If you look closely, you’ll note Mickey Rooney in the trailer for Night in the Museum. He has only a small part in the movie, as a night guard with essentially one line that he utters repeatedly with slight variations. Rooney’s near-absence from the trailer makes sense. Its advertisers don’t want to traffic in nostalgia for films past. To that end, it emphasizes, logically, the main character, played by Ben Stiller, and his “fun” go-stars, Robin Williams and Owen Wilson, all with obvious appeal to younger viewers. But in addition to Rooney, there is also Dick Van Dyke and Bill Cobbs, as, apparently (it’s not clear), retiring night guards from a Manhattan natural history museum.

As everyone knows, Stiller’s Larry Daley is the typical modern movie loser who ends up with the job. He’s a failed inventor (see the forthcoming Knocked Up), his ex-wife (24‘s Kim Raver) rides him (previous comedies incalculable), and all he wants to do is earn the love of his son (Wild Hogs). Soon he learns, however, that due to the presence in the museum of a pharaoh’s tomb, that every exhibit in the museum comes to life at night, with the codicil that they must all stay there (keeping them inside is the night guard’s job) or be turned to dust if left outside when the sun rises, what amounts to a fake suspense ploy, but which puts it in league with all the current animal animated films, which all rest on the same premise. The movie is calibrated to appeal to all ages, but it is primarily a kids film, and the presence of the old wrinklies in the cast are a sop to the elderly sentimentalists who think back fondly on the TV shows or, for the older, movies of their youth.

Night in the Museum is a truly terrible movie. I haven’t seen as bad a film that is also a major box office hit since, well, The Da Vinci Code, also a movie of supreme ineptitude — in pacing, editing choices, framing, casting choices, dramaturgy, just about everything. That it was the box office leader for three or four weeks in a row is cause for a whole other column, about the disconnect between reviewers and moviegoers, which I don’t have anything to add to anyway, but it does suggest that American filmgoers really don’t want their films to be good, if by good one means stylish, coherent, intelligent (the failure of Grindhouse, its polar opposite in quality, at the box office suggests this to be true). They are made uneasy by complex emotions, as opposed to the simple emotions of kids movies (Night is based on a children’s novel), and by visual sophistication. An example of the film’s incoherence is that Robin Williams’s Teddy Roosevelt admits at one point that he isn’t really the old president, but a ceramic stature made in a factory; yet in the film’s resolution, Larry introduces his love interest, docent Rebecca (Carla Gugino) to the subject of her stalled Ph. D. thesis, Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck) — as if another statue does have intimate knowledge of the person she is modeled on.

Which isn’t to say that Night in the Museum should be ignored. On the contrary, it should be studied, both by scholars seeking to understand society, and by film students seeking a way into the business. Don’t follow the QT way! Go the superficial way, as this film’s director, actor-turned-director Shawn Levy has done.

To that end, the two disc special edition of Night in the Museum is an aide to study. It comes in a good widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) with DTS and DD 5.1 audio, plus Spanish and French 2.0 Surround tracks, and English and Spanish subtitles. Supplements on disc one include two commentary tracks — one by a boosters Levy, the other by co-writers Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon (of Reno 911!).

The second disc begins with almost 20 minutes of deleted or extended scenes, most of them about Larry’s loserhood, followed by a blooper reel, out takes with the monkey-related outtakes; a gag reel of Levy’s wit as manifested in hijinks on the set, an episode of Comedy Central’s Reel Comedy focused on Night at the Museum, and making of featurettes segregated by subjects such as special effects, costumes, and set design. In addition, there is a storyboard to screen comparison, two “making of” specials from the Fox Movie Channel, one about animated the T Rex skeleton, the other showing Levy lecturing some film students). Finally, there are trailers and a DVD-ROM game based on the movie.

Rooney was, reportedly, 86 when he made Night at the Museum. He was 52 when he made Pulp, released on the same DVD day, April 24, 2007, and shot during the middle phase of Rooney’s career. Something of a cult film, Mike Hodges made Pulp in 1972.

There are three great modern cinematic homages to crime fiction in the movies. Gumshoe, Peeper, and Pulp. Two of them star Michael Caine, while Gumshoe stars Albert Finney. Each of them parodies the tough guy similes of Raymond Chandler’s books, and turn conventions of the genre on their heads. All three are brilliant in their various ways. And it is partially because in their individual ways they ultimately take the task of storytelling seriously, despite the ribbing. Pulp is the first one to make it to DVD.

Caine stars as Mickey King, a disreputable cad who ran out on his wife and kids to write, dictate actually, pornographic mysteries. He is approached by a mysterious tough guy (Lionel Stander) to ghost write the memoir of an at first secretive figure, but who eventually turns out to be Preston Gilbert (Rooney), a former Hollywood actor who mixes up the gangster roles he played with his real, or “real” life.

However, someone doesn’t want Preston’s book to come out. Is it the mysterious photographer (Lizbeth Scott, whom you might confuse at first with Melina Mercouri)? Is it the luscious young associate of Preston (Nadia Cassini)? Could it be the creepy mystery expert (a subtly brilliant Al Lettieri ) King meets on a tour bus? Though the mystery is “solved,” ambiguities remain, and King, who narrates the movie like he writes his books, is left at the end confined in paradise with a broken leg, but, like the Rules of the Game style images at the end suggest, not unlike a boar in a shooting pen, to be picked off by powerful elites.

Pulp is funny (whimsical might be a better term), and also a premiere example of film soleil, especially those in the revisionist mode of the 1970s. Such films maintained the narrative pleasure of the old noir movies but added an extra level of delight by undermining or deconstructing key elements of the genre.

The Pulp disc from MGM, via Fox, doesn’t go into any of this. It’s a bare bones release with an adequate widescreen transfer and three sound options. Nevertheless, it’s a must for every noir and neo-noir collector.

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