Category: Nocturnal Admissions

Paris, je t’aime is a French anthology film from last year that is finally making the art house circuit in the United States. And for all intents and purposes, it was financed by the Paris Boosters Society (Le Societé du boostiers du Paris), as even the grimiest of its 18 segments, such as the one about a mugging, or the tale of a female vampire taking a new victim, serve to glamorize the already world capital of glamor. What’s wrong, has tourism been down? Has American hatred of all things French finally had its impact? Have Freedom Fries finally conquered French Fries?

For the most part, these short segments come across like either piss poor Chanel perfume ads or the sort of bad short films that even get hooted off YouTube. Take the first one, “Montmartre,” credited to Bruno Podalydes (one of numerous directors asked to participate that I happen not to have heard of). A lonely guy finally finds a parking lot, and then helps a woman who has stumbled on the street near his car. Love blooms. Clearly the point is that Paris is a petrie dish of romance, so come on down!

On the other hand, segments such as “Tuileries,” credited to the Coen Brothers, come across like Hostel Lite, in this case a cautionary tale of the bad side of tourism as Steve Buscemi is shown abused by a scary couple and a twerp with a pea shooter in a subway station. A segment with Juliette Binoche, directed by Nobuhiro Suwa (“Place des Victoires”), concerns a woman grieving over her dead son (who is presumably taken to heaven by God, who arrives in the form of Willem Defoe as a mounted cowboy). Drug use is rife in Olivier Assayas’s “Quartier des Enfants Rouges,” with Maggie Gyllenhaal as an actress trying to get through an historical epic with the obliterating crutch of dope, even just hours before going to the set, perhaps an homage to recent historical films made in France, or to the American obsession with the doings of young celebrities.

Though mostly knocked off, segments by some of the directors, such as Gus Van Sant, are instantly identifiable, if only they revisit boring old obsessions (though at least Van Sant’s film has something akin to a comic, Maupassant punchline). Tom Tykwer’s segment, “Faubourg Saint-Denis” with Natalie Portman, looks like its going in the Run Lola Run direction, before digressing into the most heavily edited of the shorts. Others seem to bear no resemblance to the director’s earlier work, such as Wes Craven’s “Pere-Lachaise,” in which (oddly) the ghost of Oscar Wilde helps save a young man’s marriage (Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer play the pair). “Loin du 16ème,” credited to Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, makes a less than subtle political point. The nadir of the whole enterprise is a story about, yes, God help us, mimes.

Inevitably, the viewer turns such omnibi films into horse races. One sifts and weighs directors against the very each other against the communal spirit of the enterprise, if only out of boredom (it is amazing how quickly, in mere seconds, it takes for a short film to bore you). Though I got a kick out of the Coen Brothers segment, if only for its visual acuity, the best segment belongs to Alexander Payne. His “14th arrondissement” starts out, as do all of his films, as if it is going to ridicule ordinary people, in this case Margo Martindale as a lonely postal employee on solo vacation in Paris, whose voice over, in accent-free French, constitutes her French language class report. It’s beautifully done, takes you unawares, and says a lot in a short amount of time.

In the end, Paris, je t’aime, which seems to be generally supervised by Tristan Carné and Emmanuel Benbihy, makes a vague effort to connect some of the short subjects, and also to reassure us that all those scary segments shouldn’t be taken seriously (vampire victim Elijah Wood isn’t “really” dead, it turns out!). What’s weird is how little the film feels like “Paris.” The Coen Brothers segment, for example, could have taken place in London or Manhattan. And “love” is “universal,” not solely product of the City of Lights. I could imagine something funny coming out of a blending of The Red Balloon with Breathless and Tintin: that might have provided a caricaturally Parisian feel. But maybe “Paris,” both literally and imaginatively, cannot be caught in a two or three minute segment. After all, it took Bernardo Bertolucci two full length feature films to isolate his own feelings and observations about the city. Apparently, 12-odd Frenchmen and their international acolytes can be wrong.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism is one of the greatest films ever made, but yet is largely forgotten and never makes Best Of lists. Even during its short, intense phase of art house popularity in 1971, it suffered mispronunciation, most people reading the title as “Mysteries of the Orgasm,” a not inappropriate confusion, as it turns out, given the film’s subject matter, which is in part psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s concern with freeing human energy through fruitful sexual climaxes. An image from the film even made it as the cover image for Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, but that was it (and even the book is out of print). Like his Hungarian counterpart, Miklós Jancsó, director of such now forgotten masterpieces as The Red and the White, Makavejev is a man without a country or a legacy. Now thanks to the Criterion Collection, which has released Both WR and its companion feature Sweet Movie (CC Nos. 389 and 390, respectively), viewers can enjoy the continual relevance of the film to contemporary times and revel in director Dusan Makavejev’s knack for finding the most exotic Balkan women on the planet, already made evidence in his earlier features Love Affair; or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and Man is Not a Bird.

WR tells two stories in one film, or is two movies as one, a kind of intellectual Grindhouse. The first is a playful documentary of film essay on the life and thought of Reich, who was hounded by the U S government and died in prison in the mid 1950s. Scenes from this movie alternate with episodes from a fiction comedy about a Yugoslavian communist girl (Milena Dravic) having trouble reconciling her belief in the party with her sexuality. The documentary contrasts such things as fictional enactments of Stalin in Soviet cinema with Nancy Godfrey, the woman who made plaster casts of rock star penises.

It’s a very funny movie and also a time capsule of concerns raging at the height of the hippie and protest movements in the West. In the Reich part, Tuli Kupferberg, ex member of the Fugs, marches up the boulevard and in front of Lincoln Center as a demented soldier offering a form of street theater that is linked to Reich’s ideas that militarism and in turn fascism are the result of blocked sexual energy. Makavejev makes hay with the contrast between the European intellectuals who trucked into Reich’s campus in upstate Maine and the local yokels who comment on his odd behavior from the perspective of their bedrock simplicity, including the town sherif’s deputy who is also the town barber, who describes the odd manner in which Reich liked to have his hair styled (the strands rising up, toward heaven). Today’s sensibility might note that Reich, like all Freudians, was, consciously or not, a snake oil specialist with a bogus philosophy, but in the abstract his ideas are more congenial than Less a “talking cure,” Reich’s approach was more a screaming cure, finding its apotheosis years later in the practice of Arthur Janov.

Dravic’s story is ostensibly funny but has a tragic core. She is a well meaning sad sack, yearning for sex, but she is not as lucky as her apartment mate (the delightful non-pro Jagoda Kaloper, who has real sex on screen with kittenish abandon, perhaps the perfect living argument for Reich’s ideals). She ends up with a State hero, a blonde haired championship ice skater who, instead of having sex with her, cuts off her head with the blade of his skate in a fustian of repressed rage and sexuality, afterwards wandering a deranged landscape with bloody hands where he finds a lone horse, a symbol of the free spirit he just silenced. One could write a whole essay about stray horses in modern movies.

WR comes in a window boxed full frame (1.33) transfer wit two sound options, mono 1.0 in all Serbo-Croatian, or English with Serbo-Croatian, plus optional English subtitles. For supplementary material, there is a commentary track pieced together from Raymond Durgnat’s BFI monograph on the movie, the late critic’s words read by Daniel Stewart. Durgnat’s book may have single handedly revived interest in the film. There are also two interviews with Makavejev, the first a half hour interview for Danish television, the second one from 2006 and conducted by Peter Cowie for the disc. Also included is a short self portrait, Hole in the Soul (1994), made for Scottish BBC, which features such curious scenes as Makavejev, a director, disallowed from shooting footage in the lobby of the Director’s Guild. The is also a four minute feature concerning a revised version of WR that Makavejev made exclusively for the BBC, which gave the director a chance to rethink aspects of the film. Finally there is a 16-page booklet insert with cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles, and a long essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, plus a booklet promoting Criterion’s noir films.

What egg yokes are to WR, chocolate is to Sweet Movie, which continues an exploration of the themes of sensuality and repression. This film, too, tells two heavily symbolic stories, one about Anna Prucnal as a prostitute living on a ship on which she cruises through Amsterdam, this tale blending themes of death and revolution. The second concerns the Candide-style (or Candy or Barbarella style) odyssey of a young woman, played by French Canadian actress Carole Laure, and ends up with the so called Actionist commune (to the real horror of Laure). It’s difficult to reconcile Makavejev’s concern with sexual freedom with the way Laure’s character is treated, little more than an impersonal piece of human debris carted from one extreme and unpleasant situation to another.

Aspects of Sweet Movie hark back to key films in cinema history, including Jean Vigo’s L’atalanta, and anticipates some aspects of Lars Von Trier. But in the end it is a much more chaotic film than WR, and its international cast and settings detach Makavejev from his roots, that is, Yugoslavia, where his anger and humor fueled his art. Sweet Movie is too often garish and adolescent, whereas his earlier films were sensual, keyed to textures and fabrics, and with a less oblique operating principle. The role of John Vernon, for example, as a millionaire industrialist, is only one in a succession of cartoon figures.

Sweet Movie comes in a widescreen transfer (1.66, enhanced), with a mono 1.0 – French – English track. For supplements, there is a short segment of Anna Prucnal singing a song used in the film on a French TV show, who reveals that one of the consequences of her appearance in the film was that she was banned from Poland for seven years. And there is another interview with Makavejev by Peter Cowie, plus one with Dina Iordanova, a film scholar who explains the background and meaning of the movie. Inside the box, there is a 16-page booklet insert with cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles, and essays by Stanley Cavell and David Sterritt, plus the booklet promoting Criterion’s noir films. Both WR and Sweet Movie hit the street on June 19, and retail for $39.95 and $29.95.

Eli Roth is batting three for three (or four for four if you include the trailer for Thanksgiving). Hostel Part II is not only a great horror film it is a great sequel to a horror film.

It begins with what I take to be an extended homage to Friday the 13th Part Two, a clearing up of left over business from the first film. This gets things off to a bleak note, since the sequence implies that the Slovakian gangsters who run the house of death are invincible and relentless in their pursuit of escapees.

From there, the film tracks parallel paths, a new pair of torturers and their victims, as they make their way independently to Slovakia (which must love these movies as tourism ads). There is a superb sequence in which an array of international bigwigs bid on one of the three traveling American girls the gangsters have captured, via an internet hook up.

Curiously, the two villainous American friends who arrive as clients in Slovakia are both Desperate Housewives alums: Roger Bart as Stuart and Richard Burgi as Todd. Together they make a pair out of a Neil LaBute play, say, In The Company of Men, in which the alpha dog bullies the weaker man into something cruel. The paradox is that the wimp turns out to be the worm who turns and the macho man is the fuck up who can’t take what he is doing, the one with a conscience.

The victims this time around are girls: Lauren German as Beth, Heather Matarazzo (late of Welcome to the Dollhouse) as Lorna, and Hollywood royalty Bijou Phillips as Whitney. This ups the hot chick quotient considerably. But Roth’s characters are rarely just stick figures. They are fully realized characters, and as he must realize, that makes the horror even more exhausting. The last 20 minutes of the film is a taut twisting of expectations and clever resolutions to impossible situations. Let’s just say that this film rings an interesting companionability to Death Proof; and does the name Lorena Bobbitt ring a bell?

Homages this time around include Edwige Fenech as an art teacher and Ruggero Deodato as “The Italian Cannibal” who is eating a live guy bits at a time. Fenech is the cult horror star from the 1970s, a sort of European Betty Page, unabashed about getting naked, to the gratitude of adolescent boys everywhere, or at those who could get access to such films as 5 Dolls for an August Moon, Demons of the Dead, and Your Vice Is a Closed Room and Only I Have the Key, to name only a few from the giallo genre out of scores of films. Deodato is of course the director of perhaps the most controversial film ever made, Cannibal Holocaust.

Once you get past the finger gnawing suspense, you have to sit back and be impressed with Roth’s sheer cleverness. Again and again he writes himself out of a corner. Roth has created this little world, sets himself problems in it, and like a screenwriting Buster Keaton, manages to work out a fully satisfying and clever escape. Plus the movie is subtly consistent. Football revelers near the start of the are echoed in a final, ghoulish but hilarious scene. Another broad homage is to the myth of Elizabeth Bathory.

The qualities I like about this film, and indeed all Roth’s horror films so far, is the humanity he brings to the characters (even the villains), the exotic locales that evoke the feel of some of the great European horror films of the ’60s and ’70s, the offbeat sense of humor, and the plausible, realistic surface and look of the films. He makes the relatively small budgets go a long way. I’m a little disappointed that his next film is going to be a Stephen King adaptation, Cell: first, few of them are good as films, and second, adapting a set text may restrain Roth’s wit (in the larger sense). But then, Roth has written himself out of corners before.

A remarkable event occurred on Monday, February 19th, 2007. In fact, the evening may go down in television history. That was the night that How I Met Your Mother, on CBS at 8 pm, and the new sitcom Rules of Engagement, also on CBS, but at 9:30 PM, aired episodes that told the exact same story.

Now it is true that in the long history of television, many plot points tend to get repeated. After all, there are only so many stories, and a lot of hours to fill on way too many stations. In consequence, longterm TV viewers will see the repetitious use of certain season padding tropes. In dramas, there’s the “temporary blindness” trope (used in shows from The Untouchables to Dynasty), there’s the “loss of memory” trope (Miami Vice, among many others), the “false arrest” trope (soap operas since the dawn of time), and so forth. But, for two different shows to have the same plot premise on the same network on the same night, well, that’s historic.

In the How I Met Your Mother episode called “Stuff” a fight breaks out between the show’s young Manhattanite lovers, architect Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and TV newswoman Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), over the amount of clutter in his apartment, junk that in fact had been given to him by numerous ex-girlfriends. She finds this disheartening and distracting and demands that he remove it all.

In the episode of Rules of Engagement, called “Young and the Restless,” a fight that breaks out between the show’s young lovers, Adam (Oliver Hudson) and Jennifer (Bianca Kajlich), professions unknown. Adam revealed in passing that the nice big bed he took out of storage to accommodate their sleeping needs is the same one he used while dating a predecessor, Sonya. This outrages Jennifer, her philosophy being, “I cannot sleep or do other things in a bed you bought with your ex.” She finds the presence of the old bed disheartening and distracting and demands that he remove it.

To have not only the same network air what amounts to the same story in two different sitcoms, but even worse, and against the odds, on the very same night is tantamount to, oh, say Universal and Fox releasing big budget volcano movies in the exact same year. Actually that did happened ““ both Volcano and Dante’s Peak came out in 1997, so maybe the proper stance to take is wonderment that such coincidences don’t happen more often, especially in that plot-hungry abattoir that is the network sitcom’s Writer’s Room.

In fact fans of both Mother and Rules should be grateful. CBS offered its viewers a perfect, almost laboratory level opportunity to compare and contrast the two sitcoms, to weigh and assess their virtues and faults in relation to each other.

How I Met Your Mother, now in its second season, is a congenial comedy about two couples and the fifth wheel single guy whose presence puts their intimacy in sharp relief. Rules of Engagement is (or was) a acerbic comedy about two couples and the fifth wheel single guy whose presence puts their intimacy in sharp relief. Hmmm, well, perhaps the differences are found deeper.

For one thing, Mother‘s cast is warmer. The two couples, Ted and Robin, plus kindergarten teacher Lily (Alyson Hannigan, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and lawyer Marshall (Jason Segel, a veteran of the cult favorite Freaks and Geeks), are warm and engaging people who actually like each other, unusual in a sitcom context where the modus operandi is generally insult humor, unattached to character motivation or plot logic. Neil Patrick Harris plays Barney Stinson, the power suited womanizer, but one can’t even take him seriously as a relationship threatening roué, because he, too, is ultimately soft and nice. The gimmick of Mother is that the events we are watching, set in the present, are the anecdotes told by Ted to his children about “how I met your mother,” with the older Ted voiced by Bob Saget. This allowed the writers to play a curious game: withholding information about just who it is Ted ends up marrying (though at least viewers know from the narration that it’s not Lily). This pitch-meeting level gimmick proved not to be essential to the show, however, and has been progressively minimized. Without it, How I Met Your Mother remains surprisingly funny and the characters are attractive and well-cast, helping the series earns viewer loyalty.

Rules of Engagement, by contrast, is a mid-season replacement that made its debut on February 5th, and is currently on hiatus after seven episodes (a common network practice employed as far back as Seinfeld, which went on to become a hit). Engagement‘s gimmick is to look at relationships from three different but simultaneously stages of love. David Spade’s Russell represents hedonistic singledom. Young love is represented by David and Jennifer. Long-term married life is embodied by Megyn Price’s Audrey and Patrick Warburton’s Jeff. With its single Casanova and its young and old couples in grumpy contrast, the show is a cross between the concurrent Mother and the Fox sitcom ‘Til Death, itself a variation on the earlier Fox show, Married … With Children. The problem with Rules, as highlighted by the two similar episodes, is that its characters aren’t very likable, being either skuzzy (Russell) or dumb (the young couple). Worse, it traffics in that same old and tired insult humor that has afflicted the worst sitcoms since the 1970s. The sole attraction Rules holds is in Warburton and Price, who immediately seemed convincingly cozy together. Warburton’s line readings are unpredictable, and Price, a veteran of earlier sitcoms, is endearing as a wised up “older” wife.

As the two shows played out their similar plots, it was clear that for Mother the premise of old-girlfriend-artifacts was a single step in a larger story, perhaps prepared long ahead by the writers, because at the end of the episode the pair decide to move in together (though there are subsequent episodic complications). For Rules the fight over first the bed and then some other romantic artifacts is just an excuse for an insult fest that results in the inevitable fake resolution hollow hug, the last refuge of the lesser sitcom. The couple has “learned” something, but only until their next contrived fight in a future episode.

So though it was a potentially embarrassing coincidence, the airing of same story sitcom episodes proved helpful. In fact, more shows should air the exact same stories. There should be a rule that at least once a season all sitcoms should build a story around the exact same premise, which viewers can use as aesthetic measuring sticks, the way film buffs compare different versions of Ben-Hur and Exorcist: The Beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie buffs often lose sight of this, but most people don’t know what’s going on in the cinema at any given moment. The public may be aware of a big, well-publicized film that everyone knows about, and they may have a vague notion of “that new movie with what’s his name in it,” but for them films are consumer items, used then disposed of.

This was brought home to me after seeing a screening of Grindhouse on Tuesday night and then running into someone and telling them excitedly that I just came from the film, only to have my auditor say, “What film is that?” They’d never heard of it. They weren’t aware, in fact, of any of the films opening the following Friday, nor of those that had opened in the previous weeks. The last movie this person had heard of opened last summer.

This incident rang an alarm bell. Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and the Weinstein Company are betting that there is a form of waking nostalgia for an era and type of filmmaking that is otherwise viewed as maudit by arbiters of official culture. I wonder, however, how big the market is for such a film beyond the sort of cultists who crowd into auditoria at the ComicCon. The filmmakers haven’t help their cause by calling the resultant work, a faux double bill with trailers for non-existant (yet) films and various teasers, Grindhouse, which is misleading. Eddie Muller’s book on the subject makes it clear that the term refers to theaters specializing in softcore exploitation erotica and taboo topics. The film might have been more accurately called Drive-In, except that perhaps that title might too closely evoke the film’s unlikely inspiration, Stanley Donen’s Movie Movie.

What will get lost in all the ballyhoo about the correctness of the term’s use, the length of the two movies together (after cuts, the film comes to about three hours and 10 minutes) as a marketing impediment, the level of its financial success, and whether or not Tarantino’s film represents a aesthetically regressive move is the actual nature of Tarantino’s achievement. What he has done is replicate in feel, look, and tone an actual drive in movie from the 1970s such as Swinging Cheerleaders. But the level of the mimicry doesn’t end just in its overexposed shots or the chick banter. Tarantino has gone on to conceive of a plot that is just as odd as some of the better more experimental ’70s drive in films. I’m thinking of films such as the explicitly acknowledged Vanishing Point as well as Two-Lane Blacktop, very odd narratives (and on a side note does anyone doubt that the reticent friendship between the two men in Two-Lane is echoed decades later in the equally if differently marvelous Way of the Gun?).

More about Death Proof in a moment. First there is Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez’s homage to Italian zombie movies and John Carpenter. This is a fine film, typical of some of Rodriguez’s earlier films such as The Faculty, which is multi-character driven suspense tales set at a rapid pace. Rodriguez does this sort of thing well, and though the film has funny parts it is not a parody or a satire on the genre, it is basically a straight zombie film. One feels like a curmudgeon for complaining that perhaps the film is set slightly below room temperature, that it could have enjoyed more sparkle and pizzazz. Planet Terror was mostly of interest to me because of Rose McGowan, whose remarkable face compels attention even when she isn’t the focus of the frame.

The fake trailers are also fun. Machete practically tells a whole story (one that sounds, oddly enough, a lot like Shooter). Werewolf Women of the SS looks exciting but there is a certain lack of clarity in the trailer. Don’t is funny, but only Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving really replicates a bad trailer for a bad movie, even down to the overuse of footage from just one or two scenes random scenes. The serial killer’s costume is subtly hilarious.

Death Proof is probably going to strike most unsympathetic viewers as too talky and weird. The movie appears split in half, chronically two separate attacks by a car-wielding serial killer. But in fact it is using a variation on the Psycho effect. The real story is the second half; the first half is distracted by following a small group of really offensive people on a wild goose chase.

That’s the other thing that unsympathetic viewers might find objectionable, that the group of three girls in the first half are mostly unpleasant. Sydney Tamiia Poitier as a careerist DJ is an unpleasant, self-absorbed, bossy “mean girl,” while Jordan Ladd’s character is a non-entity, a personality free follower. Only Vanessa Ferlito, set up as the “final girl,” has allure.

It’s not that Tarantino gets these people wrong. On the contrary, he develops a whole world around them in just some 20 minutes. Their later interactions with and comments about Rose McGowan’s Pam, and vice versa, says a lot about the high school culture they all emerged from. But then the movie makes an abrupt plot turn; like the characters in Crash, the film’s serial killer has a thing for car wrecks. And then we have to compose ourselves and learn the dynamics of a whole new quartet of women.

But notice how different they are. As my colleague Kim Morgan has pointed out, Tarantino has laid out really precise differences between the two groups of women. In a sense, because of their hedonism and haughtiness, the first group deserved to die. Whereas the first group of girls were all about fucking hypergamously, to advance their careers or to get high or to sate their hedonism, the second group are professionals (two stunt women, a make up girl, and an actress) but mostly on a humbler tier, and their on set romances are realistic and comic (the actress’s boyfriend, a Rock lookalike, likes to watch her pee). These are nicer, more engaging women, and we don’t want to see them die.

The point of the narrative thread is to get stunt woman Zoe in a death match with serial killer Stunt Man Mike. And it is one terrific car chase sequence. One of the best I’ve ever seen anyway. There are camera angles used here that you haven’t seen in a “car” scene since, say, Blowup, which, unpredictably, sets the gold standard on how to shoot a car in motion. Part of its power is that the car chase sequence is clearly mostly real and you admire its “redemption of physical reality.” This sequence is the “payoff” to average viewers for “enduring” all the talk. If Death Proof were a Roger Corman film, the rest of the movie would be window dressing built around this chase scene.

But also note just how weird are all the things that have happened in this film, the strange way characters are introduced, the long seemingly pointless sequences. Note how close it is to a movie like Swinging Cheerleaders, and yet so far from it. When drive in movies were odd, it was because they were made in a hurry, or had budgetary problems, or because they were made by incompetent people, but occasionally it was because an occasional filmmaker, like a Larry Cohen, was using the relative

It should also be pointed out, because people might not notice this facet too amid all the hubbub, that Tarantino pulls a Soderbergh and acts as his own DP. This makes the framing and color tones of the shots doubly interesting. I doubt if he is going to be interview by American Cinematographer over this, so I’m guess that it is because he was having a hard time, or anticipated having a hard time explaining to a photographer just what he wanted in his film. You will also notice that the look of the film changes subtly between its first and second halves, the second part being more intentionally “polished,” another clue that the second group of girls is privileged by the filmmaker as worthy of life. In one shot, a Woody Allen Hannah and her Sisters shot set in a diner, you can see Stunt Man Mike in the background, at the counter eating something, but otherwise his presence is not indicated.

We’re probably going to get four DVDs out of this movie. A quick and dirty release this fall, with just one extra, a video interview with RR and Tarantino (and have you noticed how absent Rodriguez is from the publicity build up?), followed by a two disc special edition, and then each film sold on its own, perhaps with even more different extras, and with luck the full lapdance scene (there are two shots from the sequence in the second trailer). I welcome them all.

One of the best DVD videos you are likely to see this year is a solo production of Beowulf. Yes, Beowulf.

Philip Larkin is reputed to have moaned a litany of the turgid works of English literature that he was forced to study in college, each more boring than its predecessor, in defiance of chronology and mounting sophistication, works from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. Today, in the popular imagination Beowulf is just a Woody Allen punch line. But once upon a time there was a thing called literature, then in its infancy. It dealt with the doings of great men, men the auditors of this “literature” were meant to admire, literature in those days being spoken, or rather sung, by roving scops, who were rewarded with food and shelter for their efforts. History was presumed to be scripted by great men doing great things, and their deeds needed recording so that the public could know how they got where they were now, and perhaps appreciate it. Though just as influenced by his Roman and Greek antecedents, Shakespeare surely, whether consciously or not, maintained the same vigilant scrutiny of the masters, it being easier to tell tales of mass appeal when the characters are “known” and their doings of vast importance. Over time, the masses were taught to read, it being believed that this would make them better employees. In the event, it increased their appetite for stories (and political change), and when the novel was the art form, it still told of the doings of the great. Eventually, the professors took over, and literature became a game, one designed to thwart the efforts of the dominant society to “inscribe” within the “text” the prevailing and imprisoning ideology. Thus taught, students of this new “literature” go on to write what they know, which is about seduction at the hands of their hypocritical professors.

Beowulf lies at the very birth of this literature as we know it, or at least once knew it. Though most people affect boredom with the poem, it has had a great and insinuating influence. Tolkien, for example, translated Beowulf (that’s where he got the noun Orcs), and its impact on the most popular film cycle so far of the 21st century is pronounced. Another contemporary fascinated by the text is Benjamin Bagby, a Medievalist and musician, whose musical ensemble, Sequentia, formed in 1977, recreates music from all periods of the pre-recording era. Starting in 1990, Bagby began mounting solo performances of Beowulf, accompanying himself on an Anglo-Saxon harp, a long, thin square of hollowed out wood with short strings attached.

I know this is going to sound a little PBSy, but Bagby’s performance is amazing. He doesn’t read the poem, so much as sing it, to melodies that emerged to him over the course of his study of the work (the music can even change from performance to performance). Bagby’s voice is a beautiful instrument, capable of doing almost anything, and his interpretation of the poem inspires a wide range of emotions, but wistful romanticism to rage in battle. Bagby’s stated goal is to recreate the experience of the poem as medieval audiences might have from a traveling storyteller. Bagby is utterly engaging, despite the fact that he is sing-speaking a poem in an early form of English that sounds Scandanavian.

Bagby captures the masculine urgency otherwise invisible in the lines on the page. Following along with the subtitles, the viewer is dropped into the mead halls and battlefields via Bagby’s marvelous instruments, both the harp and his voice. Listening, one realizes how the TV show 24 gets it right. By concentrating on the doings, both nefarious and well-meaning, of our leaders, their court battles and their power jockeying retinues, the show’s creators have made a suspenseful show that in essence harks back to the concerns of the theatrical literature from the Greeks to Shakespeare.

Beowulf captures on video Bagby’s performance of the poem in a Swedish culture center. Sitting the whole time, his harp on his left thigh, a subtly lighted blue curtain behind him, the full emphasis of the show falls on Bagby’s voice and facial expressions. which carry us powerfully through the narrative, indeed making us see that it is powerful. It’s one huge song. You may not understand the words, but then, how many songs have you heard on the radio without understanding the words?

This disc from Koch Lorber, which hit the street February 13th for $29.95, comes with two extras, each about 20 minutes long, neither of which explain how Bagby fell in love with Beowulf. In the first, Bagby is joined in a bookstore called the Poet’s House in New York, by three scholars, Mark Amodio Vassar, John Miles Foley of the University of Missouri, and Thomas Cable of the University of Texas, who served as a close advisor to Bagby in his creation of the stage show. They discuss the likely genesis and history of the poem, Cable guessing that it might have been written down by a monk remembering performances from his youth.

In the second extra, Bagby attempts to answer the difficult question of how he comes up with the music and melody of his piece. In the end, it is unanswerable because it is so embedded in his process, but he at least does go into detail about the structure and unusual facets of his harp.

From Jean Seberg to transsexualism, Walt Disney’s Peter Pan has probably had the biggest Influence of all his films. If you include the tradition of women playing Peter Pan, than J. M. Barrie’s play may be the most influential art work of the 20th century.

I recall being obsessed with it as a kid and today I can’t remember why. Re-seeing it in DVD form after so many years I get a strange Proustian hit over the bomb in the ticking alarm clock (and clocks and time are a theme in the show), but it is a feeling, a mental atmosphere, a cloud of emotion, more than a tangible or solid memory. When, in the post hippie, early feminist era, women began wearing their hair short, a la Jean Seberg in Breathless, I attributed it to the precedent of Peter Pan (not Wendy). And isn’t Woody Allen’s title What’s Up, Tiger Lily an evocation of the Disney movie’s comic alien and shipboard hazards?

One of the clever things about the film is that, as the supplementary material reminds us, the crocodile is the real villain. Captain Hook is a cowardly fop, whose Dickensianly named assistant Smee, serves to make him seem slightly more masculine. And for a short movie (77 minutes) a lot happens in it. The Darling family life is set up briskly. The flight to Never Land feels like a real escape. In Never Land there are pirates, caves, Indians (unfortunate, that), ships, gang planks, and more and more and more. To a tiny mind learning to absorb story, it must have seemed like an epic. Spielberg and Lucas have been trying to remake it, literally and figuratively, for decades.

It’s great to get re-acquainted with it. Disney DVD’s two disc Platinum Edition hits the street on Tuesday, March 6, 2007, for $29.95. It boasts a new digital full frame restoration with DD 5.1 (along with a restored version of the original track), French and Spanish audio tracks, and subtitles.

First off, you are greeted by the choice of Fast Play or menu options. Fast Play simply starts the trailers and movie; to get anything else you need the menu. The animated, musical menu offers 31 chapter scene selection.

Supplements on disc one begin with the audio commentary track, hosted by Roy Disney, who says correctly that Peter Pan represents Disney animation at the height of its “second golden age,” and joined by Leonard Maltin, animators Mark Davis, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas, and Ward Kimble, and voices and models Kathryn Beaumont (Wendy Darling) and Margaret Kerry (the leggy, buxom lass who served as the physical model for Tinker Bell), authors Jeff Kurdy and John Canemaker, and finally Walt Disney himself in oral history excerpts, in which he bemoans the “failure” of Alice in Wonderland, and confesses that, “I’m corny enough I want to be hit right here in the heart.” Alice, it turns out, didn’t have “any heart,” and one of the animators on the yak track feels that Disney blamed them for that.

In other supplements, you can play the film’s five official songs, with optional follow along lyrics, read or have read to you “Peter’s Playful Prank,” a digitalized version of the Golden Book version of the movie, and see a sneak peek of the forthcoming Tinker Bell spinoff, presumably straight to video.

Finally (actually first, as they are the first thing you see) are trailers for
Jungle Book 40th anniversary, Meet the Robinsons, a forthcoming mix of computer generated and drawn, Peter Pan in Return to Never Land, the straight to video sequel, and the new Tinker Bell.

As often happens, by the time you get to the second disc, DVD contents begin to feel thin and repetitious. Disc two is divided into four parts: Music, Backstage, Games, and Peter Pan’s Virtual Flight. That last item is a nothing, a three or four minute computer generated tour of the film’s unpopulated settings.

I barely looked at the Games section which has “Read Along Peter Pan,” “Camp Never Land: Train To Be a Lost Boy,” “Smee’s Sudoku Challenge,” “Tarrrget Practice,” and “Tink’s Fantasy Flight,” which I tried to play but couldn’t figure out.

Music contains a pirate song deleted from the film, or more precisely never shot, an interview with composer Richard Sherman who resurrected an unfinished song, wrote it up, and which we hear in a music video sung by Paige O’Hara. Finally, the Disney Channel’s T-Squad offer a music video of “The Second Star to the Right.”

Backstage Disney offers up “You Can Fly: The Making of Peter Pan” (15:55), a modern making of; “In Walt’s Words: ‘Why I Made Peter Pan’” (7:41), a reading of an article that appeared in something called Brief magazine around the time the movie came out, and which is surely not really “in Walt’s own words,” but ghosted by a staff writer; “Tinker Bell: A Fairy’s Tale,” (8:27) an account of the fairy’s role in the Disney universe, from Disneyland gatekeeper to inspiration for subsequent “take charge” Disney dames; “The Peter Pan that Almost Was” (21:01), which offers variations on the finished film (Pan was supposed to be Disney’s second feature, but the war intervened; in one variation, Nana goes to Never Land); Art Galleries (Visual Development, David Hall Concept Art, Mary Blair Concept Art, Character Design, Storyboard Art, Layouts and Backgrounds, Production Photos, Live Action Reference, and Publicity), and “The Peter Pan Story,” a black and white promotional film from 1952 (12:04).

Inserted into the box is a thick promotional catalog of Disney wares, and a six page and not completely helpful guide to the DVD (it doesn’t list the yak track participants).

Smokin’ Aces has only a 28 per cent approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes and that pisses me off.

Why must every movie I like be reviled? And why must every bad, inept movie be number one at the box office for four weeks in a row?

Even the “positive” reviews at RT are backhanded. “Will not disappoint fans of mayhem and bloody contract killing madmen,” writes another internet reviewer. The consensus derived from all these critiques seems to be that the film starts out wild and crazy, but is sure to wear out the viewer as it gets more and more absurd and out of control. “Overstays its welcome,” is how Variety put it. But I think these reviews have it all wrong. It is at this point of supposed absurdity that Smokin’ Aces actually gets good, as amid the gunplay there is an overpowering sense of sadness as various unorthodox “couples” in the film lose their partners as all those around them are losing their heads.

Another thing that pisses me off is the phrase Tarantinoesque, which I am always careful to try and use properly. These days the term is used promiscuously for just about any crime film that has young people in it, or that features older stars resurrected for a bit part, or has lengthy sequences of pop culture dialogue, or scenes of gross unexpected violence alternating with clashing black humor, none of which are qualities necessarily invented by Tarantino, by the way. But really, if anything isn’t the film more like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, making it “¦ Ritchiesque?

But does the following description sound Tarantinoesque or even Ritchiesque? Many years ago, the FBI took a raw recruit, pretended to kill him, and then altered his face and sent him undercover in order to spy on the mob, where surprisingly he rose to the rank of a Mafia don. Along the way he had an illegitimate son. Named Buddy Israel, the son grew up to become a Las Vegas magician. While working in Vegas he grew friendly with various mobsters. Inspired by their example, Israel embarks on his own life of crime, financing various robberies. But eventually he is cornered by the law, and in order to escape various penalties, he has agreed to rat out his former mentors and his closest advisor among the mobsters. Meanwhile, his biological father suffers in a hospital ward for want of a key organ transplat. Knowing that Israel is about to snitch, the mob leaders agree among themselves that Israel must be killed. Since he is under protective custody in a Lake Tahoe penthouse suite, the mob believe that he is something of an easy target and proceed to acquire a hit squad to assassinate him. Word of the million dollar price on his head leaks out, and freelance hit people and bounty hunters plan to converge on the hotel. The gangsters are reckless, however, and discuss the matter openly on their telephones, within earshot of two FBI surveillance officers.

At this point, the film begins. But the rest of the film is not solely gunplay and black humor with bits of backstory plastered into the cracks. It’s a story that transforms from delirium to dirge as bodies drop, and the expense of loyalty is added up. The film, in fact, is about clashing loyalties, an agency’s to its own versus individual agents to each other, hired killers to each other, bosses to their body guards, men of crime to their underlings. With careful applications of poignant music some of it borrowed from Ennio Morricone, director Joe Carnahan’s film turns elegiac, particularly when focused on the canvas of Ryan Reynolds’s face. He’s one of the two FBI agents listening in on the gangsters and his partner is played by Rat Liotta. The anguish and anger Reynolds evinces in the wake of Liotta’s fate is the point of the movie.

Yes, Smokin’ Aces is fast paced. It is hectic and multilayered and demands that you keep up. The film is all about transitions as Carnahan links scenes by asking questions in a shot or location that are answered at the start of the next scene. And it has a vast cast that partially includes Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Peter Berg, Andy Garcia, Alex Rocco, and Alicia Keys among many others, making the movie one we will probably look upon years hence and say, “Wow, was he in that, too?”

I don’t know if Smokin’s Aces is a great movie. All I know is that the film surprised me (the trailer is a tad misleading), and that it requires multiple viewings just to begin to digest it. And I also know that like other past films denigrated as mere Tarantino rip offs, such as Way of the Gun, it has a spirit and atmosphere that is increasingly rare in films, an exploration of the glue that holds society together, as manifested in the unspoken loyalty of people to each other and its cost as the society contrives to undermine it.

Ultimately I think that my favorite film genre is That Really Great Film I Saw on TV Last Night But I Can’t Remember the Title or Who’s In It.

If you have even a modest reputation as a film buff you become the go-to guy whenever someone wants to be reminded of the name of an actress in an obscure ’30s film, or what won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1978, or the title of a film that they saw on TV late last night that they had never heard of but turned out to be really, really good. When the person asks me about these kinds of films, I get really excited to. Confronting a blank slate, one’s mind paints on it all the inchoate images that you have always wanted to see in a film. A few hints and scraps from the confused viewer open up a vast terrain at the end of which is cinematic valhalla.

What’s always puzzled me, though, is why can’t people remember the titles of movies they just saw last night? When they come to me with these queries in the old days, before the Internet and the IMDB, I could never find the answer. Now, of course, I can usually find the answer in a few seconds and take all the credit from backward people who still haven’t caught on to the vast resources of the world wide web.

Among the aides du memoires that have proved handy is the Criterion Collection, which has solved two puzzles. Backs in the 1980s an elderly couple of anglophiles were extolling the virtues of a film they’d seen the night before, one starring Alec Guinness as a lonely soldier. They remembered it as having a title like Paths of Glory, Something of Glory. Since one could not at that time look up a title by its last word, I could never find it in skimpy Guinness filmographies. Later they asked me about a British thriller they thought was called The Green Light or The Green Ray, with Alaistar Sim. It’s too late to tell them now, but the real titles were Tunes of Glory, a CC release of a few years ago, and Green for Danger, due out from Criterion on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007, for $39.95. Green for Danger proves to be every bit as fun as they elders proclaimed.

Directed by Sidney Gilliat and released in 1946, Green for Danger is a murder mystery in a wartime medical setting.

The narrative begins precisely, with an exterior image of a postman on deliveries struggling up a hill. The at-first unidentified narrator says that the time is August the 17th 1944. Then in the very next sequence, this narrator points out that of a group of doctors and nurses and a patient in a surgery theater, three of them will be dead in the course of a few days.

The point of the dateline precision is to tell the audience that the story is taking place at the height of the German V-1 bomb campaign against the British. Known as the “Vergeltungswaffe” or reprisal weapon, and known colloquially as a doodlebug and buzz bomb, among other names, these were pilotless missiles bearing a large payload, the aircraft flying until it ran out of gas and then tumbled to the earth, where it destroyed random locations. About 10,000 were launched against Great Britain between June 12th, 1944, and March 29, 1945, killing at least 6, 000 people and injuring an additional 18, 000.

In the context of Green for Danger, the buzz bombs add to the air of tension and assault as doctors work on casualties at a military hospital. One patient brought in is Higgins (Moore Marriott), the postman. He seems particularly alarmed by two of his helpers, the anesthesiologist Dr. Barnes (Trevor Howard), who has a black mark in his past, and a nurse (Megs Jenkins), whose voice frightens him. When he dies on the operating table, his demise is viewed at first as another mishap of war, but later when one of the nurses falls apart in public and announces that Higgins’s death was the result of murder, and then is herself killed, outside help arrives in the form of Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim ) from Scotland Yard.

That Inspector Cockrill doesn’t make his presence known in the film until about 37 minutes in (though, it turns out, he is also that narrator), and that when we do meet him is a blend of buffoonishness and arrogance are among the many signs that this is an anti-detective film. It’s not told in a conventional manner and the presumed detective “hero” is a very unlikable man.

The first forty minutes is a whole lot of backstory. We learn that one nurse, Marion Bates (Judy Campbell) still carries a torch for Lothario Dr. Eden (Leo Genn). Bates is a character in Mrs. Danvers mode, with arched eyebrows that pierce the screen with contempt and suspicion. Nurse Esther Sanson (Rosamund John) feels guilty for leaving her mother behind to be bombed by a V-1, and nurse “Freddie” Linley (Sally Gray) is trying to weasel out of an engagement to the hyper-jealous Barnes.

Into this hash of Earl Grey’s Anatomy, walks Cockrill, who revels in making his suspects nervous and in causing fist fights between them. With his slouch hat and recklessly wielded cane, he is frightening, and Sim was a scary actor to begin with, several notches up from Boris Karloff in his capacity for physical ghastliness. In Gilliat’s vision, Cockrill ends up less being Columbo than Clouseau.

Gilliat, co-writing the script with Claud Gurney from a novel by Christianna Brand, one of the pseudonyms of Mary Milne, skirts many reservations from the British censorship board in almost operations and presenting the doctors as a randy bunch. And shot almost wholly in the Rank studios, the film has a beautiful controlled, British noir look, of wind-swept groves and little streams gushing through small rolling hills, of long hallways and small doors whose windows frame the odd corpse, a visual style that evokes Val Lewton’s movies. It’s a fantastic look and well worth a viewing in and of itself. As a parody of detective fiction, Gilliat starts out encouraging his actors to act as suspiciously as possible, with guilt-proclaiming glances at each other, but soon the film settles down and takes itself and its story seriously.

Green for Danger is a real find, one which Criterion has plucked out of its Janus Films catalog. It was previously released in the early 1990s as a laser disc, and one of the supplements is Bruce Eder’s audio commentary track from that disc. It’s a highly informative account of the film, its makers and its stars, who are likely to be unknown to most viewers given the general lack of attention to British post war cinema from anywhere else besides Criterion. Eder concludes that Gilliat wanted to parody the detective genre, but instead made “one of the best ever.”

Gilliat enjoyed a 30-year partnership with Frank Launder that took them from film scripts such as The Lady Vanishes to a series of popular success in the mid-1960s. New to the disc is a 14-minute video interview with Geoff Brown, the author of books on both Launder and Gilliat and Michael Balcon, and he walks the viewer through a thumbnail account of Gilliat and Launder’s career and points out some telling details about Green for Danger itself. In addition there is a 20-page booklet with cast, crew, chapter tiles, transfer info, and an essay by Geoffrey O’Brien and a brief statement by Gilliat, taken from Brown’s book. The static, musical menu offers 21-chapter scene selection. The disc is a fine account of an unusual film from an interesting period of film history.

It seems like every week I read about, receive in the mail, or enter a theater to view a movie that I’d never heard of. Running Scared (with Vera Farmiga), The Dark (with Maria Bello), Edison Force (with Justin Timberlake), and Bandidas are just three such recent examples. Now comes Unknown, which shouldn’t be unknown because it has an all-star cast that includes Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Joe Pantoliano, Barry Pepper, Jeremy Sisto, Peter Stormare, Chris Mulkey, and Bridget Moynahan, plus several recognizable faces from TV.

Apparently never released to the theaters, Unknown now comes to us as a Weinstein Company – IFC co-release on DVD. One can instantly see why the Weinstein Company might have been drawn to it. The film begins with a quasi-Tarantino-esque congregation of guys’ guys coming to in a warehouse somewhere. One is handcuffed to a railing (Sisto), another is tied to a chair (Pantoliano), and the other three are lying on the concrete floor. Caviezel is the first one to wake up, to the ringing of a telephone. He answers but because he has no memory of who he is or why he is in the warehouse he fakes it. Soon the others start to arise and they engage in long, rambling, repetitious conversations about who they are and how they got there. A rather clever premise is almost instantly pissed away with bad dialogue.The pissing is compounded by almost immediate cuts to the outside world where a woman (Moynahan) is trying to appease both some men who have kidnapped her wealthy husband and the FBI agents trying to “help” her. Thus we begin to learn a bit more about the background of these men through these cutaways.

Still, the film remains eminently watchable thanks to the great if wasted cast. But few such like clever movies can live up to their premises, and inevitably the more we know or begin to piece the puzzle together the electricity is zapped out of the project, and it may well be that there was no other way to bring us up to date on the overall plot without the mystery-quashing cutaways. Directed by Simon Brand and written by Matthew Waynee, for both of whom this is a first feature, there are warehouse bathroom scenes to evoke Reservoir Dogs and the presence of Joe Pantoliano to remind us of Memento and other films soleil. The surprises, turnabouts, and reversals continue on up to the film’s last minute, and I have to say that I was puzzled by its final revelation (DON’T READ THIS: Does Caviezel’s character turn himself in at the film’s last seconds, or is he doing something else that is inexplicable to me, something that might be telling us “this movie’s plot will carry on beyond its tangible climax,” like Sorcerer?).

Unknown arrives on DVD on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007, for a mere $19.95. It comes in a fine wide screen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) and for extras contains about six minutes of deleted or extended scenes, most having to do with the secondary characters.

Bridget Moynahan is also in Prey, released the same day by the same company, and in this one she has to anchor the movie, unlike ** Unknown, in which she is window dressing.

Prey takes place in African veldt, where a drought has caused dire changes in the feeding habits of lions. Newman (Peter Weller) is an engineer in charge of the new damn. He’s arrived with his second wife Amy (Moynahan), and two kids from his first marriage the resentful and sulky Jessica (Carly Schroeder) and David (Conner Dowds). While Newman is off to survey the damn, Amy and the kids head out for the tour of the land. When David has to take a pee, their guide walks him off to some bare trees, whereupon the guide (carrying the car keys) is attacked and killed by a lion. The three survivors spend the next three days and nights trapped in the Range Rover as a pride of lions hovers outside.

We know when the lions are there because the film slips into “leonine vision” that is a desaturated and distorted version of the same shots we just saw. A cross between Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Jaws, this is a film in which human beings can outrun lions, and where ** deus ex machine characters, such as a hunter and his son, are handy when the scripters (Beau Bauman and Jeff Wadlow) have penned themselves into a corner. Director Darrell Roodt (Cry, the Beloved Country) tries to make this essentially static film “active” with a camera that swirls all around its characters, but that ends up just a distraction. The plot also requires that someone drive recklessly at the worst possible moment and to drop precious water when startled. Prey requires that Moynahan (who resembles Famke Jannsen) look haggard and dehydrated but even that can’t quell her inherent beauty, even under the relentless close ups of the movie’s tight quarters (one notices that she has a mole on her lower left lip). The other cast members do the job expected of them. The film ends with a nice family pose by the four survivors with Newman saying, just after the viewer does, “Let’s go home.” Moynahan is about the only reason to watch the film.

Like Unknown, Prey comes out on January 30 for $19.95, in a nice widescreen transfer (2.35:1) and with no extras.

Also out the same day from the same people for the same price also in (2.35:1) and with no extras, is The Gathering, a horror film set on the Isle of Man. Directed by Brian Gilbert (Wilde) and originally released in 2002, The Gathering is written by Anthony Horowitz, which makes this, after Stormbreaker, makes this the second lousy Horowitz film in a season. This saddens me because his show Foyle’s War, is one of the best things on TV.

Unlike Stormbreaker, The Gathering isn’t atrocious, just rather predictable and derivative. It evokes memories of Friedkin’s The Guardian, Don’t Look Now, and the tradition of British films about home invaders, of strangers invading the sanctity of the British home and refusing to leave, such as Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle.

The invader is Cassie (Christina Ricci), who materializes outside the town of Ashby Wake where she is instantly struck down by the car driven by Marion Kirkman (Kerry Fox). Since the girl is relatively unhurt, and she can’t remember much about her past, Marion takes her into the family estate, where there are already two children and a husband, Simon (Stephen Dillane) who restores religious and art artifacts. His latest project is a buried church nearby, whose dire statuary Cassie sees in the faces of the villagers at Ashby Wake.

As Simon and his colleagues learn more about the nature of the buried church, Cassie is alerted to the fact that something is wrong by the fact that people stare at her and dogs bark ominously and she has hallucinations in which normal people have gaping holes in their heads. As she wanders around the village in her copious free time, she meets and is aided by a helpful fellow stranger, Dan Blakeley (Ioan Gruffudd) who is house sitting another estate. We instantly know he is up to know good because he is too nice and helpful to be true, and this is otherwise the kind of movie in which cars on the highway blithely pass by where there is a (ridiculously contrived) car accident occurs, an accident that ends, by the way, in a variation of the new, more violent version of the old Val Lewton “bus” as seen in Final Destination and Meet Joe Black.

Meanwhile, to Anne Dudley’s sea-saw music, Cassie rescues the Kirkman son several times and also stops a bomb from taking out most of Ashby Wake. The central mysteries, which are who is Cassie and who are the strange figures she sees watching her, burble in the background to know real resolution as far as I can tell. Either that, or I just didn’t get it, as the villains seem to be a blend of some kind of tale about these evil watchers born of early Christian times who thrive throughout the bad scenes of history (one of them is watching the motorcade at the JFK assassination) and revengers for child abuse. To its credit, though, the film actually ends, rather than leaving things open ended for a sequel.

Dana Stevens at Slate has an interesting article finding linkages between Mike Judge’s Idiocracy and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.

Well, I happened to watch Children of Men again last night and I was suddenly struck by its resemblance to Apocalypto.

Consider this. Both are “journey” films. Both recount the actions of a man striving to save or rescue a pregnant woman. Both culminate in a hellish vision of a civilization in its death throes, charged with garish and even incomprehensible emblems of humanity reduced to an animal level. And both films end with images of a ship arriving, offering either hope or hints of further disaster.

Any student of cinema knows that films bearing such similarities arriving at the same time is not unusual. There are broad coincidences, such as Volcano and Dante’s Peak arriving near simultaneously, and there are more subtle coincidences, such as a resemblances between Children of Men and Apocalypto (and Idiocracy). Meanwhile, The Nativity Story, most obviously, and Pan’s Labyrinth also concern themselves wholly or in part with the protection of an unborn child.

Obviously it’s the zeitgeist. In this post 911, post Guantanamo world, we are affected every day by terror alerts, long lines at airports, and a general climate of suspiciousness, that leads to a fear of others and a terror of what unjust mishaps could happen to ourselves.

But both films also have a religious component, which many viewers are not going to find as part of their zeitgeist. It’s unclear how extensively Gibson’s retrogressive conservative Catholic sect rules his life but his films certainly traffic in suspicions about the fate of people or cities that get lost upon the true way (there is also a homoerotic undercurrent, too, that goes back to his first directorial effort, The Man Without a Face, way back in 1993, but that is a whole other column). Meanwhile, Children of Men is a form of nativity story, with several in jokes. The young mother pretends for a second that her birth is virgin, and, like Saint Francis, Clive Owen’s Theodore Faron attracts animals to his side. However, ultimately Cuarón’s film pulls its punches, unlike the much different source book, which is more allegorical and comes down harshly against such things as euthanasia and other “liberal” and unChristian policies. People running to the book after an enthusiastic experience with the movie may be startled by what they find there.

In any case, there’s the coincidence between Children of Men and Apocalypto. I’m not sure of its full implications, but something is going on out there and even our filmmakers, who dwell in protected living quarters far from the rude hubbub of the street, are feeling it.

You’d think that you’d have heard of a film starring both Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz. You’d think that Hollywood’s publicity mavens would be in high gear to make you know about it. Especially if the film was also produced by Luc Besson. You’d think that when the DVD of said film arrived in the mail unbidden that a critic might say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been waiting to see this.” No, instead when Bandidas arrived in my mail box I had never heard of it, and upon researching it, wondered why.

It turns out that Bandidas, essentially a European production, was released to theaters in America solely through the Cinema Latino theater chain, something else I’d never heard of (it’s so hard to keep up, not despite all the info radiating technology, but because of it). Instead, Bandidas became a Fox almost-directly-to-DVD release, hitting the streets on January 9th and retailing for $27.95. Is it worth the purchase?

Well, it depends on the box (which my disc lacked). If the cover art emphasizes that Hayek and Cruz have obvious fun with their roles and that the film is a mad western romp, perhaps yes.

Joining Hayek and Cruz is like putting Brando and Dean in the same picture. The two hottest latina actresses in the world, they could have only made this film hotter if they rounded up Jennifer Lopez, Eva Mendes, Rosario Dawson, and Roselyn Sanchez, in a Hispanic remake of Bad Girls.

Along for the ride along are Steve Zahn as a ur-CSI criminalist (think Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow), the casual Sam Shepard as a shootist mentor who gives them lessons in bank robbing (think Robert Culp in Hannie Caulder), and Dwight Yoakam as the villain, attempting to channel Johnny Depp from Pirates but succeeding only in making himself an uncanny doppleganger of Clint Howard.If you’ve seen Louis Malle’s underrated Viva Maria (and aren’t all Malle’s films underrated?), you have a general idea of what Bandidas is all about. Basically, it creates a situation in which Hayak and Cruz start out as antagonists and end up partners in noble crime, especially after they take a page out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by leaping off a cliff together. Cruz is Maria Alvare, a girl of the soil whose father is wounded in a land grab implemented by Yoakam’s Tyler Jackson. Hayek is the highly educated and sophisticated Sara Sandoval, whose father is poisoned by Jackson as part of the same conspiracy. Together the two women go on a bank robbing run to break the strangle hold of the American imperialists over the Mexican economy. Zahn is Quentin Cooke, the criminalist summoned to catch the two looters.

Co-directered by Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg, their first feature, you’d also hardly know that this is a Luc Besson production. Only near the end, in a shoot out staged in a train car, do you get a hint of the visual creativity associated with Besson’s films and those of his subsidiaries (the scene uses some “bullet time”). Otherwise the film is straightforward western comedy, with a clean through line. It goes generally in the very direction you assume and want it to go. The best scene has Cruz and Hayek first meeting Zahn. Disguised as dancers they tie him to a bed and interrogate him, before deciding to use the helpless man as a kissing guinea pig, with Hayek leading the way for the supposedly innocent Cruz.

There is an English Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track and a Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround track in which you can hear the girls in their native languages. Plus English and Spanish subtitles. Number one supplement on the disc is a commentary by Hayek and Cruz that is unrevelatory but is girlish and fun, followed by a shortish making of, “Burning up the Set with Salma and Penelope,” and concluded by the theatrical trailer. Bandidas comes in both a widescreen and full frame version on the same disc.

It’s mid season, with the returning shows emerging from winter hiatus and new shows introduced to replace the bloody remnants of the season’s early bright ideas. Since I have been watching a lot of TV lately, indeed too much, I might as well put all that exposure to good use, so here is my assessment of the 2006 – 2007 season at midpoint.

The first thing to assert is that thus far, all my favorite network prime time shows have already been canceled. Smith, Kidnapped, and Daybreak all bit the dust somewhere between three and six episodes. Smith was a visually stylish show about criminals with a cast of movie stars (Ray Liotta, Amy Smart, Virginia Madsen) doing great work. But you could tell from the beginning that Smith didn’t fit into the general CBS template of bland looking, methodical plan americain presentation and conservative subject matter. Fortunately the unaired eps along with synopses of the remaining plots were available on line. Same with Kidnapped, a very realistic show that attempted, like Smith, acquire a bit of the 24 shine. In essence, it was a TV version of Ransom, even down to the presence of Delroy Lindo. Again it was well cast, but it did seem to be treading a little bit of water by the time of its unaired post-cancelled eps. ABC’s Daybreak had the bright idea to do an unofficial remake of Groundhog Day as a cop show with hints of 24 and The X-Files (the film also starred Mitch Pileggi). In it, Taye Diggs is a cop re-living the same day repeatedly, one on which he is accused of killing a DA. On paper, the show sounds like a drag, a repetitious narrative that taxes patience, but in fact the makers brought a lot of imagination to would have been a deadly and stagnant program.

Fortunately, there was still cable, and The Wire and BSG there to make up for the short-sightedness of either the mass of viewers or the decision-makers in the board rooms. Both cable shows were at the height of their powers and whetted the appetite for their next seasons, both due at different ends of this year. I don’t have cable, but greatly enjoyed the first season of Dexter, which excelled where for me most Showtime shows have fumbled. In the Battle of the Network Blondes, I favor Dexter‘s Julie Benz and Without a Trace‘s Montgomery over any of the others.

Meanwhile, back on primetime, Criminal Minds, a show I watched only because of Lola Glaudini, dropping her a few eps into its second season at the end of some convoluted Nixonian law and order subplot that, as usual in TV shows, intellectually wants you to side with law but which is secretly weighted toward vigilantism. Lola may be back, however, for a resolution of her plot line, if current teasers for the show are correct. Her character, Elle, pulled a Vic Mackey and murdered a serial rapist. I was disappointed at this turn of events, as it probably meant that Glaudini wanted off or was wanted off, the show (though her disastrous new bangy haircut is reason enough for banishment).

Also on CBS was the new show, Shark, which coasts on the star power of James Woods, and some of its cast, including Jeri Ryan. However, aside from them, it’s pretty conventional stuff, in the classic conservative CBS crime show manner, and most of the subsidiary cast members are rendered utterly unmemorable.

Shark has a character going from defense to prosecution, while the short-lived Justice had a guy going from prosecution to defense. Justice offered the gimmick of showing “what really happened” in the show’s last minute, but like most gimmicks, it would have been dropped eventually if the show had survived six airings.

I watched about 20 minutes of Jericho, but it didn’t grab me,it felt so conventional and soap operary. And I haven’t even watched Heroes yet, though all the episodes are saved up on my hard drive. Meanwhile, I’ve become a regular watcher of Without a Trace, not because it is a good show (it pulls that same dichotomy between moral and legal action), but because I love Poppy Montgomery’s mouth and because I like the fact that her character is named Sam(antha) Spade. Like Criminal Minds, the show had her shot recently and she tried to come back “too early.”

In the CSI realm, I still like “classic” Vegas CSI, am a bit repulsed by Miami, and am waiting for NY to take off (it’s tried to make itself hip by including the Suicide Girls). I wish that the producers would do something daring such as CSI: Vancouver, i.e., go to a wholly other jurisdiction where all the rules are different. Actually, in a way the show already exists, in the form of the excellent Canadian program DaVinci’s Inquest.

I don’t watch the rest of CBS’s female-oriented dramas ( Ghost Whisperer, Numbers, or for that matter, NBC’s Medium), nor its reality based shows. Over at ABC I watch Boston Legal (reviewed earlier under its box set), and Lost (treading water). I never even had a chance to follow The Nine or Six Degrees before they were canceled, and I just recently did a marathon of Ugly Betty, a good show that has something of a divided soul: Betty’s home life is realistic, but her work life is farcical (like the telenovelas that her dad watches). With luck I’ll catch up with Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives later on DVD, which is my preferred way to watch those shows.

At Fox, I follow House (which tells the exact same story every week), Prison Break (which is starting to wear me out), the X-Files-like Vanished before it was canceled (though it wasn’t very good), Bones (against my better judgment), and The Simpsons.

Over at NBC, I’m following Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip without really liking it much, along with 30 Rock which I greatly prefer. By way of comparison, note how they both mocked the ambush pederasty shows on NBC, but 30 Rock integrated them into the narrative while Studio simply did a funny skit. Again, Studio is already treading water (while presenting the occasional powerful moment), while 30 Rock has some sharp wit and Alec Baldwin. Fey’s portrayal of a conflicted modern urban woman is, I fear, terribly underrated, if it is “rated” at all. I’ve only seen a few hours of Friday Night Lights, and while I like the coach and his wife, haven’t found myself addicted, and don’t really like where the show appears to be going. Of the Laws and Order, I prefer the Sherlock Holmesian CI, which has lost its way terribly, never watch SVU, and only the classic L&O when I am home on Fridays, though I like the addition of Milena Govich. I never watch NBC’s game shows or news shows, and Thursday is all about four good comedy shows in a row.

Finally, I’ve been catching Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars when I can. It’s my understanding that Gilmore was much, much better in earlier seasons, and Mars is continuing its downward spiral, with an obviously bright Veronica trapped in what appears to be a community college, and clashing with her dreadful boyfriend an parodies of college extremists. The show just doesn’t have the layers or nuances of its first season.

I’m obviously watching way too much tube (or plasma screen). I just wish I were getting paid for it. But this immersion into network television has been building for years, not just with me, but with many of my friends. It seemed to have started way back in 1999 with the appearance of The Sopranos on HBO. Suddenly snobbish movie buffs found themselves making appointments with television, something they hadn’t done since they were kids. Having raised the bar, HBO inspired other networks to keep up, and in a spotty fashion, they have.

But it is also clear that as good as TV is these days, it is still a medium in crisis. It doesn’t know what to do. When it tries to push the edge of the envelope (hate that phrase) it’s shot down; meanwhile it is rewarded for airing shows like NCIS that are like every other show. Meanwhile, people are TIVOing and Bittorrenting shows and so the networks have no way to really know who is watching their shows. And it is obvious that anyone who can, be it via iTunes or other downloads, avoids seeing commercials as soon as they can. Worse, the networks are still locked into the 22 to 24 episode season, when it is obvious that the strength of HBO shows is that they play to fit, they exist as a cycle of episodes only to the extent of their internal narrative logic. HBO writers, I imagine (though I could be wrong), don’t tire out as fast. Thus The Wire has stayed strong for four seasons, which Veronica Mars seemed tuckered out in its second season. We are on the cusp of many, many radical changes in the nature of programing and consumption, in formats that have changed more in the last eight years than in all of the previous 80.

One of our QuickStopEntertainment colleagues has a new job.

If you are a fan of Kim Morgan‘s work from her old MoviePoopShoot columns (Morgan hasn’t yet been active at Quickstop) or from her own blog Sunset Gun, or even from her news blog at MSN Movie Filter, you’ll want to follow her work over at ClickStar, where she is also a writer and editorial consultant.

What the hell is ClickStar, you may wonder? Your wonderment is not surprising. ClickStar is the multimillion dollar investment in home movie downloading that no one has ever heard of. Launched last month in a cloud of silence, the service bears the faces of Morgan Freeman, Peter Bogdanovich, and Danny DeVito, who make the site unique by offering commentary in the form of video interviews before you watch the movie (I’m guessing about this because, as a Mac user, I am banned from ClickStar).The company is backed by Revelations Entertainment, which Freeman co-owns, and Intel Corporation, and has agreements with Sony, Universal, and Warner to offer downloads of portions of their catalogs. ClickStar also boasts the ambition to allow downloads of new movies, such as the Freeman starer 10 Items or Less, which was released on ClickStar and in the theaters in an experiment similar to Mark Cuban’s burst Bubble.

ClickStar appears to be a great idea that has been terribly implemented and marketed. Starting with its name, ClickStar, one of those nonsense internet techno names that mean nothing (especially since you don’t actually click on anything with a tuner as the illustration on the home page suggests), all the way up to its goulash of conflicting website names, and its virtual anonymity among pundits. But things got worse when it went live. The site’s user forum, which Mac users can access in a limited fashion, contains complaints by eager customers who can’t figure out how to download movies (Steve Jobs would never have allowed the site to be this complex) or who are overcharged while getting nothing. Click? Yeah, right.

One bright spot in the hash is Morgan’s ClickStar blog. So far Morgan has written a general introduction to herself and subsequent posts on Bringing Up Baby and films based on plays by Tennessee Williams. Morgan is enthusiastic and movie mad and informed, and like the late Pauline Kael is very good on stars and star personae. The site has several bloggers, but Morgan’s blog thus far is the best. Morgan makes you eager to see the movies she talks about (which are then downloadable from ClickStar), unlike one of the other bloggers, who spends most of her webspace ridiculously listing movies she hasn’t seen, rather than celebrating ones that she has, certainly missing the whole point of the blog.

You may not be able to figure out how to actually purchase any ClickStar movies yet, but you can at least enjoy Morgan’s enthusiastic film criticism.

One of the first Criterion publications of the new year is likely to puzzle fans of the company who associate it almost exclusively with high art, such as the Janus Film Collection and the severe aesthetics of Bergman and Bresson. I refer to the company’s new box set, Monsters and Madmen, a four disc compendium that hits the street on Tuesday, January 9th, for $79.95. Monsters gathers together two rare Boris Karloff films from the late 1950s, together with two sci-fi films from the same period, all executive produced by Richard Gordon, who, with his brother Alex, comprise a rather remarkable chapter of minor film history. Close students of Criterion will recall that the company issued Fiend Without a Face back in 2001, and this box completes, or at least continues, Criterion’s excavation of Gordon’s work, done in collaboration with the enthusiastic writer and researcher Tom Weaver, author of numerous McFarland books on subjects such as John Carradine. The Gordon collection is all part of Criterion’s occasional forays into the offbeat genre material, such as their Beastie Boys collection of a few years back, and of some recent releases such as Equinox, all of which may have been part of a genre imprint that Criterion was contemplating initiating for a time.

The box contains, in the order in which I viewed them, Corridors of Blood (1958), The Haunted Strangler (1958), The Atomic Submarine (1959), and First Man Into Space (1959) (Fiend was released in 1958). The first two are the Karloff films, and are surprisingly good, as long as you don’t expect Psycho. The second two are the militaristic sci-fi films, the first execrable, the second somewhat better (but still without the iconic rightness of Fiend).

Corridors of Blood packs a lot of story into its short running time, and covers a tall social canvas. It’s about the search by an elderly but still idealistic British doctor in the 1800s seeking to invent anesthetics. Like Dr. Jekyll, he ends up experimenting on himself, which leads to mood changes and physical incompetency, but also falls into the hands of a band of lower class louts, among them Christopher Lee, that sells corpses to the very medical school where the doctor performs. The script, credited to Jean Scott Rogers, is quite clever, but calling it a horror film is something of a stretch. Put, say, Joel McCrea in the role, as he was in the similar The Great Moment by Preston Sturges, and it is more like a period drama. Indeed, Corridors of Blood is much like one of those short films from MGM in the 40s about science or american history, just more nuanced and complex. One of the film’s “ironies,” is that the doctor most contemptuous of Karloff’s endeavors is the most rapacious client of the graverobbers. The film is also remarkably contemporary, with Karloff descending into the depths of addiction, sucking on his elaborate smoking device like it was a crack pipe. Also, look for Bond’s Q in the background of some of the operating theater scenes.

This disc supersedes an Image release of 1998, but though the black and white, full frame transfer mostly looks good, there are some defects, such as a hair in the gate around the 35:24 time code. The static, musical menu offers 15 chapter scene selection for the 86 minute movie, and like most of the discs in the set, there is an audio commentary track with Gordon, conducted by Weaver, a short 15 minute making of that features video interviews with director Robert Day and cast member Francis Matthews, and audio interview with actress Yvonne Romain (who is married to the composer who wrote the theme song to Goldfinger), a short survey of censor cuts, the trailer, and a gallery of promotional stills.

The Haunted Strangler is a another Jekyll and Hyde tale, with a little over flow into the investigator-looking-for-himself genre (like Angel Heart). In this case a prominent writer (Karloff) is attempting to prove that the man hanged for a series of Jack the Ripper like murders is innocent. Karloff is most engaging as the writer, and the role demands a surprising level of emotional variation. It’s slow paced, but never unconvincing, and the filmmakers got a lot out of a little.

Haunted features another yak track by Weaver and Gordon, a 12-minute making of with interviews with director Day, writer Jan Read, and cast members Jean Kent and Vera Day, along with the trailer, radio spots, and a stills gallery.

Not so hot is The Atomic Submarine, a woeful tale in which a sub is sent to the North Pole to track down the reason for a series of naval disasters. The solution proves to be a flying saucer that swims, using the magnetic field to recharge itself. The film stars Arthur Franz, a familiar face, as the sub first mate, and Brett Halsey as a scientist. George Sanders’s brother, Tom Conway, sonambulizes his way through the story, also as a scientist. Special effects are laughable and the “monster,” when finally seen, is atrocious. The film comes narrated by an officious voice, and the film in general evokes memories of The Thing, but it is inconsistent in all ways great and small. For example, a frogman on board asks for a locker to store his stuff, and is told that there are no lockers. Then, five minutes later, you can see a wall of lockers in the background of a shot with another character.

Extras are another commentary with Gordon, but augmented with taped interviews with his late brother Alex, plus an entertaining and frank interview with Halsey in the making of, the trailer, and a stills gallery.

Finally, there is First Man Into Space. Like Sub, it starts out like some kind of military tale, but when the pilot always striving to climb higher is infused with space dust, he comes back to earth a monster. His brother (Marshall Thompson, another familiar face – indeed, he even resembles Franz – and who was also in Fiend) seeks to help him out, but fails. Unlike Sub, this film is well-written, well-acted, and well-shot. Only the eventual manifest appearance of the monster drags things down. Supplements include another track by Weaver and Day, and a brief making of with video interviews with director Day and some cast members, trailer, radio spots, and a stills gallery.

All the commentaries were recorded in 2003, with the promotional material shot shortly thereafter, which gives an idea how long these items were either on the shelf or in the works. The four films come in two dual disc keep cases, housed in a box. There are two companion booklets of 24-pages each. The Karloff films booklet contains a terrific essay by Maitland McDonagh, who gives a summary of the remarkable career of the Gordon brothers. In addition to chapter titles, cast and crew, DVD credits, and transfer information, there are excerpts from the memoirs of John Croydon, the producer, whose thoughts were only printed in Fangoria magazine. To accompany the sci-fi films, there are essays by Michael Lennick and Bruce Eder. Packaging is nifty, with imagery that evokes the starlite, deluxe 1950s of bowling alleys, sci-fi magazines, and coasters.

After impressing Hollywood with films made in his native land, Renny Harlin came from Finland, where he was known as Lauri Harjola, to direct movies in America, and became one of the many directors to jumpstart a career by helming a Nightmare on Elm Street entry. He leapt from that to Die Hard 2, just as good as and arguably better than the first film. He stumbled a bit and then did Cliffhanger with Stallone. His next few films featured his then wife, Gena Davis, and included what might be considered his masterpiece, The Long Kiss Goodnight. An expensive film, it flopped at the box office and then he collaborated again with Stallone on Driven. At $72 million, that was his last big budgeted film. Since then Harlin has dwelled in the more modestly acquitted realm of films budgeted at around $20 million dollars. Exorcist: The Beginning and Mindhunters were both troubled projects and essentially reviled by the critics, and Harlin, perceived as vulnerable, clearly became a whipping boy for them.

Yet for me there continues to be something about Harlin’s films that I find attractive. Even at more modest budgets, they evince a command and control that should be the envy of others. And his career should be a cautionary tale to others who specialize in the action film. After burning brightly, the Ratners, the McGs, the Finchers, the Bays will at some point themselves also all fall into an abyss of one kind or another.Harlin obviously likes to do genre material but his films are mocked, while Tarantino, equally genre mad, gets a pass, indeed gets praised.

Now comes The Covenant which sneaked in and out of the theaters last fall and now appears on DVD from Screen Gems, hitting the street on January 2, 2007, for $28.95. It’s not the level of film that a Harlin apologist wants to go out on a limb for, and in fact is filled with rather amateurish mistakes. Ideally, it is Joel Schumacher material.

Harlin rather confounds critics who approach him from an auteurist bent. His films have a consistent visual quality, but it is also the same quality found in most big budgeted action films and might better be counted as a producer’s style. And it is difficult to pinpoint a thematic consistency. One of his Finnish films, Born American, concerned three American tourists who jokingly cross the border into Russia and end up in a Soviet jail. Mindhunters, Deep Blue Sea, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Cliffhanger, and Die Hard 2 all also feature innocents or something equivalent to that who stumble into a larger life threatening situation. And that’s speaking very broadly. Also, this list accounts for less than half of his output, and on cursory consideration those films don’t scream out with any kind of thematic consistency.

The Covenant also features an innocent, in this case Sarah (Laura Ramsey), who is the new student at the prestigious if also wholly ominous Spenser Academy in Ipswitch. She gets an insta-crush on Caleb Danvers (Steven Strait), the naturally charismatic leader of the student body, but a lad who also happens to be one of the descendants of the Salem witches. His posse makes up the other descendants. There is another new student in the school, the goofy Chase Collins (Sebastian Stan) who turns out to be something more than what he seems – a rival warlock who wants to suck dry Caleb’s power as he “ascends” to a higher level of skill on his 18th birthday. The film climaxes with a battle royale between the two antagonists, with Sarah held hostage between them.

If nothing else, The Covenant shows the problems facing filmmakers making a Dr. Strange movie, because it devolves into two guys facing off throwing CGI fireballs at each other across a room. Roger Corman did the same thing better 44 years ago in The Raven.

Most of the problems with The Covenant can be traced to the script credited to J.S. Cardone. The 97 minute film appears to have narrative gaps (though the disc doesn’t feature any deleted scenes), and introduces about 12 characters in its first 10 minutes. By the time you reach a state where you can tell them apart, the movie’s over. Its fantasy world is typically inconsistent, is one of those scripts in which every casual thing you see will loom large later, and is one of those “arrivals and departures” scripts, in which every scene begins and ends with someone arriving then departing. This approach to screen writing makes for very enervated, predictable, and repetitious stories. The fantasy world is inconsistent in that way typical of such films, in which powers characters have are opportunistically inconsistent. For example, on the one hand these warlocks can fly, but on the other, at the end Caleb simply carries Sarah out of a burning barn. Why doesn’t he fly out?

Thus, The Covenant is a disc for Harlin completists only. The widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced), with a full frame version also available on the same disc. It’s a good transfer that makes the numerous special effects believable. Subtitles come in English and French under a English Dolby Digital 5.1 and French Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks. Extras consist of a commentary track by director Harlin that emphasizes the technical challenges of the production. Besides trailers, there is also a making of featurette called “Breaking the Silence: Exposing The Covenent” which is typical upbeat EPK fluff.

Taking a page out of contemporary European radical thinking, Godard used to complain in his films about the “CocaColonization” of France. He was a profound American movie lover, but abhorred the deterioration of European culture at the hands of uniformity-demanding corporate culture, the rise of McWorld.

A similar “CocaColonization” has taken place in the world of Asia action cinema. This has had a perhaps almost beneficial effect on world audiences, or at least American viewers because they are now easier to follow, having been denuded of their “odd” local cultural eccentricities. In addition they often have specific political messages embedded in their narratives, but not at all explicitly, as Godard’s later films did. For example, Yimou Zhang’s Hero had a specific and pro-Chinese message about unification and strong leadership to impart. Yimou may or may not have believed in the message himself, but it was obviously the price he had to pay to get the film made, a crazy mirror image of the patriotism test Howard Hughes made of the RKO film The Woman on Pier 13.

Which brings us to the latest example of Asian action, Fearless, also known as Jet Li’s Fearless. The titular possessiveness makes sense. It is clear from the making of on the disc that this is a highly personal film for Li, a practicing Tibetan Buddhist, whose film is the result of his grappling with the conflict between the subject matter of his movies and the nature of his beliefs.

Directed by Ronny Yu, who has made something of a name for himself in American films via Freddy vs. Jason, Formula 51, and Bride of Chucky, and credited to writers Chris Chow and Christine To, Fearless tells the oft-recounted tale of Huo Yuanjia, the martial artist who, according to the film, unified the disparate Chinese combat techniques back in the early 1900s. As the film tells it, Huo always admired the martial spirit of his father, who refused to let his son train. Huo does it anyway, secretly, and grows up to lead a popular school.One day he goes into combat to defend the honor of a student beaten up by a rival school master. Huo takes so much out on him that the rival dies. Then Huo learns that the beating the student suffered was more or less deserved, but that doesn’t stop one of the dead master’s students from killing Huo’s wife and kid before slitting his own throat.

Fearless is divided into four parts. The massacre ends part two. Part three follows Huo as he becomes a drifter, his hair growing wild and his mind apparently broken. One day he is pulled out of a stream and brought back to health by a village of rice farmers. Working with the villagers focuses and steadies him as his strength comes back, and Huo finds himself drawn closer to a blind girl (Li Sun) who “sees” better than him.

The third and final part commences when Huo leaves the village (it’s probably obvious but I didn’t quite catch why), and sets about to help China regain its pride among other nations, whose leaders have nicknamed China the sick man of Asia. This is done, of course, via a succession of combats, the last one staged between Huo and a Japanese martial artist. The film ends on a rather solemn if elegiac note.

Though the tale is perfectly clear, unlike many of the older action films beloved of buffs who first saw them back in the 1970s, the film still subscribes to some of the crazier aspects of the genre. For example, Huo has a preternatural ability to fly. He uses this ability to dance around his opponent, like a Muhammad Ali. But if you can fly, why bother to continue fighting so conventionally in the first place? If the movie were wholly funny and action oriented rather than having a political message in a mostly serious and realistic context, then the flying wouldn’t stick out, but it does. Being a “cleaned up” version of an action film, it is also bereft of humor, Jet Li taking his role and the message of the film very seriously.

Asian viewers probably found its message of unification and working together as one rather unsubtle as propaganda, and in the finished film it comprises only a few minutes in part three as Huo rallies the masses. It’s subtle as messages go, but still there. It’s not clear to me, though, who its intended recipients happen to be, because the message seems at variance with Li’s stated beliefs in the making of doc. There, Li indicates that as a follower of Tibetan Buddhism, he must work on himself, on his own never-ending training and development. Maybe this isn’t really at variance with Huo’s call for national and martial unity, but it seems to be. What Huo seems to want is for the faceless masses of China to become strong though collectivism. What Li practices in private sounds self-absorbed and isolating.

Jet Li’s Fearless comes in a smashing wide screen transfer (2.40:1 enhanced). It features both Chinese and English dialogue tracks in Dolby Digital 5.1, and has English, Spanish, French subtitles. The Unrated Edition also includes the original, slightly shorter theatrical version.

Supplements consist of one a 20-minute making of, and a deleted scene. “A Fearless Journey” recounts how and why this is Li’s final action film, and displays him wrestling with issues of screen violence and moral messages. It exists almost solely to prompt respect in the viewer for Li’s decision, but does have sound bites from Yu, and from some of the martial artists who play Li’s opponents in the ring. The deleted scene is a six minute sequence that takes place in the rice farmer village and shows a major stage in Huo’s development as a “peaceful warrior.” Jet Li’s Fearless hit the street December 19, 2006, and retails for $29.95.

How would you put together a movie version of a popular TV show? Would you modernize it? Or would you somehow tap into nostalgia memories of a program that viewers may not have even seen in some time?

There is a third option, though, which is simply to ignore the show and create a new, different entity. That seems to be the choice of the makers of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible series. The first one, directed by Brian De Palma, and therefore twisted and dark and obsessed with betrayal between friends, spent a few minutes repudiating the show by turning Jim Phelps, played by Peter Graves from the show’s second season on, into a traitor and killer. No. 2 was a John Woo exercise. Now No. 3, just out on DVD after a recent release to the screens where it “underperformed” by the studio’s standards, serves as an entree for J. J. Abrams into the big screen.

He was probably a good choice. If you aren’t going to truly adapt the source show you can at least adapt a modern equivalent that does its stuff better, i.e., Alias, Abrams chick spy program. It was an excellent show, at least in its first two seasons, and was innovative in its complexity. Plus, it didn’t look or sound like a TV show. In its camerawork, editing, and music, it was more like a movie. So the transition from small to big screen was probably logical for Abrams, who was otherwise distracted by his other hit TV show, Lost. And in any case, Cruise has an eye for, and the clout to work with, the best directors, so his imprimatur is really important to those who have the brains to pay attention to such things.

As many have noted before me, reviving TV shows is a fad in Hollywood, born of the movie industry’s need to offer up material that is somehow familiar to the public. Yet then they go and change the thing. It’s such a confusing hash of influences. One of the most faithful TV show adaptations was The Flintstones, with good physical analogs for the original cartoon characters, is probably the closest adaptation, and that was a yabba dabba dud, a movie that everyone saw and no one liked (which makes it the perfect embodiment of the Houxian Principle, which states that, “Just because a movie made $100 million dollars doesn’t mean that anyone liked it”).

In any case, Cruise’s adaptations have shown a savvy sense of the public’s tastes, which is a hunger for off season Bond films, mainly because the real Bond films are usually bad (until 2006, anyway). Cruise, as I never tire of repeating, is probably one of the great screen stars, and it isn’t an accident. He makes an interesting contrast with Johnny Depp, another great actor, whose choice of directors and projects is quirkier and more personal, and Sean Penn, probably the most overrated actor working, whose taste in projects and directors is appallingly bad. The person who should be in this top three is Robert Downey, Jr., who derailed his own career.

In any case, Abrams turned MI3 into a episode of Alias, with an emphasis on family, on loyalty, and on the conflict between the secret and the public life. Abrams is a master of the highly emotional boy – girl scene (as well as the father-daughter scene, and so on), and with certain very key scenes between Cruise and Michelle Monaghan develop a rapport that remains crucial later when Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is in extreme jeopardy. I thought that MI3 was a terrific film, very well cast and with non-stop well choreographed action.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the special two disc MI3 is rife with terrible supplements that fail to do justice to it as a film. I could fill probably three or more columns with bile born of my mounting rage at the lost opportunities found on contemporary DVDs, of the contempt for the audience represented by most supplements, on the continuing disdain of filmmakers such as De Palma and Spielberg toward commentary tracks, of EPKs tossed in as if they had value as explications du textes. MI3 is a two disc special edition set, but frankly the regular old widescreen edition without the supplemental supplements should be fine for most consumers, as they won’t have their intelligence insulted by the faux extra extras (there is also a full frame edition; does anyone buy these?). DVDs are on the brink of being in trouble. Downloads are easier; there is a lot of bootlegging; the introduction of two new competing high standard formats is confusing and alienating. DVDs are slipping as a buffer zone for studios whose movies are weak at the theaters.

Shared among the three versions of the DVDs are an audio commentary by Cruise and Abrams, deleted scenes, The Making of the Mission, and something called Tribute Montage: Excellence in Film.” Will you life be deprived of unexpected sunshine if you never see or hear these supplements? No. It’s not like missing out on the Peter Ustinov interview on the Criterion Spartacus, which I’ve shown to myself and others over 10 times. Supplements, basically, need to be valuable and entertaining in and of themselves. The five deleted scenes add some nuances, especially about the character Lindsay. The yak track is an excited account of how much fun it was for the duo to work with each other, how much Cruise got hurt making the film (Clooney raised the stakes on that aspect of filmmaking), and some scenes were rejiggered.

Abrams is a master of LA speak. I still recall something he said on the Lost first season making of, in which he said that when he met his collaborator on the show, they were so compatible that he was “mad that I hadn’t met him before this.” In the MI “making of” he is adept at praising everyone else in very specific ways that sound both true and false at the same time. The final supplement on the first disc is a nine minute anthology of Cruise movie clips (unsurprisingly Kidman free) originally screened when Cruise won a British film award. I liked it because it affirmed Cruise’s range and film wit.

Except for one or two brief elements, the supplements on disc two are totally useless. “Mission Action: Inside the Action Unit,” “Visualizing the Mission,”
“Inside the IMF,” and “Launching the Mission” are either for kids or morons, if not to fulfill some contractual agreement that stipulates that everyone associated with the movie gets 15 seconds of “making of” fame. “Mission: Metamorphosis” is about the making of the film’s mask sequence and is slightly interesting, and “Scoring the Mission” is about the film’s music, and that’s almost always of some value, but “Moviefone Unscripted” is an embarrassing throwaway, and “Tribute Montage: Generation: Cruise” essentially repeats the same thing from the first disc. Finally there is a photo gallery and trailers. None of the things that used to be on DVDs in abundance, such as isolated music tracks and complete screenplays, are bothered with anymore. It’s too “technical,” I guess, too “geeky” or “fannish,” and alienates the ordinary fucking people presumed to be the main consumers of DVDs now. The format is too popular for it to escape descending into condescending mediocrity.

MI3 comes in a terrific widescreen transfer (2.35:1 enhanced), with a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track. The special edition retails for $34.95 and hit the street October 30th, 2006.

Since Paramount owns the Mission Impossible franchise, the studio is also able to release the first season of the TV show. In total it consisted of seven seasons and a two season revival series, but with Cruise divorced from Paramount it is unclear if there will be a fourth movie from him for the studio, so for further MI joneses, Paramount may have to relay on the six or eight remaining TV seasons.

Seeing the show again after all these years offers some evidence as to why the filmmakers changed so much. It’s fairly tedious. In fact, it’s a show that was more or less made by its theme song, which promised more tension and excitement than the show itself, constrained by conventions of the time, could offer. The individual plots don’t exploit the Topkapi-style engineer scam as much as you think, the politics of the show is retrograde, even for its time, and one of the episodes even posits the existence of ghosts, which come to the IMF teams aid.

This is a show with an international canvas that looks like it never got out of the Paramount back lot. It’s interior scenes are either badly lit or over lit. Like most shows of the time, the set decoration is atrocious. Orange couches on green rugs with red walls. While throwing up slightly into my mouth, I wondered why the sets were so garish, and then remembered that color TVs at the time weren’t particularly sophisticated (a fact parodied in the otherwise predictable Invincible), and the louder it was the easier it was to “see.”Seasons were longer then, and MI season one has 28 episodes spread across seven discs with no extras, though the episodes are announced as digitally remastered in both sound and picture. To harp on the subject of extras again, there are lots of fans of the show out there who have written books or kept blogs or fan sites in its honor. Presumably they are intelligent enough to add their voices to either commentary tracks or to write text for screen or booklet. Excluding the fans on the discs is to eventually exclude them from buying future sets because their viewing experience won’t be enhanced and there is no compensation for badly shot, acted, and written episodes.

Mission Impossible season one hit the street on December 5th, 2006, retailing for $59.95.

When the holiday season comes around, new movies end up divided into two general categories. There are the explicitly Christmas films, such as Deck the Halls and the whatever latest Santa Clause there is, and there are the Oscar whoring films, crammed into the last few days of December to qualify for Academy consideration.

I’ve had a chance to see most of the Oscar whoring films, and the challenge is to determine which if any of these movies will be of lasting importance. Some of them have already even come and gone, if by “gone” we mean failed to make enough money to qualify for continued residence in the main auditoria of first run theaters. And while the financial hell of the sub run and second run theaters is filling up, the new movies crowd the starting gate like Boston Marathon aspirants.

Take Turistas and Deja Vu. It’s always struck me as odd that slasher films are frequently released at Xmas, and several good ones have been, such as Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (which I saw on Xmas Day way back when it first came out), so they must appeal to some particularly suicidal mood in loner Americans. Turistas was a short-lived new release, a general addition to the genre about Ugly Americans and other tourists in Latin America cunningly routed to a house of horror in which their internal organs are slated for distribution among the poor. Summer fun specialist John Stockwell’s film is beautifully photographed and has a strong cast, including Las Vegas‘s Josh Duhamel and the wonderful Melissa George, but it appears to have struck reviewers and subsequently the audience wrong, and quickly faded. I liked it, though, but in the way you like a TV show that isn’t top flight, or the way you like minor poetry, which is often better than high art.

Deja Vu also carried with it some baggage, being another Tony Scott – Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration, with all which that entails in our minds from their past associations, and in addition sparking the revilement of Manohla Dargis in the New York Times for the casualness with which it played with terrorist themes. It’s the most “normal” of Scott’s recent films (no ad-agency style subtitles, and a less frazzled editing style), and concludes two different ongoing trilogies, one on American policy and paranoia and the other being films extolling the virtues of Denzel Washington. Again, I enjoyed watching it, but it did feel light, and turned out to be much more romantic than the usual Tony Scott film, while also inspiring the usual mind wrinkles time travel films generally do.

Those two films are unlikely to garner any Academy consideration, as are the two big romantic comedies of the season, The Holiday and Stranger Than Fiction. Director Marc Forster and writer Zach Helm’s comedy, about an IRS tax investigator (Will Ferrell) whose life is inexplicably controlled by a reclusive novelist (Emma Thompson) has a very interesting thought at its center, i.e., that characters in books are more than “galley slaves” and that authors have a certain responsibility toward them, but this being a Hollywood movie and not completely a Charlie Kaufman enterprise, the thought gets lost. Still, it worked as a movie, and its second half is very touching.

Nancy Meyer’s The Holiday is her attempt to replicate the tone and spirit of recent British romances such as Love, Actually and Notting Hill, and though I am far from a fan of Meyers’s previous films, including the Father of the Bride remakes and the Oscar voguing Something’s Gotta Give, this one won me over. I was teary eyed all through it. This is partially because The Holiday is as movie mad as I am, with one of the film’s temporary house-trading characters (Cameron Diaz) being a movie trailer editor, and the other (Kate Winslet) befriends a ancient Hollywood screenwriter (Eli Wallach). In fact, Wallach may end up nominated for best supporting actor, if the Academy’s tendency to acknowledge very small almost non-roles remains consistent, and Meyers’s Oscar cred remains high.

For Your Consideration, which mocks Oscar buzz, has generated Oscar buzz, and that’s a pity because it is a very unfunny comedy about movies made by people who don’t seem to understand movies. It is ludicrous to suggest that someone would make an indie film called Home for Purim set in the post-war South, even in the cockeyed world they are imagining. In fact, the film’s TV satire is more spot on than its movie satires. Where’s Billy Wilder when you need him? His movie quips would have been achingly accurate. And I’m getting rather fed up with Christopher Guest and Company’s absolute and unremitting cruelty towards their characters. They could take a lesson from Thompson’s Kay Eiffel.

I was under-whelmed by Almodovar’s Volver. This entirely female-centric tale of a mother comes back as a “ghost” (there is a surprise twist) to help her two daughters and granddaughter is being praised by critics and award dispensers far and wide as the director’s crowning achievement, but to me it was Almodovar Lite, a conventional movie that shows how far he has strayed from his surrealistic roots.

Another title that can’t be mentioned without the breath of Oscar on the lips is Babel, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s latest foray into that genre that the Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy calls the “web of life” film. Since Amores Perros, his films have grown colder and more oblique and despite the sunny climbs of this film’s three main locations where distant, loosely connected cross-cultural family dramas are enacted, it is actually quite soft at its center.

Babel‘s Cate Blanchett is clearly the star of the season, appearing in no less than three of its films. She is excellent in all of them but outstanding in Notes on a Scandal. In a time period that insists on sharing with us unintentionally paired films, this one goes with The History Boys, a cinematic adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play about the conflict between an old style view of learning as a civilizing end in itself, and a cynical view of education as a tool for advancement in a money mad society. Richard Griffiths is excellent as the old codger whose values and sexuality conflict with the new world order. There is an exquisite scene, in which Griffiths’s character, just forced into early retirement, attends a conference with the student most like him and discusses the Hardy poem “Drummer Hodge,” which becomes a vehicle through which he discusses his most sacred feelings. It’s one of the best moments in recent cinema.

Call Judy Dench in Notes on a Scandal the “History Girl.” She is a severe dinosaur in a modern school whose new headmaster wants modern teaching techniques. She is also prone to rather obsessive fixations on younger female colleagues. Told from her viewpoint, via voiceover readings from her acerbic, hilarious diary, Notes on a Scandal recounts how various passions in her circle of friends and colleagues flail out of control. Dench, Blanchett, and Bill Nighy (as Blanchett’s husband) are all superb in this film based on a novel by Zoe Heller. It, too, is awards bound, and the only blank spot is the kid who plays the object of Blanchett’s affections. Either as acted or as written, he fails to embody the sort of predatory Beatty-in-Embryo he is supposed to be. Nevertheless, Notes on a Scandal is surely one of the best, if not the best film of the season.

Dench will no doubt be up against Helen Mirren, titular character of The Queen, about the few days the monarchy endured after the death of Diana. Though directed by the otherwise dependable Stephen Frears, The Queen ends up being just a very, very good TV movie, in all ways, as it ends up slobbering over the royals in the most craven and arse-licking manner. Furthermore, Mirren is OK in the role, but really, come on, 12 other stars could do just as well. I’m also getting rather weary of actresses and actors being over-praised for just doing their jobs, and for at-best competent performances being hailed as Oscar worthy because of sentimentality over the performer. Awards, if they must be given, should be reserved for the truly most outstanding, risky, and successful performances of the year.

Speaking of TV movies, that’s what Rocky Balboa turns out to be. This sixth Rocky entry is a slow paced, lumbering, impoverished film that comes across like an ’80s inspirational TV movie you might see on a Lifetime channel, as Rocky pauses periodically to espouse his “philosophy” of life. The only innovation, as the film virtually repeats the structure and climax of the first Rocky, is that the final fight itself is presented as if it were an HBO broadcast, which should make for a good DVD transfer.

Who would have thought that two holiday films would feature, at some point, Spanish conquistadors? Both Mel Gibson’s derivative Apocalypto and Darren Aronofsky’s turgid The Fountain reference such throwbacks. But that is not the only thing ancient about both films. Each one harks back to the roots of American cinema. Apocalypto, which draws upon about 30 film clichés, from the choppers at the start of Apocalypse Now to the blood dripping from a wound that betrays someone hiding, from Rio Bravo and countless other films, is ultimately derived from silent films such as F. W Murnau’s Tabu and the some of Robert Flaherty’s docs, and alternately also from Terrence Malick’s near-silent modern epics of love and war. Apocalypto, from its “beheading cam” to its stacks of Maya holocausts bodies, is as excessive as we might expect, but ultimately a minor film that replays scenes from Gibson’s earlier films.

Aronofsky’s muddled, well-meaning movie is a variation on D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which also told several stories simultaneously, inter-cutting among them. What it comes down to is that each of the three Fountain stories features one of a trio of Hugh Jackmans (conquistador, contemporary scientist, bald spaceman) is trying to save his dying wife by finding the secret of eternal life. The wife is played, mostly in closeup, by Rachel Weisz, a current critical darling, but who here is treated, boringly, like a delicate, virginal spirit of life itself.

I’d like to add a footnote to this brief discussion of Apocalypto, however. Back in 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman, the moral equivalent of carnies, produced a small horror film, shooting it in a Miami motel room. It went on to be one of the most controversial films ever made, one that unleashed a radical change in what and how we watch movies. I refer, of course, to Blood Feast, aka Feast of Flesh. One of the most striking images, much reproduced, shows the murderous and deranged Egyptian caterer Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) just after he has torn out the heart of a female victim, holding it up for the geeks in the audience to see. Forty-three years later, Mel Gibson virtually recreates that moment, on a grander scale, toward the middle of Apocalypto. The implications of this stagger me. Speaking only visually, few other paired images show how far we have come, or how much the old psychotronic films have been taken over by mainstream media.

Also in the realm of confusables are The Good Shepherd and The Good German. George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s German, which also stars Blanchett, is an adaptation of a pop novel that they turn into an academic exercise in mimicking 1940s Hollywood styles. This film is quite simply boring, confusing, and repetitious (Clooney is beat up about three times in the first 20 minutes). It’s possible that Soderbergh has some high-minded goal of mocking the MPAA’s standards or something like that with his blend of old fashion camera techniques and modern era humping, but for this Soderbergh supporter, the experiment failed.

Though often a part of Clooney’s posse, here Matt Damon strikes out on his own as a withdrawn, laconic CIA administrator modeled loosely on James Jesus Angleton, who, like Damon’s Edward Wilson, was befuddled by a Soviet mole and betrayed by British double agent Kim Philby (here played by Billy Crudup). This is one of those dream projects, the apple of director and co-star De Niro’s eye as well as of writer Eric Roth. It also makes for an interesting variation on, a sober corrective to, Damon’s Bourne films, with Wilson being an inward operative whose whole career is a failure. In a brilliant, all-star cast that includes Alec Baldwin and William Hurt, the only false note is the freckle-faced guy who plays Wilson’s son, who is dreadful and too often shot in eyeball peeling close-up.

The other big confusables are Todd Field’s second film, Little Children, and Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of the P. D. James novel, Children of Men. They couldn’t be more different, although the ironically titled Little Children bears the influence of American Beauty in its examination of adultery and spiritual corruption in suburbia. I didn’t like this film as much the second time I saw it, when it came across much more mechanical and schematic. Still, Kate Winslet is, once again, very good in a tough part, and Field does capture well the wind blown suburban environment well.

Children of Men is a movie I wanted to like but for all its visual pyrotechnics has very little affect. The mono-expressive Clive Owen has something to do with this. Although clearly the people of this film’s future, where childbearing has ceased due to some vague environmental factors, is populated with depressed unexpressive people, it seems like Owen could be a little happier later as he tries to escort the last birthing mother to safety. As a director Cuarón appears to like journeys, at least in the few movies of this prolific filmmaker that have received wide distribution, but in this one the journey is the least interesting part of the film. Only the very beginning and very end really seem to matter, like in a basketball game. Nevertheless there are at least two stunning long takes that are utterly surprising.

Everyone knows that “movies” as we have known them for over 100 years are on the verge of radical change. Indeed, since at least the late 1970s, with the introduction of home video, an implacable force of change has been on the march. Home entertainment centers, iPods, Bittorrent trading, and the world wide web itself are just a few of the mutations that have revolutionized how we view movies and how we find out about them. One of the most vivid shifts among so many such alterations is that a movie, as we customarily know it, may cease to be a physical thing. Taking a page, as it were, out of the aesthetics of Monroe Beardsley, who argued that a work of art is a perceptual object rather than a physical one, movies are now more often than not a digital object.

Predictions of the eventual digital hosting, projection, copying, and so forth, of movies have been rife since the early 1990s, or at least since the inception of Wired magazine. But who would have thought that Portland, Oregon – a drink water town in a state no one has ever heard of – would some day become the epicenter of a digital projection revolution?

Well, so it has come to pass. In early December, 2006, the six-screen Living Room Theaters complex opened in Portland’s downtown gentrified area, specifically at 10th and SW Stark. As its website announces, Living Room Theaters will be a complete leisure experience, with a restaurant, a bar, free wi-fi, and six small auditoria (the largest has 65 seats). The company putting the project together has a sister theater also going up in Miami, but the owners maintain that the Portland unit is the flagship of what they hope to be a national chain. What is most unusual about Living Room Theaters is that the founders also plan to exclusively screen independent and “speciality” (i.e., foreign) films, often trafficking in films that have not even premiered in the United States, and they add that in some cases they will be dealing directly with the filmmakers, circumventing the lugubrious, arcane, and outsider-excluding mechanics of national distribution, the stumbling block that fells most bright ideas in film production and exhibition.

Shawn Levy of the Portland Oregonian has covered the theater’s advent the most thoroughly of local papers. The brain child of Felix Martin, Ernesto Rimoch, and Diego Rimoch, Living Room Theaters is at the very least an ambitious enterprise that prides itself on its energy conservation and green policies, and it aspires to tear customers away from the mundane reliance on popcorn, candy, and soda pop as inevitable movie time concessions. Writes Levy, “Martin and his partners currently operate a firm which converts celluloid prints of movies into digital files that can be projected in moviehouses, and they are establishing connections with independent and foreign filmmakers who don’t have distribution in the United States.”

What’s curious is that about a year earlier Cinetopia, another digital theater with eight screens, a full restaurant, and “gourmet” butter for popcorn, went up in Vancouver, Washington, a neighboring burg situated but just across the Columbia River, and it appears to have made itself a rousing success by showing a mix of popular hits, such as Casino Royale, along side the studios’ definition of art films, such as Babel, as well as digital projection of football games on Sunday and Monday, among other special events. By coincidence, Cinetopia calls its three fine dining theaters, where waiters serve spectators candy, pop, beer/wine, and/or hot meals prior to show time, Living Room Theaters. The presence of these two venues within 15 miles of each other suggests that Portland and environs is plugged unwittingly into the zeitgeist.

One wonders if the ernest founders of Living Room Theaters know what they are getting into. From the local arena to the national they may be greeted with resistance or, worse, indifference. Circumvented distributors may not be so happy about offering up at good terms the films that Living Room Theaters in fact does want to book. Film fanatics may decide that it is still cheaper to stay home with their own theater-equivalent presentation than to wend their way to a part of town where it is difficult to park and expensive to play. And finally there is the issue of where Living Room Theaters resides, which happens to be a busy but recently gentrified section of the city called the Pearl District, yclept thus for reasons no one can remember. The residents consist of mostly very wealthy but conventional-minded people living in high rise condos, who are more likely to be frustrated at the fact that the theater is showing the latest intellectual Argentine thriller rather than Superman Begins. Worse, the company’s founders may have overestimated the town’s general appetite for off-beat entertainment, although the theater complex’s presentation as a multi-faceted “experience” may indicate an awareness of this possibility. It’s Seattle, up north, that is the real movie town; Portlanders watch lots of movies, but have a very narrow appetite.

Worst of all, Portland filmgoers have long been dominated by a succession of large dominating theater chains, all of which have flirted with federal anti-trust suits. Currently, it is Regal Cinemas that owns most of the city’s screens. Outside of the Regal chain, there are a handful of independent theaters scattered around the city that show either second run, revival, or repertory calendars, among them the Cinema 21 and the Hollywood theater. Each successive corporation that rules first-run theater-going experience in Portland has been aggressive in the past about preserving its hegemony.

Be that as it may, Living Room Theaters has announced its first schedule and the company appears to be living up to its self-imposed mandate. Among the films slated for screening, a mix of new and recent, are Agnes and His Brothers (German director Oskar Roehler’s award winning domestic drama), Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid, the Edward Norton starer Down in the Valley, Look Both Ways (Australian helmer Sarah Watt’s blend of slacker ethos and animation), 13 Tzameti (Gela Babluanni’s hard-edged descent into masculinist competition), and a revival of Wordplay, among 14 titles.

This is all well and good for Portland viewers, but what are the international implications? High tech may advance and improve, but people themselves don’t change and mostly what new technology does is appeal to people’s inherent laziness; thus, downloading a movie for home viewing is easier than getting up and fielding numerous obstructions in order to get to a theater. More optimistically, cheaper is better when it comes to poorer countries, which still rely on and enjoy the communality of public screenings. What it comes down to is what the film industry likes to call product. If Living Room Theaters can triumph over inertia through must-see movies, than their model may be one other theaters and other countries may follow.