Category: Nocturnal Admissions

 

 

Desperate Housewives‘s season two was the NBA basketball game of TV shows Ñ¿ only the final minutes counted. You find out what happened, then you’re done.

Well, it wasn’t quite  that bad. But still. Before its second season,  Desperate Housewives was a show that galvanize network broadcasting, which was on the ropes thanks to competition from HBO, cable in general, sports channels, sports in general, video games, and everything else that floods this self-amusement ridden culture, including counter-programing on the other four networks.   DH is one of the shows that people point to when they say that episodic television is now better than movies.

Or they used to anyway. Something happened to  DH in season two, yet no one has been able to say just what it was exactly. For example, the new issue of  Entertainment Weekly simply refers to No. 2 as lacking No. 1’s “humor and dramatic unity,” while also getting show creator Marc Cherry to admit that he “learned a lot” toiling on the troubled S2. While everyone was pondering the flaws in  DH2, the other ABC shows –   Lost 2 and  Grey’s Anatomy 2 – continued to garner more prestige and obsessive viewers. I happen to have a theory about what, if anything, went wrong,   which I’ll get to shortly.

The new  Desperate Housewives: The Complete Second Season, The Extra Juicy Edition will give students of the show a chance to sit down and watch its second frame in rapid succession, and doing so may allow viewers to glean clues as to why the second season is bad, or at least widely considered to be inferior to the first.

I’m baffled as to why people think that. After all, this is the season when Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) had a jealous fight with a nun in a church, eventually setting her on fire. And speaking of fire, this is also the season where the accidental pyromaniac of last season faces a conflagration in her own home. This is also the season where Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and her husband change jobs and roles, and  where Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross) watches like an angel of death over hysterical pharmacist Roger, whom she lets die in what would have otherwise been a theatrical suicide attempt. Then she abandoned her psychopathic son on an isolated road in the woods. And Susan (Teri Hatcher) broke up with her “plumber” boyfriend and fall back in with her untrustworthy husband, if only temporarily. Not to mention the season-long mystery of the thing or creature in the basement of the hour that new neighbor Betty Applewhite (Alfre Woodard ) just moved into.

 

There was quite a bit of action on Wisteria Lane in the season, starting with the resolution of the cliffhanger from S1, and golf carting through all manner of hospital visits, fights, spyings, and psychological games. Personally, I’m a little baffled as to why some critics detected a falling off. Maybe S2 was a little  too chaotic, I don’t know; too me it seemed of a piece with the first season, while progressing forward into dark areas, especially in the Van De Kamp family (but I am a sucker: I am continuously surprised at how show writers can come up with new and interesting twists). There are some nice twists in this season; the Danny Elfman music still makes the show by setting a certain tone, jaunty, puppet like, racing, and for me it was a delight to see the normally invisible, because she is dead, narrator Mary Alice (Brenda Strong) pop up in special flashbacks: she has a fantastic voice but also a beautiful smile.

But if so, if there really was something wrong with S2 I think I know what the source of the problem is: Emmy whoring.  DH won five Emmys out of numerous nominations for its first season. This may have gone to the head of the sort of people who run  DH,  that is, people obsessed with awards and award ceremonies. On the new DVD set, creator Marc Cherry mentions a couple of times how this or that scene should have won an Emmy. If your goal is to achieve personal or corporate validation from awards, then you are thinking outside the box in a bad way; your eyes are on the prize, not on the substance of the scene, its place in the show, and the show as a whole.  DH won no Emmys in 2006.

But you can make up your own mind. Season two of  Desperate Housewives comes in a lavish package, the six discs in a folding multi-disc digipak with a see-through plastic holder. The 24 episodes, in excellent widescreen transfers, are spread over five discs, with the final platter holding all the supplements.

These include a video interview with Marc Cherry and his mother, an inspiration for the show; a 10-minute segment on how a typical show (in this case, Ep 13) is created; a group interview with various contrasting TV moms from  Happy Days‘s Marion Ross to The Walton‘s Michael Learned. 

 

 

There are no audio commentary tracks, but Cherry provides one of sorts over a selection of his favorite scenes, plus over two story lines pulled from episodes for time; there is a profile of the show’s costumer, a promotional bit about the show’s sex scenes, a promotional summary of season one, a look at the  DH video poker game, and finally trailers for numerous other Disney shows and movies.

 

Desperate Housewives: The Complete Second Season, The Extra Juicy Edition hit the stree on Tuesday, August 29, and retails for 59.95

 

 

As I’ve noted elsewhere, we seem to be experiencing a rush of great DVD releases. This flowering, this elevation, of DVD content may be a coincidence, or it may be the last gasp of DVD before Blu-Ray or HD-DVD take over. Or it may just be “fall,” when, traditionally, the movie industry “gets serious.” But whatever the reason, DVD collectors are grateful for such recent notable titles as the box sets of Rohmer and Malle, Powell’s  A Canterbury Tale, the  Mr. Moto set, and the box of Jayne Mansfield movies. Also among them was  Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, the latest version of a film that continues to reveal new facets and spark interesting commentary. It can be endlessly watched and endlessly debated.

 

Another similarly rich movie is  Seven Samurai, coming out from Criterion in a new three disc set Tuesday, September 5 (and retailing for $49.95). Thanks to the new commentary track and the two big supplements, I learned this time around that the movie  should be called  Seven Ronin. It seems, if I understand the chat correctly, that the seven warriors coming to the aid of a small village annually raided by brigands, are masterless samurai, i.e., ronin. In fact, according to one of the experts on the disc, the real samurai, which made up five per cent of the population in the 16th century when  Seven Samurai is set, were often merely bureaucrats filing paperwork for their bosses.

 

 

But that is just one nugget amongst many. And the film is well worth seeing again anyway because  Seven Samurai is one of the great works of cinematic “existential humanism,” perhaps the best “philosophy” for making great, high art films, and most post war European films fall broadly into this category (you might also call it the Janus Films philosophy). Kurosawa’s innovation is to marry it to an action film, and his ability to elicit beautiful movement from his camera, from his cast, and, more theoretically, from his narrative, serve to, so to speak, embed his views, rather than make them the point of a given scene.

 

 

I’ve just re-listened to the Michael Jeck audio commentary track, often heralded as the gold standard of audio commentary tracks, and which also appears on the original DVD, which bore spine number 2, and which also shares with the new set the movie’s theatrical trailer. Also included then but now missing were an essay by David Ehrenstein and, for those lucky enough to get the earliest pressings of the disc, a restoration demonstration that was later removed.

I’ve also listened to the new commentary track recorded for the new release, still labeled CC No. 2 so it supersedes the old disc. The new commentary is an edited group effort that begins with Stephen Prince, and proceeds through David Desser, Tony Rayns, Donald Richie (who emphasizes the influence of Soviet cinema on AK), and Joan Mellen. The set also comes with a 60-page booklet that includes essays by Kenneth Turan, Peter Cowie, Philip Kemp, Peggy Chiao, Alain Silver, Stuart Galbraith IV, Toshiro Mifune, Sidney Lumet, and Arthur Penn.

 

 

This is a three disc set and the first disc, which has the first half of the movie, also features a suite of trailers and teasers, and a production stills and poster gallery, combining to present about 40 images. The second disc, besides offering the second half of the film, features the 55-minute episode on  Seven Samurai from the Japanese television series  It’s Wonderful to Create (segments of this series also appear on other Criterions). From it, we learn that there was a first scene that was stuck from the film in which the brigands attack an earlier, different village, and then the doc runs through the script writing process, the film’s music, problems in shooting the “burning water mill” sequence, and other cruxes. It’s highly entertaining and informative, with many alum of the production telling funny anecdotes. It’s also filled with shots of the much-worked over script and costume test footage.

 

Finally, disc three has two big supplements.  My Life in Cinema is a two-hour TV interview with Kurosawa from 1993, probably arranged to help promote his then recent and it turns out last film  Madadayo. It’s conducted by fellow helmer Nagisa Oshima, a wholly different kind of director, but who acts with deference towards his elder. It’s a good nuts and bolts interview, talking about AK’s background and how he does what he does. Oshima begins by asking about Kurosawa’s ethnic background (the director was unusually tall), and Kurosawa avers that there may have been some Russian interbreeding way back in his family’s past (which makes an interesting connection with Richie’s points).

The second is  Seven Samurai: Origins and Influences. This is an original documentary, made by Criterion. It’s divided into three parts. The first covers the history of the samurai in Japanese culture. The second part covers earlier samurai films, with clips from early silent films featuring rather stagy, balletic sword fights. The final part covers the innovations to the genre that Kurosawa wrought. This effort provides a good grounding in all that goes into the samurai legend, thanks to the various commentaries, who make up the same scholars doing the commentary, with one exception, and should inspire newer fans to get caught up via such books as Alain Silver’s  The Samurai Film, along with books by the scholars summoned to commentate.

Criterion has a new, softer look and a new logo, introduced a few movies back, but this is the release that is probably going to introduce it to the consumer. This set will be a bestseller.

 

 

 

I’m growing rather weary of being quoted on noir DVD audio commentary tracks. I don’t mean to be blasé about it, but it happens ever so often. 

The first time was on James Foley’s track for Confidence, where he made reference to my earlier review of his film After Dark, My Sweet, which I dubbed a film soleil. Now, a commentator on one of the four noirs here under review (I think it is Eddie Muller on Double Indemnity) says something like “Someone once said that there are no bad noirs” “¦ and that was me again (in my book Film Soleil, from Pocket Essentials). Now, it is true that none of these people remember my name, and in fact the idea that there are no bad noirs is probably a pretty common one and someone else may have said it well before me. But still, all this attention is making my head hurt and I have to lie down.

But it is true. There are no bad noirs. Even the “bad” ones, such as a couple in the latest batch of Fox noirs, are still interesting, evocative, and can inspire comment.

Fox releases a trio of films in its series Fox Film Noir every three months or so, and the latest set brings the count up to 21. Universal has done a batch or two, but has slowed down considerably, and its new double disc set of Double Indemnity, published as part of its Legacy Series, seems more like a Billy Wilder production than an iteration of its noir catalog.

 

 

Shock, from 1946, is No. 20 in the set and is a Gaslight – Snake Pit sort of deal in which Anabel Shaw, in San Francisco to meet her husband after a long separation due to the war, witnesses a murder and falls into a state of catatonia. She is rushed to an asylum by, of all people, the very murderer she observed, played by Price, who happens to be a psychiatrist having an affair with Lynn Bari, the film’s femme fatale.

 

 

Like many a noir, especially the noirs influenced by Hitchcock, this one, directed by Alfred L. Werker from a script credited to Martin Berkeley, Albert DeMond, and Eugene Ling, shows a surprising amount of sympathy for its “villain.” Price’s Dr. Richard Cross is a man who momentarily loses control, and then tries to mop up after himself, harried by his Lady Macbeth, Bari. He is divided, doesn’t want to do many of the things he ends up doing, and Price, in one of his first villainous roles, manages to evoke great sympathy for Cross, despite a tendency to haminess, which afflicted Price throughout his career. Meanwhile, the heroine is asleep or unconscious most of the time, to be carted around from one venue to another (like Jodi Foster in most of the dreadful Five Corners), and her husband, when he arrives, spends most of his time trying to catch up with what the audience knows.

The Fox noirs have settled into a routine in which basically for supplements you get a yak track and the trailer. On Shock the track is by John Stanley, the Creature Features movie guide author, summoned because he is something of an authority on Price. Stanley is one of those unvarnished (he says “Eye-Talian”), somewhat mush-mouthed (he says “landschape” instead of “landscape”), and jokey film geeks who read too much of Famous Monsters of Filmland when he was a kid: his commentary is filled with excruciatingly bad puns (“What food these morsels be”) no doubt in mimicry of that magazine’s editor Forrest J Ackerman. The commentary is mostly about Price, whom Stanley had the advantage of meeting twice, but he is also good on almost all the actors on the screen, even those whose names don’t appear in the credits.

 

 

As others have noted, Fox seems to be stretching the definition of noir with its inclusion of Fourteen Hours (No. 21), the 1951 drama about a potential suicide that Howard Hawks famously hated. Directed by Henry Hathaway, it’s more like a social problem film, like No Way Out, the Sidney Poitier – Richard Widmark race-themed drama which was in an earlier batch of Fox noirs.

 

 

It comes across as a well meaning TV drama of the time, and could have been penned by Rod Serling. But it is also afraid to come out, so to speak, and say what it is really about. Richard Basehart’s potential suicide never says why he is depressed, but it is clear from the subtext, as Foster Hirsch points out in his detailed and interpretive commentary, that Basehart’s character is probably gay and wrestling with his identity. Besides the trailer, the disc also features the film’s press book.

 

 

Vickie is No. 19, came out in 1953, and is a remake of I Wake Up Screaming, which came out 10 years earlier and is considered to be the first Fox noir, if not one of the first films in the genre itself. Both films are based on Steve Fisher’s novel about a publicist accused of killing the client who was getting too big for her britches. Neither film captures the flavor of the novel, which has wonderfully cynical things to say about show business, but the earlier film (which is Fox Film Noir No. 18) is better cast. There it is Victor Mature as the publicist versus Laird Cregar as the cop who, Laura-like, secretly loved the victim (Carole Landis). Betty Grable, trying to escape musicals, plays the victim’s sister, who ends up aiding the publicist.

 

 

H. Bruce Humberstone directed Screaming, and imported noirish tones from his B movie work. Vicki is helmed by Harry Horner who had, if it is possible, an even less distinguished directorial career than Humberstone ( Red Planet Mars). After some 15 films, he gave it up to become a production designer, working on such films as The Hustler and The Driver.

 

 

Vicki is also weakly cast. Elliott Reid is awfully light as the publicist, and Richard Boone is game but sluggish and miscast as the cop. Foster Hirsch in his commentary, favors Jeanne Crain as sister Jill over Jean Peters as victim Vicki (they look remarkably alike), but I had the opposite impression. Jean Peter struck me as a real find, an actress whose career might bear reconsideration. Hirsch’s commentary is efficient and informative, and the disc also comes with the trailer and three galleries of art and advertising.

 

 

Double Indemnity is a long awaited DVD but it has in fact been on disc twice already, first by Universal in a bare bones release, then by Image in a transfer from a scratchy print. Still, that Image disc was hard to find when it went out of print, and in the video store down the street from me you had to put down a $200 dollar deposit in order to rent it, as if it were Salo. Curiously, though, I found a pristine used copy of the Image disc just a couple of weeks ago for seven dollars.

And what a pleasure it is to re-submerge oneself into this great film, with its crisp dialogue, brilliant acting from unlikely cast members, now in a nice package with an excellent (if soft) transfer and good supplements that honor the film.

 

 

This two-disc set has an excellent full-frame transfer (1.33:1) transfer from a new source-print with an adequate DD 2.0 audio, plus English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The supplements on Disc One include an introduction by Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies, and two commentary tracks. The first is an enthusiastic, informative track by Richard Schickel, who wrote a BFI Classic monograph on the film, and here goes over the basics. The second has Nick Redman interviewing screenwriter Lem Dobbs on the film.

 

 

Dobbs is the son of American born but British educated painter R. B. Kitaj, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s spent a lot of time in Los Angeles socializing with and painting famous directors, such as John Ford. Kitaj also happened to know Wilder who was a great art collector. Dobbs has several anecdotes to tell about meeting Wilder (once with Hockney and his dad), and nervously giving Wilder scripts to read that were later critiqued at Wilder’s independent office at the Writers and Artists building. Dobbs notes the sense of place given to Los Angeles, specific streets named and places shot, that he speculates would not fly with contemporary executives because they wouldn’t see the point of being so specific about a place that most viewers wouldn’t have been to. The most interesting thing that Dobbs says is to go against conventional thinking and charge I.A.L. Diamond with a degradation in Wilder’s output in the 1960s; he maintains that after his collaboration with Diamond began Wilder’s films more theatrical and more like sit coms.

 

 

The retrospective documentary, Shadows of Suspense (37 minutes) also on the first disc is a very good celebration of the film and it is also interesting to see the faces that go with a lot of the noir yak tracks one hears: the ubiquitous and bickersome Silver and Ursini look like twins. Finally there is the theatrical trailer.

Disc Two consists solely of the 1973 made-for-TV remake starring Richard Crenna in the MacMurray role, Lee J. Cobb as his boss, and Samantha Eggar as the femme fatale. It is exactly as good as it sounds.

As others have pointed out, not included on the set is the famous real ending, the gas-chamber sequence, which apparently did not test well at the time and may be lost, though stills exist. Paramount’s version of Sunset Boulevard had a version of the famous dropped opening, but there is not even an attempt to recreate it via stills and script here. But perhaps that is for the super deluxe HD-DVD 70th anniversary edition in 2014.

 

Lohan, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lind-say-low-han: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of (three or) four steps (depending on how you pronounce her last name) down the palate to tap, at four, on the soft palate. Lin. Say. Lo. Han (or Loan). She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing five foot five in one boot. She was Lindsay in slacks. She was Linds at school. She was Lindsay on the dotted line. But in my dreams she was always Lohan.

If only she would stop making movies like  Just My Luck.

Not that there is anything wrong with it. It is not funny, but is supposed to be a comedy. It evokes no sentiment or tears, and it supposed to be a romance. It is set in Manhattan but does not capture the spirit of the city (but then, few of the recent comedies set there have, perhaps because they are usually shot in Toronto).

Lohan has herself been very lucky. She has had, in essence, nine lives. But is her luck running out?

There is a marvelous moment, a typically Lohanian moment in the middle of what at this point remains Lindsay Lohan’s magnum opus,  Mean Girls. Her character, Cady Heron, is a newcomer to school serving as something of an undercover agent or sleeper cell on behalf of her newfound nerd friends and against the school’s elite “Heathers” who have oppressed them.

Thanks to plot complications, Cady has joined the mean girls of the title in a Christmas talent show. Dressed in Santa hats, higher elf drag, and go-go boots, the four girls come out to dance to “Jingle Bell Rock.” It is a given within the history of the school that the mean girls always “win” the contest.

 

 

Lohan as Cady dances the other girls off the fucking screen. It’s a moment of revelation, like Astaire, or Kelly, or Travolta in their first films, and one regret for her fans among Lohan’s tumultuous life and career direction is that dancing has been minimized (her mother was briefly a Rockette). Her co-stars are no mean achievers themselves. Chief meanie Rachel McAdams went on to pop fame in  A Walk to Remember and  Red Eye; Lacey Chabert will be seen shortly in the  Black Christmas remake; and the exotic looking Amanda Seyfried has appeared in  Veronica Mars and the HBO show  Big Love. And this is not to put them down, but none of them evince the absolute joy in movement, the confidence and sassiness that define both a great dancer and a mega star.

How many lives does Lohan have left? Has Lohan indeed not become a mean girl on her own (abusing Disneyland staff, for example) in what readers of magazines take to be her private life? If so, too bad, because Lohan has the potential to be the next great screen star, a new Julia Roberts, able to straddle romantic comedies and Oscar winning dramas.

Lohan built a lot of good will with that scene and that movie. But she wasn’t able to capitalize on it. What she needed to do was to solidify public love with another romantic comedy, just as Julia Roberts consolidated public affection generated by  Mystic Pizza and  Steel Magnolias by leaping into  Pretty Woman. She needed to appear across from a man of equal or higher stature so that she can share it and feed off it.Instead, she opted for serious indie-hood by appearing in a Robert Altman film, which is a crap shoot, since his films are so uneven and few people go see them. Normally I wouldn’t care to dwell on the career aspect of an actress (these thoughts, by the way, are a tacit admision of one’s real inferiorty in the face of the mean girl in Lohan), but I like her so much I want to see more of her movies (just as I want her mirror image, Storm Large, to keep going on  Rock Star even though I don’t want her to win). But of her forthcoming films –   Speechless, an updating of  Cyrano based on an  L. Sprague De Camp story;  Chapter 27, the second of two forthcoming movies about Mark David Chapman;  A Woman of No Importance, the Oscar Wilde play directed by the unpromising  Janusz Kaminski (and which will require a British acceent?),  Bobby, another assassination story, this one about the night Kennedy was shot  – only one,  Georgia Rule, sounds like they might fit this bill  sounds like it might fit the bill, partially because the cast is strong (Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman, Dermot Mulroney, Cary Elwes) and is directed by  Pretty Woman‘s Gary Marshall (who has, unfortunately, been dreadful lately. In fact, he was dreadful in Pretty Woman but the movie transcended its ineptitude). In almost all of these productions, Lohan has garnered headlines about her behavior, on and off the set.

Lohan is a new breed of star whom most adults probably don’t understand. Like Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson, and Hilary Duff, they are singer-actors, who feud with each other across the pages of competing tabloids. They have high school-ized the media and live their lives in contra-distinction to the “moral lessons” their movies tell, like the mean girls they play against. Even a  New York Times article in May of 2006 fretted out loud about Lohan burning herself out. But Lohan is clearly resilient. She has already had nine lives, and unlike the cat of the fable, may have nine more before she’s through.

 

1) Started out as a young Natalie Wood, in the Shirley Temple – Lolita mode, a preternaturally talented and charismatic child actress.

2)  As a “Disney star” with all that means about living up to a certain style or standard of kid behavior and fealty to parents. (Are actors auteurs? Can a kid star be said to choose films that reflect her personality? Can thematic  similarities be found among the young star’s films?)

3)  As a “Tweener” star, hinting at sex and boys without explicit references.

4) In an alternate career as Lindsay the singer, with two albums out.

5) In the real world, as a “Law and Order” victim of her dad’s hi-jinks.

6)  As she matured, as the jilted lover pulling an Ava Gardner going to war with the tabloid and paparazzi and indulging in self-destructive behavior.

7)  Thanks to the Altman film and a few others coming up, as a future indie queen.

8)  As an actor – auteur. But are actors auteurs? Can a kid be said to choose films that reflect her personality?

9) But ultimately, there is Lindsay,  the sexy dancer, the new Ann-Margret, waiting first for her  Bye Bye Birdie, and then for her  Carnal Knowledge.

 

Just My Luck is directed by Donald Petrie, who was probably a good choice. He has had a few 100 million dollar hits, and he was the sherpa for one of Roberts’s best early performances in  Mystic Pizza. He has a knack for working with sex symbols (as in   The Favor), but is helpless before a bad or indifferent script, such as the one with which  Just My Luck is burdened, credited to a smorgasbord of writers, among them I. Marlene King (Senior Trip), Amy Harris (Sex and the City), Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer, and Mark Blackwell ( Max Keeble’s Big Move). 

 

 

You can tell that many hands (but no Lohan) were involved in the composition because they can’t even keep straight the definition of look, as other reviewers have noted, as it tells of a curiously lucky girl (she was named homecoming queen of a high school she didn’t even go to) in one of those vague Manhattan comedy jobs whose luck is transfered to a loser (Chris Pine)  . The supplementary material doesn’t help much. There are three deleted scenes, only one of which is substantial and could have stood to remain in the movie, plus there is the short featurette “Look of Luck,” and a behind-the-scenes look at the band, McFly, that figures in the plot.

The disc has a fine widescreen transfer with a full frame transfer on the B side.  Just My Luck hit the street on Tuesday, August 22nd, and retails for $29.95.

 

Director Lance Weiler can’t stay out of the woods.

You remember Lance Weiler don’t you? In 1998 he co-wrote and co-directed The Last Broadcast. That was the historic indie film that was simultaneously screened in numerous theaters around the country via then-groundbreaking satellite technology. It seemed to be the techno wave of movie exhibition’s future, and though occasionally someone in the movie business predicts that satellite broadcasts will soon supersede celluloid, it hasn’t yet come to pass, partially because DVDs and digital home download have edged it out.

The Last Broadcast was also famous for turning out to be a potential inspiration for The Blair Witch Project, sort of the way that City on Fire popped up surprisingly as a precursor to Reservoir Dogs. They tell similar tales. In The Last Broadcast, some filmmakers and a “psychic” take to the Pine Barrens in search of the Jersey Devil. The film features some beautiful footage of the woods by day and night The Last Broadcast proved to be a true indie film (made for $900 dollars), that proved to be a well-made and cleverly twisted tale of hubris and insanity.

His latest film, the excellent Head Trauma, also shows traces of the lure of the forest (as does his next film, but more about that in a minute), and Weiler, helming and writing alone this time (his cinematic partner, Stefan Avalos, has his own shot-on-and-sent-direct-to video film, The Ghosts of Edendale, from 2003. Those familiar with Last Broadcast will see similar themes: mysterious figures in the forest, interpersonal incompetence, hubris, and a narrative twist that takes the center of the film and points it back at itself (if that makes any sense).

Head Trauma tells the story of one George Walker (Vince Mola, a sort of Francis Ford Coppola clone). After living on the road or in the streets for some 20 years, he returns to the home of his late grandmother, now a condemned structure in a lower middle class neighborhood. With the help of Julian (Jamil A.C. Mangan) the African American youth next door, who is also a gifted cartoonist, George attempts to clean up the house and rescind the condemnation, in the face of obstacles from an old high school rival who stands to profit from its destruction. Also impeding George’s labors are the bad dreams he has, in which mysterious images rattle around in his head, among them a small feminine figure whose features are obscured by a large hood (like the running girl in Don’t Look Now), and some disturbing activity in a wooded field, a hanging and a large sleeping bag being hauled away.

 

Head Trauma </i> is a psychological thriller of precision and insight. George is a not particularly sympathetic character, it soon turns out, and he tends to destroy potential relationships before they even happen, especially with an old flame from the neighborhood, Mary (Mary Monahan). He doesn’t need his old rival to sabotage his house, as George is fully capable of sabotaging himself.

Although at first it seems like Head Trauma is going to be an “old dark house” horror film, it is in reality loosely part of the tradition of thrillers that include An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Jacob’s Ladder, and Angel Heart, speaking broadly, but with some of the suspense created by the unseen and by psychological tensions found in the films of Polanski and Roeg. Weiler has a knack for making empty rooms in daylight and the woods in the afternoon feel ominous.

Weiler’s script is a lean, mean machine, with no fat on it and with little or anything that can qualify as a subplot. The film is creepy, with additional help from the excellent music and sound production, and – in a phase that I hope will soon disappear from the reviewer’s syntax – for a film shot on HD video looks fantastic, very controlled and precise. There are even superb arial shots.

Head Trauma was released theatrically in several markets in mid-August, before its September 26 release on DVD on the Heretic label. Despite Weiler’s hectic schedule I managed to extract a brief interview with him about his cinematic past, present, and future. Weiler proved to be an ageless lad who could easily have a career in front of the camera as behind it, and is an articulate, passionate lover of movies of all kinds.

It seems to me that the movie industry is a little short sighted in not taking up the technological breakthroughs established in your first film. Having made the history-making The Last Broadcast, did you still find it hard to capitalize on its success to advance to the “next step” of your career, so to speak?

In some respects yes and others no. In a lot of ways we were ahead of the curve in terms of the way we made and distributed TLB. So we found ourselves at a strange place. On one hand people respected what we’d done on the other they had no clue. Sometimes people get hung up on aspects of the work. For instance they’d say TLB – that’s a nice documentary but can you do narrative? They miss the point. Sometimes the tech aspects got in the way of the story but I think it’s always some type of a struggle to get the work made and to get it seen.

What was the genesis of Head Trauma?
HEAD TRAUMA comes out of two life experiences that took me very dark places The first was a head on collision with a garbage truck that almost killed me. Twelve years ago I was laying in a hospital bed with a severe head injury and my jaw wired shut. I could have died that day, stupidly I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt – my jaw snapped the steering wheel and my head busted the windshield and thankfully I lost consciousness. After the accident I was plagued by vivid nightmares of the crash until one day they just stopped.

Flash forward to 2000 and I’m pitching a TV show to some major networks. After a year of pitching we land at a network and after a roller coaster ride that takes another two years of the show being on again / off again we received money to shoot a pilot. Working on the show ranks as one of the worst professional experiences I’ve had. At times it really felt like I was a tenant farmer not a co-creator executive of a major network show. In the end we shot a great pilot but it died a slow painful death and I felt like I went through the five stages of grief.So in the winter of 2003 when I was feeling like shit and unsure of what to do a couple simple words change my path. I owe a huge thanks to my wife Jennifer for simply saying “Do what you love just make another movie.” It’s so simple and obvious but at the time I was out of my head. And that’s the series of events that created HEAD TRAUMA.

 

Why make a “horror” film? Why that genre,rather than another, or just a straightforward drama? What does horror offer you or inspire in you that, at least in this case, creatively you can’t get elsewhere?
I love the horror genre. There is something interesting to me about exercising those demons, those dark things that rest in one’s mind – it’s a way to get them out of your own head and do something productive with them. I’ve had some dark times in my life. When I was younger I drown and at the age of 14 my house burnt down, and then a number of years ago I was in a horrible car accident. I always like to have some autobiographical element within my films. Water and fire play an important role within HEAD TRAUMA as does the concept of a blow to the head.

Given that it is a lot easier to make movies these days, what remains the most difficult aspect of filmmaking?
By far the most difficult aspect of filmmaking these days isn’t a production issue it’s a promotion / distribution issue. With over 20,000 feature films being made due to the boom in digital production the chances of a film being seen past a film festival are rare. On top of that releasing a truly independent film into today’s market with out millions for P&A can be very difficult. But thanks to the web there are ways to build an audience and get the word out in very effective ways. For instance the web comic for HEAD TRAUMA is not a normal film site http://headtraumamovie.com – it is an interactive comic with some twisted stuff hidden under the surface. It becomes an extension of the story. Now more than ever it is important to create extra value for the fans. With HEAD TRAUMA I’m working hard to give a good presentation from start to finish. I’ve been on the other end and I know what type of things hook me in – that is really the issue knowing your audience and then the trick is finding a way to get the work to them.

Can you give us a hint about what you might be working on next?
Yeah it’s a really dark and twisted flick set in the remote wilderness. It’s based on an actual experience of my life that occurred while I hiked a part of the Application Trail called the “Wilderness.” The AT is a wild place and being alone for 10 to 12 days with no civilization in sight can be a very creepy.

Here’s a preview of the supplements on the Head Trauma disc. Not only is there a detailed audio commentary track with Weiler, but there are several relatively short but informative makings ofs, one about how the crew blew up a car, another on the man who help shot the ariel shots, an interview with comic book artist S. R. Bissette and his son on the comics they created for the film, some cast interviews, and a piece on the film’s music. Bissette will be very familiar to readers of QuickStopEntertainment as one of the artists on Swamp Thing and numerous other comics, including some independent work in recent years.

As with the extras on The Last Broadcast, the supplements are uninhibited, and Weiler and his collaborators are articulate raconteurs. Finally, there are trailers for both Head Trauma and The Last Broadcast.

 

A few years ago I went to a local theatrical production in a small venue that catered to small troupes doing original material. The play (I forget the title) was a satire on radio mystery dramas in the spirit of the Firesign Theater’s Nick Danger. 

About halfway through the play it suddenly occurred to me: what the fuck are these people doing drawing on old time radio for their dramatic inspiration? This is 2003? How many people in this room have even  heard an old radio show? In fact, has this young cast itself even heard many radio shows?

 

Still, I think I know the impetus behind the show, which was probably the same impetus behind the movie George Lucas produced,  Radioland Murders, from 1994. The hectic world of on the air broadcasting creates a dynamic, vivid environment that pays homage to an earlier, fun time and which allows actors to ham it up. Lucas was probably also inspired by the 1940s films set in the world of radio, such as the Red Skelton “Whistler” series. When you are a kid, those movies seem like perfect films, blending horror and comedy and suspense, like  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It’s the same original honorific impulse behind  Star Wars.

 

In the end, though,  Radioland Murders, credited to writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz and Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn, from a story by Lucas, and directed by Mel Smith, a comic actor and writer who has directed six movies so far, is no  Star Wars. I’m tempted to say that it is Lucas’s  Hudson Hawk, but he already has one in  Howard the Duck.

 

The whole spirit of  Radioland Murders is based on frenzy and fast talk, except that here the talk isn’t funny. Its premise is a distant relative of that joke in Spielberg’s  1941 when the sailors on the sub complain about the cumbersome size of non-transistor radios. The trick here is that the secret killer behind the spree is an inventor of television. The only time I laughed during any moment in the film’s 112 minutes was when the police detective (Michael Lerner) found he had to pull his officers away from the hypnotizing effect of the tube, which is only showing the famous Native American splash screen.

The film has an all – star cast, filled mostly with people who are still around and still widely viewed as “funny,” from Brian Benben as the harried head writer of the radio network, WBN, making its debut one night in1939, and Jeffrey Tambor as a director who is also the first victim. In between are Mary Stuart Masterson as Benben’s wife (who makes a surprisingly effective ’30s type star in the Jennifer Jason Leigh manner; she and Benben are supposed to be Curt Henderson’s parents from  American Graffiti, set 23 years later), Ned Beatty as the network owner, George Burns as a comic (it’s his last film), Brion James, Michael McKean as a faux Spike Jones, Stephen Tobolowsky, Christopher Lloyd  as the sound effects guy, Larry Miller, Corbin Bernsen as an announcer, Rosemary Clooney, Bobcat Goldthwait as one of the network’s many unpaid writers, Dylan Baker as a cop, Candy Clark and Bo Hopkins reunited again after  American Graffiti, Robert Klein, Harvey Korman, Joey Lawrence, and Peter MacNicol. It’s not that there are too many of them, but that when they are there what they have to do isn’t funny. The blend of death and humor isn’t easy here as it is in the film’s inspirations, especially in scenes such as the one where Larry Miller is crushed bloodily between giant gears. And this is a show that so doesn’t understand radio that one of the talents performing on its opening night is a dance act.

The disc for  Radioland Murders  is as bare bones as a disc gets that doesn’t just start with the movie and have no menu, like a David Lynch disc. You can’t chose your chapter breaks (for the record there are 18 chapters) but it does have the trailer and the “option” of English track and / or subtitles. One peculiarity of the film, or at least this transfer, is that it does not bear a title. There is no title at the beginning, and none in the end credits. Curious.

 

If only poor old (really old) Eric Rohmer hadn’t called his set of six films “moral tales.” Made “out of order” between 1963 and 1972 and based on stories that Rohmer wrote some 10 or more years earlier, some of the Moral Tales are feature length and some of them shorts, some of them in color and some – necessarily  – black and white, but there is a consistency to the set, as each film deals, according to the director, with a man who, though destined for one woman, is temporarily sidetrack, for the length of the movie, by another. 

Call them Six Romantic Tales, or Six Paradoxical Tales, or just plain Six Tales. Had Rohmer done so, he would have staved off decades of critical machinations over the “morality” of the films, and spared himself a lot of  tsuris having to explain and re-explain himself.  When he came to his next collectively named sets, he did just that, calling one of them “Tales of the Four Seasons” and the other “Comedies et Proverbs” – all vague enough to allow the director some liturgical leeway and stolid enough to give a sense of finality to the critical compass.

 

You can see what he got himself into on the new, fabulous Criterion set of the Six Moral Tales. On the disc for  The Bakery Girl of Monceau in the set, Criterion includes “Moral Tales, Filmic Issues,” an 80 minute conversation or interview between Rohmer and the films’ producer, Barbet Schroeder, who is of course an internationally known director in his own right. When they get to the title, once again Rohmer ties himself in verbal knots trying to explain it. The confusion may be the difference between the languages. French speakers might well know exactly what is meant by “moral tales,” but English speakers bring different connotations to the phrase. But on the disc for  La Collectionneuse Rohmer is interrogated for an hour by two French Canadian TV critics about his life and career and yet again, the intricacies of the title demand explanation. It didn’t help that the most famous of the batch, My Night at Maud’s, featured lengthy digressions on the meaning of Pascal and had a guy wrestle with casually sleeping with a gay divorcee.

 

If My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee are the most well known of the Rohmer tales, the early shorts that form the first two parts of the series are the least well know, by anybody, and it is a joy to have them so readily available, with all the others. In fact it is interesting to ponder these two shorts has bearing in miniature the concerns of the later, more complex films. It becomes clear that Rohmer does not necessarily sympathize with or admire his male protagonists, and that one of the key hurdles the viewer has to get past is the disparity between what characters say about themselves, even in voice over, and what the movie reveals about them. The Bakery Girl of Monceau is the first and the shortest of the films, and concerns a man (Barbet Schroeder) who juggles a girl named Sylvie (Michele Giardon) and a baker’s assistant, Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier), later cruelly dumping the lower class girl. The film sets the tone – yes, the moral tone – for the films to follow. The 23-minute Bakery Girl was completed in 1963 and so was the hour long Suzanne’s Career, which tells of Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen), the less romantically successful friend of rake Guillaume (Christian Charriere), and who almost dates Guillaum’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne (Catherine See), but indecision prevails.

 

 

As in a Neil LaBute film, both men are horrible, the weakling and the strong one. Thus we are prepped for fully understanding the character of Adrien (Patrick Bachau), the preening art dealer in the fourth film of the series, and another lesser known one,  La Collectionneuse, who takes a vacation from his girlfriend to stay with an artist pal Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) borrowing a villa in southern Mediterranean France. Also staying in the house is  Haydee (Haydee Politoff), a carefree girl who has a more solid moral center than either of the two men, as shown by the cruel way that Adrien tempts, taunts, and uses her. Seeing it in the context of all the later films, plus the first two shorts, its meaning is clear and the story is rather hard to take, but only because it is so uncompromising.

My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, and Love in the Afternoon are too well know to benefit from my regurgitations here. Suffice it to say that it was a pleasure to reacquaint myself with them.

 

The Bakery Girl of Monceau comes in full frame (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles. As with all the films in the set, this is windowboxed. Also on the disc is Rohmer’s 10 minute film  Presentation, or Charlotte and her Steak, starring  Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, and “Moral Tales, Filmic Issues.”  Suzanne’s Career is a full frame presentation (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles, plus Rohmer’s short film  Nadja in Paris.  My Night at Maud’s is in full frame (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 and optional English subtitles. Supplements include On Pascal, a film Rohmer made of a conversation between authors and philosophers Brice Parain and Dominique Dubarle (22 minutes), and an episode of  Telecinema, which interviews critic Jean Douchet, star Trintignant, and producer Pierre Cottrel (14 minutes), plus the theatrical trailer. The full frame (1.33:1 OAR) transfer of  La Collectionneuse is gorgeous, and it has French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles, plus the short documentary Rohmer directed called  A Modern Coed  (13 minutes), which anticipates his later Tales of the Four Seasons, an episode of  Parlons Cinema, a 1977 interview with Rohmer, and the theatrical trailer. Claire’s Knee comes in full frame (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles, plus Rohmer’s 1999 short film  The Curve, and an excerpt from the French television program  Le journal du cinema, with interviews with stars Jean-Claude Brialy, Beatrice Romand, and Laurence de Monahagan. Finally,  Love in the Afternoon is once again in a full frame transfer (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 audio with optional English subtitles, plus Rohmer’s 1958 short  Veronique and her Dunce, and the theatrical trailer.  Finally, there is an “Afterword by Neil LaBute” (12 minutes), and it becomes clear that Mamet is less of an influence on LaBute in his own cruel portraits of soulless moderns than Rohmer is (though Polanski might be another one).

All the discs come in digipaks and are accompanied by the a book of the short stories on which the films are based, and a 60 page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles,  transfer info, still, and essays by and about Rohmer, including Molly Haskell and  Film Comment elites such as Kent Jones and Philip Lopate.

 

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales hit the street on August 15th, and retails for $99.95. The whole box is No. 342, with the individual films bearing numbers 343 through 348. It is to be hoped that the release of these older films will create an appetite for more recent Rohmer, the last five or six of his films having found no purchase on the American market.

 

There are all kinds of films, good, bad, and indifferent. Of course we all relish the good and the great. But the “bad” or indifferent films can have value, too.

Kisses and Caroms isn’t a bad film. It is an indie style film made on a small budget, shot on video, utilizing a handful of sets and employing a small group of actors, who play friends and colleagues working in a billiards supply house, who make momentous personal decisions in the course of one day. It is earnest and well made within those limitations, and if the film had been made by Universal and released as a summer teen sex comedy, with the aid of 16 more writers and / or script doctors, it might be a modest hit.

As it stands now, it is a very good calling card movie, one which director and co-writer Vincent Rocca can use to show executives and say, See, I can make a movie that is funny and makes sense, is well edited and well shot, so give me a chance to become the next Steven Spielberg, even the next Shawn Levy.

In the course of the day covered by the film, Zack (Drew Wicks) realizes that he has to make a choice about his recently ex-girlfriend and still-co-worker Jennifer (Nikki Stanzione), while his work friend David (Ryan Parks, who bears a slight resemblance to Edward Burns) realizes that he has to stop trying to imitate Warren Beatty and change his conduct. The day begins with Zack and Jennifer waking up in bed – with Tara (Nicole Rayburn), the female equivalent of David, a fun loving hedonist and a champion pool player who also works at the billiard shop. Jennifer suggested the threesome because that’s what she is, the perfect girlfriend who will even do things such as let Zack indulge in his sexual fantasy. David, meanwhile, has a habit of being invited back to the homes of clients such as Ginger Lynn Allen for extemporaneous sex. Eventually, Dr. Bob Johnson (Bart Shattuck), a Dr. Phil style radio counselor, catches David in flagrante and heads down to the billiard shop for a confrontation.

David’s later reflection is thus well motivated, if perhaps temporary. Zack’s resistance to settling down with Jennifer is mysterious, even though he explains it well enough. But that speaks to a moral or behavioral conflict within the movie. Hugh Hefner is to Kisses what the Rat Pack was to Swingers, a living manual of modern conduct. David and Zack often wonder what “Hef” would do in a given situation.

But at the same time, if Kisses has a frat boy’s surface philosophy, it also has a chick flick’s center. Taking an essentially conservative position, the film affirms marriage, commitment. I am guessing that the film is going to lose the guys around the time David submits to soul searching, and pick up the women around the time that Jennifer and Zack have their first argument.

Another thread of the film is score settling. I am guessing that writers Rocca and / or Michael Hutchinson had some kind of shit day job. A parallel film within the film, so to speak, is the succession of uncomprehending, demanding, scamming customers that the staff have to deal with while barely hiding their contempt. As someone who also has a shit day job, I can speak to the fact of this half of the film’s accuracy. On the other hand, David and Zack have a cavalier attitude toward their clients (as seen in their humor over and disdain for a customer leaving messages on the store’s machine when the shop hasn’t opened on time) makes them much less likable.

But what do I mean when I note that even bad or indifferent films have value? I hinted at this with the reference to the usual 16 writers that most summer blockbusters have. Kisses and Caroms only has two credited writers, but the script would have benefited from a few more journeys through the word processor. Some of the dialogue, and thus the acting, is uneven, such as in the first scene between David and Zack, and sometimes the dialogue feels too chatty and not focused. On the other hand, a scene between Tara, Jennifer, and Zack, about religion and Mormonism is both well written and well acted.

One character, Eddie, (Keith Alexander) is the butt of jokes because he is not naturally funny like the two privileged main characters. Unfortunately, they are not as funny as they think they are. But yet, the film is onto something with this set up; we all know people, either from school or big work places, who rely on TV to write their jokes for them, and traffic in empty catch phrases. It’s just that the writers did not think it though enough, or come up with better examples to really capture the pathetic hollowness of Eddie. Also, the crude cloacal humor, such as scenes with Eddie and Tara in the bathroom (not with each other), though they may be nods to films from Porky’s to Clerks, also aren’t funny. In honor of the film’s roots in recent film history, Rocca makes a nod to Kevin Smith with the character of a Silent Bobbette (Deanna Rocca) delivering some Mooby’s food substances to the shop. Still, director Rocca shows unheralded bedrock filmmaking skills, and I look forward to  his next film.

After a limited theatrical release, Kisses and Caroms hits the street as a DVD on Tuesday, August 22nd. For extras, on the disc I reviewed, anyway, the package offers Rocca’s earlier film, a short subject called Helium a funny mock news story about the witnesses to an auto company’s dirigible crashing into a warehouse all speaking in squeaky voices thanks to the escaped gas. The disc as it hit the street contains two commentary tracks, one featuring the cast, the other the director, plus three featurettes offering auditions, outtakes, a “making of,” and a photo gallery with 80-plus images.

 

I can’t believe that’s 2006 and we are still talking about  Apocalypse Now. Not that I’m complaining.  No, I’m delighted to be given the chance again thanks to Paramount’s release on August 15th of  Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier. 

A few reviewers have already complained that the set, which combines  AN ’79 with  AN ’01, A.K.A.,  Apocalypse Redux, along with some deleted scenes,  isn‘t complete,  because it lacks the documentary  Hearts of Darkness. I can understand the hunger to have every cinematic component of the  AN story available in one place, but A)  Hearts of Darkness is not really affiliated with the film, it is an independently made doc owned by others and therefore not easily added to the mix; B) it is easily available to anyone who really wants it, and I am not going to give even a  bit of a hint how to get it; and C) if you are going to put something on a disc that makes for a “complete dossier,” why not include the 5-plus hour work print that everyone seems to have except me, including the operator of the video rental place down the street who only lends it to his friends?

 

So, yes, it would be nice to have  Hearts of Darkness consolidated with  AN, in some kind of package that maybe also includes the work print, but all that will have to wait for another publication of the disc, say, maybe four years from now, when the film is released again on HD DVD (the other companies are doing Blu-Ray). And I am delighted to finally be able to see, finally, after all these years, footage of Colby (Scott Glenn) killing the Photojournalist (Dennis Hopper).

 

Instead, for now we have a two-disc set with extras that include maybe 20 minutes of previous un-included footage from the work print, plus a commentary from Coppola himself. It is an excellent commentary, despite the fact that he refers to the actor as J.D. Spradlin instead of  G.D. Spradlin “¦ and who cares if he calls  Hearts of Darkness his wife’s film instead of Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s (after all, she did shoot 75 per cent of the footage in  Hearts). No, the man talks about  AN with the enthusiasm and committment as if he were still working on it, and though some of the anecdotes may be a tad well worn to the point that neither he nor anyone else can probably remember if they are really true, it is still a joy to hear a major director discuss a major film with such intimacy and knowledgeability, despite the fact that you have to insert disc two to get parts two of each of the two versions (which must have something to do with the way the yak tracks work).

 

 

Other reviews have gone into such detail about the extras, such as Preston Jones in his excellent coverage at  DVDTalk that there is no need for me to duplicate or add to that material here. Rather, I’d like to discuss curious aspects of the film that struck me for the first time while watching it on three times in preparation for this review.

 

 

For example, while watching  AN I began to wonder, What does the film believe about the Vietnam war? Is the film for it, or against it? Is it anti-communist? Is it liberal, or conservative? Is the film anti-war, or just anti-bad wars that can’t be won, or can’t be won by western interlopers? What are we suppose to think about Kurtz and Willard? What are we suppose to think about the end? Just what is it that Kurtz is mad (both angry and insane) about?

Willard is suppose to be our eyes and ears. Through him, we absorb the Vietnam experience. All that is strange about it is newly strange to him, and thus to us (although he  has been there for some time, so Vietnam’s psychedelic nature shouldn’t come as a total surprise). But Willard is also a competent if not superior soldier, enough to earn the respect of Kurtz, and he has killed men, close enough to feel their last breaths, as he tells us in the narration. He is not us. He is a good soldier but tortured by what he has seen and done, not unlike the way Kurtz has been twisted by his frustration. He is determined. The breaking point comes with the intermission heralding sampan sequence. The mission is all to Willard, and he kills the dying woman to get back on track, showing a ruthlessness that cows the PBR crew. He is not us, but we are a part of him.

 

Kurtz, on the other hand, is  for war. He wants to fight it, but properly, and to win. He is a soldier to his essence. Kurtz is the equivalnet of, or a rogue version of, someone like John Paul Vann, an essentially conservative figure of whom liberal journalists of the time were enamored, perhaps without fully understanding. As with Kurtz, it’s a little difficult to figure out just what it was that Vann was so mad about concerning the conduct of the war beyond its ineptness and bureaucratic slowness. He saw battles fought poorly, and seemed to be fixated on a policy of the generals concerning village conversion. But as far as a global perspective on the conflict, I can only find one quote, which is that “If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government.” Kurtz, too, has something of that larger perspective, with an added dollop of Vietnam’s role as part of a cultural – anthropological cycle of death and rebirth, based on the writings of Frazer (which, as far as I have been able to research, no one has bothered to try and research in connection wtih  AN; well, it is a thick book). Kurtz’s modern equivalents probably would be men such as Scott Ritter, the UNSCOM guy, and Robert Baer, whose vision infuses  Syriana.

Milius, however, apparently specifically based Kurtz on a Colonel named Robert Rheault, of the Fifth Special Forces Group. In 1969, Reault ordered the execution of a South Vietnamese guide whom he though was a double agent. His judgment appeared tio be correct, but he was brought up on charges (later dropped), and word spread that the military was conducting “foreign policy” on its own. It was from (if I remember correctly) a  Newsweek article about Rheault that Milius got the inspiration for Kurtz and the phrase “termination with extreme prejudice.” Rheault’s rogue activities appealed to Milius’s anarco-conservative leanings, which are out of Baudelaire’s portrait of the soldier in  The Painter of Modern Life more than Any Rand. Soldiers are the only truly noble people. This, you might say, is the Milius viewpoint. On their own, soldiers have a code and an honor and could probably triumph in any contest were it not for politicians and officers. In Milius’s version of the script, Willard joins Kurtz in a final apocalyptic battle with the North Vietnamese. And Kurtz’s submergence into primitivism is something seen in other Milius films. Like the Soviet era soldiers who liked to tell anecdotes drawn from Russian culture (see James Brolin’s joke in  Traffic), Milius likes to use cautionary examples from Hitler’s army, partly for shock effect, but partly because German was, until then, a society that honored military culture, until it was subverted by the madness of the leaders. The Milius vision of Kurtz remains fairly consistent throughout the whole history of  AN, even during the weeks and weeks of expensive improvs with Brando. In the deleted scene, Colby gives Willard his imprimatur to kill Kurtz, but when he does, Willard replaces him in the eyes of Kurtz’s followers, “as a god.”

 

What does the film believe? The movie seems less concerned with policy than with a personal journey. Yes, war is hell. No matter what or why or where, war is hell. Stay out of it, stay away from it, for war can only kill you or harm you so bad that it unudermines your faith in the meaning of the society you are fighting for. The Vietnam war could have been won, theoretically,  but the Kurtz view is that it was fought badly. The movie might also be saying that the war could have been won if the soldiers were more like Kilgore and not fucked up on drugs and ambiguiety. But more important, war provides an intractable invitation for a personal journey, down the river of one’s identity. Let’s not forget what was happening in the real world during the time in which the film is set (which is, according to internal evidence, about 1970). The US was engaged in peace talks in France, Kissinger was bombing Laos, Lon Nol kicked everyone out of Cambodia, and four students were killed at Kent State. None of this is mentioned, nor is it relevant to  AN. Coppola is famous for saying that AN is not a film about Vietnam it is Vietnam.

 

 

Is  AN an anti-war movie? Perhaps in a general sense, but it is not necessarily an anti-Vietnam war movie. I would argue that  AN is instead, a Francis Ford Coppola movie. As in  The Godfather, as indeed in most Coppola movies, from  Dementia 13 all the way up to  Jack and  The Rainmaker,   AN is about a man who thought he was one thing,and turned out to be someone different. Michael Corleone thought that he didn’t have a trace of his father’s wicked blood in him, until the night he saved his father’s life in the hospital, and realized that, while all around him were shaking, he was still and composed, made for this sort of thing. Willard thought he was a regular soldier, a Special Ops kind of guy, but he wasn’t, he was another Kurtz. “They were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn’t even in their fucking army anymore.”

 

 

Well, I am in the midst of my review of Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, but realized that I received an extra DVD from the distributors.  So I am going to give away the still sealed DVD  to the first person who can answer all, or most of, the questions in what I call The World’s Hardest Apocalypse Now Quiz. It’s 20 of the toughest questions I could come up with, based on Coppola’s commentary track for the new disc, and my extensive research into the film. Here they are:

 

1) Whom did Coppola originally want to play Willard?

2) What does PBR stand for?

3) What now-obscure Green Beret colonel served as the initial inspiration for Kurtz?

4) What member of the early American Zoetrope community claims that he came up with the idea of adapting Heart of Darkness to a film about Vietnam?

5 ) While Martin Sheen was recovering for six weeks, what person served as a stand in?

 

6, 7, 8; 9, 10, 11; 12, 13, 14) Name the Playboy Bunnies, the actresses who played them, and their centerfold calendar month or title?

15) What actress was almost a Bunny but dropped out to star in a TV show?

16) What animal is sacrificed at the end of the film?

17) What poem does Kurtz read obsessively?

 

18) What is title of Eleanor Coppola’s published diary about the making of the film?

19) What unusual thing did Martin Sheen do during the Academy Award season?

20) What is the title of the play inspired by ** AN, in which several filmmakers and a Bunny are trapped in a room by a monsoon?

 

Please send your answers to dkholm2003@yahoo.com, which I have reserved solely for this quiz. Please include your address. The first person to answer all of the questions correctly, or, barring that, to answer the most correctly, will be mailed a sealed disc of Apocalypse Now. Sadly, I won’t have time to inform the losers, only the winner, so if you don’t hear from me within a few days, well, you probably didn’t get enough answers correct. With luck, I will announce a winner when I post my AN review.

 

 

As some kind of evidence that the studios are taking critics less and less seriously, or at least a certain kind of critic, there is the recent case of Eric D. Snider, a Portland, Oregon based internet critic who got in trouble with Paramount. This, along with the absence of a “critics screening” of  Snakes on a Plane, and several think pieces on critics in recent newspaper columns and around the internet, hint at coming harbingers of great change. 

By a complicated happenstance irrelevant to the results, Snider ended up attending the  World Trade Center junket held in Seattle, and then went on to write a devastating “insider’s” account of the experience at his website, a column which then became a national story when Media Bistro covered it.

Paramount struck back at Snider, first demanding that he take down the column, and then deciding that they could do without Snider all together, banning him from all future Paramount screenings. In addition, the company that represents Paramount in Seattle and the Northwest market went further, banning Snider from the other studios the firm represents, including Dimension, Miramax, and The Weinstein Company.

What with Willamette Week reviewer Becky Ohlsen pelted with a pie by a disgruntled theater operator, Portland is becoming the No Man’s Land of critic bashing. In this case, though, it’s not clear what Paramount has against Snider’s essay, beyond surprise at the fact that typical junketteers are rarely eager to bite the hand that so lavishly feeds them.

But still, if a studio invites a freelance writer, you open yourself to lumps of spice as much as lumps of sugar, and Snider’s  original column , “I Was a Junket Whore,” is at times wildly funny and insightful about the junket process (although the title should have been “I Was a Junket Whore for a Day”), while also mean spirited and a tad naive, and frankly, something that has been done before. Paramount may have been miffed at the fact that Snider names names, especially of lower level PR publicists who are simply doing their job, pens poison portraits of stars “off camera,” as it were, and talks about that most taboo of topics, money.

David Poland weighed in with some dire warnings about what Snider may have “done” to other freelancers, which was followed by a lively talkback with posters contributing both for and agin Snider (for more details on Snider and his interesting past, consult his Wikipedia citation ).

Worse for Snider is that he is presumably one of several potential candidates for the film reviewer’s job at  Willamette Week, recently vacated by David Walker, and where Snider is already a freelancer.  But as a recent column shows, Snider is  unrepentant. It is unclear how  Willamette Week will react to the prospect of a first string reviewer banned from advance screenings and publicity material for a fifth of the films released to the city, but who knows, they might like that kind of spunk. Perhaps Paramount should have just thrown a pie in his face. Lord knows it would have been an expensive one.

Snider’s case is only the most recent manifestation of the ongoing “crisis” in the movie reviewing world. Newspapers, themselves dinosaurs, are dumping some of their older critics, and studios are increasingly skipping the press screening stop in a film’s trajectory to the screen, the most recent example  Snakes on a Plane. In the past, you’d see maybe two or three films a year withheld from the press, “always a bad sign” to the reviewers that the studio at least thought they had a dog. Now, there, there is about one a month.

Well, I for one think that the studios should drop all critics and not screen their films for any of them. Let the critics pay and see the films the first weekend like everyone else.  Ban Snider, and all the rest of us, too.

I say this as a working reviewer. I have grown sick of the radio tie-in advance screenings anyway, and don’t go to them anymore. But I always secretly had reservations about the idea of the studios offering up free screenings in the hopes that we would write positive reviews.

Without that largesse, reviewers would be truly and unambiguously independent. And a newspaper or a web site’s owners could pay the ticket costs, so the reviewer wouldn’t be “losing” anything. Also, the reviewer would be seeing the film with people who really wanted to view it, not with passholes there only for the free t-shirt and bragging rights. Cost conscious studios would save millions a year by canceling these screenings and even dropping the junkets, although they would probably have a jones over the evaporation of puff pieces in every publication from Vanity Fair to Parade (whose reporters get special treatment, anyway).

And subtracted from the “news” angle of a movie’s release, reviews could be written and read more as thoughtful cultural criticism rather than rushes to judgment. There is an invisible divide of mutual contempt between film writers and the film industry and the average man on the street, who usually sides with “business,” i.e., the producers, rather than critics, who are interested, or should be, in art. These are two (or three) different sets of peoples, with different agenda, goals, and responsibilities, and they rarely truly interact. I say take this opportunity of a critical “crisis” to raze the promotion-industrial complex and start over.

 

 

 

Toward the end of the excellent audio commentary track for the recent Criterion disc of his film  Slacker, Richard Linklater pretty much sums up the existential quandary of the film director in a wonderful extemporaneous passage that should be required auditing for every would-be helmer. “[With] money issues and all the other psychic pressures that would come up in such an undertaking, you have to be sort of a head coach,” he says. “You know, you gotta be a taskmaster, you gotta be a charmer, you gotta be a manipulator. You know, I had to tap into what I call ‘necessary bad qualities’ in a personality, you know: ego. You gotta be able to stand up for yourself at the right moments; you’re always subtly being challenged. You know, it was kind of a psychic mine field. I remember I was walking through, and I was going, OK, this is it, this is what a director does, you better buck up, you know, you better – I had to tap into some long lost part of my personality, that maybe being a team captain in sports a decade before,  that guy had to kind of reëmerge in my personality. It had  long been gone. It’s not what you ever thought about when you said you wanted to make films but it’s necessary, and if you can’t do that, if you can’t have those meetings and do that necessary crap, and not feel like your denying who you are, you know, then you really shouldn’t be doing it. You won’t be ** able to do it.”

 

I thought of Linklater’s remarks throughout my reading of Michael Bamberger’s new book,  The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale (Gotham Books, 288 pages, $27.50, ISBN 1592402135). Linklater is a director I love and Shyamalan is one I have mixed feelings about, and the differences between them couldn’t be more caverous.

I read Bamberger’s book sympathetically, but it is easy to interpret the work as an embarrassingly lengthy press release, and it has already received devastating reviews, such as Janet Maslin’s in the  New York Times, and  Christopher Goodwin in the  Times of London, on the basis of its hagiographic genuflections to Shyamalan’s cinematic genius (though “business savvy” would be a better label). Bamberger is a sports writer who has moved placidly in the presence of superstars such like Jim Courier, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods, yet it is Shyamalan who has reduced him to a blithering fan, finding exquisite nuance in the most mundane aspects of the filmmaking process.

Part of the problem is that, as he admits, Bamberger knows nothing about movies. He never watches a film more than once, has never heard of Aint it Cool News, and couldn’t tell you if Ingmar Bergman is a chick or a guy. Instead he knows sports, and the ins and outs of conservative straight arrow publishing in the form of  Sports Illustrated. In short he is a square. But it takes a square to extoll one, and the clearest message in the book is that Shyamalan is a pampered, sheltered, privilged, unlettered, and inexperienced square.

 

I’m not sure where I fall on the issue of Bamberger’s ignorance of the movie biz. Things highly familiar and routine to me strike him as fascinating, and though it is sometimes nicely “Martian” to have these familar things seen though neophyte eyes, one also despairs that someone so clueless was given such supreme access to Shyamalan and everyone in his creative circle. Bamberger pursued Shyamalan not because he was a movie buff but because he was developed some kind of man crush on him at a party, and seems to have an interest in minority success in mainstream areas of activity such as sports. Bamberger, who also lives in Pennsylvania like Shyamalan and his extended family, met the director at an exclusive dinner party and found himself so intrigued he pitched to Shyamalan the idea of spending a year as his Boswellian amanuensis. Shyamalan, for his part, is a tireless self-promoter, or at least a protector of his talent, and Bamberger seems to have caught him at a vulnerable moment, when he wanted to “prove” something to his former studio, Disney, as he embarked on a new relationship with Warner. But I can think also think of a heck of a lot of American directors who would benefit from this same kind of scrutiny and access, scrutiny that would benefit the readerL Tarantino, Scorsese, Stone, Coens, an Anderson.

 

The book begins just as Shyamalan is finishing up his latest script,  The Lady in the Water. At least it sounds like MNS really writes his screenplays, unlike a lot of Hollywood frauds, and he had great difficulty composing it (the script is supposedly based on a fairy tale he made up for his kids). Bamberger follows the scripts, in the hands of MNS’s then assistant Paula, as it goes across the country to three execs at Disney, none of whom grant it the kind of courtesy the spoiled rich kid is used to. At the end of a tense dinner with the trio back in Philly, Shyalaman more or less announces that he is leaving Disney. Its not clear  how he can do this; Bamberger doesn’t go into detail about the kind of contractual relationship he had with Disney (at the end of the book, Bamberger invites readers to email him questions, so I did, and Bamberger replied that after Shyamalan’s disastrous experience with Harvey Weinstein, MNS maintained a more distanced relationship with Disney, which I imagine is akin to a month-to-month lease).

 

Like a John McPhee, Bamberger attempts to delve into the minds of both parties, but the inside of Night’s mind is fully and warmly portrayed and the minds of the execs are cold and unforthcoming (one of them was fired from Disney the weekend that the movie opened and the book came out). Though Shyamalan is ushered into the Warner world, the image of the three executives hover in his head as a spur and a curse, in a rather crowded place what with all those voices. I leave you to consult DSM-IV about what a head of voices means. Bamberger watches the set built, the film cast, what appears to be the whole shoot, and various screenings and premieres.  Throughout, he shows abject admiration for Shyamalan and for a few others, such as lead Paul Giamatti, who, it turns out, he knew slightly already. Rarely does he show Shyamalan throw a fit. But he does, occasionally, generally in the direction of the DP, Christopher Doyle, who does not, to put it mildly, conduct himself in a manner consonant with the standards of this ancient gentlemen’s club (the book has been talked about as a Shyamalan career killer, but if anyone is at risk, it is Doyle, at least in the American market). Doyle’s idea of complimenting an actress during costume sizing is to say, “You look fuckable.”

 

But for all the attention to the mechanics of the movie making process there are a few things missing. There isn’t a lot about Shyamalan and money, there isn’t much about  how he writes or why, and there isn’t anything about the vanity or consequences of him casting himself in his own movies. It’s reporting, not criticism, but I would also have liked something about Shyamalan’s artistic intentions.

 

The consistent theme in MNS’s movies, though, is not the trick or surprise ending, but instead, the interesting thematic turn of someone thinking he is saving someone when in fact it is really he who is being saved. Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) in  The Sixth Sense thinks he is helping the little boy, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), but it is really the kid who is rescuing Crowe from the delusion that he is still alive, while in  Unbreakable,  David Dunn isn’t being revealed as as superhero, it is Elijah Price being exposed as a supervillain. In  Lady in the Water, Cleveland Heep isn’t saving Story, she is rescuing Heep; depending on how clearly this narrative twist is treated defines how successful Shyamalan’s movie is going to be, on an aesthetic level.

 Lady is further complicated by is subtheme  of  telling stories, though. Heep can’t just learn more about the mysterious ethereal woman who emerged from the apartment swimming pool, he has to enjoin all manner of complex re-tellers to tell him. Thus, he can’t get the lexicon of the water people directly from the old Korean woman, it has to be translated to him by her daughter. Shyamalan thinks he is honoring storytelling, but he is really putting impediments in its way. In a related subplot, the critic (Bob Balaban) must die because he  doesn‘t convey stories, he merely interprets and judges them.

Another theme in his films is water. Shyamalan is fixated on it. Water is (illogically, if you think about it for five seconds) Dunn’s Kryptonite in Unbreakable, as well as the aliens’ weakness in  Signs. Here it is the rejuvenating amniotic fluid for Story and her people.

Bmaberger doesn’t go into any of this, but one shouldn’t expect him to, I guess.  Instead, he is the interested fly on the wall when Shyamalan has numerous encounters with executives, actors, production people, and intimates. To me the most fascinating segment is when Shyamalan confronts an unnamed  African-American NYU film student about a highly negative review he wrote anonymously for Ain’t It Cool News (since pulled down) after piggy backing into a highly exclusive early screening for intimates. Night and his team figured out who the poisoned penner was and called him out. Night met him him at a public place in Manhattan and proceeded to break through the kid’s arrogance and reduce him to tears, a blubbering slave intent on following Night’s wishes evermore.

What is interesting about this story is less the intervention of a filmmaker into the very lowest rungs of critical reception of his work, but the image of him after the conversation, of him walking through the streets of New York, a little figure with an loose oversized knapsack hopping on his back. Suddenly the specter of Haley Macaulay Culkin in  Home Alone came into my head, and I realized that Shyamalan remains an adolescent. His movie tales are adolescent, his view on life is adolescent and his memories of the past are fixated on the small triumphs of the adolescent (as in an incomprehensible anecdote told first early in the book in which a teenage Night goes to a car with a girl in defiance of an athlete; I couldn’t really follow that anecdote but it apparently looms large in Night’s view of himself). MNS ended up marrying a beautiful woman, a sort of supermodel with brains, has two kids, is a millionaire with a large retinue of helpers, and his movies have made his corporate masters over a billion dollars. But he is still a disappointment to his parents, in Bamberger’s portrayal, and their lack of approval continues to infantalize him, while he still dwells (as do we all) on high school slights.  Night is a square. He uses outdated slang (dig, turn me off). Night’s favorite films are listed as films such as The Wizard of Oz, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET: not a Samuel Fuller or a Bela Tarr flick in the bunch, just straight down the line corporate blockbusters. He is only just now “getting into” (as Night might say) Bob Dylan, and his identification with Dylan, as a troubled artist facing misunderstanding, is utterly square – and a few decades late.

 

I regret that all this sounds negative, because I had a fine time reading the book (which is really more like a long magazine article – without pictures). It made me almost sympathize with Shyamalan, it provided some insight into the movie making process, and I got interesting glimpses into Giamatti and Doyle.  The person I identified with most was, oddly,  Bryce Dallas Howard, who confesses to nervousness and emotional and intellectual withholding  and nervousness when she is in the spotlight on the set and when she is in Night’s presence, which is exactly how I would be. Bamberger writes easefully, his enthusiasm is appreciated, and he happened upon a showbiz story with real drama in it (although the book came out before the story was over). It’s a quick read but well worth the time.

 

 

On my crowded desk right now are seven books just on  The Prisoner, ranging from episode guides to serious considerations of its philosophical and political implications. All are fascinating, just as the show was fascinating when it was first broadcast on Britain’s ITV on October first,  1967 (it hit America on CBS in June 1968).

 

Also on my desk is  The Prisoner: Complete Series Megaset (40th Anniversary Edition), the latest publication of the whole 17-episode series, from A&E Channel video library.   The Prisoner was originally issued in five individual box sets in April of 2001, and simultaneously in one big box for $150. The new  Prisoner megaset hit the street on July 25th (retailing for $139.95), cheaper, apparently, because of the thinpak cases, even though the set features new pull out material.  The new set has sharp transfers and the addition of a booklet on the series and a fold out map of the village, and, as far as I can tell, the addition of DD Stereo tracks on the discs (though some on line reviews indicate that the discs are the same as the previous set’s).

 The Prisoner made its debut to hosannahs from the print media, grateful for brain candy finally manufactured in that vast wasteland. But  The Prisoner may have been too brainy. It has the encoded thematic complexity of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and what the reviewers at the time couldn’t know, a production crew in disharmony. Co-creator and story editor George Markstein left halfway though and one key collaborator, director Don Chaffey, also escaped. McGoohan himself eventually “left” the show, closing it down and ending it abruptly rather than continue with a second season. The consequence is that ultimately  The Prisoner is inconsistent. Like certain plays of Shakespeare or the Sherlock Holmes canon, it contradicts itself. Thus there can be no set answer to what  The Prisoner is about, based solely on critical interpretation of the show. This does not negate the fact that  The Prisoner is a great television show,

Forever after, Markstein and McGoohan would bicker in print over who invented the show. Was Markstein, who was a Jewish refugee (not American, as the Wikipedia has it) from Hitler’s Europe, really a spy himself, one with inside knowlege of a secret camp in Scotland used to rehabilitate spies? Or did the show’s idea come from the causal comment McGoohan heard at a cocktail party from a member of the governmental elite, when the actor posed the casual question, Where  do spies go when they retire?

The best way to approach  The Prisoner is through its credit sequence. It’s one of the most unusual openings in television history. For one thing, it is just over three minutes long, and each week walked the viewer though the premise all over again: how a spy resigned in some kind of fit of moral outrage and then woke up to find himself trapped on a bucolic holiday isle seemingly under the supervision of his former masters. In a way, and perhaps like all credit sequences, it promises more than the show can deliver. It is like a music video, all highlights and tease.

 

The credit sequence for  The Prisoner begins with a crack of thunder and the sight of ominous dark clouds. There has been a momentous rift in the social fabric, public and secret.

Then there is the simultaneous sounds of bongos on the soundtrack from the score by Ron Grainer, and the sight of a long road whose vanishing point issues forth a yellow Lotus 7. Close up, we see the intense, angry driver, Patrick McGoohan. The usual immediate association for him is with John Drake, his character in  Danger Man or Secret Agent, the cultish, sober spy program that aired off and on from from 1960 to 1968. Controversy reigns over whether this driver is Drake (McGoohan has “denied” it).

In successive shots, the man progresses from lonely road to London, past a church (Westminster Cathedral? That would tie in with McGoohan’s Catholicism, and the religious symbols he is said to have planted in the show; in any case, it is a really famous landmark and I am a dummy for not instantly recognizing it), and then turns right and descends into a parking garage. Next the man is shown walking angrily down a hallway with checkerboard lighting, passing in and out of shadow, his footfalls thumping ominously, not unlike Lee Marvin in the airport at the beginning of  Point Blank, also made in 1967.

 

The man, this future prisoner, known as P in the script and No. 6 in the Village, is then shown pacing back and forth in front of an inpassive bureaucrat. This is not the way James Bond treated M. The man behind the desk in the credits is played by George Markstein, his only screen appearance. Pounding the table, P is obviously angry about somthing. But what? And if he is angry, and telling the bureaucrat why he is angry, and offering up a resignation letter, why are the Villagers so curious about why he resigned during the subsequent 17 hours?

 

P has left. While he travels through the city his photo (a publicity shot of John Drake) is processed by automation as resigned. P arrives home and moves furiously around his digs. He trows a batch of travel brochures into his his suitcase. In a sense, he will get the vacation he seeks, transported shortly to a faraway locale.

While P is in his flat packing for a holiday, a tall funereal Edwardian figure pulls up  in a hearse behind P’s Lotus and approaches the door. In broad daylight he attaches a large tube to the keyhole, releasing thick white powder or gas into the flat. Note how often doors and doorways figure in the credit sequence as they do in the subsequent show itself. Portals to authority. Thresholds to secrets that don’t exist.

 

Sensing the gas P stops abruptly. For the first time we see the patented McGoohan freeze, a sudden tensing created in mid flight. He falls back onto a chesterfield and falls asleep.

Part of McGoohan’s appeal as an actor, at least a lead TV actor is his sardonic independence, his misleading seriousness broken up by real physical wit, and his his suave twitchiness, found in those bizarre stops and starts. He has a face made for the small screen, handsome yet odd, with protuberant eyes, and a voice with several different tones or accents in it at once. An international man. As partially a vanity project, McGoohan must carry the show, and he does.

But the credit sequence (in which there is a dearth of actual credits)  still isn’t over. P awakens in what appears to be the same room, but utside his window is a new locale. Here the music changes to a haunting theme with guitar and harmonium (?).

Now for the first time, words, in voice over, we hear words that summarize the hierarchies of life in the Village. It’s a dialogue between the Prisoner and that episode’s No. 2.

The Prisoner asks, “Where am I?”

The answers: “In the Village.”

“What do you want?”

“Information.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“That would be telling. We want information. Information. Information!”

“You won’t get it.”

“By hook or by crook, we will.”

“Who are you?”

“The new Number 2.”

“Who is Number 1?”

“**You are Number 6.”

“I am not a number – I am a free man!” To which No. 2 laughs sadistically.

 

The dialogue is a mix of libertarianism and Lewis Carroll, with a hint of Holocaust anxiety (quarantined men stamped with numbers). Under it we see the current No. 2, the monitoring devices, the beach, and the Rover, the large weather balloon dragooned into being the Village cop. The power of the sequence is in the quick editing and the great music. The first half harks back to silent cinema (so does the second half, though: it doesn’t really need the dialogue, though it is helpful). The sequence manipulates the viewer just as the Village seeks to manipulate the Prisoner, psychologically, except the goal is to inform, not mislead or trick, as in the barrage of psychological experiments the Village tries on No. 6.

 

 

To me, the most interesting part of the credit sequence is No. 6 rashly tossing in some travel brochures. He doesn’t know where he is going, he just has to get out of there, some where far away, and preferably sunny. He gets his wish. The Village is an even-climed resort where, as we learn, all your needs are met (if you comply). It’s half prison, half retirement home. Is the Prisoner the center of its attention? Does it exist  solely to pry out of him his secrets? It’s raison d’etre changes in the course of the show, but that is one possible theory. Still,  The Prisoner remains one of the greatest TV shows of all time, and continually rewards repeat viewings. It’s one of the tightest focused shows, anticipating the conceptual type of show such as  24 and  Lost only now coming to American television.

 

The full frame transfers are crisp and clean, and the English (with subtitles) Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo is fine, with all 10 discs in thinpaks. New to the set is a 60-page “Limited Edition” pamphlet with episode summaries and trivia, and a map of the Village.

All the extras are carried over from the old set: interviews with production manager Bernie Williams, rare footage of the 1966 location shooting, with commentary by production designer Bernie Williams, “The Prisoner Video Companion,”an alternate edit of the episode “The Chimes of Big Ben,” “Foreign File Cabinet” footage, original broadcast trailers, original series promotional trailer, gallery of promotional materials and production stills, “interactive” map of the Village, and trivia quizs.

A&E’s discs can be controversial. There are running time discrepancies, transfer issues, and pricing outrages. This strikes me, a neophyte, as a good set, though I’m searching the net for a close, detailed analysis of the transfers.

 

 

 

I wonder if Philip Larkin saw  A Canterbury Tale as a youth. He would have been 22 when the film came out. In one of his most famous poems, “The Whitsun Weddings,” he describes the English countryside, as seen from a train, as “postal districts packed like squares of wheat.” And there, in the film’s first few minutes is a landscape shot of Kent, near Canterbury, its fields,  mutatis mutandis,  as Larkin describes them. The film’s opening narration is in the form of rhymed couplets sounding not unlike Larkin, and is read by Esmond Knight in a tone of exaltation that Larkin himself recommended for the reading “The Whitsun Weddings.”

A Canterbury Tale (1944) also evinces some of the bedrock English characteristics which Larkin’s poetry is famous for celebrating. Pluck, generosity, a sense of “getting on with it” in the face of difficulties, an openess to strangers, and a silently held melancholy about one’s state in life. Larkin, on the other hand, could drepress the hell out of you with his meditations on a Godless death.  A Canterbury Tale‘s ostensible project is to “support the war effort” and foster better British – American relations as it tells a modern Canterbury tale in which three travelers at the height of hte war come together in the village of Chillingbourne to solve a puzzle.

The travelers are Alison Smith (Sheila Sim, in a role originally slated to Deborah Kerr), a “widow” who has gone to country to become a Land Girl, Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price, of  Kind Hearts and Coronets), a sergeant in the British army based not far from Chillingbourne, where they are practicing maneuvers for D-Day, and sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet, an amateur whom Powell spotted in a production of  Our Town, and who returned to teaching after the war), an American on his way to Canterbury to meet his buddy and see the church. Their first night in Chillingbourne results in Allison being doused by the nefarious Glue Man, who targets women out in the street at night with or near soldiers. The next day the three resolve to solve the crime which the local constabulary seems hesitant or unable to solve.

Each of the three travelers has a flaw or secret wish. Allison believes that she is a widow, that her husband, a pilot, was shot down by the Germans. Their “caravan,” or camper, is stored in Canterbury, and part of her reason for volunteering as a Land Girl was to seek out the camper for sentimental reasons. Johnson, from Johnson County, Oregon, is distraught because his girl has stopped writing to him. Gibbs, who tickles the ivories in a movie theater, always wanted to be a church organist.

It’s difficult to describe the unsettling nature of this film, both cozy and tense at the same time. From its famous cut between a medieval hawk returning to its master to a contemporary British fighter plane in the same sky, indeed the same spot, a cut so reminiscent, as many others have pointed out, of Kubrick’s similar trick in  2001, to the gentle almost non-verbal resolution to the three main characters woes, it is a magical film. The magician at the center of this magic is Thomas Colpeper, JP (Eric Portman, in a role that Roger Livesey turned down). A judge, a gentleman farmer, an archeologist of the local landscape, he has a mystical relationship with the land, and seems to touch people’s lives like a Jesus of Canterbury, drawing people out and turning their instinctive hate into respect. He also almost always appears suddenly, out of no where. Yet he starts out seeming like a homosexual woman-hater who may well be the notorious Glue Man.

The Glue Man plot engine is the most perplexing part of the movie, in that it’s such an odd crime. But it was worse originally, with the Glue Man something like a Canterbury Slasher. It is also very “English,” or at least English movie, for the three new fast friends to drop everything and try to solve the mystery.

 

 

Not all the magic resides within Colpeper. There is a marvelous sequence where Allison and Bob run into each other at the wheelwright’s shop. Since Bob is from Oregon, famous for its forestry, he soon gets on well with the wheelwright, talking wood density and harvesting timing. The wheelwright invites Bob back for lunch and he takes him up on it, but we never see the actual meal, though it is referred to later in dialogue. It’s very touching and delicate the way Powell takes the viewer through different attitudes to arrive at a state of mutual respect. The only analog I can think of in contemporary films is certain scenes in David Lynch’s  The Straight Story, which captures a similar egalitarianism. Another deeply moving moment is when Allison, in close up, hears the “sounds” of medieval Canterbury, and looks like Ingrid Bergman as her hair whips around her. One difference, however, is that there is a pronounced sexual tension throughout the movie, from the unexpressed, or even unacknowledged interest some of the characters have for each other, and the integration of people with “alternative” sexualities into the war effort.

I was so enthralled with the magic of A Canterbury Tale that I watched it three times, putting me even further behind in my DVD reviewing. The Criterion Collection’s two-disc offering, disc No. 341,  gives us a transfer of the 1977 125 minute restoration of the black and white film in a full frame windowboxed transfer.

 

 

Extras on Disc One include an audio commentary by Ian Christie, who is a longtime Powell scholar and who contributed an essay on  Canterbury Tale to the excellent anthology  The Cinema of Michael Powell, edited by Christie and Andrew Moor and published by the BFI. Also on disc one is a small compilation of the American segments made for the shorter US release, featuring Kim Hunter as Mrs. Bob Johnson.

 

Disc two has a modest array of very informative supplements. There is a new video interview with Sim (Mrs. Richard Attenborough) who provides some affectionate anecdotes. This is followed by “John Sweet: A Pilgrim’s Journey,” made when Sweet returned to Canterbury in 2000 for a special event. It is interesting to hear his comments on “stardom.” “A Canterbury Trail” is a video record of a walking tour of the film’s sets conducted occasionally by historian Paul Tritton and Powell and Pressburger fan Steve Crook. Finally there  is “Listening to Britain,” a piece of installation by one Victor Burgin that blends images from this film and Humphrey Jenning’s quasi-documentary “Listen to Britain.” The installation piece is a seven minute loop, and the disc also offers Jenning’s film as a counterbalance. There’s also a 24-page  booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer info, and essays by Fraham Fuller, and Peter von Bagh, with diary entries made by Sweet at the time of filming.  A Canterbury Tale hit the street on Tuesday, July 25 retailing for $39.95.

 

Late in 2005, Criterion also released another Powell and Pressburger “tale,” their adaptation of the opera  The Tales of Hoffman. Released in 1951, is a colorful account of the Jacques Offenbach’s opera adapting three supernatural love tales by E.T.A. Hoffman. Metropolitan opera star  Robert Rounseville is Hoffman, telling the tales in a tavern while Stella (Moria Shearer) finishes up a ballet performance on stage nearby. Hoffman’s nemesis is Councilman Lindorff (Robert Helpmann), who also loves, or at least wants, Stella. It is a very visual film, but the interpretation of the music is a tad on the slow side (or at least so my opera buff experts tell me), and though the visual style has invoked references to Jean Cocteau, to me it feels Disney. Still, I’d rather have this disc than any of the hundred others that came out that day.

 

The Criterion Collection’s edition, spine No. 317, is a vivid full frame transfer marred only occasionally by some of the peculiarities of the Technicolor process. Supplements for this disc are unusual. This is the 127 minute version of the movie; supposedly there is an 138 minute original that is lost. There is an  audio commentary with both director Martin Scorsese, a Powell enthusiast,  and music historian Bruce Eder, and there is also an 18-minute interview with George A. Romero, who turns out also to be a longtime fan of the film. Also on hand is “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1956), a short musical film directed by Powell, based on the Goethe story, a gallery of production sketches by production designer Hein Heckroth, a stills galleries, and the theatrical trailer. Finally, there is a 12-page insert with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer info, and an essay by the always informative Christie.  The Tales of Hoffman retails for $39.95 and hit the street on Tuesday, November 22, 2005.

 

God, I love Michael Mann.

I love him so much that even abuse from a “screening rat” couldn’t diminish my pleasure in his latest film, Miami Vice.You know what screening rats are, don’t you? They are creatures about two steps up from self-pissing derelicts on a street corner, and slightly less loathsome than cockroaches, though with the same nocturnal habits of feeding. Screening rats are the freeloading trailer park trash who attend advance critics and word-of-mouth screenings on free tickets passed out by radio stations. They arrive en masse, buy no concessions, eat noisily from their plastic sacks of CostCo bulk food, talk all through the movie, get into fights with each other, scramble after posters and t-shirts, and in general make it hard for the reviewers to do their job.

The rats, also called “Passholes,” are famous all across the country, from Seattle to Chicago, but they are particularly virulent in Portland, Oregon, for some reason. Most of them come from Gresham, an outlying city that is the identity theft capital of the world.

For Miami Vice I was at the Lloyd Cinemas, a Regal theater in what is called Northeast Portland, although that doesn’t tell you anything. Having had a minor altercation with another guy over the seating arrangements before the public, i.e., the “rats,” were let in, I moved to another seat. In the new chair, I was soon joined by the onslaught of rats, let in all at once (there are very few civilians at these advance screenings. The rats track down almost all the available tickets and power-pack the theater). The seat behind me was almost instantly occupied by a rat and what appeared to be his family. I was on the aisle and the guy right behind me kept kicking the seat. I figured that if he was doing this before the movie, it was going to be a nightmare while Miami Vice was playing. So I turned, after the 8th bump, and asked him as politely as I could if he could avoid hitting the back of my chair. The guy jumped down my throat, yelling at me.

Now, it has been awfully hot in Portland the last week, sometimes reaching 105. I’ve seen all sorts of incidents, from a bus driver turning into Dirty Harry to fist-fights in normally placid parks after 10 PM. So this fellow’s reaction wasn’t abnormal in context. But he was so virulent in his attack on me that I went and fetched the publicity rep. And it turns out that they knew each other – but this is only because the rats make it a point to memorize the names of the people who hand out the passes.

The patient rep asked him to move; the guy went ballistic again, yelling, saying “Not gonna happen,” and then to me, “You want to go out side and settle this?,” and then pleading to the rep, “You’re gonna believe him and not me?” and calling me fatso (which was the pot calling the kettle black, as this fellow was lugging an extra person in his gut and had a square head not unlike a block of limburger cheese, only with a Russ Meyer mustache in the middle).

I was saying nothing; Limburger was escalating it all by himself. The rep said, “Now you have to leave.” After arguing for another two minutes Limburger said, “I’m just gonna go,” acting as if it was his decision leave, to preserve what shred of dignity he had left.

What was funny about this was that we were about to see (now thankfully without Limburger) a film full of the kind of masculinist posturing that makes Saturday afternoon action films such invigorating fantasies for boys. Here, Colin Farrell plays Sonny Crockett, the part made by the underrated Don Johnson in the seminal 1980s NBC series that Michael Mann produced (but didn’t create nor direct). Jamie Foxx is Rico Tubbs, his partner in undercover drug busting in present day Miami. The two spend a lot of time in the film flashing hard looks, posturing, and moving with efficiency when the tension breaks in front of their drug dealing nemeses, who flash and posture back. It’s a sort of tango.

You’re either going to like the posturing or not. I liked it, especially some nice large hole-creating head shots, which put me in mind of Limburger. The sound in either the print or the theater was bad so the dialogue was hard to hear, but the movie is almost a silent film anyway, and the pace is deliberate. I suspect that a lot of people are going to fine it slow or boring.

Miami Vice is shot like Collateral, in high def digital video that leads to somber cityscapes and beautiful skyscapes. Parts of the film were shot in Miami just as Katrina and other storms were on their way and the sky often has an ominous and thick cast about it, with lightning spiking down (I assume that it is real lightning, not CGI effects). Skeptical viewers are going to find the weather more dramatic than the actors. This is a very muted action film, with both lead actors mostly withholding. I especially like the patented Mann shot, with the camera held close to the rear right or left of someone as they walk. He uses it about five times in this movie and the shot is always effective, really bringing you into the action.

This is the second time that Mann has gone to the well of TV work to fashion a movie. Heat is a masterly re-filming of his TV movie, the 1989 Crimewave (AKA L.A. Takedown). In essence, what Mann has done here is re-write the end of Heat. In that film, crook De Niro and cop Pacino have a face off on a busy airport runway in a sequence that left a lot of people unsatisfied. Here, in a similar situation, a character makes a wholly different decision, and it is indeed much more satisfying. Thus, both because of their roots and because of their contrasting resolutions, Heat and Miami Vice are paired films in Mann’s filmography. Mann tries to balance two entirely different moods, absolute quotidian realism on the one hand, and romanticism on the other. This time he may have got the ending right.

Personally, I liked it quite a bit. A suspense scene in a trailer park (which must have felt tres familiar to the hoard of screening rats in the auditorium) had me on edge. And I like Mann’s silent men. The movie is well cast in all its subsidiary roles. Mann takes a page from Tarantino and casts an Asian woman, Gong Li, as the right hand CEO. John Hawkes and Ciarán Hinds also appear, and fans of The Wire will enjoy seeing Domenick Lombardozzi in a similar role.

But it is not Miami Vice the show. There are no flashily stylish clothes, no sessions where the plot stops to indulge in a rock video sequence. It’s a very focused if dense film with no subplots. But I like the director’s Mannerisms; they do for me what movies are in part suppose to do: make me feel good after a trying day.

 

 

When in doubt, Roger Corman returns to the race car movie. He didn’t direct  Asphalt Wars (2004), but his named appears at the beginning as producer, and the film was originally released by his third company, New Concorde. It’s directed, edited, and written by Henry Crum, who is something of a cinematic jack of all trades, and I assume that Corman’s company simply picked it up for distribution.

 

 

It tells the story of young Reno (Gilbert Chavarria), who by day works in his uncle’s garage, and by night joins illegal street races, which for him is the graduate school where he learns how to drive, in preparation for going pro. Two things happen. Reno annoys and impresses the local gang leader, and he falls for Dina (Calvi Pabon). In the event, the gang leader wants Reno to be the driver for a heist he has in mind, and that job will take Reno as far from the direction he wants to go as it is possible to stray.

 

 

This is a low budget affair with lots of obviously real people hanging out at what appear to be real off track races. It’s not the best looking film but its lack of frills gives it a certain integrity, at least in those moments when you don’t notice it cutting corners. What’s unusual is that it posits an almost entirely Hispanic world. White people don’t figure in it to any great extent, and as a consequence you feel how on their own the characters are, with no law or institutions to rule over them. It’s also a curse, as the gangs remorselessly rob from their own. Reno is an oddly interior lead character. He is ambitious, but also withholding, and strangely you don’t really get to know him (that may be the actor’s fault).

One virtue that digital video offers is that special effects are relatively easier. The big scorpion looks good, but also very much like a special effect. But that might be the point, as animators like to have their work appreciated.

The disc has a full frame transfer that is rather dark and grainy, possibly shot on 16 milimeter (it doesn’t look like HD digital video), and has no extras.

 

 

Released the same day, is another film with Corman’s name on it,  Scorpius Gigantus (2006), an Aliens style horror film with scientifically tampered-with giant bugs taking out a military base.

The second thing you notice about  Scorpius Gigantus is that it is shot in high def video. This causes an interesting reaction in the viewer (or at least one viewer). Part of out pleasure in watching a DVD is that it is a record of a movie going experience, whether we had it directly or not. There is a certain grandeur to the large screen with its towering people and its fine detail. Even if we are experiencing it at second hand there is a mental adjustment to the local TV experience in which we read into it the grandeur.

 

Digital video is “easy.” Anyone can do it. It’s everywhere. Since most of us have actually done a little video shooting, we know that it is a bunch of unglamorous people standing around waiting. Digital video also mentally equals “reporting,” so that a film employing it out of choice rather than necessity is aspiring toward a hyper realism. But the traditional setting and context of  SG belies that. It’s another horror film economically shot in Eastern Europe, in this case Bulgaria, with numerous cast members of distinctly Slavic cast, which is no problem unless you are trying to pretend you are in America.

Jeff Fahey stars as  Major Nick Reynolds who trains and leads a small assault team. Meanwhile, some Russian gangsters end up with a giant scorpion laying waste to them. Reynolds and his team are asked to intervene. They learn that the scorpion is the result of experimentation, and that it is also part metal and part human. As his team is reduced in numbers, Reynolds and scientist Dr. Jane Preston (Jo Bourne-Taylor) must find a way to stop genetically mutated this monster.

 

You will have a feeling that you have seen this film before, and essentially guess everything that is going to happen before it does, even down to lines like, “Major, you’re gonna want to see this.” I am a big fan of Fahey, and have always been puzzled why he never became more famous. Perhaps he is on the level of a Richard Egan, some one ridiculously handsome, almost too good looking for movies. He looks a little weather beaten here, but then the video camera is cruel, especially when there is a dearth of lights and make up.

SG also arrives with no supplements. It is a full frame transfer which suggests that it was originally meant for television, though no one seems to know if it was ever aired thus. The first thing you’ll notice about the film is that it is apparently a part of the Roger Corman collection, but the box makes no claim for it, and the credits indicate that is released by New Horizons. This appears to be another name for Corman’s New Concorde.

 

Both  Asphalt Wars and Scorpius Gigantus were released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment on Tuesday, July 25th, for $29.95.

 

 

 

 

The thing I like best about  Dumbo is that it’s the film that figures in the manic climax to Steven Spielberg’s underrated comedy of excess  1941. There, General Stillwell (Robert Stack) has taken over a downtown theater to watch  Dumbo in private, so that he can weep copiously and out of sight of his minions. His private pleasure is interrupted by the hysteria arising over a presumed attack on Los Angeles by the Japanese, which in reality is a lost sub. 

1941 is one of those strange films in Spielberg’s catalog. The popular critical image of Spielberg is that he celebrates the middle class suburban family, using the pretext of a suspense or sci-fi story to wallow in the comforts of an ideal home with harried parents and messy kids whose kingdom resides everywhere but the parents’ bedroom. But he is just as likely to tear a family apart, as he does in  Close Encounters, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, and 1941. It’s the reverse of his usual narrative choice ( Jaws, Poltergeist, ET), where the external threat to the family only strengthens it.

 

 

The family in  Dumbo is torn apart, too. Little Dumbo is separated from his mother, who is confined in a cage in a traveling circus because she has been outraged at the treatment of her child, mocked for having big ears. With the help of Timothy Q. Mouse (voiced by Edward Brophy; Dumbo never speaks), Dumbo discovers that he has the power to fly on oversized wings grants him and mom special status in the circus world after a delicious revenge against the scary clowns who tormented him (could  Dumbo be the source for the widespread fear and / or hatred of clowns?).

 

 

 Dumbo came out in 1941 at the height of Disney’s war on motherhood. Bambi’s mother is killed by hunters, and Alice’s lonely journal among mean adults. Today, as in the Lion King, the mother figure is as likely to be absent with the father remaining as the spine of the family (in any case, at least one of the parents is always gone). Was Disney directing his writers to dwell on these mother led families because he thuoght they made for better box office, or were his own neuroses plugged into the zeitgeist? Was ’40s and ’50s American culture, and therefore the culture of the civilized world, ambivalent about The Mother at the height of a war, and so therefore erased her? She was certainly the nemesis in most comedies, such  Father of the Bride, where the father is continually emascuated by the machinations of the women around him, completely oblivious to his individuality.

 

 

But at root,  Dumbo is a salutary tale about self esteem. As Mr. Mouse says, The very thing that held you down are going to carry you up and up!” That’s the congenial message of the film, which Disney said was his favorite of all his productions. Dumbo appeals to the fragile person within us who wishes we had a special talent that would set us apart. Not make us equal, but make us better.

Dumbo (Big Top Edition), which is the second iteration of the film on DVD, comes in a fine full frame image with DD 5.1  sound, manipulated out of the original mono. The film has  English subtitles, and language tracks in French and  Spanish. Curiously, this DVD release has fewer special featuers than the 60th anniversay release of 2001 and the transfer has been criticized has being worse than its predecessor. Close comparisons with the 60 anniversary disc show that the image here is dimmer and flatter.

 

 

Among the extras remaining from the first disc are the commentary by animation historian John Canemaker, “Celebrating Dumbo” with by Roy E. Disney and Don Hahn, Disney’s intro to the movie done for his weekly TV show,  Dumbo art gallery of 167 images, two singalongs, “Look Out For Mr. Stork” (2:28) and “Casey Jr.” (2:27), “DVD storybook: Dumbo’s Big Discovery,” and two bonus shorts, “Elmer Elephant” and “The Flying Mouse,” while erasing “Sound Design,” “Exclusive Look at  Dumbo II“, which never came out anyway, and “Publicity Materials,” which included all the trailers. Disney has something against trailers. Maybe they recognize as much as we that they spoil all their movies. New to the disc are the music video for Jim Brickman and Kassie DePaiva’s rendition of “Baby Mine” (4:00), the unduly complicated “DisneyPedia: ‘My First Circus’.” If you are a completist,  Dumbo hit the street on June 6, and retails for $29.99, but the 60th anniversary edition should continue to satisfy most consumers for now.

 

 

Glory Road is like about 20 sports films you’ve seen since  Hoosiers, most of them about basketball. A man takes a coaching job not because it ays more but because it offers a chance to make a name for himself. His players are troubled and he is as much a life teacher as a coach, giving them “tough love” when it comes to their classes. In the course of a season he battles both the school’s endowers and his own wife. Against impossible odds he takes the team to the state championship (or the Olympics. Or the World Series) and with only seconds left in the last quarter of the final game pull out victory from the jaws of defeat. His wife and the school supporters both come around. All this happens to a non-stop soundtrack of contemporary pop hits.

That Glory Road is fundamentally true makes it no less cornball, and that it makes a bold, if laggard, statement about racism in the 1960s only gives it more opportunities to extrude unearned emotional high points. The film, directed by James Gartner (his first feature after making a short subject called The Last Leaf) and credited to writers Chris Cleveland and Bettina Gilois (the first script, it appears, for each), falls into that broad catagory of film from Hollywood’s vast liberal conscience. As George Clooney said in his Oscar acceptance speech, Hollywood has been out of step with the nation by among other things encouraging equal rights when the rest of the nation practiced easy racism, a laudable stance. And it is still advocating equal rights with the same fervent if old fashioned determination. One suspects, however, that the five African American starters for the 1966 Texas Western team strike the overwhelmingly white producers of Hollywood’s films as “better” Negros that the bejewelled, gun-toting hip hop ganstars of their contemporary imagination and Crash.

The likable Josh Lucas, a blend of Paul Newman and Kevin Costner with a bit of Peter Coyote’s voice thrown in, plays the real life Don Haskins, who did indeed do all the things the movie says he did. Emily Deschanel (Bones) has the traditonal role of the skeptical wife, and one assumes that that is painfully true. The climax of the film, a televised match with the University of Kentucky for the NCAA title, is also as previously describe, with not even a subtle variation it fits right into the Disney template.

As the credits roll, the real players are shown, now in their dotage, remembering those times, and the viewer realizes that despite the admirable dedication to accuracy of the filmmakers, a better movie along the lines of When We Were Kings might have been forged from this documentary footage.

Glory Road comes to the screen in a fine wide screen trasnfer (2.35:1,enhanced; there is also a full frame release, and a UMD edition) and with DD 5.1 with French and Spanish language tracks and English, French, and Spanish subtitles. Gartner’s audio commentary track is informative, as is the yak track with the two writers, an option I would like to encourage the DVD publishers to continue. In addition there are four deleted scenes (about seven minutes), a profile of the real Haskins (12:36) and a study of his training techniques (4:26), more credit interviews with survivors (22:00), a music video with co-star Alicia Keys (2:00), and trailers for recent or forthcoming Disney releases. Glory Road hit the street on June 6 2006, retailing for $29.95.

There is a funny passage in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen. It’s in Chapter One, and it’s when everyman Hollis Mason (The Night Owl) and the neurotic, combative Laurel Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre) go out to dinner. In word balloons, the pair discuss part of the attraction of being a superhero was the costumery. “Why did we dress up like that,” she asks. “The Keene Act was the best thing that ever happened to us.” It’s clear from Hollis’s reaction that he doesn’t share Laurel’s views on superhero costumery.

The passage hints at the fetishistic lure of fighter costumes, that at root the comic’s adventure story exists to offer an excuse to draw and view women in tight leather and thighboots.

And that is exactly what is wrong with My Super Ex Girl Friend. Here, director Ivan Reitman and costume designer Laura Jean Shannon ( Elf) had a marvelous opportunity to turn on every comic book nerd in the world (and increase their film’s revenues). They had at their disposal one of the most beautiful women in the world. She is about two heads taller than most everyone else in the film, and she’s got a gene pool to die for (there is a statue of her mother back in the homeland). And how do they dress her up? Like a Swedish schoolmarm’s idea of a super heroine. Shannon could have done it: several years earlier she made Lena Olin hotter than hot in Romeo is Bleeding in heels and stockings.

Of course, there are some scenes when Jenny Johnson (Thurman) is in “disguise” as a workaday Manhattan girl with a job in an art gallery and a prim way of warding off strange men on the subway. There it makes sense that she should have buttons up to her neck, lace collars, and a generally sexless exterior.

But when the clothes come off, underneath should be – a super hot superhero costume. I’m talking tight go go boots, shiny leggings or stockings, flexible lycra, a form fitting top that pushes her bosom up enough to distract even the most stolid robber. She should move through the air and stride down the street with domineering authority. Her costume should have the iconic necessity of Lara Croft’s. When G-Girl first appears in combat at the start of the film, she looks like someone out of a Pat Benatar music video with half-stockings and high heeled shoes rather than authority-inducing boots, far from the mode of a superheroine.
But that is the diffence. My Super Ex Girlfriend is not a superhero comedy. It is a romantic comedy with a superheroine in it.

To that end, it follows the lite New York romantic comedy. It begins with the corniest of New York movie openings, an arial view of the city with a sprightly if unmemorable soft jazz tune behind it. Then we’re in the midst of a crime, with jewel thieves thwarted by the mysteriously named G-Girl. And then we are plunged into the subway, where Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson), a designer, is on his way to work, when he tries to pick up Jenny. From then on it is all love, love, love, with Matt a forgettable nebbish who manages to find himself looking down on the needy, neurotic Jenny.

The real love of his life is co-worker Hannah Lewis (Anna Faris), but she dates a handsome underwear model. And Matt’s best friend is Vaughn (Rainn Wilson, of TV’s The Office), i.e., that type of best friend in youth comedies such as EuroTrip who is really a nemesis with all his arrogance and bad advice. Before the film is a trailer for John Tucker Must Die. In it is the 100th iteration of a scene also replicated in Super. There, an experienced girl teaches a nerd girl to kiss; here, Vaughn gives Matt advice on how to break up with Jenny, even holding his hand. The fact that his character is named Vaughn may be a vague salute to Vince Vaughn.

Matt dates Jenny, and then learns that she is the mysterious G-Girl. He has great sex with Jenny, and even meets her supervillain nemesis, Professor Bedlam, aka Barry (Eddie Izzard). But in the end, he really loves Hannah. Well, try to break up with someone whose PMS is even of superhuman proportions.

All this being said, in the end, despite inconsistently erotic apparel for Thurman, Super ends up being enjoyable in its modest way. The plot is reasonably well structured, if predictable (I knew the ultimate pair offs as soon as a certain flashback started; in fact, I would have delayed that part of the flashback until the last 15 minutes), and laugh out loud funny more times than not (of special note is the “land shark” sequence). In spirit is is probably more like Galaxy Quest, a gentle ribbing of comic book fantasies by people who aren’t all that familiar with the subject, but just enough to score a few points.

Thurman is very, very good in what is in reality a second lead. The pressure off her, she seems to flower. What’s funny is that in the background are actresses who are presented as much sexier than her. The character whom Vaughn is constantly trying to pick up, a bartender, is played by Margaret Anne Florence in what appears to be her first movie, and she is a total fox. And even the girl who plays teenaged Jenny (Tara Thompson) is “sexier” than Thurman. It’s nice to have them in the film, but for the sake of narrative tension the sexual emphasis should be on Thurman in costume.

Essentially, Super is a cartoon comedy, with some wised up elements. But I also like the cartoony special effects. They had speed. In the best special effects, especially when a superhero is throwing something big, like a truck, the object rarely move with the speed you’d expect. They are weighted, possibly because the animators want you to see and appreciate their handywork, even in defiance of physics. Here, such as during a catfight at the end, the effects move like lightning, as they should. Also, I really enjoyed Luke Wilson, who here acquires a sort of early Jack Nicholson every manquality, mixed with a Jack Lemmon nebbish. His closeups in the R-rating skirting sex scenes, with a powerful super girlfriend scraping the floorboards with the bed thanks to the power of her thrusts, are hilarious (and will put certain oldies in the audience in mind of  Wonder Warthog).

By the way, it’s clear that there was a scene deleted from the movie. When G-Girl rescues Matt from the Statue of Liberty, there is an obvious opportunity for a dialogue between them in a nearby park (this is before he knows who she really is), but we don’t see it, even though there are many photos on the ‘net taken of Uma in the park that day. Expect that scene to pop up on the DVD.

 

Consider these two opposed statements. 

“Pain don’t hurt.”

“Kinda hurts, don’t it.”

Both are uttered in Road House, at opposite ends of the narrative. The first is spoken by Dalton (Patrick Swayze) as he is about to be sewn up by Dr. Elizabeth Clay (Kelly Lynch). The second sentence is uttered by Dalton’s mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), who has come on the scene late in the day to help Dalton out of a jam.

 

 

Dalton is a “cooler,” a lead bouncer in a club. He’s been lured by Frank Tilghman (Kevin Tighe), owner of Double Deuce, to clean up his night club, located near Jasper, Missouri. What Tilghman fails to mention, however, is that more is wrong in the town than just some hooligans who get drunk and break out in fights. It’s is like one of those western towns where corruiption is allowed to flourish because it is more profitable, the citizens are mere pawns in the financial grip of the .

The DD is one of many victims of town gang lord Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), who used to date the local doctor (Lynch), who is herself the niece of the local car parts shop owner (Elvis acolyte Red West). Dalton soon learns that not only does he have to clean up the bar, he has to clean up the whole damn town, and to that end he eventually summons his best friend Wade Garrett (Elliott).

I guess if you were a responsible film reviewer you’d have to say that Road House is a junky movie. But as the years go by, and its reputation on cable TV, video, and now DVD mounts (the film turned into a real cash cow for MGM), one can give into one’s inner feelings and admit, as Lynch does on the new DVD, that Road House is a really great drive in movie. I am proud to admit, however, that when the film was first released, and I was working at a local “alternative” weekly, I gave the film one of the rare rave reviews it received in the country. Road House was originally released in May of 1989, putting a capper on what Lynch refers to on the new DVD as a bad decade, and made a respectable amount of money. The film originally came out on DVD in February of 2002, and fans everywhere were disappointed that the film did not receive the DVD respect it deserved: yak tracks, makings of, and so forth. MGM, or its remnant shell of a company, has rectified that mistake, with its new Deluxe Edition, published on June 8th, 2006 for $1995, in conjunction with a negligible but entertaining straight-to-video sequel, Road House 2. 

So, does pain hurt, or doesn’t it? Well, it depends on the attitude. If you are zen philosopher like Dalton, no (or if you are trying to impress a hot doctor, no). If you are Garrett, yes it does, because you have dispensed it to highly deserving victims, and you don’t have time to philosophize about it while in the heat of action.

Road House is the great post-Hawks Hawksian movie. It’s about men who live by a code. It is post Hawksian because the men talk about the code, and also because, in a more highly urban modern society, the men are more transient. In a quintessential Hawks movie, the pattern of the narrative is that the characters do something exciting, retired to their home base – a camp fire, a sherif’s office, a pilot’s bar – plan the next move or relax, then set out to do something else exciting, retire to the base and reflect again, then set out for another adventure, and so forth. This alternating rhythm creates a soothing and reassuring affect for a typical Hawks film, the stability beneath the chaos that the characters are fighting. The films aren’t essays on violence. Violence is a fact of their lives, and the characters simply deal with it. In the self-conscious 1980s and beyond, you have to have a philosophy about violence, because half your battles are going to be with people who oppose resorting to it.

Dalton is “the best damn cooler in the business,” and in case you didn’t know it, in the 1980s bar bouncers, like bike messengers (Quicksilver) and arm wrestlers (Over the Top), had a cult around them, Road House is here to tell you so. Everyone is in awe of Dalton, whose reputation precedes him. And he is presented as the perfect man. He can stitch his own wounds and change his own tires. Everyone likes him, from the farmer he rents a room from to the patrons of the club he helps “cool.” He performs tai chi in the dawn light and reads Jim Harrison in his off hours (Swayze has a wonderful actorial moment when his attention is pulled from the book to the pool orgy raging across the pond from his room. He has to drag his eyes from a page, a gesture one sees in real life all the time, but which I’ve never seen in a movie before).

There are many things to love about Road House. One enjoyable component is an impossibly blonde Kelly Lynch as the foxy ER doctor. Another is venerable sage Sam Elliott as a weathered bar bouncer. And until the film descends into a messy last sequence straight out of a Phil Karlson film, Road House is an enjoyable revenge genre story with a despicable villain or two with remarkably clever dialogue, credited to screenwriters David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin. Dalton explains that “Nobody ever wins a fight,” and Garrett works in as a bouncer in a bar whose patrons are so dumb that the bathroom “has a sign hanging over the urinal that says, ‘Don’t eat the big white mint.’” And this film may be the first instance in the history of American culture in which the phrase “It’s my way or the highway” was uttered.

Road House was made back in the day when films rated R actually had nudity and violence in them. But the film’s roots stretch back much further, to redneck noirs such as Thunder Road and Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story, and his later revenge fantasies Walking Tall and Framed, tales of a lone man who must clean up a town (themselves premises that hark back to western clichés) or best a racketeer. In this film, Gazarra has Jackie Treehorn status, lazily controlling the town with an oddball gang of misfits. It’s not entirely clear how Wesley manages to hold such sway over the citizens, but one thing is sure: villains have never before cackled with sadistic pleasure over their misdeeds as they do in Road House. And it is nice to see a villain who actually enjoys his villainy and the hedonistic fruits of his labors.

Patrick Swayze is the embodiment of the fact that in movies dancers make the best movie fighters. Think back on how lovely Elvis looked when he was engaged in a brawl, or how smooth and elegant Brando, who moves like a dancer, appears when he is punching some scum-sucking pig. Think of all the West Side Story gang members. That’s what’s missing from modern action movies, the sense of violence as a ballet rather than the definitive blowing up of snarling villains.

Road House comes in a fine widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) and numerous sound options (DD English Surround, French Surround, Spanish mono, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles).

 

 

All the extras are fun. “On the Road House” (that title doesn’t make sense to me) is a retrospective making of in which you come to realize how hilarious Kelly Lynch happens to be, but also get a survey of the film’s impact on its makers. “What Would Dalton Do?” is a group interview with a bunch of bouncers, and the film also has a celebratory text only Trivia Track, that serves as a continual reminder of the worse cultural excesses of the 1980s. There are two commentary tracks. The first is by director Rowdy Herrington, which is highly informative. The second is my favorite kind of track, one provided by people who, though not associated with the film, happen to love it. Such tracks are few and far between. In this case, the yakkers are Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, who know the film in and out. Perhaps the best part of their track is when they wonder out loud why guys like fight films especially when, as these two admit, they’ve never really even been in a fight of consequence nor ever want to.

 

These extras are fun, but in addition I would like to have heard from the screenwriters, if they happen to have been available. Otherwise it’s great stuff.

There is also a sneak peak at Road House 2: Last Call (though it is called only Road House 2 on the print itself). On its own disc, which hit the street July 11 for $24.95, 2 is an enjoyable attempt to recapture some of the glory of the first film, with the now dead Dalton’s son (we learn that Dalton was his last name and that his first was James) Shane Tanner (Johnathon Schaech, who also wrote the script; and yes, his name has both a “j” and an “n”) returning to his home town to help his mentor (Will Patton) out or a jam. The story borrows elements from movies such as Lethal Weapon 2 as well as the first Road House, but the villains are not as comical or ruthless as in the original, and there are no zeitgeist defining lines of dialogue.

Finally, on the Road House disc there are also trailers for the James Bond Ultimate collection, Population 436, and Freedomland. For the original Road House theatrical trailer (1:55), hold on to the previous DVD.

 

 

 

Of perhaps only historical interest,  An Early Frost, made in 1985, comes out of that Hallmark school of filmmaking, which strives to make you feel good about yourself despite the quotidian trials of life, and out of that American tendency of cultural elites to instruct their inferiors: this is how we must act in the face of the AIDS crisis. As a Emmy winning TV movie that was heralded as the first film to openly deal with AIDS it must be saluted for its bravery; but as an instruction manual it is out of date. 

It is one of the strategies of the film to sprinkle the cast with cinematic nobility in the form of old Warner Bros. star Sylvia Sidney, as the family matriarch, and Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands as the parents of the AIDS victim, even though their roots are in the tough New York school of acting and the harsh documentary naturalism of John Cassavetes’s films, whose uncompromising aesthetic An Early Frost‘s reassuring palliatives stand opposed to in nearly every way. Aidan Quinn as the handsome son is very good in the role but one wonders if his casting had more to do with his preternatural and exploitable thinness, like Steve Buscemi’s in the competing AIDS-crisis movie  Parting Glances (1986). Gazzara and Rowlands add an actorial heft in a film that in many ways avoids too much drama, not to mention the outward trappings of gayness. The film lacks a kiss (of any persuasion) much less a trip to a gay bar or a telltale tube of Vaseline near the bed-stand. It’s the most prophylactic gay movie, in all ways, since  Never Too Young to Die (1986).

An Early Frost first aired on NBC on November 11th, 1985, and was produced and written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, who later went on to do the American version of  Queer as Folk. Their work has the olive brach quality of the talents behind films such as  Making Love and  Claire of the Moon, seeking to minimize the differences between gay and straight culture for the edification of the straight half. Earlier explorations of gay culture such as  Boys in the Band, by vocalizing inner tensions uninhibitedly, ceded half the battle for acceptance to the “enemy.”  Curiously, though, An Early Frost subscribes to some of the most retrograde psychoanalytic views of homosexuality’s basis. Nick Pierson (Gazzara) is a successful businessman, running a lumber company with firm generosity. His wife Katherine brings the art to the household, teaching legions of small town American boys how to play the piano. The script suggests throughout that Nick is the tough but distant patriarch and Katherine the smothering, babying queer-maker. Their son Michael is manufactured from the nexus of their opposing developmental philosophies. Yet later, Michael’s boyfriend Peter (D. W. Moffett, Michael Douglas’s aide in  Traffic) argues on Michael’s behalf to the unaccepting Nick that Michael can’t help being what he is. This runs counter to the notion, inscribed in the film, that with a little familiar rejiggering, Michael might not have been gay. This reliance on psychoanalytic voodoo unintentionally opens the way to expensive sessions with somnambulant shrinks and summer vacations at a Christian conversion camp.

The film follows the template of previous slow death TV movies such as  Brian’s Song, with the added garnishes that determined all subsequent AIDS-themed movies, such as the references to bloodwork, group sessions, the battle between anger and acceptance. In fact, it is interesting to see how similar the film is to  Philadelphia, in that Michael has just made partner in a law firm, though with  Frost stopping way short of the lawsuit plot. Instead,  Frost is about gentle acceptance. For all its earnestness and didacticism, the film is still heartbreaking in its near-final shot of Michael smilingly telling his parents that he loves them – both of them – through the window of a taxi (the mirror image of an opening scene when life was good), as he is about to be driven off, presumably to die.

An Early Frost also stars  John Glover, Terry O’Quinn as a sympathetic doctor, and Bill Paxton as Michael’s brother-in-law. QuickStopEntertainment was provided with a screener disc that was not street ready. It had the trailer, and the film sans chapter breaks, but no menu, no “Living with AIDS” documentary, and no commentary track featuring Quinn and writers Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman. Wolfe Video’s An Early Frost hits the street on July 18, 2006, and retails for $19.95.

 

Some Like it Hot breaks all the comedy rules. For one thing it is too long. Whereas most comedies are 90 minutes or less, Hot goes on for over two hours. The first 15 minutes or more is all back story and set up. The film’s real star, Marilyn Monroe, isn’t introduced until 25 minutes in. It quotes a lot of other movies, from Billy Wilder’s own Seven Year Itch and Sunset Boulevard to A Night at the Opera. Much of the film isn’t even comedy. It’s crime story, with murders, gangsters, revenge, and machine guns. And it’s amazing what this film got away with for its time. Look for the line, “Do you pluck?”

Some Like it Hot, Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond’s highly esteemed hit from 1959 about two ’20s era Chicago jazz musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) seeking to escape the mob by joining a girl’s jazz band in disguise, began life as a 1935 French film directed by Richard Pottier called Fanfare D’Amour, itself remade in Germany in 1951 as Fanfaren Der Liebe. Wilder remembered it, and pitched the premise first to his writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, and then to his new movie producing partners, the Mirisch brothers (precursors of sorts, to the Weinsteins), who released movies through United Artists. Some Like it Hot became the second film from the Mirisch Company, and the first in a long string of hits for them by Wilder, who was still fleeing Paramount after a dispute with management over the distribution of Stalag 17.

 

 

This ur-Hot was going to star Frank Sinatra, Mitzi Gaynor, and Tony Curtis. When Sinatra stood up Wilder for a luncheon date the director remember a good young funny actor he saw in another movie, named Jack Lemmon, and when Monroe called to tell Wilder she wanted to work with him again, Gaynor was out. (Some have said that Danny Kaye and Bob Hope were also under consideration, even Jerry Lewis, and that Anthony Perkins auditioned for the role.)

Once finished it was a hit, but over the years gained an even greater reputation as the top comedy ever, resting at No. 14 on the AFI’s best movies ever list and No. 1 on its comedy list, followed by another cross-dressing comedy, Tootsie. It has been mimicked in shows such as Bosom Buddies and the Sister Act movies, and remade a few times, most recently unofficially as Connie and Carla, experiencing a sex change of its own. Like several other of Wilder’s films, it was converted into a stage musical, in this case Sugar. Now it has emerged for the third time on DVD (this disc supersedes a dual release in May 2001, one a special edition, neither enhanced for wide screen TVs).

The first thing to be say about the new Some Like it Hot (MGM, 1959, 122 minutes, black and white, two single sided dual-layered disc, 1.66:1 (enhanced), DD stereo in English, DD 5.1, mono, original audio, and mono in French, with English and French subtitles, audio commentary track with Paul Diamond (son of Izzy), Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz, and including oral history quotes from Lemmon and Curtis, plus on the second disc a new making of, “The Legacy of Some Like it Hot,” and carried over the the previous special edition, “Nostalgic Look Back,” with Tony Curtis interviewed in the Formosa by Leonard Maltin, Memories from the Sweet Sues,:” a “Virtual Hall of Memories, the original pressbook, and he trailer, animated musical menu with 22-chapter scene selection, eight page insert, post cards, dual keep case in a cardboard sheath, $24.95, released on Tuesday, July 18, 2006) is that it bears a better transfer than its predecessor. Though not perfect, it is anamorphic. Released in tandem with Wilder’s birthday, which is June 22th, and which was “celebrated” last month on TMC, the two-disc set adds a few more extras over the previous release, and though it doesn’t increase our understanding of the film (scholars are mostly left out of the extras even though several have written good books about Wilder in recent years) it’s good to have the new transfer.

 

 

For more in depth appreciation of the film, one can turn to Some Like it Hot – the book. (Some Like it Hot, edited and annotated by Ann Castle and Dan Aulier, Taschen Books, 2001, $200 hardback, 384 pages, ISBN 3-8228-6056-5).

This Taschen book of Wilder and Diamond’s highly esteemed script comes covered in Banana yellow faux suede with red lettering and is stored in an orange box. It weighs about 11 pounds, and is shaped like a CinemaScope screen. And it is also at least the third time that the Wilder-Diamond script has been published.

There was a Signet paperback in 1959, and Premiere magazine published the script as part of a short-lived publishing venture in 1994. Do we need another iteration of Wilder and Diamond’s brilliant screenplay, especially one offered as an expensive coffee table book?

Editor Dan Aulier has an answer for that: “It’s one of the best screenplay’s I’ve ever read.” Aulier, who had already done two books on Hitchcock and who was approached by publisher Benedikt Taschen not long after Aulier published his book on Vertigo, took a year and a half to complete the volume. One of the main reasons, he says, was meeting Wilder. Admitting to some nervousness in facing the sharp-tongued director, the editor says that nevertheless that “was the principle reason for doing the book. Who would turn down a chance to talk with Billy Wilder – and to do so for eight weeks?”

 

 

Production on Some Like it Hot, the film, began before the screenplay was done. Yet the finished movie doesn’t show any sign of incompletion or evidence of being rushed; the film’s climax is a natural extension of the beginning. Aulier accounts for that by citing “the extraordinary professionalism of both Wilder and Diamond.” On the DVD, Diamond is presented as saying that he and Wilder usually began shooting a film before the script was finished, though that didn’t mean that they didn’t know what was going to happen. The rest was just “paperwork.”

Aulier and co-editor Ann Castle, a Paris-based artist, have done a sumptuous job. Even though the volume sits as comfortably in the lap as an airplane wing, it is certainly the most supplement rich version of the script ever published. With its interviews with then-still-living participants, its array of ad slicks, posters, articles in fan magazines, publicity photos, on-set snaps, and frame enlargements, the book comes with a lot of material that augments the DVD. In fact, all that’s missing from the book is the DVD.

It’s hard to imagine who’s going to be able to read it, though. It’s doubtful that citizens will be able to check the bulky book out of a library. And with a prohibitive price tag of $200 dollars, it’s not likely to find its way to Christmas celebrations or birthday parties. Publisher Benedikt Taschen himself doesn’t even seem to care if the book recoups its expenses. In a charmingly clumsy afterward, he writes, “If it doesn’t sell, we will have great gifts to give for years to come.” This is unfortunate, because from its campy cover to its attached Billy Wilder caricature bookmark, Taschen’s Some Like it Hot is a treat.

Taschen is the prolific German photography and art book publishing house with a sideline in fetish erotica. Lately, however, it seems to have strayed into movie book publishing. Dr. Jurgen Muller’s Movies of the 90s inaugurated a whole slew of film books, that have evolved into director career summaries.

 

 

Aulier’s book contains the complete screenplay of Some Like it Hot in facsimile form, dated November 12, 1958; interviews with Wilder, Jack Lemmon, and others; reproduced pages from the script’s first draft; the Billy Wilder bookmark, along with an illustrated Wilder filmography; an international survey of posters and lobby cards; and most interesting of all, a facsimile of Marilyn Monroe’s small prompt book, with her annotations, which recently sold at auction for $60 thousand dollars, presented here in the form of a pull out booklet tucked into the volume’s inside back cover.

Taschen is basically an art publisher, and the real raison d’être appears to be the 600-plus frame enlargements from the film. They are beautiful. Great attention has been lavish on the background of the film’s production and on the presentation of the frame enlargements in tandem with the pages from the script. The only problem with the book is that it doesn’t seem to have been made to actually be read.

At the time of publication, Aulier offered no hints as to whether Taschen would tackle another script with similar intensity, but noted that there are several movies that might qualify. “Maybe Vertigo. Citizen Kane. The films of Bunuel and Cocteau lend themselves to this kind of treatment, too.” In 2005, Taschen followed up the Wilder book with a career survey of Kubrick’s art, with material from the Kubrick archives.

On the DVD, most of the holdovers are from the previous special edition disc. The new stuff includes the edited audio commentary track, with host Paul Diamond (who says he insulted Monroe as a young tyke on the set by calling her a fat lady; Monroe was pregnant before the shooting began,but lost the baby toward the end of the shoot). He surpervises recorded oral history comments by Lemmon and Curtis, and chitchat by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The two writers are appropriately appreciative of the film, but say wrongly that it has no theme or meaning. They are good on practical comedy aspects, such as pointing out that when they change into women, Curtis holds back and Lemmon goes nuts, the reverse of their “male” identities. They also maintain that this long movie only has three acts (even Diamond says that in his archival footage) when it most clearly has the more classic four act structure. At 1:35:02, the screenwriters announce, “The third act begins.” No, in reality it is the 4th act.

Like most of Wilder’s films regardless of whom he wrote them with, Hot is about a louse who changes. Here the louse is Curtis’s Joe, a womanizing and gambling con man who uses everyone, including Jerry, who is more or less in love with him (to him Joe is “some kind of terrific”). In the tradition of Hollywood, Joe changes his ways when he falls in love with the incredibly forgiving Sugar (Monroe), and they go off together in the end. But for a louse who doesn‘t change, turn to the also recently double dipped Stalag 17 (Paramount, 1953, 120 minutes, black and white, one single sided dualred layered disc, full frame, DD restored mono in English, mono French, with English subtitles, commentary by actors Richard Erdman and Gil Stratton and co-playwright Donald Bevan, “Stalag 17: From Reality to Screen,” “The Real Heroes of Stalag XVIIB,” photo gallery, 14-chapter scene selection, keep case, $19.95, released on Tuesday, March 21, 2006). William Holden is the louse here, Sefton, a POW who traffics in whatever the market will bear. He is obviously feeding off the needs of his fellow soldiers, but has no regrets and even a cogent justification. Based on a popular stage play, Stalag 17 is mostly static and talky, but when the film returns to the main plot about who is betraying the soldiers it is precise and executed admirably. Sefton ends up acting heroically but for a louse’s reasons. He remains true to himself to the end.

This disc supersedes a bare bones platter from 1999 with some restoration work and more extras. From the yak track we learn that comic actors Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck hated each other and caused some disharmony on the set. An attempt to replace Lembeck with Cy Howard before production proved a failure. The retrospective making of features writer-director Nicholas Meyer, and Wilder biographers Bob Thomas and Ed Sikov.

 

To everyone else in American the magazine artist they looked forward to was Norman Rockwell in the Saturday Evening Post. But like a few thousand sick and twisted horror fan kids around the country my “Rockwell” was Basil Gogos. He did the covers for most of Jim Warren and Forrest J. Ackerman’s magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. In fact, looking back, I have to say that the best thing about the mag was the covers; the insides were on cheap newsprint and featured stories that were mostly excuses for horrific puns. 

Gogos was a mainstream magazine “super realist,” like Rockwell. But he also had a vivid sense of color, and a flair for the dramatic pose. I love his cover image of Gorgo, with its rich deep midnight blue background, for example.

Now, thanks to the new book Famous Monster Movie Art Of Basil Gogos (Vanguard, 160 pages,$24.95, ISBN: 1 88759 171 0), I am suddenly aware that Gogos, who is still alive, permeated the whole of pop culture, including work for men’s adventure magazines, book covers, and movie posters, and I know a lot more about how Gogos did his art. This oversized paperback is a career survey of Gogos, with many fine reproductions and a fine if somewhat cursory biography. Vanguard specializes in books on artists, including 

 

I say cursory because there is no mention (that I could find, anyway) of the terrible tensions between Warren and Ackerman. But then, they may have been irrelevant to Gogos’s work for the publication. On the other hand, there is a lot of detail about Gogos’s covers and interior illustrations for many men’s magazines, an unknown terrain to most readers. The book is written by Kerry Gammill and J. David Spurlock, with an intro by Rob Zombie. It tracks Gogos from the 1950s when he was an up and coming commercial artist, through the Warren and mens’ mag years, to now, when he does special private commissions, works on charcoal and the occasional cover. There are extensive quotes from Gogos, who says at one point that his career making alliance with Warren was formed because no one else at the agency where he worked and which Warren contacted “was cut out for it, or cared to do it.”

There are also numerous testimonials from fellow artists. James Bama, for one, who did the Doc Savage paperback covers, said of Gogos that his work is “second to none,” which is high praise indeed. And there is also lots of detail about Gogos’s technique, from his imaginary quartet of colored lights which sometimes gave his subjects the hues of a Francis Bacon, to his transition from dyes to watercolors to casein to acrylics. He even experimented with silkscreens, long after the medium had been dropped by everyone else, but which for him led to some great covers, such as for the the cast of Tales of Terror.

The book is loaded with tidbits. For example, I learned that both Gogos and Bama used the same model, a guy named Steve Holland. The stolidly handsome Holland was both a thousand adventurers in men’s mags for Gogos, and Doc Savage for Bama. It’s too bad that when they came to make a movie of Doc Savage they didn’t use Holland, who as it happens already was an actor, appearing as Flash Gordon on TV.

 

 

These days your average woman of a certain socio-economic class looks like either a rock star, a stripper, a hooker, or a lesbian. And they might even be all of the above. What they end up being to me is scary, which may be the point. Among the scariest new women on the scene to embody this sartorial aesthetic is Storm Large, one of the 15 contestants on the talent contest Rock Star: Supernova. 

 

 

You probably already know enough about this show to spare me having to summarize its premise. For that you can go to TV sans Pity:

But there is one thing that you probably don’t know, which is that Storm Large comes from my town. As a Favorite Daughter, all the Goth girls are cheering her on, and the coffee bar swells are rooting for her, unless, of course, that is deemed an uncool thing to do amongst that sort. Also, all the geriatric out of touch local papers are scrambling to assign themselves street cred by suddenly acting as if all along they have loved and supported Storm and her band, The Balls (which played nearly exclusively, as far as I can tell, at a scary bar downtown called Dante’s).

Another thing you don’t know is that I have met Storm Large. Perhaps I should phrase that as “met” Storm Large, as I doubt if she can remember me among the hundreds of thousands of faces that have come before hers. Storm is a friend of a friend of mine, Marne Lucas, the superb art photographer who also lives here. When Marne was working at a local bar, called the Aalto Lounge, she invited Storm in one weeknight to watch herself on TV. Storm was the subject of a profile on an arts show aired on the local PBS affiliate. I happened to be there with a bunch of my geek nerd movie buff friends who at the time always met that week night. I watched the segment and studied the back of Storm as she sat at the bar. She has a rather humongus tattoo on her back. I met her but only to say hello, and then say I met her (I’ve also met one of the members of the recently disbanded Sleater-Kinney, who also hangs out at the same bar, but only because we once worked for the same company and she makes no secret of hating my guts. But then, she’s a woman, and this is Portland).

 

 

After the show Storm went on to ensorcel and hypnotize my movie buff friends, who all sat around a round table in a back smoking room where the bathrooms were located. She came out of the bathroom, responded to their testosterone, entertained and flirted and controlled them, and then left the room, forgetting about them. It was all very entertaining but also scary. My lord, the pure absolute ego one must have to be a rock star! One of the best moments from the second week was Dilana mask-flipping off Dave Nararro when she thought he was going to say something rude (he didn’t, he praised her). Does one ever really “know” a rock star? Aren’t they always “on” and at the same time full of themselves, warding off real human contact? You can’t imagine being around rock stars (or should I say aspiring rock stars). They don’t want friendship, they want worship. And when you think of your own petty puny life, all you can think to do is drop to your knees and whine, “We’re not worthy.”

This is made evident on the show, wherein each contestant, during the post performance judging orals, endeavors to come across as arrogant, confident, strutting, and narcississtic. They all assume that they will be the singer for Supernova. Including, sadly, Storm. Except that she has a very polished and professional voice, and could front the band with confidence (in local interviews, Storm likes to say that she doesn’t need the show because she already is a rock star, and that she is doing the gig to be able to pay the musicians in The Balls). But this is what makes Rock Star ultimately more enjoyable than American Idol: the contestants aren’t amateurs. We are not watching them “grow” before our eyes. Most of Rock Star’s contestants are seasoned professionals who know what they are doing. Curiously, though, the three Supernova members and the producer of the their album seem basically pretty down to earth. Apparently only years of real rock star fame allow you in your old age to revert back to being a human being.

 

 

The contestant who seems the most sympatico to me is the one actually named Star; he’s a guy who doesn’t like tattoos or the other trappings of rock living on that high level. I don’t know how well that sits with the band members of Supernova or Dave Navarro, who have no unmarked body space. Storm is a little scary herself, but that is required of Portland women. Portland, as you know, is the home of Tonya Harding, and the whole state is notable for producing Marci Rideout, the woman who gained fame by accusing her husband of rape, and Diane Downs, the trendsetting child murderess. Apparently the goal of most Portland women is to have a TV movie of the week made about them.

It turns out that Storm Large is her real name (her middle name is Susan). Which she must get that a lot. It’s the first thing she says about herself in the first interview with her aired on the show. But she is no Portlander. Storm was born in Massachusetts, and went to a prep school in Southborough called St. Marks, where her father teaches.

 

But now seeing Storm up close thanks to the wonders of television I kept being reminded of someone else, and I couldn’t figure out who it was. I knew who contestant Lukas, from Canada, looks like: Clint Howard, widely noted as the ugliest man in Hollywood (Lucas is another homeless guy, like J.D. Fortune, who won the first season’s contest to front INXS). Anyway, I finally hit upon it. She has the same basic facial structure as Lindsay Lohan. And I revere Lindsay Lohan. It turns out that, after all these years of thinking that I was attracted to any reasonably pretty girl, I have a “type.” 

I’m a little worried about Storm. She is 37, and that seems a little long in the tooth for a band fronting rock star. At the same time, Supernova are pretty old themselves. In any case, I am rooting for Storm, while at the same time kinda hoping she loses so that she’ll come back to Portland.

 

 

 

 

In case you haven’t noticed, film book publishing is at its peak right now. There are more new books on cinematic subjects now then there were at it’s peak, which was from about 1968 to 1973 when all the (still) great film books were published. It all went to shit shortly thereafter, and throughout the 1980s, film topics couldn’t find a publisher. Fortunately, things have changed, and there are new books by the old guys, such as Robin Wood and David Bordwell, and great new books on diverse topics from writers as diverse as Linda Ruth Williams and Chris Fujiwara. 

And if there is one vein of publishing that has proved to be the most fruitful, it is in genre and especially horror. FAB Press is doing a fantastic job, as are Reynolds and Hearn and numerous other independent presses. But mostly it’s been academic and university presses that have exploded in a wealth of books on horror films and other genres.

Into this mix comes Annalee Newitz’s Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press, 224 pages, $21.95, ISBN 0 8223 3745 2). It’s a terrific survey of “monster” movies of the last 20 or so years and pop culture well before that, and focusing on cannibals, robots, and serial killers.

Now, Newitz isn’t the typical college prof who has been mining the same narrow topic for a lifetime. She has written for The Believer and Salon.com, and has published two previous books on quasi sociological or American Studies topics. And she brings zest and wide ranging cultural references to her topic, plus a knack for presenting complex ideas out of Marx, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Horkheimer, explaining them clearly and using them to illustrate how cinema has become a canvas upon which the culture has been grappling in fantasy with overwork, bad bosses, and meager returns. What she’s talking about is the horrific complement to what I called “Heroic Alienation,” films such as Clockwatchers, American Beauty, Office Space, and Fight Club, that take on the boredom and injustice of the workplace.

 

 

For me, the most interesting part of the book is chapter 5, which, after chapters on serial killers, mad scientists, the undead, and robots in that order, focuses on “media” monsters. This is a wholly original contribution to film studies, in which Newitz collates together disparate tangents of the culture to show us in unified form what has been there the whole time. The other chapters are fine, and Newitz has new and interesting things to say about robot love and serial killers in films, but it is essentially old if still interesting ground, covered by many other books, including Philip L. Simpson’s Psycho Paths, Joan Hawkins’s Cutting Edge, Mikita Brottman’s Offensive Films, and Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representations. The chapter starts off with a placement of the audience in relation to the screen by some aspects of George Lucas’s THX Sound adverts in theaters. The catch phrase “The Audience is Listening” strikes Newitz as rather ominous, although I have to say that her argument didn’t really convince me, as the phrase can be interpreted in multiple ways with the context she gives in her book. She then goes on to provide an operating definition of what type of film she is trying to define here, i.e., “monsters of the culture industry,” narratives about people who use and consume or are used by mass media. These films have no consistent genre attributes as do mad scientist films (or women in prison films, for that matter), but there are recurrent themes or situations, such as how stars and directors are portrayed and how consumers are often reduced to muttering zombies by overuse.

 

 

This chapter is then sub-divided into four mini sections, each addressing different facts of “media horror” movies. Under consideration first are films set in Hollywood (that site of “crazed but meaningless productivity”) or in the movie business, including Day of the Locust (in which Homer Simpson, played by Donald Sutherland, is torn to pieces by a frenzied crowd outside the premiere of The Buccaneer), The Bad and the Beautiful, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard (which suddenly makes sense if one views it as a gothic or a horror story), and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, tales of people driven made by lust for fame or other inconveniences of show biz. Next she takes on films that play with ideas of the effects of pervasive media culture on citizens, including Logan’s Run, Videodrome, Scream, and Nurse Betty. Fantasies about people who drop into media productions follows: Pleasantville, The Truman Show, Tron, and The Matrix (films where the characters here are “eaten by a giant narrative”). Finally films such as The Last Starfighter, Galaxy Quest, and The Ring play with notions of belief in fantasy constructions that turn out to be real.

This is all fascinating stuff, a new way of seeing films about films and other media, as horror films. But because it is groundbreaking material, some of the connective tissue is a little tenuous. I found myself not entirely clear on just what the genre she is talking about, and the genres within it, really had to do with horror. At the same time, I could also come up with additional titles that seemed to fit into her descriptions and thesis that she doesn’t mention – not that a book has to mention everything, but these films might have buttressed her definition. For example, there’s Hollywood Boulevard, which is an actual horror film, and The Big Knife, another Hollywood tale about horrific people. In terms of the horror of media, I can also think of The China Syndrome, Rollerball, The Running Man, Freejack, and Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. In the media business realm, demonlover comes to mind, and in alternate realities and games, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, eXistenZe, Shocker, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare seem pertinent.

And there is the occasional error. She has Margo Channing’s boyfriend in All About Eve, played by Gary Merrill, as a writer, rather than a director (Hugh Marlowe is the writer), and in general tends to credit the director with everything good in a movie. But Nurse Betty is anomalous in Neil LaBute’s work for being written by others, in this case, John C. Richards and James Flamberg, and The Truman Show was written by the interesting Andrew Niccol who went on to write and direct Gattaca.

 

 

But as I say it’s new territory. To make up for lapses and the odd mistake Newitz more than makes up in insight and wit. On Baby Jane: “When nobody wants to look at an actress anymore, she deliberately makes herself more or less deliberately hideous.” And, “The idea that audiences take pleasure in the degradation of their screen idols is one of the most disquieting parts of the horror narrative known as mass culture.”