Category: Nocturnal Admissions

As I do every July 4th, I spent part of the afternoon, 129 minutes to be exact, watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It strikes me as the perfect patriotic note to strike. And it includes the whole scale in its confrontation of back home idealism with big city cynicism. You can believe in Mr. Smith while laughing along with the wised up reporters and political operatives who use or observe him. Director Frank Capra pushes the buttons so well that I never fail to cry,especially at the parts that are the most treacly, such as when Smith first visits the Lincoln Memorial and watches a little kid read the Gerrysburg Address as an elderly African-American (old enough to remember the Civil War?) comes up and takes off his hat.

Every year I forget how perfectly Capra and his associates cast Mr. Smith. From Jack Carson on up, each role, no matter how big or small, is vivid and engaging. Claude Raines moves like a dancer. Jean Arthur’s voice is entrancing and has a wider range than I recall. And Edward Arnold, as the Penderast-style boss of the political machine, may have been the best actor in Hollywood, ever.

This time I read the script, credited to Sidney Buchman, after seeing the film, and was struck by how much was cut out of the (already long) movie. The script doesn’t appear to be on line anywhere but is available in a cleaned up reader’s version in the book 20 Best Film Plays, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols. There are at least three major sequences deleted from the film and lots of little bits of the script are excised (as an example, look at the scene where Susan Paine calls up Saunders, very obviously edited down in the finished version). I get the impression that screenwriters wrote fuller texts back in the old days, and that in the editing room the films were trimmed down dramatically, the editors cognizant that the viewer could accept shorthand and make leaps. Riskin’s script to It Happened One Night kicks off the book and it actually reads better than it plays. Anyway, the script’s first introduction of Smith is elided, and at the end there is a whole sequence that takes place back in Jackson City, where Smith is feted and he introduces Saunders to his “¦ pets. It’s a fuller text and makes me as misty eyed as the finished version does.

At the end of the 4th this year I had occasion to see the wealth of fireworks that were going off around the city (and they are illegal in this town). Wealth in both senses. There must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars going up in smoke that night. It was like Bagdad on a bad night. I love fireworks (invented by the Chinese) and they are fun to watch and hear but in the caustic circumstances of a typical 4th they lose connection with the holiday they announce loudly, one that established the birth of a nation and a flag that survived, as the song says, the rocket’s red glare. In a time of trouble the bread and circuses are attended for their own sake. Next year take a tip from me and start the day with a shameless reminder of what the 4th stands for and revel in the exquisite beauty of Buchman and Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

 

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Forest J. Ackerman, the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, indirectly introduced two of his readers, both aspiring horror filmmakers, to one another. David Allen ran an ad in FM asking to hear from anyone out there interested in stop motion animation. Dennis Muren, living not far away from the home base of FM in the San Gabriel Valley, responded. The two boys visited, became friends, and later collaborated on a low budget film, working under the lowest of low budgets, a mere $6000 dollars, back when $6000 dollars was a lot of money.

They were joined in their enterprise by two others, Mark McGee who lived in Arcadia and had written a screenplay, and Jim Danforth, a specialist in matte screens. All of them were horror and special effects fans, spun in the FM orbit, and loosely met to watch and critique horror films, and to write articles for and distribute ‘zines about their interests.

The boys went about things in an almost traditional manner. They held a casting call, which attracted 50 auditioners, shot the film a la the New Wave, on a 16mm Bolex without direct sound, built sets, created special effects, and even had a “premiere” sometime around 1966 to 1967. But far from being an instant calling card into Hollywood, the resultant film, Equinox: A Journey Into the Supernatural, and its makers went no where for several years. Eventually, however, Muren was able to place it in the hands of Jack H. Harris, who did some re-editing and re-shooting, adding a few new characters and requiring the old cast to find the clothes they wore during the shoot two years earlier. The new Equinox made its debut in 1970 and received wider distribution starting in 1971.

It became a cult; but also rather difficult to see, unless one spent a lot of time up late watching movies on television in cities that had many, many channels. It became a cult probably because its special effects harked back to the style of Ray Harryhausen, and because it represented an act of will by the boys, who would not settle for being simply fans. McGee went on, after a long hiatus, to write screenplays for such as Stepmonster. Danforth, who had some 20 credits before Equinox, went on to work on over 60 films, while the late David Allen worked on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Young Sherlock Holmes. Muren hitched up with George Lucas and worked on the Star Wars films, and with Industrial Light and Magic won six Oscars, for The Abyss among many others.

As a late night film, Equinox must also have influenced other aspirant filmmakers. Among them may have been Sam Raimi or some of his Michigan collaborators who worked on The Evil Dead with him. The stories are quite similar, though the difference in tone between the two films shows how much the world and cinema changed between 1967 and 1981. In Equinox, four youths embark on a trip to the woods to meet a college professor. But the prof has gone mad, and they take off his body a Book of the Damned, which apparently is the cause of his demise. The four youths then find themselves victim to numerous preying monsters and demons, which try to possess or kill them. Only one escapes, and in the ’71 version’s book ends, David Fielding (played by Skip Shimer, credited as Edward Connell in his only role) makes his way to the highway, like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a film that McGee had seen almost 100 times), and himself ends up in the madhouse.

Some filmmakers might find it embassassing to have so amateurish a work resurface late in life (Kubrick and now his estate won’t let anyone see Fear and Desire). But with Equinox it’s a fascinating peek into a an enclosed world of fans, privileged knowledge, and specialization. Equinox‘s acting is uneven, the special effects are obvious, the script is frequently incoherent. But they did it. The kids actually made a movie. Such serendipity makes me pine for the pre-internet days of horror magazines such as Famous Monsters and Castle of Frankenstein, and the first real ‘zines, mimeographed at home or at school and mailed to a small list of 100 or less “subscribers.” We are talking about kids who were very, very serious about thier fandom. It was harder to be a fan, and a Darwinian imperitive separated the wheat from the chaff. Only those with great drive, determination, and selfishness (don’t fora minute think that nerds are passive, feckless weaklings: amonst themselves they can be as aggressive, harsh and bullying as any random grouping of atheletes). Today, relatively speaking, it is easy to be a fan, and in fact the culture encourages it, as a profitable economy. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, lines of communication were limited and the films themselves were hard to watch. It is no coincidence that ’50s fandom rose along with TV and drive-ins, venues that gave the kids something to be fans of. At the same time, though, the buffs with the ‘zines wanted to do something with their fandom, wirte books, make movies, fashion horrific faces out of plastic or bring to fruition fantasies of space flight.

The Criterion Collection has a knack for singling out cheap horror films that have a pervasive influence on the film culture while themselves being forgotten, films such as Carnival of Souls, which influenced Night of the Living Dead. If Equinox influenced Raimi (and it is not at all clear that it did, since the premise is a common enough idea), than it helped gave birth to a number of important careers and films among its Michigan film geek viewers. Equinox (The Criterion Collection, No. 338, 1967, 1970, 82 minutes and 71 minutes, color, NR, full frame, DD mono in English with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 18-chapter scene selection. 16 for the 1967 version, 32-page insert with chapter titles, transfer info, pix, credits, and essays by George Lucas, Ray Harryhausen, and Brock DeShane, keep case, two discs, $39.95, released on Tuesday, June 20, 2006) is for fans, specialists, and historians only. Muren calls Equinox a “fossil.” I don’t think that a “regular” viewer stumbling upon it is going to get much out of the film. But a dedicated fan will enjoy the two versions of the movie, and the commentaries that go with them (Viewing Tip: watch the original version first, and then the re-editied mass-distributed version), plus all the extras.

The 1970 commentary track is by veteran writer-co-director Jack Woods and producer Jack H. Harris. For the 1967 version, effects photographer, producer, and director Dennis Muren, writer-codirector Mark McGee, and matte artist, cel animator, and effects techinican Jim Danforth chat, though in two edited-together tracks. In this track, we learn that Robin Snider, billed as Robin Christopher, and who played Vickie, was a childhood friend of Stevie Nicks and influenced some of the songs she wrote. And we learn that part of the film was shot in Bronson Canyon, and it is clear that Equinox uses the same cave that Ford uses at the end of The Searchers. Also in the cast were the then Barbara Hewitt, later a Rose Queen and now a minister, as well as Frank Boers, Jr., later known as Frank Bonner and a cast member of WKRP in Cincinnati. We also learn why science fiction writer Fritz Leiber, of all people, appears in the film as Dr. Arthur Waterman. Disc round also includes a video introduction by Forrest J Ackerman.

Disc two features a video interview with Muren, and an edited assembly of interview segments with of the actors from the show, Bonner, Hewitt, and James Duron. “Monstrous Origins” includes outtakes, deleted scenes (include a pool-side party scene that features a vixen worthy of Russ Meyer), and some monster test footage. Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast from Hell, from 1972, is a silent eight and a half minute short film with some of the same people who worked on Equinox, plus Rick Baker. “David Allen Appreciation” is a section of the disc that contains The Magic Treasure, an early animated fairy tale by Allen, which comes with a textual history, and Allen’s King Kong homage Volkswagen commercial, plus test footage. “Equiphemera” gathers together an exhaustive gallery of stills, on set shots, promotional material, and so forth, under the headings, Origins of *The Equinox, On Location, Designing the Demonic: Special Effects, Publicity and Promotion, Beyond the Barrier, David Allen’s Kong, and Buried **Treasure. The final grouping, “Trailer and Radio Spots,” contains one 1970 trailer and two radio ads.

 

 

 

Here is my audio review of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

 

 

When I came out of the screening for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on Wednesday last week, the publicist’s rep, as is her mandate, asked me what I thought of the movie.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s not over yet.”

For that is the big news for viewers who don’t keep up with all the details of the big summer releases on the chat boards and at AICN. Pirates doesn’t conclude. It just stops. It closes on a cliffhanger, while bringing back a major character from the previous film. If you happen to love the Pirates series, don’t make any other plans for May 25th, 2007.

 

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please do stay through the credits. Not only do you get to hear more of Hans Zimmer’s score, but also there is a narrative surprise in the final five seconds.

Anyway, Pirates 2 ends with disaster looming over everyone, in the fine tradition of cliffhangers since time immemorial, or at least since the Perils of Pauline. But I bow to the prevailing notion that people read the Internet not to know what’s going on in the world, and so I won’t describe these numerous poised disasters, on the off chance that you are reading this before seeing the film. Just visualize in your mind The Empire Strikes Back, and you’re in the same ballpark.

 

 

Though the chances are good that while watching Pirates you will also think of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lost, Apocalypse Now (when the travelers go up river to meet a new character, Tia Dalma, played by Naomie Harris), even SNL‘s Mr. Bill (during a moment when Jack Sparrow falls through a succession of rope bridges), and a few other movies that aren’t so much quoted as alluded to in passing, works which it seems are now so much a part of the culture that screenwriters draw upon them without thinking, as they might have a concentrating person jump when a friend comes up from behind and touches them, or as they might type “neither here nor there” or “be that as it may.”

 

 

Credited screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio apparently thought that what everyone liked most about the first Pirates were the stunts, the thrills, the suspense. In a film that was built around Johnny Depp as “Captain” Jack Sparrow, and who brought great charm and wit to his Bob Hopian turn as a cowardly and opportunistic rogue, all its $653 million dollars intake told the producers was, “More monsters! More explosions! More hairbreadth escapes! More big scenes! Just big, big bigger!” Of course, the show is based on a Disneyland ride, but that’s not why people liked it. Instead the public enjoyed it because of its mature wit and integration of the “thrill ride” elements into a relatively well-crafted plot that mocked its genre without disparaging it and didn’t insult the adult viewer’s intelligence.

 

 

But intelligence, it seems, is neither here nor there. The new film plunges the viewer into the story in media res as Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) are arrested at the direction of a new character, the oily Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), local representative of the East India Trading Company at Port Royal, Jamaica. This arrest is really a bargaining chip to get Turner to get Jack Sparrow to get Beckett the key to the fabled Dead Man’s Chest, which doesn’t mean in this film what it means in seafaring lore.

 

 

From there things fall apart. And we’re only five minutes into the film. Every character has a task or a goal. Sometimes they have tasks within goals. It’s hard to keep them straight, especially when the tasks are modified or expanded due to new circumstances or new characters. The goal of Governor Weatherby Swann (Jonathan Pryce, who talks the way Hilary Duff and every other teen pop idols sing) is to keep his daughter alive, to which end he must “¦ I forget. Elizabeth’s goal is to fetch Will, to which end she escapes from prison and stows away on a ship whose name, crew, purpose, and destination evaporate from the mind even as events are happening, like invisible ink. Will’s goal is already stated, and Jack’s is to rescue his soul or fate or something from the clutches of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, unrecognizable beneath tentacles), who in this text is a deadly demon who haunts the seas and directs a huge monster to swallow the ships crewed by his enemies. I think so, anyway, and I forget what Jones’s goal is. Oh, yeah, to get Jack’s soul. I think.

 

 

As I was watching the film, I couldn’t help but think that it was more like an animated movie than a fun, frolicsome yarn. All gags, emotions, and facial expressions are big, and set-ups and situations are like those in a cartoon, impossible and gravity defying. Of course, in a sense all films these days are animated, at least to a certain degree, and there is the merest bat-wing’s whisper of high seriousness in having a representative of corporate imperialism be the human villain. But otherwise this impression was confirmed in a way by the credits of the writers, who have been associated with *Shrek, Antz, Aladdin, and Little Monsters, making them obviously the Disney house scribes. Well, I guess in the eyes of corporate media we are all seven-yeas-old now, a perhaps justified assumption. For me, the film just wasn’t funny, except for a line of Jack’s when he is telling Elizabeth how she should dress and what he has, or doesn’t have, in his cabin for such purposes, or one of the two scenes on the beach (there’s two of everything in this film), with Elizabeth hopping around on the sand trying to get the attention of the fighting boys. Otherwise Pirates part two appears to have been constructed with a dead man’s hand.

 

 

It’s a given these days that Leonard Cohen is one of our great rock poets. Writer Larry “Ratso” Sloman classifies him with Bob Dylan and Kinky Friedman as key Jewish rock artists of the 20th century. And as one of my colleagues said after a screening of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, Cohen’s album Songs of Leonard Cohen, must certainly be a seminal record of the 1960s, comparable to Highway 61 Revisited, Led Zeppelin 4, London Calling, and Trout Mask Replica. 

But like many a cultural star, such as Jack Kerouac or David Lynch, Cohen is not much like what his fans take him to be. Far from the scruffy, hedonistic rocker or folkie, Cohen has always been a well-coifed, sartorially splendid specimen whose garb was at odds with the brooding sex-and-religion-obsessed songs he sang, or spoke-sang to be more accurate, the songs themselves born of his play with language as well as a deep depression he struggled with from the age of nine, when his father died (a trust fund financed Cohen’s artistic career). The depression lifted only when he submitted himself to the strict monk’s life of the Mount Baldy Zen Center but it reigned in his mental climate despite the fact of his liaisons with such beauties as Marianne Jensen, Suzanne Elrod, Rebecca De Mornay, and Anjani Thomas (he even banged Janis Joplin, and then wrote a song about it, “Chelsea Hotel No. 2”).

Still, Cohen wasn’t really a Dylan because he wasn’t given to experimentation or even change, and he wasn’t a Friedman because he wasn’t a rock and roller. He was more like a male Laura Nyro, his songs meant to be listened alone in a darkened bedroom as you gently rock back and forth on the bed with your eyes closed.

Ultimately, Cohen may be a musician’s musician and a writer’s writer, an avatar to be followed and a maker of lyrics of admirable but unique complexity. Thus rock musicians go nuts over him, and Cohen has enjoyed numerous tribute albums over the years, including 1991’s I’m Your Fan with the likes of R.E.M. and the Pixies, and 1995’s Tower of Song, featuring Sting, Elton John, and Willie Nelson.

Perhaps some day Cohen will get the documentary cum rock concert movie celebration he deserves, but Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is not it. This is a flaccid, dull, insufficiently informative film that has too many borderline pop stars pretending to love the songs and not enough of Cohen himself.

 

The film comes in two parts that are shuffled together. The first part is excerpts from a series of interviews with Cohen, with comments by others on him. Cohen looking, if you’ll forgive me, like handsome Dustin Hoffman, speaks to someone off camera while in extreme close-up, close enough to expose the broken vessels in his nose, and director Lian Lunson sees fit to “play” with the image like a Stan Brakhage gone mad, with digital impositions and a general shakiness. Still, Cohen speaks in a clear, well-practiced voice, making charmingly self-deprecating remarks, such as that “I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.” 

 

As a transitional device, Lunson also imposes a double exposure of what look like red lights or a curtain, which only makes sense at the end of the film, when the 74-year-old Cohen is finally granted leave to sing on his own behalf. Unfortunately he does so with U2. Bono and The Edge are getting to be like Spike Lee, who is hauled out as a talking head in every documentary about race, as if he is the sole spokesman for a people. As exemplars of a caring, political rock music, the U2 boys are the instant experts on all things musical. But since they admitted in (the utterly boring) Rattle and Hum that they knew little about music, these assignments must require a great deal of cramming with the Rolling Stone Album Guide to bring them up to speed before the camera rolls. 

 

 

The second part of the film is a concert, titled “Came So Far For Beauty,” and staged at the Sydney Opera House in January, 2005 by producer Hal Willner, who may or may not understand the subject of his tribute. The performers include Rufus Wainwright (a painfully sloppy performer), his mom and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle (folkies far from Cohen’s style, but like him raised in Montreal), Martha Wainwright, his sister, Nick Cave (in an adopted Cohenish suit and growl), Beth Orton, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) doing “If It Be Your Will”, Teddy Thompson (son of Richard), Jarvis Cocker (son of Joe), and Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla.

Most of these performers are appallingly bad, with no feel for the songs. Or it may be that producer Willner has no feel for the songs, despite his exclamations over them at the start of the movie. Only Antony, a sort of a gay Joe Cocker, with body twitches out of rhythm with the beat, evinces even the least bit of feeling for the words behind the songs. Wainwright Soeur also has weird body language, with a kind of leaning down onto a mike that is positioned low on the stage. Jarvis, despite his heritage, is the normal one.

Watching Thompson sing the Cohen song, “Tonight Will Be Fine,” made me feel like my parents. Why does he have to scrunch his face? Is he in pain? Why doesn’t he sell the song, like a Frankie or a Perry or a Wayne? And what’s with the hair? But badly done rock and roll can do that to you, take you outside the Dionysian celebration, and make you feel old and alienated. That Cohen isn’t really a rock and roller in the first place should have been obvious to the singers and producers involved in this show.

 

 

Sometime in the early 1970s, Harvey Bernhard met Robert L. Munger for lunch. They were an odd pair. Bernhard was a recent transplant from Las Vegas, where he had mounted innovative stage shows. Mugger was an L.A. based advertising man who was also a born again Christian. The topic of the lunch, as is so often in Los Angeles, was a pitch. How the Christian Munger came to pitch his idea to the presumably Jewish Bernhard remains something of a mystery, but presumably they were friends who had encountered each other at some point in their equally illustrious careers. Mugger may have been a neophyte, but the pitch he aired excited the otherwise stolid Bernhard, who abruptly left the meeting, made some plot outline notes on a napkin, and eventually approached Richard Seltzer to fashion a screenplay from those fevered notes. 

How Munger knew Bernhard, or Bernhard knew Seltzer, is unknown, as is so much else about the early history of The Omen, for that is the film that resulted from Munger’s pitch.

Not that it was an easy path to movie fame. Initially titled Antichrist, the script was rejected, according to legend (and there is a lot of legend circulating around The Omen, some of it, apparently, true) rejected by every studio in town, including Fox. Finally, on the eve of the project’s destruction, the script came to Richard Donner via an agent friend. Donner, an experienced TV pro, was seeking entry into the illustrious realm of movie directing. Stories conflict, but Donner was about to have dinner with Alan Ladd, Jr., then head of production at Fox, and having sat and read the script in one enthralled sitting, took the opportunity of the dinner to re-pitch the film, which this time, Ladd accepted. Mutatis mutandis, the film went into production quickly thereafter, with Donner enjoining Seltzer to make significant changes in the text (including a couple more title changes, to The Birthmark, and then The Omen). Seltzer’s main mandate was to remove all evidence of hocus pocus, cloven feet, red tails, and other impedimenta of Satan tales since time immemorial, or at least Dante, all the way up to Rosemary’s Baby.

Donner wanted a “clean” text, one that could be interpreted in numerous ways, not unlike The Exorcist, its obvious progenitor. Is Damien really the spawn of woman and wolf? Or is diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) really crazy, in an escalatingly nutty trap with his wife Katherine (Lee Remick). Donner must have been right, as his film made some $28 million dollars upon initial release from a $2+ million dollar budget, spawning two sequels, a TV movie, a short-lived TV series, and a recent remake. The Omen it appears, is the franchise that Fox turns to in tough times, or whenever the date June 6 Something6 pops up in the calendar.

The recent special edition The Omen (Fox Home Entertainment, No. 29 in its Collector’s Edition series, 1978, 111 minutes, color, R, 2.35:1 enhanced, two single sided dual layered discs, Dolby Digital Mono, Dolby Digital 5.1 in English, Spanish, and French, with English and Spanish subtitles, animated musical menu with 36-chapter scene selection, 6-page insert with chapter titles, trivia, pix, dual DVD keep case, $26.96, released on Tuesday, June 20, 2006; supersedes a DVD published in September 2000) disc’s celebratants, such as Wes Craven, recall how topnotch the film was. However, I recall that Omen was rather mocked by reviewers. Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote “The Omen takes all of this terribly seriously, as befits the genre that gave us Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. What Jesus was to the 1950s movie epic, the devil is to the 1970s, and so all of this material is approached with the greatest solemnity, not only in the performances but also in the photography, the music and the very looks on people’s faces.” and Bill Kelley in Cinefantastique (Vol. 7, No. 3) perhaps put it best when he noted that it was a “flabby series of mechanical vignettes.” Some, like Kelley, thought that the sequel, directed by actor-turned-director Don Taylor, was better, which no doubt had to be bitterness and gall to Donner whose insight had established the future franchise’s credentials.

The jocular Donner mentions just about everything else but that in the wealth of chat that he serves up on this set. Donner appears in three or four featurettes and no less than two audio commentary tracks, the first with editor Stuart Baird, the second with writer-director Brian Helgeland, clearly a big fan of the director.

But that is not unusual in Hollywood. Civilians may not realize how esteemed a figure Donner is among his peers and other filmmakers. I recall interviewing Doug Liman during the time he was promoting Swingers back in 1996. Since he was hired on to direct something written and starring someone else, like John G. Avildsen on Rocky, I was wondering how he came up with visual ideas. He cited Donner. When the swingers are driving to Vegas, Liman had to figure out whether to shoot them in a car pulled on a trailer, or from a lead car. Turning to the opening scene of Lethal Weapon II he got his answer (use another car). Directors of Brian DePalma’s generation turn to Hitchcock for answers to their technical problems. Of Liman’s generation, they turn to Donner.

Given so much air time, Donner does tend to repeat himself. But then, like most directors would, he’s probably been saying the same 15 things about The Omen since 1977. Donner also provides an introduction to this collector’s edition, and in two other featurettes, “Curse or Coincidence,” he pops up to pooh-pooh the “curse of the film, which Bernherd likes to promote, as well as in “Jerry Goldsmith Discusses The Omen Score,” which gives a fairly detailed account of the music of the film, for which it won an Oscarâ„¢. The first disc also has the trailer, and trailers for five or six other Fox films.

Disc two commences with another intro by Donner, and proceeds to two lengthy documentaries: “666: The Omen Revealed” and “The Omen Legacy,” which goes into detail about the sequels and off shoots, and a healthy photo gallery. There is one deleted scene, which concerns the guardian dog attacking Peck as he arrives at the church with Damien for the kill. This comes with an optional yak track by Donner and Helgeland, in which Donner asserts his reasons for cutting it. There is also a “Screenwriter’s Notebook,” and “An Appreciation: Wes Craven on The Omen.

Personally, I find it puzzling that Craven thinks that The Omen is so good, but Craven, who pops again, of course, on the disc for the unrated version of Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur’s The Hills Have Eyes, suggests that after Last House on the Left, he didn’t want to make a another horror film. It may be that Craven didn’t even see Last House as a horror film, perhaps more of a political commentary. It’s possible that the great tragedy of Craven’s creative life is that he is associated with a genre that he doesn’t care all that much about and is viewed as an expert on. The Omen came out a year after the first The Hills Have Eyes, long before Craven was not much more than a cult director among a few thousand horror geeks, but it seems to me that the first Hills is much superior to the first Omen.

The new Hills of course is based on Craven’s film, which Craven both wrote and directed. It’s about the 10th ’70s horror remake in the past three years and there are more to come. Bur surprisingly, like most of those remakes, it is better than the original, at least on a technical level.

That’s to be expected on one level, since technological and filmmaking skills have improved in 30 years, and anyway, The Hills Have Eyes was a low budget endeavor to begin with. The first one cost $250 thousand, the new one probably cost 50 times more (though it was shot in Morocco, doing an excellent stand in for New Mexico). But on another level, this version, which is produced by Craven and his company, seems more thought out in its particulars. It plays up the nuclear connection in more detail, and brings more complexity to the characters.As is well known, The Hills Have Eyes tells of the Carter family, driving across country on vacation. It’s a large extended family. There is the patriarch, former cop Big Bob Carter (Ted Levine), and his wife, Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan). They have three children and two dogs, which are a matched pair of guard dogs. The kids are Lynn (Vinessa Shaw of a memorable scene in Eyes Wide Shut), married to cellular phone shop owner (and liberal democrat) Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford), daughter Brenda (Emilie de Ravin, of Lost, and here lost again), and Bobby (Dan Byrd), the youngest, and the one who most takes after Big Bob. The two Bobs get a lot of mileage from teasing Doug for his politics and pacifism. Doug and Lynn have a baby. The new version hews closely to the original. Out in the New Mexico desert, the family finds itself stranded far from help. Dad goes one way, back to the gas station they just stopped at, Doug the other direction, which leads him to the crater of an A-Bomb test, now used as the dumping ground of a family of mutants, who stalk the family, kill the dad, rape one daughter and kill another, and steal the baby. The surviving family members plot their rescue and revenge.

The new HHE is better shot and better acted than the original. But possibly under the influence of Craven, Aja and Levasseur, who made High Tension, expand some of the ideas found in the original. Here, there is much more tension within the family (just as the characters in Scorsese’s version of Cape Fear are compromised much more than its anodyne source). Doug is downtrodden by the teasing. Brenda is bored. Ethel and Bob are at odds, partially for religious reasons. It is she who insists that they pray before breaking up to hunt for help.

Also, motivation for action is more carefully worked out. In this new one, the gas station operator (Tom Bower), who is also the grandfather of the diseased mutant family, intentionally sends the Carters down the wrong road, because Lynn happened to see the haul of booty that the mutant family has acquired from numerous other now dead families. In contrast, however, there is less motivation for Ruby (Laura Ortiz) who in the original was trying to escape her crazy family. Here it is Brenda who seeks escape, while Ruby is a cipher. The mirroring of the two families, which made Hills 1 so interesting and richly textured despite its drive-in origins, would have been enhanced in Hills 2 if both daughters were brought up to speed thematically.

Back in the 1970s, critics such as Robin Wood pointed out how horror films of the time, such as Hills Have Eyes, Night of the Living Dead, The Omen and others, with their emphasis on sexual repression, cannibalism, and the “terrible house” which serves as a locus for the morbid rituals of grotesque horror, seemed to be symptomatic of the American family as a social institution in crisis, of a collective nightmare from which Americans could not awaken. It was easy to infer that the foundation of society was rattled by social protest, the divisions brought on by the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, though these films rarely explicitly referred to this social tremors. What Aja and Levasseur have done in this remake is to make explicit what was only implied in the first.”You made us this way “¦ we’re this way because of you,” complains one of the more disabled mutants in the movie. The mutant family lives in the prefab houses used on atomic test sites (the third cinematic use of these setting I can think of, the other two being Mann’s show Crime Story, and the end of Kalifornia). The crater of a bomb test is its auto wrecking yard, where the cars of the families they’ve attacked are deposited. The credit sequence and some dialogue make it clear that the Carter family, standing in for America, has brought this disaster onto itself, that the mutant family is the natural result of reckless imperialism. You couldn’t get an image less subtle than Doug ramming a pole with an American flag on it into the skull of the mutant who just tried to kill him, the flag another reminder of the policies that, in its name, caused the nuclear mutations.

The first film was really just about violence. It ended with a freeze frame of the Doug character in mid blow as he continues to smash in the skull of the mutant who took his baby. He was a normal, civilized American male reduced to the level of an animal by the animals who attacked him. The story and its conclusion were the product, it appears, of Craven, a free thinking hippie type and academic, pondering how he might behave in extreme situations. The new The Hills Have Eyes stretches out the climax with uplifting music and a reunion scene in which the survivors hug in a heartfelt (or grotesque, depending on how you view it) mirroring of Ethel’s group prayer, which at that time everyone resisted participating in. The Hills Have Eyes being ultimately a Craven film, it can’t resist the suggestion in the final image that the family is still being stalked. However, this image can be interpreted as a sign of the general American malevolence that the Carters have to beware of, not an immediate threat, or a hint at a sequel (though there was a sequel to HHE, famous for its over-reliance on “flashback” footage to the first film, as various survivors from the first, including the pet dog, remember the past). I’m not sure how much further a sequel to this one could go in terms of political commentary, but it would be hard to beat purely on the level of suspense.

Aja and Levasseur have complained about certain cuts made in the film to meet MPAA requirements, and made it clear that the DVD edition would be their version. The new Hills is 108 minutes long, compared to the theater’s 107 minute length, and the new material appears to come in the rape of xx and the final gunning down of the surviving bad family leader.

The unrated The Hills Have Eyes (Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, 108 minutes, color, NR, 2.35:1 enhanced, one single sided dual layered disc, Dolby Digital 2.0, Dolby Digital 5.1 in English and Spanish, with English and Spanish subtitles, animated musical menu, keep case, $29.95, released on Tuesday, June 20, 2006; published simultaneously with the R rated version) comes on an excellent disc with a great transfer and sound. There are two audio commentary tracks, the first with director Aja, art director and co-screenwriter Levasseur, and producer Marianne Maddalena, who are all very cozy with each other. The second track is from Craven and producer Peter Locke, who also starred in the first one. They mostly talk about doing the first one, so this would make an excellent voice over accompaniment to the first film. In addition, there is the 50-minute “Surviving the Hills: Making of The Hills Have Eyes, a better than average making of, plus seven “Production Diaries, with a play all option, which shows among other things how certain stunts were accomplished from conception to filming. Finally, there is the music video, “Leave the Broken Hearts,” by the Finalists.

 

 

 

 

If you’ve been keeping up with the boys in the quarterlies you know that experts in horror film studies have noted the increase in this post- Guantanamo era in torture as a theme in scary flicks. Hostel and Saw are frequently noted as “horror” films that exist to erect lengthy scenes of torture, whereas in older horror films the monster, be he zombie or werewolf or whatever, did what he wanted and left. The modern monster wants to dwell on the pain and enjoy his victims discomfort and screams. Well, it’s not just horror films. Torture – as an endurance test, as a means of eliciting info, as cleansing and ennobling exercise – has infiltrated mainstream pop narrative films as well. 24 is a succession of torture scenes and phone calls. Take a look at The Devil Wears Prada. Is it not in its way a torture movie? So is Annapolis. You may recall Annapolis. as the military film that came out earlier this year that everyone could tell just from the trailer was a remake, unofficial or not, of An Officer and a Gentleman. Actually seeing it makes the resemblance clearer. Guy with little direction in life joins an elite military school. Has run ins with his trainer. Befriends secondary character who has suicidal tendencies. Has confrontation with trainer in tub of water. Guy gets chance to fight with trainer to vent mutual hostility.

The guy in this case is Jake Huard (James Franco), who in a variation on the source works in the steelyards across the bay and who is honoring his dead mother by joining the school. Except that he doesn’t seem to really want to join. He’s not a very good student and threatens the success of his bunkmates by his anger and inattention. His indifference to his goal is one of the many mysteries lodged in this ultimately incoherent text. Jake’s trainer is Cole (Tyrese Gibson), a Marine imported for the nonce and an expert boxer, as is Jake to a certain degree (more on this in a second). The love interest is not a townie, but another naval officer, the shiny haired Ali (Jordana Brewster), who looks less like Deborah Winger than a woman from another naval drama, Demi Moore in A Few Good Men.

There is a fight in Gentleman but it is not the raison d’etre of the film. Here, it turns out, boxing is the real story of the film. It’s not clearly stated, but one officer (Donnie Wahlberg) has apparently recruited Jake solely for his boxing skills (an idea that also harks back to From Here to Eternity). The second half of the film is all about the Brigades, some kind of boxing competition of importance to Annapolis candidates. Along the way, the film neglects nary a cliché of the boxing or any other genre even tangentially related to it.

 

The film’s sole narrative drive is that Jake must punish his body, that his “teachers” must punish his body and mind, and that all the other boys and girls around him must have their minds and bodies punished, throughout the full year that this story comprises (just like The Devil Wears Prada, which is a “year in the life”). The audience is asked to sit there and observe this torture and presumably think that it is good for them, that Jake and his coevals are rendered better sailors and officers (those who aren’t drop out or commit suicide, and we are not asked to shed a tear for them). Torture films occupy the same odd space that violent films and war films occupy, which is that though sometimes these films decry violence and war, in fact war and violence are more “cinematic” in a commercial sense than pacifism and turning the other cheek. 

Justin Lin directed the film. It’s difficult to come up with a review of Annapolis better than Roger Ebert’s, which expresses the deep disappointment of a man who admired the director’s debut (Better Luck Tomorrow) only, from the vantage point of Sundance, to stand agape as said director leaps to sell out as quickly as possible (though apparently Lin has redeemed himself a bit with the third Fast and the Furious film).

If you expect the disc for Annapolis (Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2006, 103 minutes, color, PG-13, one single sided dual layered disc, 1.85:1 (enhanced), DD 5.1 in English, with English and French subtitles, animated musical menu with 16-chapter scene selection, audio commentary by director Lin, editor, and writer, seven deleted scenes with optional commentary, two making ofs, keep case, $29.95, released on Tuesday, June 27, 2006; also in a full frame version) to clarify some of the inconsistencies, forget about it. On the commentary track, the giddy crowd, which includes credited screenwriter Dave Collard, don’t come near mentioning the Gentleman precedent, and fail to note that the film is inconsistent (the yak track was recorded after the film was locked, but before it was released).

There are also two brief makings ofs, one of them focusing on the Brigades, the boxing tournament that turns out to be the main thrust of the film. There are seven deleted scenes, one of which is a longer version of the “first day” sequence, and which is better than the one in the movie, but which was truncated because, as they say on the optional commentary, they wanted to focus on Jake, exactly the wrong thing to do, especially since they don’t really do that anyway. Other deleteds show Jake smoking in the rain at his mother’s grave, and at the bedside of his suicidal friend. Editor Fred Raskin joins Lin and writer Collard for a chat over the film in which they sound like they loved working with each other and everyone else so very much. If nothing else, I guess, Annapolis proved that Lin could helm a big studio financed feature, if that’s what he wants to do for the rest of his life. Maybe, though, he’s like the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow, who on the surface are successful by society’s standards but behind the scenes are subversive and anarchic.

There are two things I thought about while watching Commander in Chief: Part 1, Inaugural Edition (Buena Vista-Touchstone Television, 2005, 427 minutes, color, two single sided dual layered discs, 1.78:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English, with English subtitles, static musical menu with 10-chapter scene selection per episode, 10 episodes, keep case, $39.95, released on Tuesday, June 27, 2006). One was, why is this (now-cancelled) show not as good as The West Wing (now also-cancelled). And when did the studios come up with the idea of divvying up TV seasons into half-season chunks, priced at a level that ends up costing you twice what a season of shows went for?

The forthcoming first season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, for example, is released by Fox in two big chunks, each one $40 bucks. Thus the first season cost $80 dollars in full, which is about as much as HBO charges for its full seasons, which are, though, usually only 13 hours long. Commander in Chief comes out now with its first 10 episodes (and a cliff hanger) to be followed in September by the second half of the season. Will anyone care more than then than they do now enough to pick up the second part of a cancelled show?

And why was it cancelled? There is a long story behind that, best summarized by Entertainment Weekly. The program was conceived by Rod Lurie, who fashioned a show about a female president so that he could cast Joan Allen, with whom he had worked on The Contender. ABC bought the pitch, but Allen dropped out. At some point, Gena Davis, who was already batting zero as a TV star, was summoned to give the role of an unelected female president stature. The first eight or nine shows were written and supervised by Lurie, but ABC, which moved the air time around, imposed short hiatuses, yanked Lurie in October, ostensibly because he was too slow for the hectic pace of episodic television, and installed emergency surgeon Steve Bochco (pronounced Botch Co.) to take over. Bochco instantly fired most of Lurie’s team, added new opening credit and music, and changed the direction of the series, away from cold cunning political games and more toward warm and fuzzy family drama. Though Davis won a Golden Globe, Bochco left the show in March, passing it on to a third runner, and ABC cancelled the show in early May of 2006. In the end, the show garnered a mere 6 million viewers, more people than have ever read all of Proust, but a disaster by TV’s math.

 

 

 

 

It’s difficult to assign blame, and sometimes things just don’t work, thanks to key wrong decisions early in the procedures. Still, ABC seems to think that hit shows just happen, and happen quickly, but according to background tales concerning both Lost and Desperate Housewives, these were shows that executives had to fight to get aired. Lost could easily have been pulled early and not be given a chance to develop.

Now, in my heart I want to love Rod Lurie. He is a film critic who transitioned to writing and directing. He should be an avatar, someone we who might have similar aspirations should all emulate. But there is something rather cold and stagy about his three extant works, Deterrence, The Contender, and The Last Castle. He is ambitious; has ideas instead of just feelings about things; and he works well with ensembles. But the coldness of the movies was also present in the series. It seemed to dwell on the tension between the presidentially ambitious Florida house speaker Nathan Templeton (Donald Sutherland) and his cat and mouse game with the new Prez Mackenzie Allen (who is an independent, thus affiliated with neither party), a game that progressed at a snail’s pace.

 

 

The set under review takes the first 10 shows, the last two of which fall under Bochco’s influence. Sad to say, in its way, but the show was much more feel good and viewer friendly under Bochco’s short regime, which is to say much more appealing to female viewers, more sentimental, and “cleaner” in its through lines. One of Lurie’s mistakes, I believe, was in trying to make Allen an independent. By severing her from one of the two parties, he neutered her and kept the show from getting into the trenches with trenchant political debates, as in The West Wing.

I also wasn’t particularly fond of the CIC family, the selfish daughter, the straight-laced son who was at first passive and then unconvincingly something of a cheater. Kyle Secor as the “first husband” provided another TV face I was tired of seeing (he was probably hired because he is one of the few actors taller than Davis). But worse, the stories – about disaster relief, VP nominations, cabinet members bailing – just weren’t engaging.

The set has no extras. For supplemental material, instead do a search on the show’s title at the Entertainment Weekly website.

 

Alerted by a movie talk forum to the glories of Running Scared, I moved the disc to the head of the queue. Then I popped it into the DVD tray without even looking at the box, so I viewed it with only the knowledge that it was an urban crime film of exceeding violence starring Paul Walker; no director or writer research, no awareness of the other cast members.

From this virgin vantage, Running Scared quickly revealed itself to be a criminal version of Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. It’s about a guy trying to get back a gun. I hesitate to go into too much detail about the plot, so let me first say this about the film. It is great. If you haven’t heard of it, and you like visually stylish urban crime thrillers with a twist, go out and rent or buy this film now.

 

 

That being said, the movie focuses on one Joey Gazelle (Walker). He’s a minor level enforcer for a NY or Jersey mobster while also maintaining a family, consisting of wife Teresa (Mimi Rogers look-alike Vera Farmiga), a son, disabled father, and most of the time the abused Russian kid Oleg (Cameron Bright from Birth) from next door. The film opens violently, as Joey finds himself in the middle of a drug deal gone bad, in that it’s raided at mid-point by a third group. Soon it devolves into one of those Tarantino-popularized mass shoot-outs where only a few get out alive. In this case it is Joey and his boss Tommy “Tombs” Perello (Johnny Messner, from the short lived Fox show Killer Instinct), who at one point shoots an opponent right in the crotch. This is the kind of pulp product where anything can happen and life is cheap. If you have ever read Raoul Whitfield’s Green Ice you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s one of the most violent scenes you’re likely to see in an R rated movie, and the film doesn’t stop there. Children are imperiled and see terrible things; human life is cheap; the city is an evil place and even “good” places like diners play host to bad scenes.

 

 

Frankly, part of me knows that this film is gross, excessive, and ludicrous. I also know that Running Scared (New Line, 2006, 122 minutes, color, NR, 2.40:1 enhanced, English, DTS 6.1 ES, Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo with English and Spanish subtitles, 20 minute making of, director commentary track, two storyboarded sequences, the trailer, additional trailers, and CD-ROM features, static musical menu with 22-chapter scene selection, 28-page insert with comic book version of a scene, one disc, keep case, $27.98, released on Tuesday, June 6, 2006) is the kind of film I like. In fact, it got me so excited that I watched a bunch of other similar films afterwards – The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Eyewitness, Way of the Gun – instead of absorbing the disc’s multiple extras or watching any of the other DVDs I’m behind on. I also know that the plot of RS gets crazier and more unpredictable, capping it off with a serious detour into a pedophile ring, and has an ending in which practically everything happens at once. Still, I loved it, partially because of the intensity of Walker and the rest of the cast’s performances, and partially because of its visual creativity.

 

 

I watched the movie shortly after reading Ron Rosenbaum’s impassioned defense of Tony Scott in the New York Observer (no longer on line for free), and there is something of a Tony Scott feel to the film, which was directed, I learned at the end credits, by Wayne Kramer, who did The Cooler (the film was also co-produced by Brett Ratner). The film has other influences, intentional or not. There is a bit of Little Odessa, a smidge of Donnie Brasco, and The Cowboys is referred to explicitly when John Wayne buff Anzor (Karel Roden) strips off his shirt and is shot in the back where a Wayne image is tattooed (two of the bullets go right through Wayne’s eyes). To top it all off, I was surprised to learn that the film was shot in Prague, standing in for Newark. It’s so convincing (maybe it was all those wire fences) forum poster Bob Cashill was inspired to call Prague “the Lon Chaney of cities.”

 

 

Running Scared impresses but not so much for its violence which, after the opening scene, is fairly conventional, though of a quality increasingly rare in milquetoast Hollywood product. No, it’s not so much the violence as the intensity of the world portrayed, in which there at first appears to be no moral compass. Take the scene with Dez and Edele (Bruce Altman and Elizabeth Mitchell), the outlandish pedophiles for whom the whole movie makes a complete stop so as to explore their bizarre world and to dispense upon them street justice. A more traditionally plotted film would have dispensed with the passage (it would appear only as a deleted scene on the disc). And the sequence raises more questions than it offers satisfying revenge. How does the person who blows them away think it is a crime with a free pass, given the ‘phone calls and other evidence that would lead right to the killer? On the other hand, the exaggerated kids playground in which the couple dwell is another example of the fairy tale components that Kramer has inserted into the movie. The film works on three levels: hard edged thriller, fairy tale allegory, and visual storytelling. One question I had after the disc was done, however, went right to the heart of the film. Why is Joey so hot to find the gun? It makes sense at the start of the film, but as the narrative progresses and we learn more about Joey, it ceases to be a logical engine for the whole movie. You’ll see what I mean when you watch it. But don’t let that damper your pleasure in Running Scared.

 

 

  

-By D.K. Holm

Nocturnal Admissions is back, and after a two week or so hiatus, while the site made the transition from MoviePoopShoot to QuickStopEntertainment, there are a lot of odds and ends to catch up on.

For example, on June 16th, Roger Ebert dropped out of sight again to undergo further surgery on a recurrent problem, a cancerous growth in his salivary gland. In the introduction to one of his recent yearly compilations, Ebert wrote movingly of his disease and its impact on his job and on his spirit. Ebert has been a friend to this site in the past, and I wish him well. Curiously, I’ve become something of a “defender” of Ebert of late. Here’s the background. When I was younger, and Ebert was first on national TV (on PBS), finding the Pulitzer Prize winning writer’s columns wasn’t so easy, so in evaluating the man all one had to go on was the prize itself and his TV persona, in which he was, then anyway, aggressive, smart, and with a debater’s cunning for his opponent’s weak spots. Only later, when his annual review compilations began to appear, and then with the advent of the WWW, could a curious reader not living in Chicago, or with access to cumbersome library copies of the Sun Times, dive into his prose. Thus in recent years I’ve become quite a fan of Ebert the daily journalist. At the risk of insulting the TV Ebert, the print Ebert is a much better reviewer than the TV version would lead you to think  

On the page he is expansive, generous, confessional, and politically forthright, and has that quality so rare in writers of any kind, common sense. In the past four or five years I get his annuals, issued by Andrews McMeel Publishing in November, and read them from the beginning to (I hope) end while in the bath or going to bed. I go as far as I can, anyway (the next edition usually beats me to the end; I’m only in the “D”s for 2006 and the year’s half over). This immersion in the work of a reviewer is the true test of a reviewer. Can you read the old material with the same urgency and appreciation now that it had then? Does the style in such large gulps wear on you? Though the answer to the first question is “no” when asked of, say, the terribly overrated and sentimentalized James Agee, with Ebert it is yes; and while the answer to the second question is “yes” when it comes to the dread Pauline Kael (Ebert would never use thephrase “dread” of a fellow reviewer, live or dead), for reading Ebert’s style in large doses the answer is “No,” it doesn’t wear on you. It is plain prose that lasts, which isn’t to say that Ebert doesn’t occasionally have the memorable flourish or the odd joke (good phrase: a barber shop in a movie serves as a place where “daily soap operas are played out to loud acclaim or criticism”; good joke: on Dirty Dancing: “I thought the plot was a clunker assembled from surplus parts at the Broken Plots Store”). 

One knock against Ebert I’ve heard in conversations with friends is that he is too easy on African-American films and actors. Though that may be true of the TV Ebert, the print Ebert is fair and often quite hard on films that displease him. But it is true that he is much nicer in print in general than people seem to take him to be, especially Hollywood types. In fact, the individual ratings for films really only make sense (to me, anyway) if you knock them all down a star. My only complaint against his books, which annually come in at just under 1000 pages, is that the movies are offered up alphabetically instead of chronologically. I wish in the future he would either re-print them in order of publication, or post the actual release date of each film (instead of just the year), or add an appendix that re-lists all the films in chronological order. But that’s just me. In any case, it is testimony to the nature of the times that Ebert must be “discovered” as the fine writer and thinker he really is.   

 

The Closer is back on the tube and it has grown to be one of my favorite crime shows. It’s partially because Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson, as played by Kyra Sedgwick, is a very interesting character, but also because the individual mysteries are in and of themselves quite clever (the show was created by James Duff of Popular, Wolf Lake, and The Agency fame), and it is the latest in a minor genre that is one of my favorites, the “interrogation” genre. Most of John LeCarré’s novels revolve around a detailed and lengthy interrogation, and the movies A Pure Formality, Closet Land, and Under Suspicion (and its progenitor, Garde à vue) are extended interrogations and they allow moreso than in other genres for nuance, detailed and subtle variations in acting tones, and essays on the nature of truth. Johnson is the show’s “closer,” a cop version of Jerry Maguire, the big gun they pull out at the end to seal the deal. These scenes are finely etched. But there is another link that The Closer has, unofficial though it may be. It’s an Americanized version of one of my favorite periodic British TV shows, Prime Suspect. Even some of the male cop sexist pigs Johnson encounters in her job are replicas of the pigs (in both senses of the word) that Helen Mirren’s undermining nemesis, Otley (Tom Bell), has his replicant in The Closer‘s Det. Lt. Provenza (G.W. Bailey), though Provenza can’t not be a cop at times, and helps her our. Like most good shows, The Closer is perfectly cast, from Ox-alum J.K. Simmons to that essence of hard-bitten seen-it-all cops, straight-to-video king Tony Denison as Flynn.

What a difference a Dei makes! I was unprepared for how truly bad The Da Vinci Code was when I finally caught up with it. It was not only a bad movie with terrible dialogue (Her: “Ease eat possible?” Him: It’s not impossible”) that also squandered its budget and location, and cursed with long scenes of talking interrupted by scenes of driving, wherein both the camera swoops and glides hysterically in the manner David Bordwell so well describes in his latest book The Way Hollywood Tells It. It is also no Inquisitor. What’s that you say? Never heard of The Inquisitor?

Back in the 1970s there was a vogue for “mechanic” novels, thrillers in which an operative acted outside the law to thwart crime and communism. The first was Don Pendleton’s The Executioner series, in which Mack Bolen methodically took out the Mafia around the world in vengeance for the accidental death of his family. This was followed by Wayne Murphy and Richard Sapir’s The Destroyer, featuring ex-Jersey cop Remo Williams, which appears to be the most popular and most long lasting. But the best of the genre was The Inquisitor, a delightful series about the Pope’s hitman, who, after every assignment, had to do penance in the dungeons of Vatican City (killing remains a sin, you see). Though there were only a few in the series – The Devil in Kansas, The Last Time I saw Hell, Nuplex Red, His Eminence, Death and The Midas Coffin – they were funny, a highly satiric take on the “mechanic” genre and of at contemporary culture itself (although the Destroyer series has its satiric edge). Though credited to Simon Quinn, Inquisitor books were really written by a very young Martin Cruz Smith,       

Dan Brown’s novel is part of a long tradition in popular American fiction, from Moby Dick to James Michener, the novel as technical manual. Tom Clancy is the highest current living perpetrator of this style of novel. Books in this mode must be big and fat and tell you how to do simple and complex things, such as how to drain a whale of blubber or navigate the icy depths of the Bering Straight. These books revel in providing the reader with the fruits of the author’s research. Every once in a while a novel like Da Vinci Code comes along, and within living memory they have included Love Story, The Godfather, Jaws, and The Exorcist, books that everybody seemed to be reading or have read and that at the same time the elites hated. There is a secret to all these books that I am loath to expose, but they all became very popular movies.

The point is, though, that they were mostly good movies, era defining movies, career announcing movies. Da Vinci (shouldn’t it be the Leonardo Code? [Da Vinci means a place of birth, and isn’t a name]) is none of these things (a career ender, maybe). Nothing in it is clear. Who are the bad guys? What did she say? What does the end mean?

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly raises the good questions in his blog commentary on the film, noting that the movie changes he book significantly, mostly in leaving out “Dan Brown’s ultimate thesis about the evolution of Christianity – i.e., its suppression of the ”sacred feminine.” In the movie, the notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had descendents is the cornerstone of the conspiracy. The Church, as presented, is guilty of covering up a fact – the human proof of Christ’s bloodline. That, of course, is true in the novel as well, yet what gets muddled, if not lost, in the movie is the spiritual significance of Christ’s having been married. Throughout the novel, Dan Brown uses the lighting-rod issue of Christ-as-husband to ask, in a far more general and embracing way, What happened, over the course of two millennia, to women in the church? Were they ever more central? Why did goddess culture – an undisputable truth of history – fade?”

Some time in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, Saturday Night Live did a parody of 60 Minutes or at least the Andy Rooney part, with a NRFPT Player (Joe Piscopo? Al Franken?) slumped at a desk, huge eyebrows quivering, and asking the camera in great anger, “Have you thought about shoes lately?!” The opening salvo capture perfectly the banality, the false whimsy, the unfocused crotchetiness, What we really didn’t know was that Andy Rooney really isn’t a humorist, because he doesn’t have a sense of humor, as shown in the way he reacted to Ali G.’s attempt at an interview with him. I assume that a humorist requires a sense of humor but perhaps I’m being optimistic. In any case, Rooney reversed the usual order of parody on Sunday, June 4th, by dedicating his segment to “¦ shoes, reaching finally after 20-some years the depths of banality that SNL had unknowingly predicted for him. His rage at shoes. Their expense. Their ugliness. The fact that they accumulate (he hauled all his shoes over from his no doubt expensive abode in order to prove this). And so forth. The segment wasn’t funny. But then, Rooney never is. It wasn’t insightful, or whimsical, or even quotable (the collected wit of Andy Rooney is a slim, if existent, volume).

as anyone else noticed how the Dodge Caliber commercial (titled “Too Tough”) has been censored or edited? This is the commercial where the cute Tinkerbelle clone is raising havoc in a city trying to change things into child’s toy versions of themselves. She meets her match in the Dodge Caliber, which bounces her spells back at her till she collapses in defeat. When a street tough laughs at her, deriding her as a “stupid fairy,” she “taps” him into a sweater garbed Fire Island denizen with four Pekinese instead of White Supremacist with an attack dog (I know I don’t have the breed quite right here”).

However, since that commercial has first aired, the “Stupid fairy” line has been excised. Or at least is often excised (sometimes late at night the whole text is there). Sometimes its there and sometimes it’s not. Did a gay rights group protest, or did the commercial suddenly seem offensive to the car company when they finally saw it on TV?

While on hiatus from QuickStop-to-be, I wrote an exhaustive and exhausting (to read) review of John Ford’s The Searchers over at the DVDJournal.com.

 

 

Hello, my name is D. K. Holm, and I am a cinemaholic.

I’ve liked movies since I was a kid. I quasi-studied film in college. When I got out of college, I helped start a film magazine (Cinemonkey; it lasted three issues). Ten years after that I got a job reviewing movies for an “alternative” weekly. And ten years after that, I left that paper for another, the late, lamented PDXS, where I worked for another four years. After a brief interregnum, I landed at MoviePoopShoot.com, which this week mutates, to the relief of a nation, into QuickStopEntertainment.com. So I’ve been at this game for a long time, without necessarily progressing, advancing, or improving.

And why did I stick with it? Because I am a cinemaholic. I need to have movies in my life. I need to be viewing them (preferably for free), commentating on them, saving them (hoarding them is more like it), and then turning around and watching more movies. When I am not viewing a DVD or sitting in a movie theater I am reading about movies, either in Variety, Sight and Sound, or in a new film book from an academic press. One thing I am currently not inclined to do is make them, primarily because it is too fucking hard. Now, I’ve been in a couple of movies but “¦ well, for that you can consult my IMDB page.

So consequently, you, the QuickStopEntertainment browser, are the beneficiary. In this column, a blend of all the stuff I was doing at MPS, I’ll cover current big screen releases, DVDs, film books, TV shows I’ve been watching, and whatever else film related comes into my head. Let the quick stops begin!

Taking the Red Pill

A SCANNER DARKLY
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don’t want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don’t read on.]

Keanu Reeves is taking the pill again. Over the past several years, Reeves has evolved into the premiere sci-fi film anchor, the guy whose presence gets the film made. He alternates these parts with roles in romantic comedies (House by the Lake is opening near-simultaneously) which probably pay the bills that allow him to appear in Constantine, the Matrix movies, and Johnny Mnemonic (though now Reeves is moving into the crime film genre).

One wonders if the long gestating A Scanner Darkly, based on the cult novel by Philip K. Dick that many people have tried to film over the past two decades, would have gotten off the ground without Reeves’s presence.

The result is that Richard Linklater’s film is about 25 per cent science fiction, 50 per cent stoner tale, 100 per cent animated and 100 per cent live action (because of the rotoscoping process, which requires live action footage that is then drawn over frame by frame at a cost of what is broadcast as 500 person hours per frame). I was curious to see if the rotoscoping process was even necessary to the story, but yes, it is, as it allows fantastical moments to be seamlessly installed into the narrative, moments such as various hallucinations and the bizarre technology that Dick imagined, such as the electronic suit that undercover cops use to cloud their identity, and which allows the key characters to shift personas.

Dick’s source novel is ambitious, flawed, heartfelt, and paranoid all at once and the movie is a reasonably accurate adaptation of the source text, even down to the valedictory list of drug causalities that Dick included at the end of his novel. It concerns Bob Arctor (Reeves), one of Dick’s characteristically jangly named characters (Anderton?). Bob lives in a suburban ranch house in southern California, which he shares with a few other stoners, Barris (Robert Downey, Jr.), in an exquisite performance), and Luckman (the cleverly cast Woody Harrelson). “Stoners” is probably not the proper term, as they take a speed like drug. A frequent visitor is Freck (Rory Cochrane), the very definition of an addict, with hyperactive eyes and mobile hair that hides and reveals his face like a curtain. But Bob is also known as Fred, to the police surveillance team he works for, We first meet Fred, really a cloaked Bob, giving a talk to a business group about the problems of undercover life and the evils of drugs, especially a deadly new drug called Substance D, nicknamed simply Death. It reminds me of the Red Death drug in Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, but is really the speed that Dick and numerous friends were taking back in the 1970s, though Dick anticipated the current Meth crisis. Bob eventually ends up as “Bruce,” working the fields that create Substance D for the corporation, New Path, which rules the whole endless cycle of abuse, from addition to recovery to supply and back again. Meanwhile, Bob loves Donna (Winona Ryder), a fellow addict whom he wrestles internally over betraying, and who is sexually frigid, though that proves to be associated with her own secret life.

Dick’s vision of corporate criminality, one basically of fascism in its true definition, in which business and government join hands, is a product of the paranoid 1970s, just like the films Parallax View The Conversation, and Blow Out, but no less plausible for that. After a long series of directors attached to A Scanner Darkly over the decades (including, Terry Gilliam and, I think, Brian De Palma), Linklater, it turns out, proves to be the perfect helmer for the project (the film is co-produced by Steven Soderbergh, who, given his affection for ’70s cinema, might also been a good choice). Linklater is also a child of the 1970s and feels the paranoia in his bones. He also simply knows drug culture, at least cinematically. With three perfectly cast actors at the heart of the film, who each represent in their own way aspects of popular drug culture, real or imagined, this is a film that feels true, observed, prescient and retrospective at the same time. Despite, or maybe because of, the rotoscoping shield, the actors give their best performances in years.

The trailer says the film is set seven years in the future, but it feels like “now,” and the ’70s at the same time. Surely we have all been to a house like Bob’s. Dirty, cramped, cluttered, where the couch is the center of activity, where food scraps in the kitchen age like archeological finds, and no one seems to have any visible means of support. The non-stop “party” gravitates from couch to back yard and back depending on the weather, the light, and the underlying sociological rules of engagement. The urge is to be always “on” but without the confidence that anyone is listening and almost always in slow motion, and occasionally someone will marshal their resources and come out with a speculative riff that has everyone howling with laughter, and which, if you’re lucky, you remember enough to put into a novel or screenplay later. Linklater, under the influence of Dick, captures this quality of life perfectly, along with its subsidiary settings, the broad bright streets of suburban arteries that serve malls and the diner. These characters have no background, no past, no future. They are collections of base animal needs augmented with intellectual pretensions.

A home away from home the car, and it is curious to see how car-oriented the movie is (I didn’t get that sense from the book). The automobile represents vitality, man’s god-given right to go where he chooses. It’s an emblem of social and financial success. But like almost everything else in the film, the car is ultimately unreliable, even though all you really need it for is to go get more drugs. The car is there to suggest that, in this drug culture, mobility doesn’t matter much, and the car grows literally and figuratively etiolated as the drug users slump deeper into inactivity. (Animals and cats is another theme or visual motif of the film.)

An important component of both Dick and Linklater’s Scanner is the “vision of the future” in which we are all monitored at all times, a state of being that doesn’t seem so “future.” Bob goes to “work” where he sits in from of a console of monitors that show his own life passing before his eyes, via the numerous cameras hidden in his house, and he also sees what goes on when he isn’t there, such as the odd drug overdose. Science fiction that was yet plausible when the book was published, this now feels like “reality,” and it is difficult to conceive of this kind of monitoring lessening. All that saves us from complete 1984-style observation is the X factor, the human element, i.e., the kind of incompetence that we see at airports and in military strikes and police stings.

On the one hand the sci-fi elements have a Cronenberg-level viscosity, but on another broad level A Scanner Darkly is really just another movie about the workaday world, like Clockwatchers, American Beauty or Office Space (I call this genre, if it is one, Heroic Alienation). Bob is a guy doing a job, stuck with friends who don’t work and drain him of his resources, and with a girl friend who won’t fuck him We finally get to see Ryder’s rack on screen, by the way; it’s just that it’s rendered as a cartoon. But that is also the point of the rotoscoping. It puts you another step away from the characters, which allows you to view them “objectively,” while paradoxically making them seem cozier, the way that cartoons appeal to the kid in us. I think that this is a film that people will be watching over and over in years to come, because they characters feel familiar and the setting is so real (and also because of Downey’s performance).

Linklater had the remarkable, Soderberghian happenstance of having two films at Cannes this year. Though he didn’t win anything, the fact symbolized his progress since Slackers. It’s a prolific career but also one like Michael Winterbottom’s (or indeed Soderbergh’s) in which you never know what kind of film he’s going to make next. That’s because, like these other two directors, Linklater has a big appetite: for films of all kinds, for knowledge, for people of all kinds.

Linklater will go down in history, of course, for popularizing the term “slacker” and giving a taxonomy for the type. In fact in the audio commentary track to Slacker (The Criterion Collection, No. 247, 1991, 100 minutes, color, NR, full frame, DD stereo in English with English subtitles, static musical menu with 32-chapter scene selection, 68-page insert with transfer info, pix, credits, memorabilia, and essays, two discs, dual disc folder in a slip case, $39.95, released on Tuesday, September 14, 2004), Linklater gives the best ever definition of a slacker, which he calls an “active non-participant,” which is perfect (he says this in chapter eight). Linklater also makes the key point that slackers are, contrary to popular belief, not lazy or inert. All the kids in the film have something going, be it a JFK conspirary book, or a band, or a street hustle, or something. What’s also amazing is that, though the film was shot in July and August of 1989, everyone in it looks like you could run into them on the way to today’s neighborhood coffee shop.

Indeed, the movie is blessed. At one point, a girl comes up to try and sell two of the slackers Madonna’s pap smear. Fortunately, Linklater and his collaborators picked Madonna for the job, and not some other contemporaneous flash in the pan, for it is she who has lasted.

In fact, overall, Linklater is inspiring. For one thing he appears to be a legitimately nice guy, from the sound of his own audio commentary track and from what others say about him (I met Linklater once, in a cigarette-residue filled club called the X-Ray café long gone now, though there is a film about this club that I happen to be in – when he was promoting Dazed and Confused; it gave me the chance to ask him why there was a car with Oregon license plates in Slacker [it turned out to be his parent’s car, borrowed for the shot, and they now live in Oregon]). And he did it, he actually got it done, gather a cast and crew and got them all to work on his script.

And he seems to be “one of us.” Like me, for example, he is a big fan of Ulysses, which one of the characters reads from. Also, like me, he doesn’t like to do anything, and on the yak track he says that the indolent guy in the bathrobe in chapter 12, who doesn’t like to leave his house, doesn’t like to go hiking or to the lake, or any other kind of “premeditated fun” (except fucking) is just like him, Linklater. Well, his views reflect mine as well.

If you have grown to love this film as I have, Criterion’s two-disc set is a must-have. Aside from the movie itself, which has three audio commentary tracks (Linklater’s, the cast’s and the crew’s), the set has a wealth of supplements. On disc one, there is “No Longer Not Yet” (script excerpts), “Showing Life” (audition interviews, with a text intro by casting director Anne Walker-McBay, itself reprinted from the Slacker book), “Taco-and-a-Half After 10,” a compilation of home movies made during the filming, “Les Amis,” the trailer for a film-in-progress about one of the film’s locations, the trailer, and ” Shooting From the Hip,” a gallery containing more than 100 stills and snapshots from the shoot. Linklater’s commentary track is one of the best, ever.

Disc Two provides a wonderful archive of earlier Linklater films along with his views on “slacker culture.” This disc has two films, the feature length It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (with a director commentary) and the short film Woodshock . In addition there is the working script to the film, which includes additional scenes, information about the Austin Film Society, which Linklater co-founded, the film’s trailer, and footage from the 10th anniversary Slackerreunion.
Austin, Texas must be a great place to live. You’ve got the seat of state government lodged in a college town; you’ve got Whole Foods, Harry Knowles, the South by Southwest festival, Robert Rodriguez and, once a year or so, Tarantino in town to show films from his personal collection. You’ve got Austin City Limits, Mexican free-tailed bats, Charles Whitman, and the Zilker Tree.

The Zilker Tree, a lighted faux Christmas tree, figures in Linklater’s next film, Dazed and Confused (The Criterion Collection, No. 336, 1993, 102 minutes, color, NR, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 and DD stereo in English with English subtitles, DTS Surround, static musical menu with 32-chapter scene selection, 72-page insert with chapter titles, transfer info, pix, credits, memorabilia, and essays, plus a mini poster, two discs, dual disc folder in a slip case, $39.95, released on Tuesday, June 6, 2006), by all accounts a terrible experience for the director (it’s his, if you will, Mall Rats). Universal promised to release a director’s version of the film, but came out only with a bare bones disc in 1998 and a “flashback edition” in 2004, with nine deleted scenes, some faux PSAs, and a few other extras. This mammoth Criterion set supersedes all previous discs.

Write what you know, they say, and what Americans know is high school. Thus, from American Graffiti to That ’70s Show and about a million After School Specials. For most Americans high school is the defining moment, and for the underclass, high school is perhaps the most traumatizing event of their lives, like being in a concentration camp. Both factions never get over it. I suspect, from his chat on the Dazed disc, that in his HS years Linklater was part of the elite (he was on the football team, for example), so here, history is being written by the winner, though also an observant, sympathetic one. When it first came out, the buzz on the film was that Dazed was “amorphous” with too many characters, and that the ritual humiliation of younger kids by older was emblematic of the totalitarian nature of small town American life.

In the last chapter of Slacker‘s audio commentary track, Linklater gives a poignant, realistic account of what he learned about being a director, what he learned about himself, and how the personas clashed and / or helped each other. Slacker cost only about $20 thousand, but a studio paid $6 million for Dazed with all the attendant interference, and Linklater needed everything he learned to get through the trauma. I’m sorry that happened to him, but in the process Linklater managed to create a minor masterpiece of Americana while also mastering another key element of the director’s craft, casting. Look at the list of people that Linklater discovered or highlighted for this movie: Parker Posey, Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Rapp, Milla Jovovich, Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt and Renée Zellweger (who doesn’t have any lines, but walks around a lot). The film is probably not quite a the cusp yet where you watch it and go, Wow, is she in this?!

Disc No. 1 has an amiable commentary from Linklater, and 25 minutes worth of deleted scenes, some with the visuals only (First National Bank, “Banned From the School,” Smoking in the Girls’ Room, “When They Lost, We Lost, “Narcing on a Friend, Family Plot, “Are the Good Times Worth It?,” “Where’s My Drugs, Man?,” Eighth Graders, Going Into Ninth, “You Little Slut!,” Parents Without Plans, Global Thermonuclear War, Cutting in the Keg Line, Bumfuckville, Tailgate, “Knew Then What I Know Now,” Way Me the Show to Go Home), and the original theatrical trailer. The deleteds tend to make the finished film less “philosophical.”

Disc No. 2 comes in three large sections. It kicks off with an hour long documentary “Making Dazed,” which aired on American Movie Classics. It’s a very, very good retrospective “making of,” celebrating the film while also being frank about production issues, and much of the other footage on this second disc consists of outtakes from this project. Casting director Don Phillips is revealed as a key component here, as he found most of the film’s young actors, as he did on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “Making” is followed by an auditions reel (Michelle Burke, Rory Cochrane, Adam Goldberg, Cole Hauser, Christin Hinojosa, Nicky Katt, Jason London, Deena Martin, Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Rapp, Marissa Ribisi, Wiley Wiggins), and concludes with “Beer Bust at the Moon Tower,” a compilation of mixed material, on set footage and the actors being interviewed in character. It starts out with “Character Interviews,” which were used during rehearsal, each actor improvising in their roles (Sabrina Davis, Don Dawson, Cynthia Dunn, Randall “Pink” Floyd, Jodi Kramer, Mitch Kramer, Darla Marks, Mike Newhouse, Fred O’Bannion, Benny O’Donnell, Tony Olson, Ron Slater, Shavonne Wright). This is followed by “Cast & Director Interviews,” shot during the length of the production (Linklater Before Shooting Parker Posey, Ben Affleck (1992), Affleck & Cole Hauser, Nicky Katt & Adam Goldberg, Rory Cochrane, Wiley Wiggins and Catherine Martin, Wiley Wiggins, Michelle Burke and Christine Harnos, Christin Hinojosa, Linklater at End of Shoot, Linklater, Matthew McConaughey and Don Phillips). Finally, there is “Behind-the-Scenes Footage” (Every Other Decade, Muscle-Car Driving Lessons, The Costumes, The Boys, The Girls, “Love Those Redheads,” Retaliation on O’Bannion, Buying Beer, Crest Hotel, Picture Day, Start Acting,” The Props, Wiley’s First Day Back at School, Reunion Clips), a wide collection of all kinds of material that includes rehearsals, costume checks, interviews, and finally some reunion clips (of which I could have used a lot more, both here and in “Making Dazed“).

I want to say that Linklater has evolved into one of our best directors, but he started out pretty damn strong, as even his “student” films show, and his career, in its diversity, puts him up with Soderbergh, Winterbottom, Rodriguez, and Tarantino. What these directors have in common is that they are all like Howard Hawks. Within the studio system, Hawks made among the best entries in almost all the genres, including mysteries, aviation, comedies, slapstick, and westerns. These guys are like Hawks, making the best examples of the films in the wider range of genres that exist now, political films, neo-noir, comic book adaptations, and so on. We are all Hawksians now.