foldout thingies that make it kind of hard
to access any one disc without opening it up to its full length and
precariously perching it on your arms—but if you can get over that,
it’s a terrific set.
It’s also worth noting,
with the recent release of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter prequel Hannibal
Rising, which will be hitting big screens here sometime soon,
that The Silence of the Lambs is back on DVD in “Collector’s Edition”
form. You might recall that Criterion put out an excellent version of
the Jonathan Demme classic some years
back, but when their licence expired, the
film reverted to a features-skimpy studio “special edition.” This
two-disc set includes a bunch of docs, covering the writing, directing
and scoring of the film, and more.
—MARK SLUTSKY
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