Roland Emmerich is the Irwin Allen de nos jours, and his new film, 2012, is an anthology of disaster films past. It’s got a bit of Volcano, of Earthquake, of all the Airports, and even When Time Ran Out, not to mention The Bible, at least the part about Noah. But unlike those earlier films, 2012 is primarily a comedy. Sure, serious things happen, such as the near demise of the earth and the deaths of billions of people, but the story is told with a certain measure of wit, a wink to the audience that says this is all for fun. When you see elephants being hauled by helicopters to a modern ark, or when someone says, “I’m not going to let anything come between us,” immediately before a fissure opens up on the floor before him, you have to realize that the director and his fellow credited writer had a Hitchcock-Psycho attitude to their material. Unfortunately, 2012 runs out of gas about halfway through the film, just like the subject of its disaster machinations.

It’s hard to figure out why. Even if you don’t like the film, and many don’t, the tale does move swiftly for the first half, and there are a lot of laughs and last minute escapes to keep one preoccupied. But the first half takes place in the sunshine, and in suburban residential areas, and in vast forests emblazoned first by the sun, and then by noxious fireballs. The second half, like The Poseidon Adventure, takes place at sea, mostly inside, and way too often in the dark. On the other hand, maybe the first half of our movies are always better. Maybe filmmakers should start conceiving their narratives from the back, moving forward, instead of the more common other way around.

2012 is essentially an animated movie, and like most animated films these days it tells the story of a small clique of beings who are trying to rescue someone. In this case, it is divorced novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), trying to ferry his two kids and his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) ““ and her current boyfriend ““ to a secret site hosting escape ships that he heard about from a looney conspiratologist radio broadcaster (Woody Harrelson). This means flying out of Los Angeles as it crumbles and into Yellowstone National Park before it goes up in flames, and thence to China before it is consumed by water. I would also say that the second half of the movie, besides being sluggish, if not inert, is not as easy to follow as the first half.

At root, 2013 is a zeitgeist movie, less important in and of itself as another indice of the culture’s preoccupation with the end of the world, from the debate over global warming to the subjects of numerous movies such as The Road and TV shows, some already cancelled, others such as Flashforward ongoing. In that regard, it is interesting how much of the emphasis falls on black characters, from the opening scientist, to the president, to the fact that in the end Africa becomes, once again, the birth of civilization. On the other hand, end of the world movies have been around as long as the 1950s, and even the racial thing isn’t particularly new, if you’ve seen The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

2012 makes an interesting contrast with The Box. Both are apocalyptic, though The Box is more subtly so. At the same time, The Box is a quirky intricate “small” film with none of the identifying marks of a big budget tent pole film like 2012.

Richard Kelly does not make “normal” movies, that is, films in the style or manner of the day, and especially not the cookie cutter style of storytelling found in most studio pictures or CBS police procedurals. The better art films, on the other hand, follow either the style of, say, Terence Mallick’s Badlands, which is also the new “international” style, somewhat distanced from the action and often visually beautiful and about “real” people, or they follow the juiced up musical Scorsese style of Mean Streets.

Kelly’s films are much different. Because they obey no known cinematic style, not even the Miramax-indie style of minimal locations and novelty casting, his movies can discombobulate viewers who are expecting at least some semblance of the same old thing. Like David Lynch or Guy Maddin, he films to the beat of a different drum, one so different that the viewer has to be educated in the language of the film itself. Donnie Darko puzzled viewers though many were intrigued, enough to start a cult. Southern Tales has its defenders but was widely viewed as a misstep, an uneven production, though it was very much in the spirit of Donnie Darko, though on a broader canvas, bigger scale. Worst of all for the regular viewer, Kelly doesn’t feel inclined to explain the metaphysical mysteries his films traffic in.

Take the crazy scene in which teacher Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) is browbeated by a student into showing why she limps. There are a lot of things “wrong” with this scene. It is unlikely that someone would let a conversation go in this direction. It is unlikely that a teacher would allow herself to be so humiliated by someone in her class. It is unlikely that the student would be so aroused by the spectacle. Or that the other students would stand for it, or at least not express some reaction to the incident.

Other questions arise. Why does the dean of Norma’s school get a nosebleed? Why does that humiliating student end up at a family celebration at Norma’s parents’ house? Why do the nosebleeds become epidemic? How does the babysitter Dana (Gillian Jacobs) suddenly become psychic? Who is the strange disheveled guy watching Norma?

Unfortunately, most people these days have a high disregard for other human beings and would have no trouble pushing the button. So the existential debate between the couple can spark impatience in the modern, cynical viewer who will say to herself, “Damn the other person, press the button and get the million dollars, and see what happens!” After all, someone somewhere in the world is going to die anyway whether or not the Lewises push the button.

The Box is based on a story by Richard Matheson, perhaps the most inventive science fiction writer ever, but Kelly has taken the material back to the strict suburban world of Donnie Darko, its tree-lined lanes and big houses and expensive wedding receptions and its working government employees and professionals. Kelly has also added a strain of The Day the Earth Stood Still and maybe even Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But another important book is sociologist Erving Goffman’s Stigma, which is an examination of our reaction to visible and cultural disabilities in ourselves and others, and how the stigmatized have internalized the “normalcy” of the society in which they live and in a sense take its side against themselves. Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), the man who proffers the box, and the deal of a million dollars to the Lewses, has a ghastly facial wound. Yet though Steward shocks Norma when she first sees him, the man with this stigma in this case, unlike in conventional society, is the one with the power. Norma’s stigma has made her, it seems, less trusting of others. At school she teaches Sartre’s maxim that hell is other people. In the end, it is Norma, the stigmatized one, who must be eliminated. It turns out that the box is a form of enormous metaphysical chain letter.

The Box gets a little hard to follow in its second half. After a series of endeavors to change fate, things end up once again at the Lewises house, with the couple sitting across from the agent of the box. And thus most of the events in the film are explained. Or not, depending on one’s sense of horror. The “end of the world” as envisioned by Kelly takes place one suburban household at a time.

In what is widely considered to be a bad year for movies, I’ve finally been able to add one more title to a slim list of viewable and re-viewable movies. Zombieland is one of the best, funniest, most entertaining films every made about zombie attacks (for the record, the other films on my 2009 list are Orphan, Inglourious Basterds, and Antichrist).

But what do we talk about when we talk about zombies? The earliest cinematic zombies are found in the Bela Lugosi cheapo White Zombie, where zombies are people controlled robotically by a hypnotic and charismatic villain. In I Walked with a Zombie, a remake of Jane Eyre, zombies are supposedly the dead (but not really), resurrected to do slave labor. A key, transitional zombie effort is The Zombies of Mora-Tau, an obscure horror film released by Columbia in 1957 that happens to anticipate a lot of the zombie myths later codified in ’60s drive-in movies and in Italian films, such elements as the slow moving hands-outstretched zombies impervious to everything except fire. Since the regional horror film The Night of the Living Dead, zombies have been those recently dead or newly bitten who are infected with something, in the case of Romero’s first film, some vague meteorological event that reanimates the recently buried, where the monsters are slow-moving, drooling, intestine-draped retards, a concept which may or may derive from Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. There is by now of course a long history of zombie movies, but the fast moving zombie seems to have been inaugurated with 28 Days Later, which is really an unofficial remake of Romero’s The Crazies, in which the “zombies” are victims of a world wide virus. The fast moving zombie is supposed to be scarier, but there really hasn’t been a truly scary moment in a zombie movie (as opposed to many horrific moments) since the scene in Night of the Living Dead when Barbra fled the graveyard and got into the car that rolled down the road with Zombie Zero chasing her.

Since the advent of Romeroworld, the zombie has been portrayed as a relentless scavenger of food, but exclusively human food: zombies don’t seem to like pets. In fact, as the genre has evolved, some zombies themselves become pets, at least to military scientists eager to derive crucial information from their behavior. The zombie’s “horror” to human beings is that their deadness makes them singleminded, and impervious to reason or rational argumentation. They are stupid, or act like greedy children, and we human beings, when not scared of them, like to shoot them for sport and amusement. Zombies also represent, if you are a Freudian, the explosion of the appetite driven id, taking down the fragile ego and its tenuous connection to structured civilization.

That’s the situation in Zombieland, which is kind of a take off on the novel World War Z. A global zombie infection has eradicated civilization as we know it and roving bands of survivors attempt to stay alive by following a set of rules, which the main character, nicknamed Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) after his home town in the manner of an army private in a WWII film, narrates to the viewer at the start of Zombieland. Among the rules are No. 2, “Double Tap,” i.e., don’t be stingy with bullets, and No. 31, “Check the Back Seat.” These rules have amusing pay offs throughout the film, as does a cameo by Bill Murray as himself.

Columbus teams up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a sort of Mad Max figure, and later with Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), two scam artist sisters. The team ends up in Los Angeles at the mansion of Murray and then, for the film’s climax, in a carnival. Eisenberg, who was the star of the recent Adventureland, just can’t seem to stay away from fun fairs.

But Zombieland isn’t really about zombies. It is about love. Director Ruben Fleischer and credited writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have made a movie about how love and the desire for love survive even world wide devastation.

Jaws is a great American film, and one of its greatest moments is when Ellen Brody says to her husband, “Wanna get drunk and fool around?” The scene celebrates intimacy and easefulness between two people and, for an alienated lonely segment of the audience, also shows a woman initiating sex with a man. Jaws offers up a vital, admirable portrait of a marriage, one, by the way, that is much better than the marriage in the book, which is compromised by infidelity and other problems and emotions. In Zombieland, Columbus, in a flashback that shows his first encounter with a zombie, finds himself in what he calls a dream situation, on a couch with the cute girl next door, who was just attacked by a homeless man on the street who tried to bite her. As they sit next to each other and she snuggles up to him for protection, Columbus says, “I always, my whole life, wanted to brush a girl’s hair over her ear.” It is one of the most heartbreaking sentences ever uttered in a movie. And, like the list of anti-zombie rules, it has a glourious payoff at the end.

Zombieland is really about is male longing. Columbus has survived at the opening of the film because he had no friends or family. He’s a loner who, he says, acted like other people were zombies before they were really zombies. Though his aloneness has “saved” him from the virus and from attacks, he still longs for the intimacy. Maybe it’s the way a high school nerd longs for a cheerleader, or the girl nerd in the class, but in any case the need is present, and in conflict with his strategic self-isolation. When he meets Wichita he is ready to fall in love, but of course, as in Flaubert’s Education sentimentale, one never purely gets what one wants. Zombieland is a comedy and a romance and a social commentary on anomie all wrapped up in a misleading dystopian tale of zombie hegemony.

There are two essential books that celebrate region-specific horror films both well-known and obscure. One is Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA (with a companion volume planned). The other is They Came From Within, Caelum Vatnsdal’s history of Canadian horror movies. What these two books suggest is that the best of the cinema’s independent horror films are really regional works. Three of the most famous horror films of all time, Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are really regional films, independently financed and shot far from Hollywood with local actors and crew members. Thus they have a flavor not found in mainstream genre movies, spices of quirkiness, unpredictability, and rigorous bleakness that mainstream movies can’t or won’t allow themselves.

As far as I know there isn’t a book about Australian genre cinema yet, but now there is a film: Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, a survey of Australian films from roughly the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Not only is it one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a long time, but it is one of the best cinema histories committed to film, and a highly entertaining and funny work in its own right.

Interest in national cinemas seem to go in cycles: Italy in the early ’50s, France in the early ’60s, Germany in the early ’70s, Hong Kong in the ’90s, Romania today. Australia’s vogue, its grand discovery by the rest of the world, came in the mid-’70s, even though it was one of the oldest national cinemas. For festival movie fanatics, Australia provided the ethereal profundities of Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Breaker Morant, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and The Getting of Wisdom; for Academy voters, it was We of the Never-Never; for the masses, it was The Man from Snowy River, Phar Lap, and Crocodile Dundee. For the rest of us it was Mad Max (also known of course as The Road Warrior), Razorback, Dead End Drive-In, and Road Games.

Not Quite Hollywood tracks the underside of Down Under’s cinematic output, the popular films that swept their home country’s box office but that were retitled in America and shown mostly at drive-ins. Hartley follows Australia’s B movie career from the sex comedy Stork, to Howling III, considered by many to be one of the worst movies ever made, with numerous interview sound bites ranging from comedian Barrie Humphries to director George Miller. Quentin Tarantino is also present as an enthusiastic distant observer who, with his usual acuity, notes various trends and themes in Australian B cinema (the role of roving bullies) and highlights unacknowledged auteurs, such as Brian Trenchard-Smith.

According to the history as chronicled in this film, Australian cinema took off as a commercial force in 1970 with a film called The Naked Bunyip, a comical mondo documentary. The enormous success of this film invigorated the industry and encouraged the exploitation of relaxed censorship laws. It also clued filmmakers into the idea that a little bit of vulgarity ““ OK, a lot of vulgarity ““ goes a long way. Stork and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, both episodic social satires and Candide-type stories, soon followed ““ and by the way, Barry Humphries, who co-wrote and starred in the Barry McKenzie series, is wonderfully witty about his role in the re-birth of Australian cinema.

When the phase of tales of sexually inexperienced innocents having strange adventures phased out, filmmakers switched to horror and adventure films, and the doc slips into a succession of profiles of key and lasting genre entries, including among many Patrick, Thirst, Razorback, Fair Game, and Stone, possibly the most uncompromising biker film ever made. Sandy Harbutt was the true auteur on this film, and near-one-man-shows are common in the under-budgeted world of Australian films. This egomania also leads to tensions and conflicting stories and it is interesting to try and sort out the truth between actor Steve Railsback and the producers on Turkey Shoot (also known as Escape 2000), or George Lazenby versus one of his directors (did he punch him or not?). Also interviewed are Gregory Harrison, Judy Morris, and Russell Mulcahy about Razorback, perhaps the ideal genre film of its time, with its outback setting, its roving band of scum, its typical tomboy (Arkie Whiteley) with her skin tight shirts and her skin diver’s watch, and its wandering hero caught up in an inexplicable world. Dennis Hopper talks about Mad Dog Morgan, and Jamie Lee Curtis, Stacy Keach, and Richard Franklin talk about Road Games, a sort of Rear Window on wheels. It’s also fun to see the underrated Rod Taylor and the still alluring Susannah York reminisce about the old days ““ which may be coming back, as the film optimistically concludes.

As a regional artistic institution, Australian filmmaking has the quirkiness of an isolated enclave with its private language and its vague or vain attempts to mimic Hollywood cinema styles. What can look like amateurishness to judgmental outsiders can be a refreshing derailment of desiccated genre conventions by those looking for a new slant on old material. It’s true that Howling 3, for example, can tax the patience of even the most generous minded, but it is also so batshit crazy that its unbelievableness takes it into a realm that transcends its genre as both a horror film and a supposed sequel (though The Howling is a film that has been abused the most by its sequels). But such films as Mad Max have changed the way that Hollywood has made its movies. Not Quite Hollywood is a terrific celebration of that influence.

(This review discusses these two movies in great detail. )

There are two things that need to be said about Whiteout. First, it is based on a comic book. Second, it sat on the shelf for two years.

Whiteout is based on the graphic novel by mystery-novelist-turned-comic-writer Greg Rucka and award winning illustrator Steve Lieber. Once the movie was made, however, with Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Kalifornia) directing and four writers ““ Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, Chad Hayes, and Carey W. Hayes ““ as the credited adaptors, the studio, Warner, shelved the film for two years when shooting ceased in 2007. Thus there is a certain youthful freshness to the face of lead actress Kate Beckinsale, as Carrie Stetko, a U. S. Marshall assigned to the American scientific station at the South Pole, which is about to close for its six-months-of-night hiatus. At the last minute, a corpse turns up out in the ice, which undoes a carefully orchestrated crime scheme by some of the residents. Stetko solves the crime but at the cost of being isolated at the base for six months.

Whiteout has many of the basics of the mystery thriller genre as we have come to know it in the last few years. There is a deadline that frames the action and squeezes it into a set amount of hours, in this case the sun going down. The main cop has a troubled past (she was betrayed by a partner), which she is trying to get over (the television series Warehouse 13 has a similar premise with its female investigator). There is an interloping federal agent who is a high profile suspect, numerous suspicious co-workers, and several set pieces, among them an ax-chase and a fight in the middle of a snow storm. The movie also evokes with Alien by having Tom Skerritt play the part of a kindly old retiring doctor.

Unfortunately, the movie is as inert as the wintry terrain in which it is set. The heroine is blurrily sketched, and unappealing, and we don’t see why she is still fretting over a justified shooting in her past. The co-workers and the villains all look the same. The action sequences are hard to follow. And when the mystery is “solved,” it seems so trivial in relation to the labors endured to get you there.

Each new comic book adaptation disappoints in a different. The problem with Whiteout is that the source isn’t all that interesting to begin with. It’s fairly conventional mystery material in a “unique” setting, and the changes made in the transfer to the screen (making Stetko less hard looking) only make the film even more conventional.

Jennifer’s Body is much more effective. I didn’t expect to like it, but it proved to be a much more charming and entertaining variation on the teen horror movie than anticipated.

The Oscar and Emmy winning screenwriter of the film, Diablo Cody, is the new Tarantino, a screenwriter poised to take over the town and inspire a clutch of fanatic followers. She has a column in Entertainment Weekly and a Showtime TV show and also helped produced Jennifer’s Body. But though she has the image of a tattooed hard drinking rebel there is a conservative steak to her work. The EW column thus far has been a self-glorifying journey through the nostalgia of her childhood interests, and the career making Juno was at heart a conservative vision of maternity. On the other hand, no major motion picture or TV series these days can endorse abortion. The dominant culture somehow demands that decry abortion, probably for fear of a backlash. As Nabokov said in an afterword to Lolita, no American work of fiction will ever concern itself with happy incest, an atheist who dies contented in his sleep, or a fruitful interracial marriage. He could have added to the list a tale about a successful, problem-clearing, and life-saving abortion (though Third Watch tried at the start of its second season).

Having taken on unwed pregnancies in Juno, here in Jennifer’s Body Cody conceives a tale about eating disorders. Of course the subject matter is coded. Jennifer (Megan Fox) is possessed by a demon and consumes the entrails of high school classmates susceptible to her human charms.

The only person standing between Jennifer and Hell on Earth is Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried). If Jennifer is the school’s designated hot girl. Needy is its class nerd. Yet Jennifer uncharacteristically loves her as much as the audience loves Needy, with her complex adoration of Jennifer and her glasses and eccentric clothes and her big man’s sports watch (when she finally has sex with her boyfriend ““ being a girl nerd Needy gets to have a boyfriend ““ her watch is the only thing she doesn’t take off, an erotic dream come true for some of us). But also her competence and bravery. In the old days ““ well, at least the 1950s ““ women in horror and science fiction were reduced to tears and faints by the threat of violation. Today they fight back. It is a form of progress.

Here’s what happens. Needy goes with Jennifer to Devil’s Kettle’s only music club, The Carousel. Jennifer has a groupie-ish fixation on the band Low Shoulder, led by Nikolai Wolf (TV’s Adam Brody). Though Jennifer is hot for sex with anyone from the band, the group at first considers Needy, but Wolf, drawing upon his own small town wisdom, asserts that Jennifer is more likely to be a virgin. The band, it turns out, needs a virgin for a sacrificial rite of appeasment to the devil so that they can rise to success, like John Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby. This plays into a pet theory of mine ““ that all Hollywood celebrities have sold their souls to Satan. How else to explain the rise of such stars as Sylvester Stallone from mere extras in films like Bananas to writer-star of Rocky?

In any case, the procedure goes awry ““ it turns out that Jennifer is not a virgin. As a consequence, as Needy learns when she researches the topic in the school library, Jennifer has become some kind of portal for a demon on earth, a demon with a hunger for human flesh. When Jennifer zeros in on Needy’s boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons), a line is drawn between the two lifelong friends.

The film ends on note of Kill Bill-like tragedy. Institutionalized (and we know this from the opening scene), Needy now lives with the secret knowledge that she saved Devil’s Kettle. Normally, a movie like this would end with her behind bars, but Cody has a few more cards to play. Needy escapes, and hitchhikes away, driven past a highway warning sign that reads Low Shoulder. But the movie doesn’t end there, either. In a terrific end credit sequence we see the results when Needy, who has been changed forever and will remain an outcast, finally catches up with the suddenly popular rock band (apparently they didn’t need the sacrifice in the first place). This is a wonderfully poignant ending, deeper and more evocative and more truly tragic than a typical horror film.

Cody also cunningly plays with eating disorder issues in the tale, but it is so coded you might not notice. Consumption is a running theme of the film, be it liquor by underage kids or tomorrow’s uncooked meat dragged right out of the fridge. Will teenage girls make the connection? Jennifer gains strength by eating; she is weakest when she is underfed by going too many hours without killing a boy. This mirrors mere biology, but in the eating disorder mentality the opposite is true. Strength comes from starvation, thinness, denial. You could argue that the movie subtly endorses under-eating, since Jennifer becomes a demon. But in the newly mixed up psychology of Needy, the satisfaction of hunger is a positive force.

The film is also an exploration of the complexities of female friendship, disguised as a horror film. Why does Jennifer take on Needy as a friend? For one thing, she is the only other sharp person in the school. Keep your friends close, but your potential enemies ““ or lesbian lovers ““ closer. The tension underlying Jennifer’s friendship with Needy is shown in a quick moment when Jennifer pushes Needy playfully up against a door. She does it way too hard. The complexity of Needy’s affection for Jennifer is revealed in a strange spectrum of emotions on her face as she watches Jennifer while Low Shoulder plays.

Jennifer’s Body is not quite as fun as you want it to be, and it doesn’t reach the heights of insight of earlier teen girl friendship movies such as The World of Henry Orient, Thirteen, Havoc, Haven, My Summer of Love, and Don’t Deliver Us from Evil, but it certainly makes some new and interesting points. As Jennifer says about Needy, her childhood friend, “Sandbox love never dies.”

(Antichrist will be discussed in detail in this review.)

First off, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is one of the best films of the year, if not the decade.

Not many are going to share this opinion, which is really a fact. Antichrist has once again sparked a current of reaction and rebellion to von Trier and his work, already always controversial. But it’s difficult to understand what exactly it is that people, or at least critics, have against von Trier. His public pronouncements seem to irritate them. His threshold-stretching films seem to make them uncomfortable, as do the similarly provocative films of Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noe, all of whom had films at the 2009 Cannes film festival. The general attitude seems to be that von Trier is something of a fraud, playing with ideas like an uncomprehending child with letter block toys. Antichrist isn’t the first film to inspire the opprobrium of the Cannes masses: the masterpiece L’aventura was jeered at Cannes, with the audience shouting “Cut! Cut!” at the film’s lengthy takes of Monica Vitta running down a hall and opening doors in search of her lover.

Assuming that these are indeed the charges against von Trier, they can be addressed simply. It is the role of art in part to make us uncomfortable, to show us the truth of life unflinchingly, though it is difficult to take. As T. S. Eliot wrote, human beings can only take so much reality. And if von Trier plays the arrogant buffoon in public in his interviews and sound bites, well, as D. H. Lawrence advised in his important book of criticism about American writers, trust the tale not the teller; look to the work of art itself, not what the artist says about it or himself. Which leads us to the charge of fraudulence. If von Trier is a “fraud” in the sense that he doesn’t take his own work seriously and enacts the role of filmmaker in order to undermine and toy with audience expectations, that is of little concern to the viewer. If the film is coherent, if it rings true, if it says about about the human condition, then it doesn’t matter what von Trier “thinks” about it or what his intentions were. We don’t really know the “intentions” of Shakespeare ““ he left no journals or interviews or other records of his opinions ““ but we have the evidence of the plays themselves, which contain a rounded view of life.

Antichrist is many things at once. It is a religious allegory (the “antichrist” of the title is nature itself), it is a horror film, it is a story of fairy tale simplicity and resonance, and it is a European art film in the Scandinavian mode of Ingmar Bergman, especially the Bergman of The Hour of the Wolf and The Silence; essentially it is a “two hander” in the manner of a Strindberg play. The film also has traces of Miike’s Audition, and even the Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Antichrist is provocative, but also extremely well written. To my mind, von Trier is under-appreciated as a writer. Dogville is one of the best crafted but also best written of films, a richly detailed, psychologically acute tale with a brilliant management of a complex idea within which numerous characters interact.

Antichrist will remind horror buffs right off the bat of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Both begin with the death of a child due to the inattention of parents, significantly in the case of Antichrist after the child witnesses uncomprehendingly the Primal Scene, though as the wife says later, “Freud is dead.” In von Trier’s thick imagery, death and orgasm are united. The rest of the movie profiles how that death haunts the surviving parents, with both supernatural and psychological elements.

In the case of Antichrist, the married couple are He (Willem Dafoe), a Seattle therapist, and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a student working on her thesis. The bulk of the film takes place at Eden, their cabin in the woods, where He takes her for a long therapy session to help her overcome her grief and her panic attacks. Not unlike Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, this foray into into a private and isolated therapy session leads to disaster: the confrontation of a professional with the ethics of profession and the “patient” with the nature of her identity. von Trier hints at the ominous date with the forrest by frequently cutting to images of the woods, scored against unnerving music or sounds, long before they ever get there, as if the black forest is summoning them for a confrontation. Forests are often scary in fairy tales just as they are in real life. Like oceans, they are theaters in which living things fight for survival almost invisibly all around you. Certain horror films, such as The Blair Witch Project, capitalize on the inherent dangers and fearsomeness of the forest. Antichrist is very much in line with this theme in fiction, with an overlay of psychological questing. In the forest, He begins to experience the reality of nature or perhaps is simply experiencing visions of its grosser edge, of animals giving birth and of helpless creatures overcome by predators, illustrative of “nature red in tooth and claw.” These visions are the pole ends of what he thinks he is doing and what he is really doing to his wife, “giving birth” to her new identity free of panic attacks, but also dominating her and even preying on her psychologically. That their woodsy getaway is also called Eden links up with some religious concerns within the film (though von Trier skeptics might scoff that as an unbeliever he is using such themes cynically). This Adam and Eve are seeking to re-enter Eden and reshape themselves, with unEdenic results.

Like a Tarantino movie, Antichrist is divided in four chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. After the Prologue, in which their son Nick falls out of their apartment window to his death in the snow, there is Chapter 1, “Grief” in which He tries to wrest control of her therapy from the medical profession, Chapter 2, “Pain (Chaos Reigns),” in which they embark on the forest therapy retreat, Chapter 3, “Despair (Gynocide),” in which He learns some disturbing things about the way his wife treated their son, and Chapter 4 “The Three Beggars,” in which their psychological combat becomes physical. Finally, in the Epilogue, He is free of his wife, wandering the forest like a hunter-gatherer, comforted by the re-visitation of the three animals he has seen earlier, but then he is advanced upon by an ambiguous army of females, their faces blurred out.

Not only is Antichrist, which is about psychological states and physical actions that are difficult to take and difficult to watch ““ because it is dealing with facets of daily life that we spend most of our time suppressing ““ beautiful to look at, thanks to the photography by Anthony Dod Mantle, but its sound production is fascinating (Kristian Eidnes Andersen is credited as the supervising sound editor). The dialogue between He and She is sharp yet rich at the same time, with a strange echoey effect, as if they are always alone in a room. The film uses sound effectively, such as the constant plank-plank-plank of the acorns that fall on the tin roof of their cabin, an audio analog to their disenchantment with nature and Eden. In Returning to Eden, this Adma and Eve find that everything that was beautiful there is now hideous or difficult ““ in her words, dominated by “the sound of things about to die.” He at first takes a distanced, practical stance toward nature, but that doesn’t work for long.

At first He seems like the epitome of the compassionate husband, a rational man seeking to cure his wife and save their marriage. His approach to therapy, though, could be viewed as reductive as the Bay Watch Philosophy, which dictates that in every episode, someone with a phobia is encouraged to “face their fear.” The Bay Watch School of Therapy erases phobias through confrontation; von Trier’s existential humanism is less serene.

As the “therapy” continues, an underlying hostility of the wife to the husband emerges. But von Trier hinted at this tension early in the film when He is visiting She in a clinic. As they talk, the camera is first on her, then whip pans left to him for his response to her dialogue. von Trier uses this effect repeatedly in the film’s first chapter, to underscore the anger darts that She is throwing at him without his perception of them. These looks, those pans, suggest an underlying contempt for her husband, which suggests the overarching theme of the impossibility of love in such a world as the one we have.

Her contempt comes to the foreground in the forrest when she begins to speak frankly to him about his various foibles, such as his distance from She and Nick “last summer.” But he learns strange things about her, too. For one thing, she was hobbling her son with the wrong shoes, a fact that shows up in an autopsy report he at first refuses to look at. Her weird mistreatment of her son anticipates her Misery style ball and chaining of He. She also keeps something called a Gynocide scrapbook. Also, the book she was writing becomes increasing erratic in its handwriting (one of two or three subtle allusions to the films of Stanley Kubrick). She also begins to say “crazy” things, though there is the possibility of a terrible truth to them. She asserts that “human nature is evil,” that “women do not control their own bodies, nature does,” that a “crying woman is a scheming woman,” that “nature is satan’s church.” She also speaks the enigmatic “when the Three Beggars arrive someone must die,” which may refer to the three small statues that Nick knocks down on his way to the window, or to the three animal visitations that He sees. In response, He says that she has betrayed her own thesis that she has been working on for so long, and he also tells her somewhat less convincingly that “good and evil have nothing to do with therapy.”

There are three key points that will probably make an unsympathetic audience member laugh or jeer. There is the “talking fox” moment (in the husband’s hallucination, he is confronted by a fox who says “Chaos reigns”), the “leg iron” scene (von Trier seems drawn to imagery of men and women hobbled by some large impediment that restricts their movement, as in Dogville), and there is the self-mutilation (which has analogs with numerous films that lots of people like, such as Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, but apparently if von Trier does it, the moment is outrageous, cynical and provocative). But the whole movie will seem stupid to those who don’t want to think deeply about life, or prefer superficial films to adult examinations of psychology and tragedy. It isn’t as if the film isn’t thoroughly thought through, unlike so many other recent films. The credits include researchers on misogyny, mythology and evil, anxiety, horror films, music, and theology.

Antichrist is dedicated to Andre Tarkovsky, but a real, though probably unintentional, guiding spirit is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850” which refers to a man “Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law / Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.” But I guess if you don’t like von Trier you won’t like poetry, either.

[Spoiler Alert: I discuss the plot of the film in detail.]

Dead Snow does everything a splatter-zombie film is supposed to do. It gathers a group of young people in a remote spot, slowly unleashes an at first mysterious deadly force on them, picks off the characters one by one but backwards from the least to the most significant, and has the requisite number of bloody moments ““ eyes are squished, intestines are re-employed for  interesting external uses, and jaws chomp down on writhing bodies. I haven’t read any reviews or production histories of the film but this polished, well-photographed effort has the flavor of a calling card film. It pleads, “I can put a coherent commercial property together so please hire me.”

All that being said, Dead Snow, along with other recent horror films, such as Drag Me to Hell and the numerous ’70s remakes, raises some interesting questions about the state of horror.

Splatter movies are perhaps the defining interest of many movie geeks (a phrase I’ve come to hate) I know and know about. The genre is the cinematic equivalent of a wheat chaffer, and it separates the high art aficionado film connoisseurs from the rabid fans who essentially reject Hollywood (unless it is Cameron or Fincher or a few other select exceptions) and instead embrace the kind of regional, low-budget, extreme threshold violating strait-to-video style movies celebrated in Stephen Thrower’s terrific book Nightmare USA. The thing I wonder about, indeed have always wondered about even as I enjoy some of these movies myself, is what is the world view of these spectators, of these movies?

But first, let’s go into detail about the plot, perhaps as an entry point into what people get out of this genre.

In two separate cars, four boys and three girls drive to a rendezvous in a Norwegian ski cabin. The girls are Hanna (Charlotte Frogner), her cousin, the squeaky voiced Chris (Jenny Skavlan), and Hanna’s friend Liv (Evy Kasseth Rosten). That’s all we know about them, though it helps to know that Norway is one of the richest countries in the world ““ as a general background to the kids’ leisure time activities ““ and that it is the Bethlehem of death metal. The boys are Martin (Vegar Hoel), a medical student with a problematic phobia of blood, Erlend (Jeppe Beck Laursen), the requisite horror movie buff, Roy (Stig Frode Henriksen), who is characterized as the “horniest guy north of the Arctic Circle” though we don’t really see much evidence of that character trait in the subsequent narrative, and who seems to speak a dialect different from the others, and Vegard (Lasse Valdal), the cute one, whose girlfriend Sara (Ane Dahl Torp) is skiing cross country to meet them all at the cabin. Unfortunately, as we the viewers know from the opening sequence but the characters don’t, Sara is already dead, having been attacked by some unknown assailants with apparent cannibalistic inclinations.

Upon arriving at the cabin, the kids indulge in some snow mobile hijinks, flirt a bit, and then retire to the cabin.

The nature of the horror is first alluded to by a lone traveller who comes into the cabin for a coffee. He is openly contemptuous of the youngsters, and also tells them a campfire story about the menace lurking in the mountains. It seems that during World War II, a German occupying force of 300 men called Einsatz controlled the village of Oksfjord, which was important to the war effort because of its conveniently placed harbor. These Nazis were unusually cruel to the villagers. As the war went against the Germans, the soldiers, led by a Colonel Herzog, raided the houses and stole as much gold and coins as they could find. Finally, the villagers rose up against their oppressors and, using various farm tools, attacked the Nazis, who fled to the mountains of Istind with their ill-gotten gains, and where they presumably froze to death. This narrative is told in that close slow-track-in trick that signifies to viewers that something of great or scary importance is being related. It’s also a story that sets up the classic “dangerous village” premise of so many horror films, An American Werewolf in London and Kill, Baby … Kill! being two varied examples. Not that we ever see any of the village.

This anecdote at the same time explains everything about the Nazi zombies and nothing. We get the notion that they are evil and maybe still around, but we don’t know how, we don’t know what science or metaphysics lies behind such long living evil. Instead, there is just the suggestion that these soldiers were so gleefully evil that this ethereal death force has kept them alive as nemeses to unsuspecting hikers.

The title of the film, which is Dod Sno in Norwegian, is soon revealed to be both irrelevant and illogical, though it is probably meant to be funny. Snow is inert, of course, it is neither alive nor dead; those notions are irrelevant to snow. But you must have the word “dead” in your title or your movie doesn’t qualify as a horror comedy. An example spreads itself fulsomly across Erlend’s chest: he’s been to the movie Braindead and got the T-shirt. This movie nerd who can quote vast tracks of dialogue and lore. Significantly, his eyes are squished by the zombies.

More important, though, is the film’s take on the nature of evil, if “evil” is really the right word. The Nazi occupiers were bad men who exploited their hostages. Fleeing, they became even more powerful, even immune to death, it seems, and lodged in an isolated territory that they continue to dominate. They seem to be killable, in that if parts are hacked off or they are buzz sawed or shot they appear to die. But in the tradition of recent horror monsters they are implacable foes who move swiftly and seem to anticipate their victims’ thinking processes when they seek to escape.

These zombies are publicized as evil, but is that really the term? When they were alive, these Nazis would probably have been defined as evil, since they were exploiting others for personal gain, but on the other hand, they were probably ideologically driven people with a view of their Norwegian subjects as inferior beings, not a pleasant idea but from their own viewpoint not evil. The more I try to think about the term the more I wonder just what it is that is supposed to be “evil” in horror films. Help comes in the form of  Cynthia Freeland’s book The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror, one of a handful of academic studies of the horror genre that tries to grapple with its psychological allure. Her discussion of the conflicting Whale and Branagh Frankensteins is intriguing, because it is clear that our notions of evil are played with by the filmmakers, as in the original novel, though differently. The doctor has hubris and the creature is a tortured being set on revenge. As newer horror movies have come along they have grown cruder, crueler, with “evil” presented unambiguously, and with those trick ending codas where the seemingly vanquished evil rises again to finally triumph. These codas probably got their started with Boorman’s Deliverance, where it was a dream sequence, and which was borrowed by De Palma for Carrie. But in later films, especially those of Wes Craven, the coda tends to undermine everything that has gone before. The filmmakers may think that they are portraying the face of evil, but the result is so freed of ambiguity as to be rendered a cartoon. The struggle against evil is revealed to be useless.

Freeland raises the question of why people would willingly want to be scared, but the Craven Coda also raises the issue of why people would enjoy a movie that preaches the unconquerability of evil. In daily life, “evil” ranges across everything from the engineers of the Holocaust to bad bosses or the guy who steals your girl. In movies, or at least bad movies, evil is simply something that scares you or is presented as a monster. To me, Sigourney Weaver is civilization personified; to the Alien she is baby food. Most stories put goals in opposition, and there is the good goal and there is the bad goal and we are encouraged in commercial cinema to root for the person with the good goal. But there is a perverse part of us that seems to like evil. Some horror films are explicit about their alignment with evil, such as the Hellraiser series, a precursor to the so called “torture porn” genre in which the leather gear of the villains links them with a playacting S&M take on good versus evil. It was kind of cool in the ’70s to like the suave, confident bad guys better than the milquetoast good guys in thrillers, and Hitchcock exploited that impulse. But since then there has been a rise in villainy or evil to the point that in recent G. I. Joe movie the bad guys “win” through about 90 per cent of the movie and then again in the last sequel-whoring 30 seconds. It’s a story structure borrowed from professional wrestling ““ don’t let the good guys win too often. The popular culture’s enlarged interest in evil almost seems to be sexual, especially when manifested in the technically unnecessary leather outfit Sienna Miller wears in G. I. Joe.

I like violence in movies and a hot chick in leather as much as the next guy, but I don’t like despair, and I fear that despair is the ultimate philosophy hidden behind splatter films. The problem with a calling card film is that the motivation is cynical, the motivation of both the characters in the movie as puppeteered by the writers, and the exploitational motivations of the moviemakers. If the filmmakers really don’t care about the ideas and implications of their story, then they only feed the fear and biases of their viewers.

So what are the splatter freaks getting out of this movie, or any gross, gory horror story? In some crazy way it might be a sense of justice. People in these movies are being punished for minor infractions. Take Drag Me to Hell. Allison Lohman is presented as a basically good person with a streak of ambition. This is a sin for which she must pay, even when the cause of the curse she receives is unfair. For the viewer the pleasure seems to reside in the spectacle of seeing someone helplessly twist and turn in a trap and pay for bad behavior so that in the real world isn’t even a venial sin. Monsters and demons! There’s no way to win with these people!

It turns out that the Nazis do have a goal, which is to get their gold back, the money being hidden in a box in Sara’s cabin. The discovery and then the opening of the box by the frivolous youths seems to lure the Nazi zombie cannibals, led by Colonel Herzog  (Orjan Gamst), to the cabin, and anyone pocketing the coins risks attracting a specific attack. This leads to the coda, in which the final, surviving human being finds, on the brink of escape, that he has one of those coins in his pocket. It’s an uh-oh moment that is cynical and dispiriting ““ only the filmmakers don’t seem to know it because in their cynicism to construct a commercial enterprise they are inadvertently mocking human endeavor and hope.

[Spoiler alert: I discuss the plot of this film in detail.]

We’ve all seen the cup. “World’s Greatest Dad.” Michael Scott has a similar cup on his desk, one that reads “World’s Greatest Boss.” The genre is of course novelty shop humor, like one of those backyard chef’s barbecue bibs with funny sayings on them that offer slight mockery of the wearer as a kind of pre-apology for the food on the grill. In Bobcat Goldthwait’s new movie, World’s Greatest Dad, his fourth directorial effort after Shakes the Clown, Windy City Heat, and Sleeping Dogs Lie, the cup logo takes on a larger irony but ultimately takes the novelty humor of it very seriously indeed.

Robin Williams steps forward from his uncredited role as the mime teacher in Shakes to play Lance Clayton, an aspiring writer and high school poetry teacher. His class at school is under threat of cancellation, his ostensive girlfriend (Alexie Gilmore) seems to be more interested in their African-American colleague (Henry Simmons), and though he is an aspiring novelist, Clayton has never had anything published, while his colleague has a first time effort published in the New Yorker.

Despite all his frustrations in love and work, at least Clayton has a family of sorts, consisting of his teen age son Kyle (Daryl Sabara). We need to talk about Kyle. He’s a bit of a problem. He has turned that teenage phase of parental hate and embarrassment into a geographic age. Kyle’s mockery of his father, from Clayton’s enthusiasm about socializing with his son to his taste in music, which seems to consist solely of Bruce Hornsby, is relentless. Like a gold-digger on a date, Kyle flirts with going to a movie with Clayton only to make him a new computer monitor instead, and then abandon him in the mall. Anything Kyle doesn’t like is “queer.” Kyle has no friends at school. Even the Goth girl laughs at him when an athlete punches him in the hallway. He hates music, finds movies lame, and prefers anal pornography, which is why he needs the new monitor ““ to better see the gross images he downloads off the World Wide Web. This is a kid who takes clandestine pix of his dad’s girlfriend’s panties under the restaurant table and who then dies masturbating to them while undergoing erotic asphyxiation. David Carradine would spin kick in his grave.

Clayton is of course distressed to find the corpse of his son in such an unsavory situation. And he does what any parent would probably do ““ disguise the embarrassing death as a teen suicide, even going to the trouble of writing a suicide note. Unfortunately, the note is leaked to off the Internet, and in death the once despised Kyle becomes a James Dean like icon. In a twist not unlike a similar plot development in Atom Egoyan’s Adoration, Clayton exploits the interest in his son’s death to promote his own writing career. It begins innocently enough, as it probably did for “J. T. Leroy.” A thoughtful essay here, a poem there. But it develops into a full diary, forged by Clayton over a long weekend, a book that ends up on the bestseller list and lands Clayton a visit on a day time talk show. How can Clayton extricate himself from this dire situation? Like a Frank Capra hero, he makes a humiliating public confession, one that destroys his career and all the relationships he forged while operating under the ruse.

At first, I didn’t quite know what to make of World’s Greatest Dad. I saw it under certain distracting conditions, and on a disc whose playback seemed video-y and mis-formatted. Parts seemed good (the enjoyable satire of some of the students), parts seemed bad (the Goth girl’s laughter didn’t ring true, but was of course necessary for later plot mechanisms). Also, I am not the biggest Robin Williams fan in the world (though he turned out to be fine in the role). But as it happens, the film stuck with me like few others seen this year, probably because it seemed to strike deeply and uncompromisingly at an array of male fears and phobias.

For one thing, Dad confronts a little discussed minor aspect of American life: sometimes parents just don’t like the kids they’ve sired. It’s an issue that forms the basis for the popular 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. In that tale, parents find that they have spawned a high school mass murderer. That’s an extreme slice of a probable, if only occasional, reality, that a parent can look at a child and wonder where they hell they came from. It is, of course, only one of the 10 million fears that parents have, but Goldthwait, who also wrote the script, mines with over-the-top nimbleness. Misanthropes welcome here.

For another, Goldthwait is the American poet of sexual humiliation. He evinces exquisitely honed gradations of embarrassment, frustration, and jealousy. Clayton’s co-teacher girlfriend has an inexplicable interest in him, but a supremely explicable if unstated interest in the African-American teacher, who is a single dad with a good con going, unconscious or not. There is a perfect moment when, at the nadir of Clayton’s public humiliation after confessing to the fraud, the girlfriend runs to Option No. 2 and embraces him while both shoot daggers at Clayton. A masochist couldn’t ask for a better set-up. It’s a moment worthy of those other masterpieces of sexual humiliation, Malice, The Palm Beach Story, Shampoo, and Blue Velvet.

Still, for all Dad‘s occasional searing wit and tireless thumping on some of our deepest fears, the viewer still might wonder why American performers who otherwise appear to be successful prefer to dwell on failure and unhappiness and leave their protagonists with little if any hope at the end? Goldthwait has been a comic since he was 15, has been married (and divorced) with two children, and then dated Nikki Cox, his co-star on the sit-com Unhappily Ever After. Since then has had a seemingly successful career directing for television. For all intents and purposes, he has achieved a great deal. So then why does he mine childhood feelings and male neuroses? What does he get out of it and what are we supposed to apprehend?

If you thought about it long enough, you could posit the theory that comics distort the world. Think of Woody Allen. Way too many guys in the 1970s seeking a relationship took Allen’s comic persona as a role model, and operated under the delusion that women might actually like self-deprecating failures because such a male might seem honest. So while ordinary shlubs are flopping with chicks all over the country, the real life Woody Allen was dating models and actresses. In mocking the conventions of movie romance Allen unintentionally unleashed a new breed of male, programed to fail. Allen is neither the first nor the last. From Chaplin to Judd Apatow, comedians have trafficked in despair, yearning, failure. Comedies are usually, really, tragedies, often with grim or at least poignant endings. As genres, both tragedies and comedies deal in calamities, with tragedy, broadly speaking, focusing on the noble, and comedy on the quotidian. In Dad, though, Goldthwait has a weird, hybrid aim. He finds that true comedy, not just satire of current social conventions, is located in the deepest recesses of our primeval minds, in our obvious and shared but unstated fears, and treats a comic tale of ordinary people as if it is a high tragedy. Like the recent Observe and Report, World’s Greatest Dad is a comedy that isn’t really a comedy, but the marketers have to call it something. It’s an interesting experiment, if it is intentional (and not just my faulty interpretation), and shows ambitions far beyond . World’s Greatest Dad may not attract the cult following of Shakes the Clown, but it may will live on for those viewers who find it an unusually true comedy

I think I may have just about had it with reviewers.

We, all of us, have our general gripes about movie reviews as well as a constellation of betes noirs among the reviewing community who can drive us crazy if we let them. When I was a kid, there was a reviewer for the city’s main daily who basically just offered a plot summary, culled, some believed, from the movie’s press kit, since this reviewer was famous for falling asleep during advance screenings. This narcoleptic approach to movies rendered the writer utterly useless as a consumer reporter, the primary reason for a reviewer’s existence. But some of the writers who stay awake are worse. They can be shortsighted, middlebrow, cranky, and write with some inexplicable chip on their shoulder.

Don’t get me wrong. I love reviews. I read them the way most of my friends scan box scores. They have been greatly important to me over the years, offering lessons (not that I’ve necessarily learned them) in clarity, as well as being founts of unexpected wisdom. But every once in a while you bump up against a national lock step reaction against a film that is inexplicable, a stance so dispiriting and surprising that it makes you re-think what reviewing is and why people do it. Such a film and its critical reception for me was the recent Orphan, and the phalanx of critics lined up against it.

Let me say right off that not only is Orphan a superior entertainment, but it raises interesting cultural questions. I rate it up there with The Hurt Locker as one of the best films I’ve sen this year.

No one, it appears, agrees with me. I won’t name names ““ you can find them easily enough at Rotten Tomatoes ““ but the critical community joined arms and moved in lock step against this film. A few writers set the tone, and the rest of the world followed suit.

Part of me understands their reaction. The first 15 minutes of Orphan were unpromising, with its pop out scares and dream sequences. But I kept my eyes open and grew to see that Orphan is a fascinating sociological document and a superior, intelligent entertainment.

Since you probably haven’t seen Orphan, here’s the plot summary. Kate Coleman (Vera Famiga) is a mother of two with a troubled past. Her career as a pianist and teacher is derailed, she’s had drinking problems, and she may have been the cause of her surviving daughter’s deafness (either me or the movie isn’t clear about this). She also has a son, but a third child died at or before birth. Kate and her architect husband John (Peter Sarsgaard), in the wake of all this domestic tragedy, decide to adopt. A visit to an orphanage results in the couple welcoming home Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), an Eastern European 13-year-old of preternatural talent and maturity. The son takes an instant dislike to the girl; but she forms an alliance with her deaf sister; meanwhile at school, Esther’s mean girl enemies start having accidents. Though the whole thing was Kate’s idea, she begins to have doubts about Esther and the adoption, especially since Esther has a knack for twisting the knife in the vulnerable woman’s psyche. John is unable to see what Kate is talking about, and Kate’s shrink also takes Esther’s side. At a certain point in the plot, the viewer is let in on the truth of Kate’s worries, and the rest of the film is a race to see who will prevail, Kate and her maternal instinct, or the unnaturally observant and seductive Esther.

This is pulp material and largely preposterous, but within those limitations, if such they be, Orphan (credited to writers Alex Mace and David Leslie Johnson, and directed by House of Wax auteur Jaume Collet-Serra ) is a rather fascinating scrutinizing of real concerns that people have. The critics couldn’t see this. For one thing, they viewed it as a horror film, when in fact, though it has the trappings of a thriller, in reality it is more of a old fashioned “women’s picture” a weepie about a put upon mother. The film is wholly behind the attitudes and experiences of Kate. It takes her side. It views the world from her perspective, so much so that we find ourselves as mad at John for not seeing the obvious as Kate is. The opening sequence of the film is a meditation on the horrors of childbirth; not everyone has such fears of this beautiful, biological act, but enough people do to that they will be particularly freaked out by certain medical moments in those first few minutes.

And we all know how hyper-protective and micro-managing today’s upwardly mobile parents are. Orphan preys on a fear that families have of The Other (whatever that other may be) invading the home and taking it over, casting out the mother and seducing the father. I don’t know how real such fears are, but any social class that obsessed with the minutia of their children’s day to day lives must have a bunch of irrational ““ and maybe even rational ““ worries. Orphan also utilizes whatever worries that westerners might have about Russia. Though perhaps it is not been publicized as being as scary as its old incarnation, the Soviet Union, that isn’t for want of trying by some governments. Russia seems now to be richly competent in oil barony, corrupt politicians, gangsters ““ and now bad seeds.

Just on the purely practical level of plot mechanics, Orphan has one of the great shock twists of modern cinema, one that the writers, when they came up with it, must have realized was pure gold. But getting to that twist is a journey of discomfort and creepiness for the average viewer. At one point, you wonder where in the hell this thing is going. When it gets there, you can only, or at least this viewer can only, shake the head in wondrous appreciation. Yes, of course, to the “mature” scribes of our national publications, such pleasures in the craft of storytelling are to be dismissed, because they are vulgar and childish, and bespeak a sick and twisted mind. Fie on them, I say, as Stephen King might also do. If good novels these days aspires to the addictive attractiveness of children’s literature, then our best films are rooted in fairy tales, Saturday afternoon creature features, and old time serials. This doesn’t make them dumb. They don’t have to be. But it suggests that the visceral and the intellectual make a great couple.

Movie reviewing is in a state of crisis. No one reads newspapers anymore, and few people take established print reviewers as seriously as they used to now that anyone with an internet service provider and a Typepad account can “be” a movie reviewer. As papers continue to fail, old guard print scribes are let go, and this is viewed in some quarters as a loss to the national conversation about art. Those few writers who remain, at least within the New York presses, attract the ire of readers across the globe, as suggested by the recent controversy surrounding Armond White and his review of District 9 , well covered by Roger Ebert at his blog and the people responding in the talkback. The weepy sentimentality about the death of newspapers is a bit paradoxical when you think of all the stories that journalism hasn’t covered over the years, or how difficult it was for the Washington Post to keep at the Watergate story when the rest of the nation’s press ignored it. Perhaps newspapers so derelict in their duty deserve to die. The same goes for movie reviewers. Instead of spearheading new and interesting ideas and films, they bring preconceived notions and use the great grand middle brow as their fallback position. The problems surrounding White have more to do with his not going along with the prevailing sentiments about movies (and the reactions of readers on Ebert’s site are so filled with logical fallacies as to make one grieve for our educational system ““ just because “everyone” likes something doesn’t make it good) but the real problem among reviewers is close-mindedness and conventional thinking. Most of them aren’t reviewing the movies in front of their eyes, but the audiences on the other side of the breakfast table. Conventional wisdom says that regular audiences won’t like such a thing as Orphan, so the reviewers, thinking that they are anticipating the public taste, won’t either. Thus are readers and film aficionados in search of spirited, inspirational, and unconventional writing about unexpectedly interesting films rendered the true orphans.

There’s a curious moment in the recent film Paris, je t’aime.

Paris, je t’aime, you will recall, is the omnibus film about the city of light in which prominent directors celebrate the burg through stories set in each of its arrondissements. “Tuileries,” the short by the Coen Brothers is set in the Metro.

“Tuileries” opens with a shot looking down the long tracks toward a tunnel. Suddenly Steve Buscemi’s face slides into the frame from the left, first looking down at the tunnel, then turning toward the viewer, his eyes gazing into the lens in extreme Fuller-esque close-up as he looks to see if his train is on the way. There is a quick POV show of what he sees “behind” the viewer.

Then there is a cut to a long distance view of Buscemi from the other side of the tracks. In the distance we see Buscemi as we last saw him, bent over and looking in the distance. He uncrooks himself and turns to go sit down. The camera slowly zooms or tracks in for a second. Then the story, about Buscemi as a put-upon tourist abused by the locales, begins proper.

The curious thing about the long shot is that because of the shock of the extreme close up, we are hyperaware of where the camera was in proportion to Buscemi in the previous shot. But in the long shot, there is no visible camera. If in the first shot Buscemi was looking “through the camera,” in the long shot the camera simply doesn’t exist at all. But we the viewers just saw Buscemi via its agency. Where did the camera go? The shock of the cuts puts the viewer in the peculiar position of taking everything in the film suddenly literally.

One of the main goals of commercial filmmaking in the so-called classical Hollywood era was to avoid such camera consciousness. Occasionally, the camera would move or track or pan, but almost always such movements were “invisible” in the sense that the action being photographed was so vivid that the viewer was distracted from the operation of the camera. The lens was going where the narrative demanded it be in order to continue the tale with clarity. The viewer wants to see what is going to happen next, and rides the camera obliviously. One of the repellent features of modern academic film criticism to the average reader is that it creates self-consciousness about the camera, rendering it intrusive where it was suppose to be invisible.

Thus the Coens’ shot decisions appears to be self-defeating. The viewer is “taken out of the moment,” as movie biz people like to say.

But that’s nothing new with the Coens. They have done similar things from their first film on. Who can forget the tracking shot from above a saloon bar in Blood Simple in which the camera does a little hop over a drunk passed out on his stool? But such a sharp cut as the one found in “Tuileries” raises a larger question. Who in the film is doing the looking, the character or the camera? We leap from Buscemi’s POV to, so to speak, the film’s POV. We are both in Buscemi’s head and observing him simultaneously, the one thing that film can do that no other art form can. Thus the character’s POV, literal and figurative as the film progresses, gives way to the film’s attitude to Buscemi, at once both sympathetic and objective. It’s a matter of tone, a mysterious quality that we generally associate with a director’s vision.

Tone is at the center of a new approach to film studies that is beginning to make itself felt in a wealth of excellent books and articles. Well, it’s not exactly new, really, having roots in the work of the Movie writers from the early 1960s onward. And it’s not exactly sweeping the universities, as semiology, deconstruction, and other French imports did in the 1970s. But there is already a substantial body of work representing this new approach.

This field of film studies doesn’t have an official title yet, but it easily could be called Tonal Studies. As practiced by Douglas Pye, John Gibbs, George Wilson, Susan Smith, and Deborah Thomas, Tonal Studies, to put it very crudely, approaches a work of cinematic art as a series of choices, with achievements of, or fluctuations in, tone or mood providing the foundation for those choices, which in turn serve as a close reading of the film. The existence of tone implies that there is a speaker or author behind the work, but it need not necessarily be the actual, physical real world director.

The best introduction to Tonal Studies is the new, second issue of a Close-Up, edited by Pye and Gibbs.

A magazine-annual in book form published by the prolific Wallflower Press (and distributed in the United States via Columbia University Press), Close-Up offers film analyses based on directorial choices. “The centrality of tone to our experience of film is indisputable,” writes Pye, adding quickly that as “a means of focusing on the film’s address to the spectator it feels as though it should be indispensable to film criticism.”

The current issue sets forth some codifying ideas about Tonal Studies, first in the fascinating lead off essay by Pye, which scrutinizes tone in The Deer Hunter, Desperately Seeking Susan, Strangers on a Train, Distant Voices, Still Lives, and Some Came Running. It’s followed by Jacob Leigh’s excellent survey of three late Rohmer films, an essay that is especially good on Le Rayon vert. Finally, there is a fascinating study by Susan Smith of the unique use of the human voice in Hollywood cinema, with special emphasis on Father of the Bride, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Random Harvest. The utility of this approach is made clear. You see how films work, and you see how meaning is embedded not just in the dialogue, but in the decor, camera movements, and even the voice, which is sometimes at odds with the ostensible meaning of a moment.

It’s a pity that the paper or the printing process itself resulted in frame enlargement illustrations that are small and hard to see, but the exactitude of the descriptive prose of the contributors compensates, since they specialize in close readings of films, often going frame by frame. The emphasis is always on the movie as art object. In his lavish treatment of Some Came Running, Pye doesn’t cite the James Jones novel whence it came, and one wonders if Minnelli’s and the screenwriters’ deviations from the book might also offer clues as to the tone the director was aiming to achieve. Pye does cite Minnelli himself, however, from his memoir, in defiance of that brand of criticism that ignores authorial intentionality. Pye’s overall reading of Some Came Running is nuanced, detailed, and sensitive to fluctuations in tone that viewers are in fact likely pick up, but on which daily reviewer types often heap ridicule.

There are other key texts in the Tonal Studies canon. One might want to start with John Gibbs’s Mise en scene, which also includes an excellent descriptive bibliography of other books and magazines that generally use this approach. Also crucial are William Rothman’s The “I” of the Camera, Susan Smith’s Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor, and Tone, and Deborah Thomas’s Beyond Genre. Pye and Gibbs earlier anthology, Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analyses of Film has an impressive array of essays by various scholars.
Aside from writing by Robin Wood, especially in his book on Hitchcock, and the other Movie writers, the key early text is Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View, a book by philosophy professor George Wilson first published in 1986. Narration in Light contains some of the best analyses I’ve ever read of ** North by Northwest, The Searchers, and Rebel Without a Cause, among many other movies.

One of the things that intrigues me about Tonal Studies is its emphasis on directorial choices. This includes such things as where to put the camera, when to cut, and how to orchestrate the sound elements around a moment, among numerous other elements that make up a film. Different directors approaching the same material, in a remake say (Carpenter’s Halloween versus Rob Zombie’s, say), will choose different camera placements, make different edits, offer different sounds.

Yet there is a vast gulf between the tones of Hitchcock’s and Gus Van Sant’s versions of Psycho even though Van Sant replicated the original almost frame for frame, and used the same music cues. Yet Van Sant’s is odder, less realistic even though in color, campier, and in general more “gay” by making explicit the sexual identities of various characters.

Another comparison might be between Kubrick’s The Shining, which deviates greatly from the source novel, and the TV mini-series directed by Mick Garis, a “lesser” director but one more likely to be faithful to the source. Kubrick’s film twists the material into something strangely personal, as if he were re-imagining his real life as if it had gone in a wholly different direction, while also filling it with the types of scenes he is repeatedly drawn to, such as Jack and Lloyd in the bar, supplicant and officious servant. Kubrick’s hyper-realism, of setting and acting, makes the horror elements creepier, and he likes to play with audience expectation in a way that offends the horror geek. Meanwhile, Stephen King’s The Shining, is truer to the original, but is a rather typical TV movie sort of presentation, with lots of conversational padding, post-commercial scene-setting shots, and languorous pacing. If there is a tone, it is corporate. But SK’s Shining also makes Jack’s descent into madness clearer. Nicholson, as he prepares to dine on the scenery, seems crazy from the beginning. There is no moment where he ** decides to submit to the lure of the Overlook. SK‘s delineates the process of succumbing to madness much more clearly.

Is there a correlation, I wonder, between directorial choices and the choices of the characters in the movie? Does the film’s account of a character’s major decisions dictate the handling of a film, as processed through the director’s point of view? As I think about it almost every movie pivots on a key decision by a character, after which the movie is “different.” Is that a place where “tone” resides?

Take The Godfather. At one point, Michael Corleone, the one son who has never wanted to be a part of the “family business,” visits his father in the hospital, but finds all the family’s hired guards missing. Realizing quickly that his father is being isolated so that a rival mob’s gunmen can take him out, Michael hides his father and enlists another visiting innocent to play act at being his father’s guardians, standing on the hospital’s front steps. A car pulls up. The men inside see Michael and his unwilling confederate standing in silhouette. They drive away. In the aftermath of this close call, the other visitor starts to shake uncontrollably and can’t light a cigarette. Michael lights it for him, and then gazes at his hands, as if wondering, Why can I do this and he can’t? At that moment, Michael realizes that only he can inherit the role of the Don, and in the very next sequence, icily and calmly he puts forth the plan that saves the family by taking out their opponents’ leadership. His subsequent experiences in Sicily both reinforce his ethnic roots, and give him a brief and tragic experience of marital bliss. Henceforth his trusts no one, and works coldly on behalf of his family. But it all started with that non-shaking hand.

Coppola links the film to this life changing decision by ratcheting down its warmth. Night, bridges, diners, the sound of trains all take over. This is the world Michael is entering as a consequence of his life-changing decision. There is a respite. The sunny world of Sicily offers an alternative. But it is a doomed alternative. The long hand of his enemies reaches into the sacred bed chamber and snatches away his bride. Henceforth, he is closed down, and the Family supplants the family. The world becomes gray and urban, the houses emptying as bodies fall. Suddenly the camera cannot seem to penetrate Michael’s mind as it did in the cigarette lighting scene. That Coppola was able to achieve this is amazing. He watches Michael’s identity virtually shut down.

Tonal Studies doesn’t go in for character decision making per se. It concentrates on director decision making. Bu might character decision making also be a fruitful avenue of study, especially if the two are linked? Decisions, at root, are about preserving the self. Bad decisions can derail or destroy the self. Good decisions enrich it. An enriched self is one with many identities, as Charles Schwenk shows in his book, Identity, Learning, and Decision Making in Changing Organizations, a volume that has a broad application to film studies in this area despite the fact that it is geared to corporate decision-making issues. For example, Michael Corleone had many identities: son, brother, soldier, college student, fiance. The consequence of his decision on the steps of the hospital is that he comes to concentrate on only one of his identities, impoverishing his self (though it doesn’t hinder the effectiveness of his subsequent decisions as the new Don). The decisions that the director makes to present, shade, and underscore the material of the film may follow from the richness of the characters and the decisions they make.

In the interests of tracking down more information about point of view and tone, I contacted two of the subject’s primary critics, Douglas Pye, who is also a long time contributor to Movie, and George Wilson, of Narration in Light. Both were generous with their time in answering basically the same set of 10 or so questions.

ADDED FRIDAY, 31 AUGUST: Directorial decision making is also a subject investigated with great detail by David Bordwell in his many books. But for various reasons, there isn’t much communality between those who practice tone studies and Bordwell’s work, which strikes me as curious. The debate over Bordwell’s approach to film evokes memories of the debates between psychoanalysts and Behaviorists, or philosophical attacks on Logical Positivism. Though I myself wrestle with aspects of Bordwell’s writing, I am drawn to it as much as I am to the work of the tone critics.  In any case, I’ve added this paragraph in order to provide a foundation for the questions I ask the two writers about his work.

DOUGLAS PYE INTERVIEW

For starters, I’m hoping you can give me a few words about your background.

I began, many years ago, as a teacher of English in secondary schools and moved into teacher education “¦ teaching film, alongside literature “¦ at a time when a few teacher education colleges were developing some of the first film courses in British higher education. Film gradually took over from literature in my teaching and I also gradually moved out of teacher education as the college I was working in diversified.

Were you always interested in tone in movies or did the subject evolve over the course of your studies? Was there a particular moment when you realized that all these writers were all studying tone?

I don’t think I was always interested in it as a distinct concept “¦ in some ways I think that I just took its importance for granted. In literary theory tone had been a very important concept (pivotal for I.A.Richards, for instance) and it was a central dimension of much of the British and American literary criticism that I’d read and been influenced by. In close reading of novels or poems you couldn’t escape tone. It was also very much part of the wider interest in narrative point of view that I developed from reading Henry James and other late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction. When I became involved in film, these approaches and assumptions carried over to some extent. And although tone wasn’t often directly addressed as such, it was importantly there in some of the writing that influenced me when I started thinking about cinema in the mid-1960s “¦ especially Robin Wood’s early work.

It was very much later that I started to formalise my thinking about point of view in film, and even later that an interest in tone led to a series of seminars on the topic, focused on a diverse group of movies. This was part of an informal film analysis seminar for postgraduates and staff that we run in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at Reading. John Gibbs, who co-edited Style and Meaning and now co-edits Close-Up, was a founder member of the group when he was a research student. I think the impetus in relation to tone came out the fact that so many of the approaches and concepts that had been central to traditions of interpretive textual analysis had been discarded, displaced or actively rejected in the waves of theory that dominated ‘film studies’ from the early 1970s. In the way these things invariably happen, other people also started to think about tone around this time “¦ look, for instance, at Susan Smith’s book, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, which actually has ‘tone’ in its sub-title.

Could you clarify the differences been tone versus point of view?

In ** Close-Up 02 I talk about this a little and deliberately don’t come to a decisive position. These are terms that we’ve evolved to talk about complex narrative effects that can’t easily be broken down into neat categories. So many of the terms we need to use, including words like ‘narration’ as well as ‘point of view’, can seem to name specific features of a movie but the more we probe them and the movie the more problematic and slippery their referents become. There’s a danger in treating analytical distinctions and concepts as though they were things in the world. I tend to use point of view as a master term for talking about the varied relationships a film implies to its action, characters, its traditions and spectator, and so tone becomes part of that. Other people take perfectly coherent positions that see tone as somewhat distinct. In fact what happens in analysis is that as you try to trace the ways in which, for instance, attitude and emotion are embodied by a film you find that they are pervasive, affected by many areas of decision-making and the interaction between them. So whatever solidity concepts like tone and point of view might seem to have had tends to dissolve. And that’s fine.

Does focusing on the director’s decision making process re-affirm, in the end, the director as author of a given film? How do we know that a particularly cogent edit wasn’t made solely by an editor, without the input of the director?

Movie making is complicated and highly collaborative “¦ by definition films made in these ways can’t be thought of as ‘authored’ in the way that a novel normally is. An approach that wants to focus on detailed decision-making doesn’t need to commit itself to a view that the director actually made all the decisions that created the film (in fact it would be pretty mad to do so). We know how crucial the contributions of writer, cinematographer, editor and so on can be. Even so, in some areas of cinema, the primacy of the director has generally been accepted (think of the recent tributes to Bergman and Antonioni). That’s not to say that even there ‘authorship’ is uncomplicated, but it’s not generally contested. The big early battles over authorship were fought about Hollywood and were very much bound up (certainly in Britain) with attitudes to popular culture. It certainly doesn’t make sense, even in polemical terms, to affirm the director as author in a blanket way. But in the case of many films I have looked at in detail I think it does make sense to treat the director as the informing intelligence, the individual who oversaw and coordinated the different areas of decision-making but who was also responsible for the often complex interrelationships between elements that demonstrate skilful planning across the varied disciplines in film production. Skilled directors make decisions significant by making them work together. Victor Perkins writes in Film as Film that ‘film is a matter of relationships’ and it’s those relationships that detailed interpretive criticism focuses on.

How does, or ultimately how could, concentrating on tone change film studies in general?

Film Studies has many strands “¦ there are lots of things going on that tone and related matters would be pretty irrelevant to. But I believe that various forms of well argued, detailed interpretive criticism need to be central to the subject and when you become involved in those activities you have to deal with matters such as tone and point of view because they force themselves on you as you experience and analyse films. The impetus behind the Style and Meaning volume and the Close-Up series was a wish to reclaim this territory. Detailed analysis also throws up quite difficult conceptual issues that need to be addressed theoretically and there’s now quite a lot of really incisive work on narration, point of view and related matters that is also responsive to the detail of films (George Wilson’s Narration in Light is a pre-eminent example “¦ in fact, philosophers are currently providing a considerable body of interesting writing on film).

What does the “average viewer” get out of tone studies? How would this approach be utilized or applicable to a regular beat reviewer?

When we all watch movies we tend to engage quite naturally with tone “¦ it’s a decisive factor in how we experience films, as it is in conversation, our reading of novels and so on. It’s also not at all uncommon for reviewers to refer to tone. It’s academic film studies that for a long time cut itself off from these matters. So writing about tone partly involves an attempt to re-connect with something we instinctively rely on as viewers and to say that, however intangible it might feel, it isn’t just ‘subjective’ and can be sensibly discussed as part of a detailed criticism.

Tone studies bear a strong continuity with ’60s-era film criticism. At this late date, what would you say was valuable in the imported French theories of film in the ’70s?

I think you now have to consider not just imported French theory (and there were several strands in that, not just one), but later developments including the work of David Bordwell and his collaborators who were very critical (productively so) of some of the 70s paradigms and approaches. The overall landscape has changed completely. There have been very important developments in systematic film history and historiography, in the formalist analysis of film style (whatever its limitations, which I think are considerable). The period of ‘grand theory’ resulted in a greater degree of self-awareness about underlying values and assumptions in the study of film. The impact of ideological analysis has been pretty pervasive, and associated approaches to representation, especially in terms of gender, which completely transformed Hollywood studies in particular. Much of this work has been very productive.

It strikes me than an ideal exercise in isolating tone as an interpretive quality in a film might be a project such as comparing Hitchcock and Van Sant’s Psychos (and even perhaps the sequels that fell between them) “¦ a fruitful path toward interpretation and evaluation. Or does one even need a “compare and contrast” approach? The in depth frame-by-frame close readings of specific films and moments from films may be illuminating enough.

I’m not sure about comparing the two Psychos “¦ it could be productive but you wouldn’t know until you tried it. I’m also not sure about ‘isolating tone’. I want tone to be a central dimension of interpretation but as part of the process, part of the pattern of relationships you explore, not a thing in itself. In that sense I don’t think it can be isolated. Although certain elements of a film (such as music) seem often to have a large bearing on tone, it’s actually pervasive, a product of the dynamic relationship between many or all the decisions that make up the film. I think compare and contrast approaches can be illuminating “¦ in teaching they can sometimes make certain decisions easier for students to ‘see’. I base one chapter of the tone study on a comparison of two openings, although it’s not a process sustained through the detailed analysis. But whether a comparison is likely to prove fruitful is sometimes difficult to anticipate. I wrote some time ago about The Paradine Case and it was only in doing the detailed work that I began to see how closely it was connected in certain respects to Under Capricorn.

Unlike some of the other Movie critics you find some uses for David Bordwell’s work. Is there anything else in Bordwell’s writings that you find valuable besides a scrutiny of directorial decisions?

I touched on this earlier on. I’m not sure I directly draw on David Bordwell’s work but it’s so extensive and substantial that it’s always there as you do your own stuff. The historical work he and his collaborators did on Hollywood cinema, his systematic analyses of film style, just the range and seriousness of his writing, are very impressive. I found and still find his critiques of some “˜70s theory very helpful, and I often refer back to some of the distinctions between forms of narration in Narration in the Fiction Film. But I’m not the only one to find some fundamental problems at the heart of the work. So I’m very uneasy, for instance, about the attempt to separate “˜representation’ from “˜narration’ that underpins Narration in the Fiction Film and the pervasive attempt to think about style in almost entirely formal terms. These are part of the hostility to interpretation that Bordwell addressed directly in Making Meaning. Before that book appeared I wrote a short piece for Movie expressing some of my reservations and I still find the attempt to separate discussion of style from meaning to be logically untenable.

You contributions to Movie began with issue No. 20, when the format changes. Did you know the Movie critics in person or only as a force, and how did you all know you were compatible with each other?

I taught with Victor Perkins throughout the 1970s and when I wrote a piece on genre he encouraged me to submit it to the new format Movie that was being planned (this was 1975, I think). I then started to attend meetings of the editorial board and joined it a little later. I’d met some at least of the Movie writers before this in various ways. The Board had evolved from the very early days. Some of the original members didn’t attend meetings regularly because of commitments elsewhere and some new people (like Jim Hillier and Michael Walker) had previously been invited to join. Invitations were extended to people who were known to have at least some interests in common and who were sympathetic to what Movie stood for “¦ it was very much a matter of personal contacts.

GEORGE WILSON INTERVIEW

Narration in Light was published in 1986. This is undoubtedly too broad a question, but have there been many changes in your thought about point of view since then?

I’m sure I’d want to change a lot of formulations if I went through the book systematically and thought through what I said on particular points. The large issue that I have thought and written about since N in L is this: how should the concept of audio-visual narration in fiction films be conceived? There is an article called “Le Grand Imagier Steps Out,” which is reprinted in the Carroll and Chee anthology for Blackwells, that describes my newer but still somewhat tentative views on the subject. Given those views, I am now more sympathetic to the position that almost every movie has an implicit audio-visual narrator, although, in standard films, the narrator is substantially effaced. But, whether we say that there is always such a narrator doesn’t seem to me the important question. The important question is: what is the nature of audio-visual narration in film?

How did you first come upon point of view as a subject for research?

I had written a number of the essays on particular films (e.g., the discussion of You Only Live Once) before I’d written much of anything theoretical or thought about doing a book. As I looked over those essays, it struck me that the strategies that I took to be crucial in many of these movies pertained to “˜point of view’ “¦ at least if that concept was understood pretty broadly. I began to work from that intuition.

Point of view and tone appear to be used interchangeably by other writers. How would you differentiate been tone versus point of view?

For me ‘point of view’ in film has to do with the way in which a movie systematically structures the information it offers about the development of the story. Tone has to do with the emotional resonances that a film or part of a film expresses. But, two points here. This is just my sense of how I’d be inclined to use the terminology, and I don’t want to stipulate about how the terms should be used. Also, I think matters of tone and point of view are often significantly connected. Letter from an Unknown Woman is a good example of how this is so.

In the book you are careful to avoid necessarily attributing a film’s “point of view” to a director (at least if I read Chapter One correctly), while also being careful to acknowledge their contribution and the contributions of writers. If not the director, though, then whose POV are we seeing the film through? And if no one, does that make film “impersonal”? Does intentionality matter (i.e., the intentions of the filmmakers, solely or as a team)? Or am all I mixed up?

I think the best answer to this is still found in Victor Perkins’ chapter “Direction and Authorship” in Film as Film. In cases where the strategies of point of view (or other aspects of a films significance) depend crucially on the complex interrelations between different dimensions of the cinematic presentation, then it is highly likely (but not certain) that those interrelations were chiefly worked out by the director. This leaves lots of room for crediting, even in the relevant favorable cases, the great importance of the contributions of other collaborators. Even in those cases, however, I would be hesitant about saying that we are seeing the action “˜through’ the director’s point of view. Of course, a film can be set up, like Lady in the Lake, so that we are seeing the action through the Phillip Marlowe character’s point of view. But, in that sense, we normally are not seeing the action “˜through’ anyone’s point of view in a standard film. As many people have pointed out, the concept of “˜point of view,’ like the concept of “˜meaning,’ just has too many distinct but natural interpretations. The question of the importance of intentions to interpretation is very complicated. Let me say this much. If it turned out that Fritz Lang didn’t have in mind anything like the systematic unreliability that I impute to You Only Live Once, I would be extremely surprised. Given the character of the strategies I identify, I’m inclined to credit him with intending something like what I describe. However, even if I were wrong about this, it would not mean that the movie can’t be seen in detail along the lines I try to analyze. Just that possibility seems to me very striking.

Doesn’t focusing on the director’s decision-making process re-affirm, in the end, the director as author of a given film? And conversely, how do we know that a particularly cogent edit wasn’t made solely by an editor, without the input of the director?

As I say above, the elements and structures that I highlight may or may not be the result of “˜the director’s decision making process.’ But take a case where I would be inclined to say this is true, I’m uncomfortable about saying the director is the author of the movie in question. The director’s role is still quite different from the role of a person who has authored a literary work. Even in these cases I don’t want to seem to downplay the contribution of the people who “˜authored’ the screenplay. It is true that one often enough encounters a particularly striking device (a piece of editing, for example) where one is tempted to credit it to the director, and, as you suggest, this might easily be a mistake. This is why it is so important to look at systematic interrelationships that run through the film as a whole. You can still wind up giving too much credit to the director, but I think that the probabilities decline if you don’t focus on too few elements.

The chapter on You Only Live Once strikes me as a radical rethinking of Lang. Why do you think, though, that Lang has such an appeal to film scholars?

When I first wrote on You Only Live Once, I expected to find strikingly similar strategies running through a lot of his later work. So, I thought the essay did constitute a rethinking both of the movie and of Lang’s work as a director as a whole. Doug Pye has written some important articles on other Lang films in which the concept of “˜suppressive narration’ (his phrase) plays a crucial role in the overall narrational structures. However, I’d have to admit that my essay has not turned out to be as enlightening in this regard as I originally anticipated. In any case, Lang is certainly an unusually original and rigorous director.

The book seems to follow a quasi-Wittgensteinian practice, of analyzing how a film works, and then inferring “film practice” from that. Also, on page 50, the discussion of the kinds of questions that a film can raise about its characters, also strikes me as a Wittgensteinian position. You’ve taught and written on Wittgenstein: do you see any application of his ideas to cinema studies?

Yes, I have written on Wittgenstein, and he is a marvelous philosopher, but I haven’t seen much in Wittgenstein that has struck me as specifically helpful in connection with our understanding of film. Still, there are a number of excellent people who would disagree with me about this. Stanley Cavell is one, and it may be that I’m just missing some important possibilities.

Do you think that shifting attention to tone and point of view could significantly change film studies, and if so, how?

I think that there has been something of resurgence in interest in some of these topics. Obviously, I believe that this is a good thing. It is good to think through the issues in relation to more recent films. I don’t know how much this is likely to change film studies, but, of course, there are lots of perfectly valid projects that film studies quite properly encompasses. Overall, I would like to see a more careful deployment of argument and evidence in film discussions of all sorts. This just reflects, I guess, my training in analytic philosophy.

What does the “average viewer” get out of tone studies? And how could this approach be utilized or applicable to a regular beat reviewer or popular journalists?

I’ve been teaching for a lot of years, and naturally one gets a variety of responses from the “˜average’ and “˜not so average’ viewers in that setting. But a fair number of students are quite struck in a positive way by the fact that movies can have such a surprising richness and complexity. Some say, “I never would have dreamt that so much could be going on “¦ especially in a Hollywood film.” I also believe that for many these movies serve as case studies for the delicate ways in which our perception of a course of action can be affected by what we do and do not notice and by the way in which we process the information we gain. Still, I have to admit that other students find such analyses boring and fussy. There can be a real resentment at the idea that mere entertainments are getting over intellectualized in this way. One hopes that the analyses get people to see the movie in a notably different way, and then one hopes that they enjoy the perceptual shift.

Tone studies bear a strong continuity with ’60s era film criticism, and certainly seems like an endeavor that is much more fruitful and more interesting to read. At this late date, what would you say was valuable in its competing approaches, the imported French theories of film in the ’70s?

I suppose that the rise of theory in the 70’s brought a useful self-consciousness about theoretical and political commitments that were sometimes implicitly presupposed in certain interpretative projects. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of sympathy with most of the theoretical commitments that were favored during the period. But, that is a very long and familiar story. I also don’t believe that there is a coherent cognitivist account that I can endorse, although I feel much closer to a range of cognitivist researchers. Maybe this is a point where I have been influenced by Wittgenstein “¦ suspicious of the idea that fruitful theoretical frameworks are to be found very readily. I don’t have an argument for such a suspicion. It is probably a matter of my gut sense of the nature of the questions that interest me most.

Would an ideal exercise in isolating point of view as an interpretive quality in a film be to compare Hitchcock and Van Sant’s Psychos (and even perhaps the sequels that fell between them)? Or does one even need a “compare and contrast” approach, since the in-depth frame-by-frame close readings of specific films and moments from films may be illuminating enough?

It might be interesting to compare Hitchcock’s Psycho and Van Sant’s. I really just don’t know. I certainly do think that there is a range of comparisons and contrasts that one might carry out, but you can be concerned with a vast number of narrative and narrational parameters, and they will set the agenda for the comparative work you want to do. In one article, I compare Murder My Sweet with Fight Club because they both employ sequences in which we are shown certain narrative action taking place from an impersonal point of view where the sequences in question employ images that reflect the specific mode of perceptual experience of one of the key characters. It’s hard to know in advance just what range of films one would need to examine.

Your chapter on You Only Live Once also seems to suggest that movies do merit, require “interpretation,” contra the popular impression of Bordwell’s work. Bordwell seems to be something of a bete noire among writers on tone and point of view. Yet he seems to be in the same ball park, at least as far as scrutinizing directorial decision making. What do you find valuable in Bordwell’s writings?

I think that Bordwell’s anti-interpretative stance has been unfortunate and not in the end defensible. I have written at some length on this in the past (in the anthology on film and analytic philosophy edited by Allen and Smith for Oxford.) However, there is a great deal that I have found valuable in Bordwell’s various writings, and I really don’t know where to begin in making a list. He is a very important figure. I certainly envy him his vast knowledge of the history of film.

Andrew Sarris once famously called Samuel Fuller an “authentic American primitive.” Sarris went on to write that the “excitement Fuller arouses in critics sensitive to visual forms is equaled by the horror he arouses in critics of the Left for the lack of social perspective in his films.”

The charge of primitivism, which also has a political component suggesting conservative views, became unfashionable as Fuller grew more famous, but seeing his first three films for the first time all in a row, thanks to the new Criterion-Eclipse set, The First Films of Samuel Fuller (Eclipse-Criterion, three discs in slim cases, $44.95, street date Tuesday, August 14, 2007), makes clear why Sarris held this opinion about Fuller back in 1967 when he was compiling his book The American Cinema, which appeared before Fuller became the darling of the German New Wave and before Fuller himself directed Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße, The Big Red One (1980), White Dog (1982), Les Voleurs de la nuit (1984), Samuel Fuller’s Street of No Return (1989) and the TV movie The Day of Reckoning, which do little to undermine Sarris’s assessment. I don’t think that these films would necessarily modify the “accusation” of primitivism, but some of them were more prestigious. In any case, Fuller’s crude, bombastic style is the very thing that his fans like about him, his knack for cutting through the decorous crap with which most filmmakers drape their projects. Fuller was the original “in your face” director, both figuratively and literally.

If Sarris overstates Fuller’s political conservatism, which is primarily based on the seeming anti-communist thread in Pick Up on South Street, made for Fox, he also overstates the number of close-ups in I Shot Jesse James. The western is not as dramatically awash in close ups as Sarris asserts, although maybe there were relatively more close ups in Fuller’s film than most of its contemporaries. But they also tend to be highly dramatic, so that, like the lions Potemkin, you tend to remember more of them than were actually there. One suspects that Sarris was going on memory here rather than on a recent reviewing of Jesse James. Fuller political views, as became obvious with later films, and which he enunciated cleaerly in his posthumous autobiography, A Third Face, are of what you might call the “macho Democrat” variety of Hemingway, Mailer, and other dogfaces turned writers.

It’s true that Jesse James opens with some rather impatient, menacing, disorienting close ups. And Fuller was prone to the shock close up, what Mike Nelson and the film crew call a rouchet. But there is a great deal of variety to Fuller’s visual style, as Sarris also points out. In The Steel Helmet, there is a great deal of camera movement, and Hollywood great James Wong Howe even photographed the low budget The Baron of Arizona.

Sarris places Fuller in that second tier of muscular filmmakers that includes Anthony Man, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, and Raoul Walsh (Boetticher is in the third tier, but should be up there with these other boys). The big mystery of Fuller’s career, however, is why he didn’t end up like Edgar G. Ulmer. Fuller’s roots had all the proper earmarks, including a vigorous, noirish visual style attached to diverse films labored upon in financially impoverished circumstances. Ulmer was “exiled” to Poverty Row because of his affair with a top executive’s wife. Fuller started there and clawed his way to the top, at at least near the top, with brazenness and sheer force of will.

All three of the films in the Eclipse box were produced by Robert Lippert, a minor if prolific mogul at the time. Lippert’s hefty catalog was recently picked up by Kit Parker films, and this Fuller box appears to be a collaboration between Criterion-Eclipse and Kit Parker. Fuller speaks warmly of Lippert in his memoir. Lippert had the guts to back a neophyte when it was still unusual for a screenwriter to take over the directorial reins.

Fuller makes it clear that he was utterly uninterested in the western aspects of his first film, I Shot Jesse James, released in 1949. Like many of Walsh’s films, it’s really a male love story, a man who killed the thing he loved, which he can only admit with his dying breath. Fuller didn’t care much for Jesse James, whom he called a pervert and a transvestite. But he didn’t share that view with Lippert, to whom he supplied what he was contracted to give, a western. For Fuller, though, it was a shadow play, a morality tale about the mistakes we make in our lurch toward what we take to be freedom.

In the case of Bob Ford (a sometimes visibly intoxicated John Ireland), it is marriage to Cynthy (an unexpectedly rounded and affecting Barbara Britton). His drive to be with Cynthy is so desperate and so inhuman that it screams for subterranean interpretation.

The play begins like all childlike morality plays. “I still have enough to get Cynthy a ring,” Ford mutters to himself idealistically. As Ford, Ireland is an uncertain, stoop shouldered figure, and he walks very much like Henry Fonda, his shirt, at least in the beginning, like John Wayne’s in The Searcher‘s

The film is called I Shot Jesse James, but the point of view is divided up among several protagonists. With whom should we lay our sympathy? In fact, there are no heroes or sympathetic figures in the movie. It is an objective study: and yet it isn’t. Fulller’s sympathy is expansive. He likes everybody. He cannot pick and chose among his characters the way that Hollywood conventionally demands that their directors do.

One thing I noticed from Jesse James was how exquisite a photographer of women Fuller ((in collaboration with his DPs) he happened to be. Britton has one of the longest, most kissable necks in all cinema, and Fuller makes full play with it. Other facets of Fuller’s pre-movie past, when he was a reporter, that are more recognizable are his penchant for headlines to advance the story. Less predictable are the theatrical aspects of the story, that is, that at one point Ford becomes an enactor of his own story on stage, though a poor one. There, he is booed for not killing James, while in the real world he is viewed as a coward and an opportunist. As in all of the Fuller films included in this set, there is a moment when the protagonist is subjected to a terrible public humiliation, in this case when Ford breaks down on stage, his guilt becoming a subject of public discourse.

Being a Lippert production, there is a lax attention to detail. For example, in one scene Ford, referring back to an earlier moment, gets the the number of guys he shot worng. And the day for night contrast in the final shoot out is unnerving. Otherwise, I Shot Jesse James is an efficient, psychologically complex film that is as ravishing a debut as Citizen Kane.

With Steel Helmet, the second film on the disc, the viewer is in Stanley Kubrick territory: it’s like that director’s unviewable Fear and Desire. At the same time, it anticipates Fuller’s own Shock Corridor. At the same time it is like Fuller’s future Shock Corridor and The Big Red One.

What is interesting about the film is that one of the name of one of the main characters may have been borrowed by Spielberg for the second Indiana Jones film (“Short Round”), and that unlike most Hollywood films, there is no true heroically buffed main character at the center of the film. Gene Evans, as the man under the steel helmet, is at bottom not likable. That goes against Hollywood practice. But it is fully in line with Fuller’s personal view of what war is like, and what it does to people who fight it.

The Baron of Arizona is probably one of Fuller’s least seen films, as well as one of the most unusual or unexpected works in his catalog. For those reasons, it is arguably the most revelatory addition to the box. What a bizarre story, and wholly based on actual events! The narrative tells the long, convoluted tale of one man’s attempts to pull the biggest scam in American history. Despite the fact that Vincent Price plays the “villain,” like Gene Evans in Steel Helmet, he sucks at cigars non-stop, like Fuller in real life. There is little doubt that there is an edge of identification by Fuller in the lead characters in these three films.

And Price sinks his teeth into a role that demands that he play in succession a bureaucrat, a step-father, a monk, a gypsy, a lover, and a baron. There is always something hammy about Price’s approach to roles but here the ham is an indice to the multiple layers of the plot as Price is always acting at being someone he isn’t. And what a lot happens in this plot-packed film, from gypsy raids to lynchings. Decor is subtly, or not to subtly, employed to underscore Price’s rise in power, from a small monk’s cell to a huge office that sports a fabulous map of Arizona behind it, the cake he is about to slice up.

And what a relief that the Eclipse films come shed of supplements. One can dive right into the movies. Many film buffs may demand more than the anonymous text on the inside cover of the slim cases, to me it was a holiday. Thank god I don’t have to either feel guilty for not reading what little there was (as I did not). What the lack of scholarly apparatus also means is that innocent viewers will be able to experience Fuller’s first three films the way original filmgoers did.

It’s time to redefine film noir. Or perhaps refine the living definition. Or return to the original definition and work from there. Or scrap the whole genre and its outmoded definition and start over.

You think you know what noir is, don’t you? You think film noir is a minor genre that thrived from the early 1940s to 1958, one that focused on troubled men lured into criminal situations by their own bad judgment and the wiles of a seductive woman, all ending when fate, in the form of the law, reaches out its long arm to snatch them all up? You think that film noir is a heightened genre in which the visuals tell half the story, in which long shadows and venetian blinds and rain swept corners and curling plumes of cigarette smoke are as important as dialogue, if not more so.

If this is your definition, then how do you explain the presence of such films as House on Telegraph Hill, Panic in the Streets, House of Bamboo, or Dillinger in recent sets of supposed films noir. Or put another way, how loose of a definition of film noir do you want?

The DVD distributors no doubt want a definition as fluid and flexible as they already seem to have. Or maybe a definition ever more porous. Film noir is probably the most popular of the genres that sell on disc. Its films come in mostly well-priced and attractive boxes in bright colors and fun typefaces, they seem to epitomized “classic” Hollywood, and they break the color barrier: i.e., kids who normally abjure black and white films will watch noirs. Critically, each box is greeted as if it is the salvation of motion pictures. They don’t make like they used to! What great old films, each and every one!

If a person truly loves noir, shouldn’t they also be seeking out the films of French poetic realism of the 1930s, films such as Pepe le Moko or Le Jour se leve? Or, some of the films of pre-World War II German expressionism, such as Lang’s M, films whose visual style clearly pre-dated the use of shadows and unusual angles in true American noir. The answer is yes, they should: but they don’t. Noir has become a wholly American thing, its roots in other cultures ignored by consumers, its life span artificially elongated, like a dying patient on life support, a very un-noir way to go.

And is noir even a genre? When the two Toulouse-based intellectuals Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton came to write their book A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941 – 1953, they called it a “series” rather than a genre. It’s an interesting distinction to make, because it ends up emphasizing the short lived nature of the cycle of noir films. In their book, which was finally published in English in 2002, they don’t define the genre, but rather offer a set of five key noir characteristics (roughly: dreamlike, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel) that proves not to be especially helpful, and then they give you a list of noirs, a subdivided taxonomy from which we are supposed to infer a definition. Later, when Raymond Durgnat came to attempt a definition of noir for the British magazine Cinema, he ended up sub-dividing the films by cycles and motifs, such as sociological films, prison films, juvenile delinquent films, and so on. Thus, in 1970 when the article first appeared, and just two years after Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg had introduced the term “noir” to American criticism in their book Hollywood in the Forties, noir was already out of control, a casserole pot for whatever likes or linkages the critic cared to include. The first chapter of James Naremore’s book More Than Night offers the best treatment I’ve found of the difficulties of defining noir.

But here’s an easy definition of film noir: it’s a film whose images are used to illustrate the cover of a film noir book (and there are a lot of them: I have over 50 noir books on my shelves).

The current pro-noir situation is only one instance of a wholesale celebration of the cinematic past as if there had never been a bad movie made in Hollywood. Is there no film so bad it doesn’t deserve a special edition with a making of, the trailer, a booklet, and two or three audio commentaries in which the same film noir specialists pontificate and the surviving filmmaker, regardless of how minuscule his role, is dragged from the the precipice of the grave to have one final day in the sun?

I share a lot of these prejudices. Noir is my favorite genre, and I love collecting the discs and reading up on the films. But at a certain point one has to admit that nor every film out of the past is of equal weight. But in any case, these were the issues plaguing me as I work my way through the new Warner Bros. five-disc, 10-movie set, Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4.

The disc people will probably take out first is No. 2, which features Crime Wave, with an audio commentary track featuring crime novelist James Ellroy, along with the related film Decoy. In any case, that’s what I did. Crime Wave (released in 1954, but shot in 1952) proved to be an interesting little policier presented in the documentary mode, with stylistic roots in the Hellinger style of street realism. Shot in only 13 days by notable Hollywood director Andre de Toth for Warner Bros., it is an urgency and rawness that is only accentuated by its brash lighting, especially in the interiors, its tinny, almost drive-in movie level sound production, and its authentic locations.

Sterling Hayden is the Robbery-Homicide cop investigating a cheap little gas station knock over that balloons into a manhunt for a team of crooks that includes Charles Bronson (under his real name), Ted de Corsia, and Timothy Carey. It’s worth noting that Hayden, de Corsia, and Carey would appear together again two years later in Kubrick’s The Killing, and that Kubrick’s film may also have borrowed its look from Crime Wave, as the audio commentators point out.

What the yak trackers don’t point out is that Crime Wave has a plot that is an expanded version of a subplot in Michael Mann’s Heat, and that when we first meet the film’s innocent, ordinary couple, Gene Nelson and Phyllis Kirk, they are in bed together, a single bed, not the dual beds the MPAA equivalent demanded. Otherwise, Eddie Muller and his pal Ellroy cover all the film’s bases, from the exact locations where the film was shot to the backgrounds of the film’s cast. Ellroy clearly tickles Muller, who generously and sincerely laughs along with Ellroy’s shtick. Among the things we learn about Ellroy in the two-way chat is that he is self-conscious about going bald, and he thinks that Crime Wave is a better film than Chinatown. It is unclear whether he had ever seen Crime Wave before, however, as Ellroy dissolves into loud canine panting whenever a recognizable location, such as the original Bob’s Big Boy or the LA police department, pops up, as if the film were new to him. On a side note, this track appears, from internal evidence, to have been recorded early in 2006. Is it possible that Warner, in creating this set, combined what would have been two separate boxes, thus holding back a few of the films whose audio commentary tracks might have been more timely if released closer to recording?

In addition there is the film’s trailer, and a short new “making of” featuring, for no discernible reason and to no profitable end for the viewer, that pontificating windbag with nothing to say, Richard Shickel. Fortunately he is joined by others who do have something to say, including Oliver Stone, Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, Christopher Coppola (who sounds just like his brother Nicolas Cage), and de Toth himself in archive footage. In any case, Crime Wave is an efficient programer, but I’m not so sure that it is a noir, what with its photorealism and its reasonably happy ending.

Warner Bros has cleverly paired Crime Wave on the same side of the second disc with Decoy, as Decoy is written by one of the actors in Crime Wave, Ned Young, a writer and actor who suffered at the hands of HUAC. It’s a complex tale adapted from a radio play by Stanley Rubin concerning a femme fatale named Margot Shelby (British actress Jean Gillie, who was briefly married to the film’s director Jack Bernhard , and who died a few years later with very little of a film career), who contrives to ensorcel a doctor (stage actor Herbert Rudley ) into reviving her sugar daddy, a dead row inmate (Robert Armstrong), after his execution, so that she and her third lover (Edward Norris ) can dig up the buried loot. The plot isn’t told in an orderly fashion, however. After a mysterious, zombie-film style opening, the tale is told in elaborate flashback form by Shelby to tough guy cop Joe Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), who also figures in a lot of her flashback, as she lay dying.

Shelby is touted as filmdom’s cruelest femme fatale, but I didn’t find her so “bad.” Her crime career is carefully motivated, and she kills with less lurid excitement than Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity or Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy. She is an entertaining creation, however, because she seems fully fleshed out by the script and by Gillie: literally it seems, as her daring cleavage was commented on by Variety, as the disc points out.

In any case, though Decoy doesn’t bear any of the visual traces we associate with, or should associate with, noir, it does include a essentially moral man whose will is sapped by the demoness who takes down everyone with her in her pursuit of money. But that may be due to the fact that the film was made for Monogram, the so-called poverty row studio, which later became Allied Artists, only to be consumed by Warner, itself in turn consumed by Ted Turner. Hence the film’s presence in the set.

As with all the films in the box, Decoy comes with an audio commentary track, this one with writer and producer Stanley Rubin, hosted by Glenn Erickson, a film editor, filmmaker, and writer (he says on the track that the site DVD Savant is his, while I always thought it was attached to DVDTalk). Erickson is giddily enthusiastic to have Rubin on the air, and solicits many amazing little nuggets of Hollywood lore from him, such as that he almost “discovered Marilyn Monroe, and that he also cast Clint Eastwood in his first movie, years later collaborating with him again on White Hunter, Black Heart. The little making of that follows is shorter than the one for Crime Wave, but features a more interesting selection of pundits, including Dick Cavett and Molly Haskell. But I will have more to say about the pundits and audio commentators for this set in future installments.

I was a little puzzled why Hot Fuzz didn’t do better on the American circuit. Hot Fuzz is, of course, the follow up to the same team’s Shaun of the Dead. With Simon Pegg and Nick Frost once again front and center, and with Edgar Wright behind the camera, where he also co-authored the script with Pegg, you’d think that the returns would at last match the zombie film. But despite having what one would presume to be a built in viewership, the film only made some $3 million dollars its first weekend, before eventually crawling up to $28 million. Worldwide the film has made $78 million so far. Then I took a closer look at the numbers, and found that Shaun also only made $3 mil its first weekend and accumulated only $13 million in the U. S back in 2004. Shaun is probably an example of a film that is notable less for how many people like it than for who it is that like it, people like Harry Knowles and Kevin Smith. The same, perhaps, with Hot Fuzz, and no doubt it will be as big on DVD as Shaun ended up being.

Hot Fuzz (Universal, $29.98, widescreen 2.35:1, also in separate full frame and HD editions, street date Tuesday, July 31, 2007) is as funny a loving parody of buddy cop films as it was on the big screen. As you know, it concerns a talented cop shuffled off to a bucolic English village where he won’t show up the city police. There he nevertheless unearths grand crimes and buddies up with the Chief’s son. The loving parody part comes in with the replications of famous moments from such films as Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon. So why did the film underperform here? I’d speculate that it is for two reasons. One, Americans don’t like their buddy cop films mocked. Look what happened to The Last Action Hero. And anyway, most buddy cop films are already half comedies to begin with. But second, the action is all set in an English village with jokes directed at peculiar English concerns, which flow over or under the heads of mono-cultural Americans. Well, I hope it does better on DVD because it is a terrific, hilarious film that also earns its place among the films of Michael Bay, Richard Donner, and Shane Black.

Extras are abundant. There is a short gag moment, outtakes, storyboards, a trivia track, 22 deleted scenes with optional commentary, “Danny’s Notebook,” which is a flip book, trailers for other Rogue pictures, a video record of the US publicity tour (28 minutes long), in which at one moment Wright and Frost comically stuff payola in Harry Knowles’s shirt, enacting redundantly what so many filmmakers do figuratively, a collection of bowdlerized moments (just over three minutes), and a commentary track with Pegg and Wright.

Going the other way, there are certain American personalities who always attract European documentarians. One of them is the cartoonist John Callahan, who has had at least three docs made about hiim. Another is James Ellroy. James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, made by Austrian television, came out in 1993. That was followed by James Ellroy’s Feast of Death in 2001. Now comes James Ellroy: “American Dog” (Facets, $29.95, widescreen 1.85:1, in English, French, and Duch, street date Tuesday, July 24, 2007). Made in 2005 by Clara and Robert Kuperberg, who co-wrote and co-directed this 57 minute movie.

Ellroy is not only a great American writer, he single handedly changed the detective novel, not unlike three of his predecessors, Hammett, Chandler, and McDonald. Ellroy’s slangy, jazzed up, telegraphese style moves so fast and contains so many hypertext links that he made the ordinary crime novel seem sluggish and old fashioned. Suddenly, hundreds of other books on the same crime section shelves of book stores and libraries were rendered out of date.

Essentially, as he did in Reinhard Jud’s Demon Dog, Ellroy tells his story again: battling parents divorce and mother ends up murdered, Ellroy becomes a prowler, drug addict, drunk, fixates on the Black Dahlia case and that of his mother, and a later revisitation of the case as a successful adult writer opens old wounds. Unlike Jud’s film, which spent a lot of time driving around Los Angeles as if it were an alien third world, the Kuperberg’s pull a bit of a Erroll Morris and show Ellroy sitting under staged Bava-esque lighting telling his story to the camera, or reading from his books while shown walking around ex-crime scenes wearing a series of brightly colored and flowered Hawaiian shirts. Ellroy is a straight talker. He tells the truth, in truth’s own language, which is blunt and foul. He doesn’t converse, he lays down the law. He walks a bit like a nerd, and looks like a cross between G. Gordon Liddy and an aging yet fit L. A. patrolman.

The defining moment for Ellroy within the context of his mother’s death was learning that there were two worlds, the official 1950s with its apple pies and mown lawns, and the world of bars and drugs and loose women and men who can murder them and get away with it. He’s like the Teresa Wright character in Shadow of a Doubt, who finally sees the underbelly of Santa Rosa when her serial killer uncle drags her into a nightclub.

Extras include two cinematic records of dinners with Ellroy and some of his friends, first a 13 minute conversation with novelist Bruce Wagner (who pretends that Ellroy hasn’t written My Dark Places), and Rick Jackson, an LAPD cop friend of Ellroy’s, a second 12-minute segment with Dana Delany (a recent muse of Ellroy’s), Joe and Matthew Carnahan and Michelle Grace, a producer, who are the team making White Jazz, and Wagner again. Plus there is a reading by Ellroy from American Tabloid, Ellroy receiving the Jack Webb award (an award given out by the LAPD), and two photo galleries, one of vintage postcards, the other of crime scenes, from a book derived from the LAPD archive for which Ellroy wrote the intro.

One of Ellroy’s favorite authors is Ian Rankin, whose Rebus books are profligate. Set in Edinburgh, these are grim, realistic, carefully plotted books (that should be read in order), that, though they like the kind of prose stylization we associate with Ellroy, do have a cumulative power due to the attractiveness of Rebus himself, the harried DI. They are politically neutral though with a slight liberal tilt, which also runs counter to what we assume about Ellroy.

Nevertheless, Ellroy endorses Rankin’s work, and by now some 10 of the novels have been turned into TV movies, first with a youngish John Hannah, and more recently with an appropriately run down and dragged out Ken Stot. Rebus Set 2 (Acorn Media, $49.95, widescreen 1.85:1, street date Tuesday, July 31, 2007) gathers four of them (“The Black Book,” “A Question of Blood,” “Strip Jack,” and “Let It Bleed”), which aired in 2006 (these shows are technically from series three). The shows are accurate accounts of the books, and generally cover cases with profound effects on the city.

It’s hard to imagine a better actor to inhabit Rebus than Stott. His Rebus is angry and dedicated and has a long memory, and Stott appears to melt into the role, his shoulders slumped, his face haggard, his black suit worn to a glossy moistness. He is accompanied on most of his cases by Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke (Claire Price), whose face seems permanently sent in an expression of rabbit-like worry. His nemesis is his boss Detective Chief Inspector Gill Templer (Jennifer Black), essentially a good person but who has to answer for Rebus’s irregularities. In these details, Rebus rather mirrors the similar and more beloved series Touch of Frost.

The four episodes come in fine, if somewhat soft transfers, and with extras, a 50 minute or so making of and a trailer, confined to the fourth disc, plus text only actor and writer biographies related to each episode.

Continuing the British theme is Starter for 10 (HBO, $95, widescreen 1.85:1, street date Tuesday, July 31, 2007), which is most interesting for its cast of future stars than for the upbeat if familiar story itself. The plot concerns the working class Brian Jackson (James McAvoy) a student at Bristol University in 1985 whose goal in life is to serve on the school’s college bowl team. While struggling through college he is torn between two women, the blonde Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve), who wants to grow up to be an actress or a presenter, and Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall), the Molly Ringwaldish radical Jewish activist. Unlike The Way We Were, he ends up with the radical. All in all it comes across like a well-meaning Disney channel teen film, covering all the expected events in just the manner we expect to see them. Again.

All the actors are from elite acting families and will be heard from again (McAvoy has already been in The Last King of Scotland), and the actress who plays Brian’s mother, Catherine Tate, is the next Doctor Who partner. The widescreen transfer is fine, and extras consist of a pop up trivia guide, and an HBO “First Look” at the film.

When I told a colleague that I had to get off the phone in order to finish a review of the Premonition DVD, the question came up, “Why are you reviewing that film?” “Because I like Sandra Bullock.” “No you don’t! You told me you didn’t like her.” My reply was, “I have always liked her. It is unthinkable that I would ever say what you are attributing to me. It is simply not true.” My love for her may not run as deep as that for Lindsay Lohan, but it is sincere and consistent.

And indeed I’ve been a fan of Bullock’s since Speed, like everyone else. Her spunkiness on the screen, where she more or less supplanted Meg Ryan in the kookiness wars, was not matched by business savvy off screen, evinced in her appearing in the sequel. Earlier, though, she was dignified in the otherwise girly role as the sidekick cop in Demolition Man, and powerful and underrated in the now ignored Wrestling Ernest Hemingway . My love I was especially taken with her in While You Were Sleeping, and subsequently Bullock has always excelled at lonely loners and oddball brainiacs, such as in The Net, which I also enjoyed. The kooky thing got old after a while ( Hope Floats, Forces of Nature), but one residue of them is that you almost always knew what a Sandra Bullock movie was going to be like. She was the author of a brand.

And as one must be, also a producer of her own movies, while still maintaining the kookiness franchise in the Congeniality movies. But, inevitably as it does to all actresses, maturity came to claim her. In recent years she was excellent in Crash, and better as Harper Lee in Infamous than Catherine Keener was in Capote. Earlier this year she had another serious role in Premonition, as a woman who finds her self in a time shift, a sort of Groundhog Day times two in which every other day she lives through a day in the future, after her husband has been killed in a car crash and other haphazard injuries have been inflicted on her kids and herself.

Though I respect what Bullock wants to do as she gets older (she is only 42, but that is something like 60 in Actress Years), I generally don’t relish seeing her in the serious stuff. The film ended up making almost $50 million dollars but these days that translate into a “disappointment,” and in any case, the trailers were not so hot, more confusing than intriguing. The Forgotten had enticing trailers, for example, but was a crappy movie; here, the opposite dynamic was in play. Premonition is an OK movie, not quite my thing, but Bullock is good in it, and it is movies like these, in which stars work so hard only to be more or less ignored, that must give them pause, make them stop and wonder why the hell they are doing this in the first place.

Bullock plays Linda Quinn Hanson, the female half of a perfect household. But one day she wakes up and time has shifted forward a week, after her husband, Jim (Julian McMahon), has died in a tragic highway accident right out of the Final Destination movies (in fact, Premonition reminds me of a film from the 1990s with a then-current flavor of the week starlet as a character who keeps waking up in a different world alternately with or without her boyfriend. I’ve been unable to remember the actress, the title, the plot, or the year, but I know it was out there). Of course, people think she is crazy, and she keeps picking up misleading hints as to her husband’s secret life (possibly with co-worker Amber Valletta). The script, credited to Bill Kelly, who likes time warp movies (he also wrote Blast from the Past and the forthcoming Enchanted), walks a delicate line between what Linda learns and what she really learns, but the film does demand that you mentally keep an accounting book going on the whole time. The cause of this disruption in time is never explained, just as it is also not explained in Me Myself I, one of numerous time warp movies from the 1990s that also include Sliding Doors and the movie I can’t remember.

For this reason, Premonition is probably idea for the home market, where you can pause, review, discuss amongst yourselves, and basically hash out the plot. What’s interesting about the film is how Linda’s moods and attitudes change with each new day, at one point deciding that Jim deserves to die and all she has to do is nothing. If the film has a major flaw, besides being confusing, it is humorlessness, although there is a scene of high comedy where Jim’s coffin falls and breaks and his head goes rolling down the street.

As is to be expected from a major release from a big company, Premonition comes in a fine widescreen transfer (2.40 enhanced), with excellent Dolby Digital 5.1 sound in English and French, with English, French, and Spanish. The main supplement is the rather quite audio commentary with director Mennan Yapo ( Lautlos) and with Bullock herself, where the emphasis is on character motivation and shooting process.

There are also five deleted scenes with optional director’s commentary, most of the scenes excised for purposes of pacing (still not successful since Premonition still has a glacial pace), and an alternate ending, which turns out to be no ending at all. Following this, there are two making ofs, “Glimpses of the Future: Making Premonition,” about 15 minutes, and mostly boilerplate promotional material, and the slightly shorter “Bringing Order to Chaos,” which helpfully puts the days of the film in chronological order. This is followed by the two part “Real Premonitions,” about 30 minutes, and three minutes of gag reel material, mostly having to do with dead birds or pranks on the actors (which also show Bullock to be a fun person to have on the set). Finally there are trailers for Across the Universe (seemingly a cross between Hair and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), The Messengers, and Ghost Rider. I wish that they had also included her appearance on The Daily Show where she came across, as always, as a game girl who likes to have fun, and where she was quite forthright about getting lost in the labyrinth of the plot.

Premonition, in widescreen, full frame and Blu-Ray formats, comes in a keep case. The widescreen edition streeted on Tuesday, July 17th, and retailed for $28.95.

In case you don’t know it yet, Foyle’s War is one of the best shows on the tube. There are several reasons for this. The program appears only intermittently, which gives the creator and writer Anthony Horowitz, time to research and develop each movie length script. The show is also perfectly cast, with Michael Kitchen as the reticent but firm Christopher Foyle, Anthony Howell as the dedicated Paul Milner, and Honeysuckle Weeks as Samantha Stewart, Foyle’s tomboyish red haired Police driver. And the mysteries themselves, always keyed to some long-forgotten but interesting aspect of life during wartime, are invariably clever.

Television fanatics have been retraining themselves over the past decade. In the old days, we watch prime time shows religiously from September to June, circling our itinerary in TV Guide (one of my favorite hobbies as a kid, anticipation always being greater than the reality). During the summer we moaned in agony, having to fall back on reading books (I used to methodically re-read all my Marvel comics from cover to cover, even the letters sections). Then, come autumn and school and the Fall previews issue of TV Guide, it would begin again.

But now we have adapted to different styles of programing. We can wait a year between episode samplings of The Sopranos, or follow shows that start only in January, like 24. I think it was the sequelitis of movies from the 1980s that helped train us, having to wait a year or two between Star Wars editions the way the kids today wait for Harry Potter movies. But in any case, the result is that we now accept the long waits between shows like Foyle’s War and so many other British crime imports.

Now the fourth box of Foyle’s eps is out, thanks to Acorn Media (having just aired on PBS’s Mystery). Streeting on Tuesday, July 17th, the set contains four discs, each in a slim case, and retails for $59.99. It is a measure of the show’s increasing popularity that either the producers of the show or the DVD manufacturers are including more in the way of extras with each release. In this set, Michael Kitchen even steps forward to welcome the viewer to the DVD edition. It’s true that most of the supplements are still text features, such as cast bios and backgrounds to the episodes, but with each new box the producers offer longer and more interesting making ofs. The shortish doc included here lauds the show’s attention to period detail and emphasizes how each episode requires the time and effort of a feature film.

There is a modicum of confusion attached to this box, which is numbered 4, but which contains seasons four and five of Foyle’s War, which in England were only two episodes each. Series six, which is slated to air in the UK in 2008, will come to Americans as season five.

Taken all together, the Foyles will end up being a popular history of World War II from the viewpoint of those at home. For example, the first film in the set, “Invasion” takes place in 1942, and concerns the invasion of England by – the Americans. Aside from an exploration of the resulting tensions and opportunities, there is a clever mystery and a touching story of friendship. Also set in 1942 is “Bad Blood,” which concerns a biological warfare test that goes awry, and the murder hidden within it. Later in 1942 comes “Bleak Midwinter,” in which murders take place around a munitions works, and Milner’s ex-wife is also killed. Finally, “Casualties of War,” set in early 1943, concerns a fascinating aspect of experimental warfare that is also covered in the movie The Dam Busters, and also touches on issues such as a woman’s place in the world of men. But the mystery itself ends on a morally ambiguous note, and the plot itself concludes on something of a cliffhanger.

If you are coming late to Foyle, however, don’t start with this box. Like all the great shows, such as The Wire, The Shield, and BSG, it’s best to start at the beginning and work your way forward. You won’t be able to stop, and you won’t be able to not re-watch them.

No such problem with another show now on offer from Acorn Media. This is Da Vinci’s Inquest, the cult hit Canadian show now just introduced to American home video. Set in Vancouver, B.C., Da Vinci’s Inquest concerns the cases confronted by the bibulous, divorced coroner Dominic Da Vinci, played by Nicholas Campbell, perhaps best known in the states for playing parts in Cronenberg films such as The Brood. Da Vinci’s Inquest began airing in 1998 with the first of seven 13-episode seasons. This box from Acorn contains all of season one in full frame transfers (that look a little soft. It hit the street on February 27th, and retails for $59.99; for those impatient to see other seasons, Atlantis Alliance has released them in Canada).

The Acorn box doesn’t have much in the way of supplements, just cast bios and a trailer, but just having the shows all together in the right order should be enough for the series’s mounting fans. Da Vinci’s Inquest has been popping up on local stations over the past year or so, but out of order and with the seasons mixed up. But from its cozy jazz theme song to its wholly different world of law and order, Da Vinci’s Inquest has pulled in viewers. It’s mix of flawed characters, occasionally ambiguous endings (who killed the professional dominatrix at the end of episode 7, “The Stranger Inside,” even though the case had been solved?), and refreshingly different approach to now-familiar territory (forensic medicine doctors examining gross bodies) has appealed to intelligent viewers.

As a forensic show, Da Vinci’s Inquest appeared two years before the somewhat harder edged CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, but Da Vinci’s Inquest integrates the problems of the characters better into both the plots and the texture of the show. And Da Vinci is loosely based on a real guy, former chief coroner Larry Campbell, who ended winning a mayoral race in Vancouver in 2002 (an eventual spin off of Da Vinci’s Inquest was the short lived Da Vinci’s City Hall). Like presumably his real life counterpart, Da Vinci’s cares too much, is confrontational with bureaucratic ineptitude, and is prone to joining or starting causes, such as in one episode the use of teen agers as drug informants. He’s an admirable character but also a troubled one, and an episode in which Da Vinci fears that he is the perpetrator of a hit and run accident is painful to watch on his behalf. His “solution” to his problem, show in the last shot, will shock Puritanical American viewers.

Da Vinci’s Inquest is a great series and it is a comfort to know that there are six (or seven) more boxes in the pipeline.

With increasingly regularity S&M scenes have been working their way into mainstream movies, so it was inevitable that a whole movie would be made on the subject. Going Under isn’t the first, technically, but it is surely the most realistic.

Back in 1973 when Lindsay Anderson included a scene in O Lucky Man! which a hypocritical judge gets a beating from a dominatrix the audience laughed, but 32 years later in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, when assassin in disguise Angelina Jolie shows up for an assignation in dominatrix gear ready to turn her paying submissive into a corpse, the audience response is somewhat different, deeply appreciative and turned on. It’s OK to like ladies in leather these days, and OK to ogle a domineering woman in such a get up. The 1973 audience laughed because the idea of a masochist, especially one who paid a professional to administer a beating, was a failure and a weakling in all manner of ways, from his presumed nerdiness to his having a secret life at odds with the dignity of his social standing, such as being a judge, and in conflict with the presumed morality with which he is supposed to conduct his business – such as being a judge. Nowadays a woman in kinky fetish gear announces that she is liberated, is out of the ordinary and uncaring as to who knows it, and is sexually active and creative if not downright aggressive. The reality is probably much different. It is unlikely, for example, that a university librarian such as Jill (Heather Stephens) in Tomkats can afford to outfit her bedroom with a revolving wall hiding an expensively equipped dungeon. But in movies of this sort, the S&M encounter is roughly equated with unrestrained lust.

The reality appears to be quite different, according to director Eric Werthman’s Going Under, which he is credited with co-writing with Jessica Gohlke. Werthman is a therapist, and so is his main character, Peter, played bravely by Roger Rees. Peter is married to a somewhat dowdy woman his own age, and they have a college age daughter. Peter also suffers from dyslexia, a condition he appears to hide and which plagues him because it prevents him from enjoying the prestige of publishing books. Peter is also secretly a masochist, and currently patronizes the sadomasochistic salon of Suzanne (Geno Lechner, from Schlindler’s List). Suzanne is, appropriately for the masochistic imagination, is German and has rather hard, square-ish and unsmiling features. Going Under is unusual in that it goes into quite a bit of detail about Suzanne’s background, rather than simply dwelling on Peter’s neuroses.

Like many a client of a working girl, Peter wants to see Suzanne in the “real world,” because he fancies he is in love with her. Suzanne’s background is a little bit complex however. Her mother is ill, her brother appears to have some kind of weird sexual fixation on her (there is an awkward scene out of Annie Hall when Peter accompanies Suzanne on a visit to the family manse). She is also apparently a lesbian (her Asian girlfriend breaks up with her in the course of the story), she is an aspiring artist, and, like Bree Daniels in Klute, she is trying to get out of the S&M biz, only to have her admiring ex-Madam come around to lure her back for one more high paying encounter.

Peter has about four dungeon encounters with Suzanne and one with someone else at a public fetish club; Suzanne has that lucrative encounter out of town. These scenes feel realistic enough, in that they are tentative, awkward, negotiated openly and silently at the same time. Suzanne’s out of town date seems the most realistic because her client is a crabby gentleman whose tastes are extremely specific (the red leather dress, not the black!). The film suggests that for Suzanne, her profession has less to do with sex and more to do with unleashing anger on malekind. Her intimate partners tend to be women and she can’t bring herself to kiss Peter on the mouth. What the movie really seems to be about is the unbearable sadness of deluding yourself into liking someone who really isn’t interested. Ultimately, for all his training, Peter doesn’t really understand Suzanne. And she can’t be bothered to try and understand him. It’s only when she is unhappy in her own troubled relationships that she seeks solace with Peter, leading him on in a strained, unpleasant, perhaps unintentional manner. It’s not the dungeon scenes that are painful in this film – it’s the hopeless chats they have sitting outside coffee houses.

Going Under was shot in guerilla fashion around New York City back around 2003, but apparently wasn’t released to the theaters until summer of 2006, when a New York Times review appears, and appeared on DVD from Blue Underground on June 26th, 2007 (Blue Underground is just one of about three DVD distributors starting to dive into various levels of S&M fare). It’s realistically but well-shot by Vladimir Subotic, who doesn’t bother to glamorize anything in the film, from Rees’s bony buttocks to the waiting room of the S&M parlor. The acting is good all around and the script exudes realism. As is typical with BL, the disc is packed with supplements. The main extra is an audio commentary track by Werthman and Rees. Both sing chorus like praises for Lechner’s Potente-style beauty, but Rees isn’t particularly clear about why he wanted to do the movie in the first place. Rees’s chat is mostly about motivation and how he felt doing various things, while Werthman specializes in discussing the psychological background. His remarks are supplemented by a essay attached to the disc in an eight-page Word document, “Reflections on Going Under” by Marta Helliesen, Ph.D. “As the film ends there are again polarities, this time represented by Peter being unfinished while Suzanne is finished. Within the unfinished is the implicit need to seek completion, which for Peter might lead to repeated experience(s) as a paying submissive with one or several new dominatrixes. By standing up for herself and telling Peter to go, Suzanne experienced a clear sense of self. She is feeling the loss of Peter and of the idea of them as a unit, but she is also feeling a sense of freedom. Instead of repeating her old patterns she has reached a place where she is ready to explore new avenues that can support her continued process of developing a reliable sense of self.”

Rees goes into more detail about his interest in the film during a new video interview with him and Miss Lechner; both are engaging and enthusiastic about the project. There is also a very short feature about the New York City Black and Blue Ball, which needs to be watched with the pause button in hand if you want to see anything, and a selection of BL trailers. Going Under retails for $29.95.

Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the greatest films ever made, and for a simple reason: it contains multitudes. The film constitutes one of the first critiques of modern mass media; it’s cynicism (or realism) runs counter to most Hollywood films of its time; it’s a forum for some great performances; biographically, it represented Wilder’s final break with his partner Charles Brackett, with whom he had written numerous earlier films; and, not least of all, it is one of the earliest examples of film soleil.

Probably one of the top 10 films people have been waiting to own on DVD since the commercial appearance of the format in 1997, the Criterion Collection’s new two-disc DVD (spine No. 396) of the film, which finally marks its first appearance on home video, doesn’t really go into all these matters within its supplements, but then, that’s what DVD reviewers are for. It’s a terrific set anyway, and a must-have for both admirers of Wilder and collectors of top notch American cinema.

The story is simple enough and familiar in its broad strokes to Wilderians. Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) arrives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the outs. He’s a journalist without portfolio, having been kicked off 16 other newspapers from New York to Chicago. After talking his way into a job, Tatum soon finds himself missing the ethnic delights of Manhattan, its food, lights, action, noise. All he needs is a story, that one big story that will make the New York editions come crawling to him. He stumbles upon that story while on a routinely dull assignment. At a lone trading post, he finds that its operator, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) has become trapped in a cave looking for Indian artifacts. Over the course of a week, Tatum manages to turn Minosa’s entrapment into a circus, his coverage luring journalists, ghoulish sightseers, and an actual circus to Minosa’s humble outpost. But at the height of his clever scheme’s success, Tatum finds that he has sickened himself. Paradoxically, no one wants to publish the real story of how he exploited Minosa’s plight.

Minosa isn’t the only one trapped. Entrapment is the key visual metaphor of the movie, from Minosa’s dwarfed head poking out of dusk covered boulders to the rattlesnake that the corrupt Sheriff Kretzer (Ray Teal) keeps in a box. But the main prisoners are Mimosa’s wife Lorraine (Jan Stirling) and Tatum himself, who is metaphorically buried alive in the dull sand of the New Mexico desert. Tatum is mirrored by Lorraine, who feels she was luring falsely into a marriage. She’s about to abandon Minosa to the mine but Tatum manages to maker he see the profit in staying (and though there are no visual clues to this, one assumes that Tatum also cuckolds his new “friend” Minosa with her). Tatum is himself the ace reporter in the hole, trapped by his own excesses in a drink-water town, his least favorite beverage. As others have pointed out, Tatum refashions himself in a version of Cecil B. DeMille, Wilder’s fellow Paramount director and cameo actor in Sunset Boulevard.

Kirk Douglas is amazingly adept, in his only outing in a Wilder film. All juts and points and arrows, he’s like a cubist painting of himself. Like Lancaster, George C. Scott and a few other actors the big screen isn’t big enough to contain his literally raging ego and his self-regard, and Douglas treads a fine line between chewing the scenery or merely sampling it to see if it’s worth the effort. Though William Holden seems to have been Wilder’s actor of choice for this kind of role, Douglas proves perfect at embodying The Wilder Character. This is the central personage in most Wilder films. A hustler, often a writer or newspaperman, he’s a guy with a knack for seeing the main chance. He has little hesitation in stepping over others to promote himself. Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17 are the main texts of the Wilder Man philosophy but the character pops up in virtually every Wilder film. The director’s enthusiasm for the character is no doubt in part based on the fact that it’s based on Wilder himself. As a journalist himself in Germany before becoming a filmmaker Wilder must have seen, and occasionally been, the kind of hustler he is so adept at painting. The main knock against Wilder has always been that he doesn’t have the courage of his cynicism, always finding an “out” for him to show reform. But as Ace shows, the reform is inscribed in the very texture of the tale, this movies are really unimaginable with the character’s change of heart. It’s not the movie code that made Wilder make way for their reformation but his own desire to play that variation on the character in order to create a better story. Sterling, who has something of an older Sue Lyon quality to her features.

Because of its cynicism, its bleak outlook on life, its echoes of Postman Always Rings Twice and other films and mystery novels, Ace is widely categorized as a film noir. But in fact it is one of the earliest examples of a subtle shift in noir that was to reach its apotheosis in the 1990s. In her essay attached to the disc, Molly Haskell attempts to chart this shift, apparently unaware that someone else has already done so as she struggles to label it. Hey, lady, it’s already got a name, film soleil and the genre has been thoroughly gone over in the critical study of the same title. As Haskell reiterates redundantly, film soleil movies are otherwise noir-like takes of crime, greed, and seduction sat instead under the bright heat of the sun, usually in desert settings. But it’s not just a visual shift; it’s a moral change as well. From Chinatown to Confidence, film soleil examines crime with a more sympathetic eye, likely to make heroes of what would normally be villains and let them get away with their deeds, an option unimaginable in the days of the Production Code.

The lead off supplement on the first disc is a helpful audio commentary track by Neil Sinyard, author of Journey Down Sunset Boulevard: The Films of Wilder, a very good 1979 book on the director that gives equal attention to the films he wrote but didn’t direct. I sometimes get the feeling that Criterion prefers the dulcet tones of British film critics to the harsh, argumentative rasp of Americans. In this they resemble the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which so often passes out its coveted Oscars to prestige-emitting Brits. Sinyard’s yak track is in the spirit of Peter Cowie, Ian Christie, and Laura Mulvey, among other British commentators: poised, spoken rather than read, and seamlessly keyed to the events on the screen. With all due apologies to Mr. Sinyard, he is arguably the least known of Wilder’s celebrators. The disc could easily have carried instead of or in addition to him tracks by Wilder biographer Ed Sikov, collegial idolater Cameron Crowe, or early pioneering critic Leland Pogue. But in the end, Mr. Sinyard’s is fine, and a good introduction to Wilder’s concerns in this film. Disc one also has the theatrical trailer.

Disc two kicks off with “Portrait of a ‘60% Perfect Man’: Billy Wilder, is a 1980 documentary profile of Wilder that mostly follows his career arc, with added interviews featuring Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, and I. A. L. Diamond (00:58:26). It gives you a view of the inside of his art-filled apartment and his fabled office. Next are some excerpts from a 1986 appearance by Wilder at the American Film Institute (00:23:37), which touches on similar ground. This is followed by a 1984 interview with Kirk Douglas, conducted by Michael Thomas (00:14:14), in which he touches on Ace, and gives some acting tips. Next is an audio only chat with one of Ace‘s co-writers, ex-radio writer Walter Newman, talking to Rui Nogueira in 1970 (00:10:07). Lastly, there is a video after word by Spike Lee (00:05:37), who claims a special interest in the film (he borrowed its last shot for one of his movies), but in which nothing new is said, and in which there appears to be no connection between film and its extoller, the segment also padded out with clips from the movie. Finally there are about 24 black and white on set shots and pics from the premiere of the film.

Also included in the set is a cute four-page insert in the shape of a tabloid sized newspaper, with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer specs, and essays by film critic Molly Haskell, discussed above, and by filmmaker Guy Maddin, who brings his usual collection of delirium and exclamation points to a consideration of Douglas as screen icon, in the course of which he reveals that a major character in his film Saddest Music in the World was based on Tatum.

The Criterion Collection’s DVD of Ace in the Hole hits the streets Tuesday, July 17th, and retails for $39.95.

In Buster Keaton’s silent masterpiece, the civil war comedy The General from 1927, there is a marvelous scene where Buster gets himself out of yet another jam.

Contrary to popular belief, Keaton’s screen persona was not a sad sack constantly beaten down by life (later comics bore that responsibility). Rather, Keaton was an athletic, versatile, creative character, constantly innovating and thinking. In the scene in question, Keaton is engineering a train in an effort to catch up with his girlfriend, who has been kidnapped by the Northern army forces. Knowing that Keaton is behind them, the Northerners lay impediments on the track before him. At one point they are laying timber on the tracks. Keaton puts the train in first gear, so to speak, runs out, and picks up the first piece of lumber. But the train is still moving behind him, and before he can cast it aside, the cattle scoop plucks him up and carries him along. And there is another derailing piece of lumber just a head. What to do? We don’t know what is going to happen. But Keaton figures something out. He uses the lumber in his hand to catapult the one on the tracks out of the way, dispensing with both impediments simultaneously.

The audience response to this moment is to laugh. It’s a joyous laughter, an appreciation of Keaton’s cleverness. In essence, that what we are always doing when we laugh at a great witticism or muscular comeback in a comedy, admiring the speaker’s (or writer’s) achievement. Keaton and the other silent comedians took it to the physical level, speaking through their bodies and actions, a form of comedy that couldn’t really have existed before.

That’s why the Die Hard series and its new entry Live Free or Die Hard need to be viewed as fundamentally comedies. They hark back to Keaton and the physical comedians as improvisers out of cunningly constructed binds, where mind is as important as the body, where indeed it fuels the body.

In Live Free or Die Hard Bruce Willis’s John McClane must: evade a helicopter chasing him through the canyons of DC, fight his way out of a SUV dangling down an elevator shaft, elude a jet fighter that is trying to blow him in in a semi, and get off the wings of said plane after it spins pilotlessly out of control. How he gets out of these and numerous other hair raising jams is the essence of the series, and of that type of comedy. Note at one point his use of a fire hydrant as chopper repellent. It’s a cartoon, the kind in a whole automobile can be used as a flying weapon.

Originally based on a Roderick Thorp novel, the series (which didn’t know yet that it was a series) established itself as a series in which a lone man in an enclosed setting uses only the improvised tools at hand to basically rescue his wife. The second film shifted the locale to an airport, maintaining the same decorum. But No. 3 went horizontal, spreading the area McClane has to manage to a whole city, New York. Now Live Free or Die Hard turns the whole eastern seaboard into Nakatomi Plaza, with McClane running from Rutgers to Camden to DC, to Virginia and Baltimore (what will the next film be? Live Fast, Die Hard, and Leave a Beautiful Corpse, with McClane globally fighting bad guys from outer space?). While the first film played with then current notions of terrorists (more German Eurotrash than true believers) and fears of Japanese encroachment upon the American economy, the second one was a take on Iran-Contra.

The third film was a bit at sea, but this new entry is on more solid ground, with an acknowledgment of a post 9/11 world, with the villain Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) presented as a variation on Robert Hanssen, with prime hacker Gabriel turning the system on itself to make about political point about the vulnerability of the system (or at least so it seems in the beginning). And here, McClane’s adult sized daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is the imperiled McClane who provides the plot’s engine in the final quarter.

Like the third film, though, McClane has an unwanted partner, in this case a hacker named Matt Farrell, played by Justin Long, the Mac guy in the television commercials. But here he is John Hodgeman to McClane’s cool customer. It is Farrell who relates the essential premise of the film, the “fire sale” computer fiasco probably described in the news story on which the film is credited as being based (John Carlin’s piece “A Farewell to Arms”). It’s called virtual terrorism.

McClane, it turns out, doesn’t want to be a hero, he doesn’t like it, but he’s the guy who’s there at the time. McClane says this is a car as they are driving from one predicament to another as yet unknown one. It’s one of the few moments of tranquility and reflection in the film, and one of the few moments that really evokes the original Die Hard. In that film, McClane was an ordinary guy, an average Joe who ends up having to save a building, his wife, et cetera. Subtly with 2 and even more obviously with 3, McClane became an action hero, with all that means about circumscribing McClane’s character and what he feels about things.

Other random observations: There is an Agent Johnson joke “¦ Cliff Curtis (in the Reginald Veljohnson role) is, as usual, great, but not quite given enough to do “¦ Why do choppers get to fly around with impunity in movies such as this one and Lethal Weapon? If there is gunfire, don’t people complain, and anyway, isn’t all air traffic monitored? (though the situation is slightly different in this film, however) “¦ The secondary and tertiary villains aren’t as vivid as they were in Die Hard “¦ However, Maggie Q is excellent (though I doubt that fetish boots are standard issue when she is impersonating an FBI agent) and her fight scene with McClane is great “¦ Long’s characterization is perfect, ranging from his smart aleckyness, his living like a college student, his propensity to conspiracy theories, and his eating habits “¦ Zeljko Ivanek should play Vincent Bugliosi in a movie “¦ Is it unseemly to mention that Kevin Smith is great in a cameo? “¦ Director Len Wiseman (the Underworld series) does a satisfactory job, but does anyone really direct movies like this or like, say, Bad Boys 2? Don’t you really just have a meeting with the second unit director, then go off to walk Justin Long and Bruce Willis through a scene before clocking out for the day? “¦ The film has a hard, blue, grainy look throughout, like James Mangold’s Cop Land “¦ among the movies “quoted” are Speed, Independence Day, Jurassic Park 2, and Casino Royale (if that is humanly possible) “¦ The film has the best “knocked down stairs” moment since Joe Kidd “¦ This is a “modes of transportation” movie, in which McClane gets to drive about five different types of automobiles, including a chopper “¦ “Ode to Joy” does not appear in the film.

OK, admit it. You love Tom Jones. How could you not? He is the “stage author” of at least five hit songs (“It’s Not Unusual” [1965], “What’s New Pussycat?” [1965], “The Green, Green Grass of Home” [1966], “Delilah” [1968], “She’s A Lady” [1971]), and his stage act is a blend of power balladry, sexual braggadocio, and good natured “I can’t believe this is happening to me” wonderment. If the self-mockery comes ultimately from Elvis, the forceful voice is wholly his own. Like many singers he was a force for only a short window of time, but the songs were so perfect, or he was so perfect for them, that he was able to dine out on them for decades. If the Wales-born coal miner’s son has an American equivalent it is Johnny Rivers, whose creative bulb burned brightly for a brief time with numerous late 1960s covers of ’50s hits, along with tunes such as “Poor Side of Town” and “Secret Agent Man,” but who then fell out of fashion or favor while yet still being able to have a career touring.

Jones is probably someone you need to see live. He is one of those rare performers whose voice outmatches the physical source. You can’t believe that a sound that powerful is coming out of a human being. But it is not a crude, inflexible instrument. As the new box set, This is Tom Jones, shows, the man, who had been singing since he was three years old, could belt out “What’s New Pussycat?” but also old standards such as “Danny Boy” and modern quiet numbers such as “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” Though by the time he began appearing in his own show Jones had been somewhat desexualized and turned into a Vegas style showman, This is Tom Jones‘s array of guests show that Jones could hold his own with Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, and even Little Richard.

Despite his jokey-serious sexual swagger, Jones can’t help enjoying himself and his good luck, and while bejeweled and decked out like a ’50s crooner he has the virtue of sincerity. You can tell as he claps along and watches his guests that he really likes them. And they appreciated him. According to the box’s liner notes, Joplin normally hated doing television but consented to appear on his show because she liked his voice, a high compliment coming from a fellow power belter.

This is Tom Jones (Time Life, Tuesday, June 26, 2007, three discs, $39.95) offers eight episodes of the variety show, which aired on ABC on starting Fridays from early 1969 through 1971. Guests that appear on the selected shows include Mary Hopkin, The Who, Burt Bacharach, Glen Campbell, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Stevie Wonder, The Moody Blues, and Aretha Franklin (according to the Wikipedia, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were originally going to appear on the set, but due to rights issues, were replaced by Little Richard, which, as stated above, only serves to highlight Jones’s range better). Comedy acts include an early Richard Pryor appearance (which starts out awkward but gains speed), Peter Sellers, Anne Bancroft, Bob Hope, and the comedy troupes The Ace Trucking Company and the Committee, each troupe filled with now-familiar faces.

As with other compilations, such as those of the Dick Cavett Show, half the joy of the set is the guest stars who often perform with more commitment than you’d expect. The Who really tear into “Pinball Wizard,” with the busy, brilliant Keith Moon in the background “mooning” the band itself by singing along with the song. Janis Joplin is also fully committed, and Jones acquits himself well in a later “duet” with her, if that term can be used for two vocal cannons aimed at each other. And I have to admit that when Jones joined Joe Cocker for “Delta Lady” I felt chills of appreciation and nostalgia. As shown on the show, they could have kept riffing on the song forever, and eventually time constraints lead a fade out. It was considered something of a joke back in the 1990s when Art of Noise tapped Jones for collaboration but as usual he surprised people who had forgotten that Jones’s singing roots were in R&B, soul, and blues ballads and that he was up to date with current songwriting. Other performers are Burt Bacharach (who, when he sings, does so into his chest cavity), and Glen Campbell, whose ephemeral appearance doesn’t even constitute a full song.

The other half of joy comes from Jones’s persona itself. The “concert” section of the show, which constituted the final portion of each episode and recreated Jones’s stage act (and which usually began with him waiting “backstage” with a “bird” in silhouette until announced, kissing her before grabbing a microphone [so that he would bounce onto the stage with a partial erection?]), shows the full range of his vocal ability, and Jones is one of the few singers who can do African-American music convincingly. He is also a fantastic dancer, and nerds who practice their moves in the bedroom mirror would do well to cut a few moves from Jones’s playbook.

Seeing Jones’s easeful screen presence – remarkable given that he had only broken into the business a few years earlier – I began to wonder why he didn’t make more of a go of it as a movie actor, the way his predecessors such as Sinatra (and by the way Jones does a terrific version of “Angel Eyes” on the disc) or his later friend Elvis did. With his swagger and gold chains and dashing appearance in a tux, Jones would have been terrific in any number of British crime dramas, and I can easily visualize him as the gangster in The Long Good Friday, or even as James Bond. I am guessing that the deal is that Jones wasn’t much interested in performing for a camera. He needs the juice of an audience. He hasn’t even recorded all that many records, relatively speaking. However, he has a real jones about being on stage, and his career has been almost wholly live performances since the 1980s.

The transfers are taken from original source materials but nothing was done to spruce them up, so they tend to be rather soft looking, and one episode only survives in a black and white version. It can be said for the English 2.0 mono audio track that it is audible.

The extras are much more successful, however. Jones introduces most of the shows with an amusing anecdote and its airdate. Disc one contains three items. First, a short ABC commercial for the premiere that also cites the now forgotten The Generation Gap and Let’s Make a Deal game show the same night. Next, there’s one of those faked TV interviews, where the answers are shipped to local affiliates with the anchor reading from a list of questions (as also seen, for example, on the Dr. Strangelove extras). On this occasion, the noon time anchor for KATU-TV in my home town of Portland, Oregon, got the questions mixed up. Finally for disc one there is a new video interview with Jones in which he tells the story behind how he came to sing Burt Bacharach’s him to “What’s New, Pussycat?,” something he alludes to in one of the episodes. There are no supplements on disc two, but disc three offers a 30 minute video interview with Jones (shot on February 11, 2007), in which he discusses his own musical roots and the birth of the show. Finally, there is a 12-page illustrated insert with further information on each episode included.

In late April, Alec Baldwin stunned both his fans and the followers of Tina Fey’s show 30 Rock when he announced to audiences on The View that, in the words of the USA Today headline, “I want off this show.”

The reasons for his distraction are now famous: an excoriating audiotape of a telephone message he left his daughter after a missed ‘phone call, all part of an ongoing custody battle between Baldwin and his ex-wife, Kim Basinger. Basically Baldwin, pled with NBC executives to release him from his contract.

To their credit, NBC’s honchos, as quoted in USA Today, said, “Alec Baldwin remains an important part of 30 Rock. We look forward to having him continue his role in the show,” sensibly ignoring the troubled actor, who also that week quit his agency, Creative Artists Management, which also represented his wife, Kim Basinger (Baldwin rejoined CAA just this week, late May).

But it’s not just for the sake of 30 Rock that fans rejoiced at the idea of Baldwin’s continual presence on the show. Baldwin is a member of a small, select group of actors who have but one thing in common. They all speak in a low, hushed, tone, all the better to attract attention to themselves within the hubbub of the moving image frame. We like to call them The Hoarse Whisperers.

There are more Hoarse Whisperers than you suspect. If Baldwin is the granddaddy of the technique, its Pied Piper and its Pope, he has numerous followers and acolytes. Another key practitioner of this oral tradition is Edward James Olmos, who must drive the sound technicians on the set of Battlestar Galactica mad with his low rumblings, so similar to the constant roar of the Galactica itself. Another nominee is Anthony LaPaglia on Without a Trace. LaPaglia low tones may be sparked by the fact that he is really Australian (like seemingly everyone else on this New York-set show), and a growly, gravelly tone masks his struggle with the American accent.

But perhaps the king of the Hoarse Whisperers is Kiefer Sutherland in 24. His sonorous tones never rise above the level of a kat’s purr, even when he is applying electrodes to the testicles to his girlfriend’s brother on the off chance he knows something about terrorism.

More of an honorary Hoarse Whisper is David Caruso in CSI: Miami. Caruso is more of a low talker than a whisperer, or at least his whispering isn’t particularly hoarse. Caruso keeps his voice low because it lends his noble character gravitas and moral superiority. Michael Chiklis, on The Shield, is also of this school, the whispering elevated to a higher level by a lethal growl. James Spader on Boston Legal goes in and out of hoarse whispering. He can yell in a court room when he needs to, but for the most part, he likes to sit back, his oval face impassive, and hoarsely intone his lines – which, if they could be transcribed to a musical scale or a graph would resemble a swan’s neck, starting high and high pitched before cascading down to a punchline. Also in this league is Patrick Warburton on Rules of Engagement. The former Puddy on Seinfeld only occasionally lowers the register to a whisper, preferring for the most part to adopt a Slow Talkers of America pace. Warburton, who had the brilliance to realize that, looking like a cartoon character, he should only play such, carries to technique to his vocal instrument, which has also enhanced characters in shows such as The Tick and The Venture Brothers.

The phenomenon of the television Hoarse Whisperer mirrors a more dire trend in movies. There, older actors of some repute such as Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood and Al Pacino have been using faulty instruments in recent years, their voices curiously shredded (curiously because normally actors train their voices to last). These rasping actors have effectively cut down on their range thanks to these changes in their vocal cords. Even Clint Eastwood, whose career was staked on a lack of range, has had trouble uttering the simplest lines lately, thanks to the impediment of his scratchy throat. And Eastwood was the king of all Hoarse Whisperers since way back in the 1960s and the series of monosyllabic spaghetti westerns he made for Sergio Leone. Fortunately, his heir on big screen hoarse whispering, Sam Elliott, has evinced little difficulty in speech despite his own doddering age.

But the small screen is the proper venue for a Hoarse Whisperer. There, the practitioners of this near-silent art can plume new depths of hoarseness and quietude, in tones so low the viewer feels inclined to lean forward desperately in their Barcaloungers (that, or turn on the subtitles).

Another great Hoarse Whisperer is Canadian comedian Will Arnett, late of Arrested Development, who adds an arch aggression to his low hum. An apotheosis of sorts, a croaking chorus of Hoarse Whisperers, was achieved in the April 5 episode of 30 Rock when Arnett showed up as Jack Donaghy’s corporate nemesis, Devon Banks, the Vice President of West Coast News, Web Content, and Theme Park Talent Relations, whom Jack thinks is gunning for his job. At a key moment toward the end of the show, where Jack and Devon face off on the set of The Girly Show, Tina Fey’s Liz Lemmon, acknowledging the existence of the Hoarse Whisperers, says, “Wow, if this turns into a showdown, you guys could settle it with a [switching to a coarse whisper] ‘talking like this’ contest.” At last! Someone within the media has finally stated the obvious! Ah, a very satisfying movement for students of the Hoarse Whisperers.

If at first it seems unlikely that Vincent Bugliosi’s new book on the JFK assassination, Reclaiming History (W. W. Norton, 1632 pages [yes, 1632 pages], plus CD, $49.95, ISBN 978-0393045253), otherwise known as the Norton Anthology of Conspiracy Theories Debunked, is an unlikely subject for a movie column, note that Mr. Bugliosi has included a chapter – if a section of a book that is itself book length can be called merely a chapter – that is devoted solely to Oliver Stone’s JFK and its perceived sins against history and truth about the national nightmare that occurred on Elm Street in 1963. Also, Bugliosi plans a TV documentary about the contents of the book.

I haven’t read the whole book yet, mostly the JFK chapter (and I suspect that an early reviewer of the book writing in a national monthly also only read this chapter, as most of the lines quoted come from it), plus some random sections read while poking around in the rest of the book, but I suspect that the JFK chapter gives a good example of Mr. Bugliosi’s strategy throughout Reclaiming History. What he has created is four books in one, and if Norton weren’t such a refined firm, I’d suggest that when the book goes paperback that they plug it on the cover with the words, “Four Books in One: Four Days in November! The Life of Lee Harvey Oswald! Stone’s JFK! All Conspiracy Theories Debunked.

It is true that conspiracy theories are easy to weave regarding the JFK case. For example, reading Bugliosi’s book, I was reminded of the fact that on the floor below Oswald at the Book Depository, there were several African American co-workers, hanging out the window and watching the procession. Now, what if they did it, rather than Oswald? Then, what if the assassination of Martin Luther King was a revenge on African-Americans by the government that couldn’t do anything about the real JFK killers because it would have started a race riot. Then, later that year, African-Americans struck back by killing RFK (a black security guard is charged in some conspiracy books with shooting RFK in the kitchen). This is all nonsense, of course. Why would African-Americans kill Kennedy, the closet thing they had ever had to an ally in the White House? But there. I’ve put it out there. How long will it be before a book based on it comes out?

I’m loathed to contradict Mr. Bugliosi. In most other ways I am a fan. He is the author of the best true crime book, Helter Skelter, so superior to Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. His book on the Simpson trial is an endlessly fascinating read, if for no other reason than the peek it offers about what goes through a good prosecutor’s mind. He is a fine writer, and Reclaiming History is a sterling example of good, solid, impassioned American rhetoric (though he acknowledges some assistance). The footnotes (and the footnotes within footnotes) are as interesting, and more detailed, than the book itself, and there are further notes on the CD. Over 20 years in the making, and sparked by a Showtime-sponsored 1986 mock trial that Mr. Bugliosi appeared in as a prosecutor opposite Gerry Spence as Oswald’s defense lawyer, Reclaiming History is the perfect book to crawl into a warm bed with on a long cold winter night – or at least it would if you didn’t feel like you were dragging a piece of luggage instead of a book into bed with you.

But let’s look more closely at his JFK chapter, which occupies pages 1347 through 1436. First Mr. Bugliosi begins with a summary of the Garrison case against Clay Shaw. As he might to a jury, Mr. Bugliosi paints Shaw as a literate, modest, New Orleans booster. Opponents to Shaw, such as Garrison, Perry Russo, or David Ferry are all painted in prosecutorial terms, in heavily biased thumbnail portraits using words like “cartoonish.” In fact, my main criticism of the book is that instead of weighing and sifting facts before coming to a reasoned conclusion, Bugliosi went into it with his mind made up, seeing everything through the Warren Report’s eyes, tilting his arguments toward the accounts that happen to support his bias. When that fails, he makes a plea to the reader’s (i.e., the juror’s) common sense, with rhetorical questions such as “Does that seem plausible to you?”

Bugliosi then goes on to “dismantle” Stone’s film via 32 specific points or inaccuracies: 1 That in real life, Garrison wasn’t the saint the movie portrays; 2 Stone’s Rose Cherami episode is full of errors and exaggerations; 3 Stone presents Oswald as a right winger posing as a Marxist because he is an undercover agent, for which, Bugliosi says, there is no evidence (and when Bugliosi says this, he means there is no evidence presented in the Warren Report or the later House Committee hearing); 4 Stone drops all evidence of Oswald’s culpability in the assassination (such as being seen carrying a rifle sized package into the Book Depository); 5 Stone offers biased Dealey Plaza witnesses; 6 Stone “lies” about the number of Tippit witnesses; 7 Dealey Plaza witness Bowers’s testimony is more inconsistent over time than the movie allows; 8 Julia Mercer and “¦ 9 Jean Hill are not credible witnesses; 10 Senator Russell Long’s statement about the FBI’s inability to replicate Oswald’s shooting pattern is “a lie”; 11 There were no foliage “¦ 12 nor tree obstructions at Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting; 13 Despite what Stone says, Oswald was rated a sharpshooter by the Marines; 14 The bolt action of Oswald’s rifle is only slow if you use a telescopic sight; 15 Contra Stone, there weren’t three teams of shooters in Dealey Plaza; 16 Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy; 17 There is no evidence that the magic bullet was planted; 18 The Umbrella Man was not a spotter; 19 No warning was teletyped to the FBI days before the event; 20 Dean Andrews was a poor witness; 21 There is no evidence that Shaw and Ferrie knew each other; 22 There is no evidence that Ferrie died of anything but natural causes; 23 Jack Martin was not a credible witness; 24 There is no evidence that Guy Bannister was involved in the assassination; 25 Beverly Oliver is not a credible witness to any Oswald-Ruby sightings; 26 The film distorts what Ruby said to Earl Warren; 27 Stone’s composite character Willie O’Keefe disguises flaws in Perry Russo’s testimony that Stone didn’t want to acknowledge; 28 The character X didn’t exist and in the film gives a distorted account of Kennedy administration history; 29 The New Zealand newspaper report is not as outlandish as Stone and X make it seem; 30 Bugliosi maintains that the Washington, D. C. phone lines did not go dead for an hour; 31 Stone is inconsistent about who Oswald was working for; 32 Stone wants the viewer not only to believe that Oswald was innocent, but to feel sorry for him.

What this litany of errors fails to acknowledge is that Stone himself often inserts counter arguments against his own thesis, such as when Garrison’s wife complains that Garrison is only going after Shaw because he is gay. Nor does Bugliosi take on all of Stone’s charges, only some of them (at least in this chapter). And he doesn’t do nuance well. He has a straight arrow cop type attitude toward human psychology that denies ambiguity of motivation or that people can remember different, new things at different times. If it is not on the record and under oath, he doesn’t want to hear about it. Moreover, he lambasts Stone for suggesting that Shaw was a CIA agent without any proof, and then goes on to admit in a footnote that, well, yeah, he did report to the more or less informal domestic service division, where prominent Americans who had gone abroad would report back interesting intel.

What it may come down to in this chapter is that Bugliosi doesn’t understand movies much. He frets over the virtual crime of blending documentary footage with recreated moments, as if the audience can’t tell the difference or grasp that there is a higher purpose involved. He thinks that Joe Pesci has “marquee value.” In his unwillingness to concede even one point to the conspiratologists he fails to clarify simple if always vexing points, such as, Was Oswald a good shot or not, and what does the sharpshooter ranking really mean in the Marines?

Still, Bugliosi has marshaled several file cabinets worth of facts and figures, enough to keep the conspirotologists busy composing refutations for the next decade, or at least until 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination. If it is not yet the definitive book on the JFK assassination, it’s only because his prosecutorial tone prevents some readers from fully trusting him.