Tales of the City (Collector's Edition) dvd movie.|
Tales of the City (Collector's Edition) buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $59.99 Our Price: $53.99 You Save: $6 Features • Box set • Closed-captioned • Collector's Edition • Color • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : 10 January, 1994 DVD Release : 25 February, 2003 |
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Tales of the City (Collector's Edition) description "The City" in question is San Francisco, and the tales are novelist Armistead Maupin's, his romantic, affectionate, and spirited homage to the glory days of his hometown. Maupin's idea of SF's glory days isn't the drug-filled Summer of Love (1967), but rather the drug-filled lust-in of the late '70s. Replacing acid with coke and ludes, psychedelia for disco, this six-hour miniseries (which caused controversy for its open drug use, nudity, and direct depiction of homosexuality upon its initial airing on PBS) follows the romantic struggles and identity crises of a colorful cast of characters. The action--as addictive as the drugs the characters ingest--is seen mostly from the innocent point of view of Mary Ann, the city's newest culture-shocked resident--so its presentation is rather decadent and hedonistic. Because the story originally ran as a daily serial in the San Francisco Chronicle before being compiled into a novel, its serialized structure suffers from typical soap-opera mawkishness and the need to shock with ridiculous revelations. Thankfully, this degeneration mostly occurs during the final two hours, allowing you to just enjoy the personalities and hilarious and often-touching interactions of the richly drawn characters before they're manipulated by plot devices. The performances are all outstanding, especially Chloe Webb's spacey ex-hippie Mona, Marcus D'Amico's romantically doomed Michael, and Olympia Dukakis's Anna Madrigal, the enigmatic mother hen/landlady of many of the film's central characters. --Dave McCoy |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Cleaned-up Dialogue is Offensive Idea |
| San Francisco is my hometown. Armstead Maupin's "Tales of the City" is about my hometown and the "real" people who live there. I've been a big fan of Maupin's work from the start and own the original VHS tapes of "Tales". I was about to order the DVD set until I read a couple of reviews that alerted me the dialogue had been "cleaned up." I wouldn't have the DVD set under any circumstances!!! | |
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