Extras Disc One and Two:

• Audio commentary with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens
  
• Audio commentary with design team, including costume designer and Weta workshop supervisor Richard Taylor, Weta workshop supervisor Tania Rodger, production designer Grant Major, art directors and set designers Alan Lee and Dan Hennah, art department coordinator Chris Hennah, and conceptual designer John Howe
  
• Audio commentary with producer Barrie Osborne, executive producer Mark Ordesky, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, editors Michael Horton, and Jabez Olssen, co producer Rick Porras, composer Howard Shore, visual effects supervisors Jim Rygiel and Joe Letteri, sound editors Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins, creature effects supervisor Randy Cook, art director Christian Rivers, visual effects cinematographer Brian Van't Hul and visual effects director of photography for the miniature unit Alex Funke
  
• Audio commentary with cast members Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Liv Tyler, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Bernard Hill, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, John Noble, Craig Parker and Andy Serkis
  
• Easter egg: Disc One > scene-selection menu > last set of chapter selections: Gollum's acceptance speech for winning MTV's best virtual performance award, introduced by Peter Jackson
  

Extras Disc Three:

• Introduction by Peter Jackson (1:49)
  
• "J.R.R. Tolkien: Origins of Middle-Earth" (29:29)
  
• "From Book to Script: Finding the Story" (20:57)
  
• "Designing Middle Earth" (45:42)
  
• "Weta Workshop" (43:48)
  
• "The Taming of Sméagol" (39:34)
  
• "Andy Serkis Animation Reference"(1:47)
  
• "Gollum Stand-in" (3:18), with co-producer Rick Porras
  
• Design gallery
  
• "New Zealand as Middle-Earth" (14:26)
  

Extras Disc Four:

• introduction by Elijah Wood (1:07)
  
• "Filming Middle Earth: Warriors of the Third Age" (20:57)
  
• "Cameras in Middle-Earth" (68:09)
  
• Photo gallery
  
• Visual Effects: "Big-atures" (21:49)
  
• Visual Effects: "The Flooding of Isengard Animatic" (1:30)
  
• WETA Digital (27:31)
  
• Still gallery of abandoned concepts
  
• Editorial: "Refining the Story" (21:57)
  
• Music and Sound: "Music for Middle-Earth" (25:19)
  
• Music and Sound: "The Soundscapes of Middle-Earth" (21:26)
  
• Sound Demonstration for Helm's Deep (1:07)
  
• "The Battle for Helm's Deep is Over…" (9:27)
  
• Play All option
  
• Index
  

Walking into the screening a year ago of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS I was a little worried. When last we had seen the various characters imagined by J. R. R. Tolkien, Frodo and Sam were walking towards danger, Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) had been kidnapped by some rather unpleasant looking creatures, and Aragorn and Co. were riding off on a wholly other mission. Meanwhile, Gandalf was presumed dead (as if we really believed that). I was worried. Could Peter Jackson pull it off? Could he keep the story coherent with his cast scattered all over Middle Earth? I'm not much of a fan of the source book, but Jackson's cinematization of the first volume in the trilogy was unexpectedly winning, both moving and exciting at the same time.

I should have trusted Jackson. THE TWO TOWERS proved to be the best film of last year (just elbowing aside MINORITY REPORT, which suffered from some bad casting in key subsidiary roles and a penchant for crude humor).

At that time last year, the near three hours of TT felt more like two. It went by in a flash and contained everything that one wants out of a popular commercial entertainment.

The film benefits from being the middle section of a longer story. The exposition is mostly over, and the inevitable winding down yet remains; this is the action packed middle. It's like watching the central 45 minutes of STAR WARS '77.

It also benefits from previous cinematic history. Jackson has studied the masters well, and this film (like STAR WARS) shows the influence of Kurosawa's THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, both in the look of Helm's Deep and in recounting monumental events from the viewpoint of minor characters. What I also liked about TT was the fact that you really felt the characters were in jeopardy. Nothing less than the fate of all human beings was at risk. Plus the villains are truly evil. They aren't suave, attractive creatures whom the filmmaker finds secretly more interesting than the good guys. They are scary, ominous, and powerful, and the viewer doesn't want them to win. I think this needs to be said because a lot of filmmakers take only half the lesson from Hitchcock films, which was to make evil's success plausible by planting it within attractive people. Nowadays usually the bad guys are the only interesting people in an action film. Hitchcock was sure to make his evil characters actually evil, as well as human.

I've always been a big fan of Jackson, and admired the way he can do variations of his obsessive themes in different movies (going from a domineering evil mother browbeating a good son in DEAD ALIVE to showing the other side of the coin, an evil child going after a good mother in HEAVENLY CREATURES). I even like THE FRIGHTENERS. But at this point I don't really have anything interesting to say about that mammoth critical chore, THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I'm waiting for the third picture to arrive. Or better still, I'm waiting for the third four-disc set to arrive. Then I am going to immerse myself in RINGSiana, which New Line and Jackson's team make easy with their packed extended edition releases.

I see no reason to duplicate the extensive work that reviewer Damon Houx has already done in his review over at the DVDJournal He goes into detail about each of the supplements, and evaluates the material intelligently. What I'd like to focus on is Gollum, surely one of the most interesting characters in the film version of LOTR:TT, because he is the most conflicted, regardless of his roots in the source novel. Gollum provides a good entry into what makes New Line's supplements so good.

For one thing, Gollum is an almost completely artificial creation, but is sometimes more "real" than the other characters, perhaps because of that artificiality and the control that his creators had. It's one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of animation, and sets the standard by which all other CGI creatures are judged, their skin tone, their "weight," their eyes, their movements, be they Hulks or dinosaurs.

In the supplements the cast and crew go out of their way to praise actor Andy Serkis for his job on the film, a task which even Jackson admits, bore the weigh of the film's success. Jackson and one of the producers admit, at the beginning of the Gollum section of the extras, that no matter how good the rest of TT might be, if Gollum didn't work, the film wouldn't work, and would bode ill for RETURN OF THE KING. What's remarkable about Gollum, and Jackson's working methods, is that the director was willing to risk the production schedule and the patience of his animators to more fully integrate Serkis into the actual animation of the character, to incorporate his facial expressions and style of body movement.

Serkis came in to audition for the voice work and stayed for two years. What I love about this extended disc set, and New Line DVDs in general, is that the studio isn't afraid to include material that is critical of New Line. They have what amounts to a commitment to revealing the truth about the way movies work. Not all was sweetness and light between Jackson and the animators, and Serkis and his co-stars, who at first didn't quite understand why he was there and what he was doing. In one take he even accidentally pulled off Astin's wig, leading to a day of hurt feelings and rising anger, that everyone is frank about, and which you simply don't see in conventional makings of docs.

Given how goddamn good all this extra material is and how much I love it, I would be the last person to say that there is too much of it. But I will admit that I only had time to watch the two discs of extras and listen to two of the audio tracks (the one with Jackson and the one with the cast). The thing is that you don't want to breeze through LOTR supplements. They demand attention. And they reward attention. I laughed several times during the marathon of discs three and four, and was rendered emotional just as many times. At some point I'll get around to the other two audio tracks, not just because I love my job, but because New Line and Jackson, in collaboration with the directors and producers of the supplements, create added value that truly is of value.

Food for Thought

NAKED LUNCH

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 27 December 1991
  
• Producer/distributor: Jeremy Thomas, Fox
  
• 115 minutes
  
• R
  
• Directed by David Cronenberg
  
• Credited writer: David Cronenberg, from the novel by William Burroughs
  
• Cast: Peter Weller (Bill Lee), Judy Davis (Joan Frost/Joan Lee), Ian Holm (Tom Frost), Julian Sands (Yves Cloquet), Roy Scheider (Doctor Benway), Monique Mercure (Fadela), Nicholas Campbell (Hank), Michael Zelniker (Martin), Robert A. Silverman (Hans)
  
• Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
  
• Editing: Ronald Sanders
  
• Significant music: Howard Shore, with music by Ornette Coleman
  
• Awards: One Boston Society of Film Critics award, seven Genie awards, one London Critics Circle award, two National Society of Film Critics awards, two NY Film Critics Circle awards, plus five nominations
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $2.5 million

Plot in one sentence: A drug addicted writer hides out in the exotic Interzone after accidentally killing his wife.

Disc Stats:

Extras Disc One:

• Audio commentary with Cronenberg and Peter Weller
  

Extras Disc Two:

NAKED LUNCH is a spirited, visually witty free for all adaptation of the Burroughs canon. Director David Cronenberg admits as much in his audio track. Part of his track's value is that points out where he derived the individual parts of the screenplay, some of it from LUNCH, some from the book INTERZONE, and some from a short story called "The Exterminator." Cronenberg also conceived of the notion of bug spray and exotic weird plants as a source for addictive drugs. NAKED LUNCH is as far from a traditional Hollywood adaptation of a novel as you can while still laying claim to being an adaptation. It's really more an account of Cronenberg's own interaction with Burrough's books since his teen years. Cronenberg is also a Nabokov enthusiast, and I would love to see him adapt one of his books, say PALE FIRE, TRANSPARENT THINGS, or ADA.

But NAKED LUNCH is also an interesting way stop in the career of Cronenberg. I can't think of another filmmaker who started out making low budget horror films who is now recognized world wide as a serious artist on the order of a Bergman or Antonioni without his necessarily forsaking the horrific elements that got him his start. His early horror films are top notch, especially THE BROOD, are shouldn't be disparaged as mere genre enterprises, an in fact show some of the same existential concerns that his recent, "artier" films betray.

What connects the horror films to the art house fare is the same overriding trope. Cronenberg is continually drawn to a lone person on an existential quest of some kind. From the psychic in SCANNERS to the TV guy in VIDEODROME, to the bored commercial director in CRASH to the madhouse refugee in SPIDER, Cronenberg returns continually to the lone searching confused figure traversing the kind of Europeanized landscape that Antonioni and later Theodopolis made so vivid. I was pleased to note that star Peter Weller got this, and on the audio track, at about 1:24:03 he comments on this recurrent theme in Cronenberg's work.

Sexuality, its horrors and delights, also runs, obviously, through his films as an obsessional theme. Here as he sometimes does Cronenberg looks at gay sex as Burroughs's books more or less require. Throughout NAKED LUNCH the movie there is much fustian about emerging sexuality and the horrific guilt over it (which, by the way, seems to go against the predatory urge in Burroughs's work). Much of the film's play with organic typewriters and art and drug use and hiding out in the Interzone and the superego of Dr. Benway has to do with guilt over sex and the horror of sexuality. In this Cronenberg is like Kubrick, whose last film EYES WIDE SHUT was a terrifying look at the terror of sexuality in the modern world.

Criterion's dual disc NAKED LUNCH offers a beautiful transfer of this film shot in rich golden autumnal colors. On the commentary track, Cronenberg is frank about the successes and failures of the film (there is a bad puppet toward the end), but always fascinating on his influences and his ambitious. He also spends some time explaining why he chose puppet work over CGI. Weller shares chat chores and is painfully confessional about what the film meant to him at that particular stage of his life and career.

The second disc doesn't provide LOTR level supplementary material but what's there is interesting and insightful. The biggest extra on the second disc is "Naked Making Lunch" by filmmaker Chris Rodley (who also edited the interview book CRONENBERG ON CRONENBERG), a television documentary about the making of the film. It is safe to say that Cronenberg is taken much more serious in England than he is in the United States. Whole books have come out about CRASH, for example, and British-born scholars have treated him more sympathetically. Rodley's film is an unconventional approach to the production. There is also the conventional making of made at the time, and a few minutes of set footage without narration, a trailer and two TV spots.

There is also about an hour's worth of Burroughs reading from NAKED LUNCH, if you are fond of the author's wise guy snarl.

Most of the rest of the second disc is reading matter. Material on the special effects by CINEFEX editor Jody Duncan is really a glorified, if informative, gallery, and there is also a publicity gallery. There is also a short gallery of candid photos of Burroughs and other beats taken by Ginsberg. All together they add up to about 300 pix.

Croft Services

LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER THE CRADLE OF LIFE

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 21 July, 2003
  
• 117 minutes
  
• PG-13
  
• Producer/distributor: Paramount
  
• Directed by Jan de Bont
  
• Credited writers: Steven E. de Souza, James V. Hart, and Dean Georgaris
  
• Cast: Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft), Gerard Butler (Terry Sheridan), Ciarán Hinds (Jonathan Reiss), Christopher Barrie (Hillary), Noah Taylor (Bryce), Djimon Hounsou (Kosa), Til Schweiger (Sean), Simon Yam (Chen Lo)
  
• Cinematography: David Tattersall
  
• Editing: Michael Kahn and Andrew MacRitchie
  
• Significant music: Alan Silvestri, and Korn
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: $90 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $65 million

Plot in one sentence: The wealthy archeologist is hired by the British government to beat a competitor to Pandora's Box.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Commentary by director de Bont
  
• Seven deleted scenes with optional director commentary (11:38)
  
• Making of featurettes: "Training" (8:55), "Vehicles and Weapons" (4:27), "Stunts" (10:53), "Visual Effects" (11:25), and "Music" (4:44)
  
• Gerald Butler screen test (3:59)
  
• Music videos: "Did My Time" by Korn (4:02) and "Heart Go Faster" (3:36) by the Davey Brothers
  
• DVD-ROM access to original website
  
• One sheet insert with chapter list
  

My views on LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE have have already been aired in this forum, so that gives me the chance to concentrate on the supplements to this disc, too.

The clutch of seven or so making of extras are here mostly in the pursuit of tantalizing photos of Angelina Jolie by other means. She dives, jumps, rides, falls, and shoots fetchingly and the camera is there to catch it all. However, Jolie the "real" person is, to state what should be obvious but which we always forget, much different from both the Croft character but also what most actors are like in supplementary material. Jolie is continuously engaged, light-hearted, and dedicated to the part and the physical demands of the role.

You know how everybody says that Cameron Diaz is the kind of guy's girl that everyone wants to be friends with? That was in the air especially after THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY came out. Well, it's really true about Jolie, but you only see it in the added value, not necessarily in this part, or any of her parts, really. She is very engaging as she plays around with guns, has mishaps with horses, and is game for a technically grueling stunt in which she and her co-star had to descend upside down on pulleys all day long in order to get a particular shot that lasts all of 25 seconds in the finished film.

One of the main differences between New Line and almost every other company putting out new DVDs is that New Line seems to encourage frankness on the part of its contributors. On the CROFT disc you can read between the lines and get the impression that something kind of disastrous happened with the music. The band Korn was supposed to do the score, but didn't. Only a fragment remains. Meanwhile, Alan Silvestri reveals that he was brought on abruptly and only had a few weeks to prepare. What's really going on here? We are not told.

Another mystery concerns where Gerard Butler came from. The disc includes his audition video. But it appears to be shot on the very set later used to shoot the scene where he is first introduced, and most of the dialogue he utters appears as is in the finished film. Was he too an last minute addition after some disastrous casting call? We don't know. If this were a New Line film, we might.

There is also a handful of deleted scenes of no particular interest, and an alternate ending that makes one of the characters less despicable and Croft a little warmer. One of my complaints about the Croft movies, besides the fact that the main character doesn't look like the girl in the game, is that Croft is so chilly and determined. She's even mean to her underlings, and blessedly the editors took out a scene where she actually whaps one of them upside the haid (they are on a submarine at the time and he falls into the roiling ocean). Whatever the point of this behavior, it's surely not found in the source game.

The main supplement is of course the audio commentary by director Jan de Bont, the former DP turned director of blustery action films. It's a traditional track: we went here, we did this, so-and-so was great to work with. The running theme of his chat, however, is CGI. He is against it. With this film, he and his team, according to his testimony, tried to do as much as they could live, including having two guys parachute off a building 28 times in one day. This seems to be a recurrent theme of commentaries, if this and NAKED LUNCH can be set to set a theme. Their remarks hint at some kind of anti-CGI backlash. It's easy to see where it is coming from. CGI driven films wrest control of the final product from the directors, who basically exist to helm the talking scenes while teams of what amount to second unit directors do practically everything else. This is an interesting development in the light of the successful realization of Gollum, which shows the heights that CGI can take a movie. De Bont is also at pains to tell us that the human face is the most interesting thing to photograph.

Finally, there are two music videos, one by the repudiated band Korn and featuring a Jolie looking much more luscious than she does in the film itself, and the other by the Davey Brothers.

Being and Nothingness

PALE FLOWER

Original Movie:

• AKA: Kawaita hana
  
• Theatrical premiere: 1 March, 1964, in Japan
  
• 96 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Producer/distributor: Shochiku Films Ltd.
  
• Directed by Masahiro Shinoda
  
• Credited writers: Masaru Baba and Masahiro Shinoda from the novel by Shintarô Ishihara
  
• Cast: Ryo Ikebe (Muraki, the yakuza), Mariko Kaga (Saeko, the young gambler), Takashi Fujiki (The killer), Chisako Hara (Yakuza's lover), Eijirô Tono (Gang leader), Seiji Miyaguchi (Gang leader)
  
• Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
  
• Editing: NA
  
• Significant music: Tôru Takemitsu
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: A yakuza recently released from prison falls for a society dame attracted to gambling dens.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Video interview with director Shinoda (10:13)
  
• Shinoda filmography
  
• Four-page insert with essay by Chris D., credits, transfer information, and chapter list
  

Existential humanism is the most cinematic philosophy.

Existentialism puts a premium on action, and movies are about movement. Existentialism is about facing the reality that Eliot noted human beings cannot take too much of, and movies are adept at conveying an emotionally rich surface realism. But cinema is also a visual art and the camera can capture the things around us that drive an existentialist to the brink of despair: the blank faced somnambulism of the human herd, the vacuity of commercialism, the vanity of human wishes, the ultimate pointlessness of life. The great films of Antonioni, Godard, Kurosawa, Bergman, and numerous others mostly confront the anchorless waste of human life. The Japanese seem paradoxically more adept at confronting the existential horror of life than other countries. From IKIRU to AFTERLIFE, Japanese cinema dwells on the emptiness and futility of our endeavors.

PALE FLOWER (otherwise known as Kawaita hana), is another Japanese exercise in existentialism. It begins in voice-over as an unseen man mutters depressingly about the blank masses on the subways, on the streets, in stores. He drones on about the meaninglessness of life. The film runs on like this for a few minutes with images of then-modern Tokyo under this somber self-laceration, and then gradually it emerges that the speaker is … a killer just out of prison, and that this is a Yakuza film.

Well, as Jean-Pierre Melville showed in LE SAMOURAI, cold-blooded killers and philosophical pondering can go hand in hand. PALE FLOWER proceeds to follow this narrator, Muraki, as he "enjoys" the first few hours of his release from prison. He makes no grand announcement and attends no welcoming parties. He simply re-integrates himself into the street life of the city. Soon he runs into friends, begins to hang out in gambling parlors, and is taken back on by his mob, which, by the end of the film, has another assignment for him, despite the fact that he just got out of a three year stretch.

Though Muraki has a patient lover, he finds himself attracted to a reckless young gambler one night. He researches the matter and finds that she frequently goes to these clubs, and when they finally talk she wants to know if he can get her into a high stakes game. Named Saeko, she has a thirst for thrills, driving her sports car too fast, expressing an interest in drugs, and happily going with him on a hit in order to experience the ultimate thrill. In the end, he lands in prison yet again, and from a new arrival learns what Saeko is doing in the outside world.

PALE FLOWER is directed by Masahiro Shinoda (THE BALLAD OF ORIN) with a robust, nouvelle vague creatively that still feels fresh and modern. It's not just because the film is "existential." Shinoda uses the wide-screen frame well. The black and white photography by Masao Kosugi is inky and rich and realistic. The narrative arc is oblique and somber yet with a sense of threat. Shinoda also has an interesting technique, which is to use as many camera placements as possible and "surround" his characters with numerous angles in the editing, as if the camera were roving around them, trying to penetrate their mystery.

Muraki is a somber older guy who finds something transfixing about Saeko's energy and impulsiveness. This tension is replicated in the film, which blends old style sets and settings with dream sequences, neo-realistic street scenes, and up to date characters who were viewed as shocking at the time. But PALE FLOWER is not a conventional yakuza film. The codes of behavior are too obscure, the gang leaders too ineffectual and vulgar, and the film too distant from the inner workings of the characters thoughts and motivations.

As he explains on the video interview on this HVE disc, Shinoda thought he was making a film about nihilism ("They're nihilists, Dude"), not existentialism, so action, per se, doesn't really accomplish anything except one's own wished for demise. He also offered it up as a sociological description of Japan's youth and its burgeoning underworld. But his film is also peculiarly pessimistic and downbeat, though not tragic, in its resolution, as if the characters were accepting the dire fate they had been flirting with or even inviting throughout the rest of the film. Shinoda tilts his films toward his own bleak vision of futility. He is also one of the most interesting but least known Japanese directors who come from the same generation as the better-publicized-in-the-west Oshima and Imamura. HVE has done a good job with this rare, hard to see film, which comes in an excellent transfer and a modest plate of supplements. It's something of a companion disc to DOUBLE SUICIDE, released by HVE's subsidiary Criterion, the only other Shinoda film I know of on DVD in Region 1. Any further Shinoda releases from this time period, including ASSASSINATION, PUNISHMENT ISLAND, THE SCANDALOUS ADVENTURES OF BURAIKAN and even THE BALLAD OF ORIN would be welcome.

Dream On

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Original Movie:

• First broadcast: 28 December 1966, on the BBC
  
• 80 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Producer/distributor: BBC
  
• Directed by Jonathan Miller
  
• Credited writer: Jonathan Miller, from the novel by Lewis Carroll
  
• Cast: Anne-Marie Mallik (Alice), Alan Bennett (Mouse), Wilfrid Brambell (White Rabbit), Peter Cook (Mad Hatter), John Gielgud (Mock Turtle), Leo McKern (Duchess), Malcolm Muggeridge (Gryphon), Michael Redgrave (Caterpillar), Peter Sellers (King of Hearts), Eric Idle
  
• Cinematography: Dick Bush
  
• Editing: Pam Bosworth
  
• Significant music: Leon Goossens and Ravi Shankar
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: $32, 000
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: One of 18 or so adaptations of the Lewis Carroll book, this one made for the BBC at the height of the hippie era.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Commentary track by Jonathan Miller
  
• Stills gallery with photos by Terence Spencer (17 screens)
  
• The May, 1903 ALICE IN WONDERLAND, directed by Cecil Hepworth (8:30), first adaptation of the novel, with narration by Simon Brown
  
• Six-page insert with essay by Wheeler Winston Dixon, credits, transfer information, and chapter list
  

One of my favorite public intellectuals is Jonathan Miller, the med student turned satirist with Beyond the Fringe, turned theater reviewer turned TV talking head turned theater director turned opera director. I had occasion to interview him twice, once in person after a lecture when he was relatively alert and jazzed and once on the telephone before a lecture when he was exhausted, grumpy, and impatient, a hexed interview that I didn't record properly and so came across in print as a jumbled mess. One of my quests in talking to Miller was seeing if his meticulous loquaciousness on THE DICK CAVETT SHOW and other chat forums was evident in the real world. One of the things I admire about Miller is his prose style, both in print and extemporaneous. On the page, he has a gift for finding the right word that will save him six others. He also has the remarkable ability to speak aloud what would be perfectly publishable prose if set down. Indeed in person he was as eloquent as he was in the artificial environs of TV chat. When I pressed him on where such an ability might derive, Miller allowed as how it might be rooted in the traditional English classical education, but now I tend to think that his flair at language is a compensatory defense against the terrors of stuttering, which plagued him since youth. Or it may be that he really is smarter than most people, and has a vast vocabulary.

In any case, I wish his cinematic forays were as good as his books and chit-chat. His one screen labors, aside from about a third of Shakespeare's plays and a host of operas, is meager, and include the swinging away from London comedy TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU with Oliver Reed and Noel Harrison, and this adaptation of Carroll's children's book. But Miller is not a natural filmmaker, and I don't think he understands what people enjoy in movies, or what they need to make a film comprehensible.

Miller made his BBC-produced ALICE IN WONDERLAND in the mid-'60s at the height of the hippie movement, when it may have been construed as psychedelic. But like Gore Vidal, whose novel MYRA BRECKENRIDGE was also adopted by long haired readers who were unaware that the author was mocking their cultural clichés with his own generation's, contemporaneous viewers may not have been aware of the distinctly intellectual impetus of the project. As Miller points out on the disc, his ambitions for the film were two-fold. The first was to capture the quality of a dream. Not the Hollywood version of a dream with fog and tilted cameras, but the way we actually experience dreams, with crystal clarity and odd pairings and time-and-place transitions that we view as odd only in waking retrospect. This approach was based on Miller's interpretation of the book as a chronicle of a dream. His second aim was to ground the film in the world of Carroll, late Victorian England, and Oxford University in particular. Miller assumes that the book was set more or less in the world that Carroll saw everyday, the Oxfordian greensward, the doddering dons, and eccentric servants, as well as the world that Carroll's prime auditor, the real life Alice, would have seen and heard. Miller was also keen to capture the flavor of the Victorian view of childhood, that paradise of innocence that is irreclaimable because, as shown in poignant symbolism in many kids' stories of the time, adults can't fit back in through the little doors they have outgrown.

This is all well and good but the intellectual foundation for the production fails to match the reality of its realization, for one viewer anyway. Miller's ALICE is a cold production that allows the viewer no purchase on its surface story and inner workings. It's not just that Anne-Marie Mallik, who never made another movie, is a lousy Alice. It's that everyone seems to be in a different film, declaiming and gesticulating with little regard if anyone is watching or not. Miller's intellectual ambitions do not translate into a conventionally viewer enterprise. Much as Miller decries the Disney version of ALICE, it at least has an accessible story. Disney made sure that Alice was the viewer's identity figure. But then, so did Carroll, who tells the story from her perspective and shares her thoughts with the viewer, and makes her a dynamic figure ("The world would be a much better place if everyone would just get along!"), not the passive somnambulist Mallik is encouraged to be. Though Miller's adaptation is surprisingly faithful, it differs greatly from the source in its impersonality and theory-dictated complexion, less Kafka than Beckett.

Would that Miller could pitch as good a game as he talks. In his commentary track for the roughly hour-long film, Miller makes a case as to why his film should be interesting. He also reminisces about how the project came about, how he was able to get stars such as Gielgud and Peter Sellers to appear, where he scouted the locations, how he found Mallik to play the lead and what he was hoping to achieve with her, why he chose Ravi Shankar to compose the music, and why he deems the summer that he shot the film one of the happiest times of his life. Again, Miller is a pleasing raconteur, and the hour spent listening him talk about what one may view as a failed endeavor is 20 times more entertaining and illuminating than two hours or more spent with the latest hot shot director talking about his recent hit action film.

Other supplements include a brief stills gallery with photos by then prominent snapper Terence Spencer, and the first filmic adaptation of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, directed by Cecil Hepworth and released in May of 1903. It's a worn source print, but viewable, and is accompanied by Simon Brown's explanatory commentary. There is also a six-page insert with credits, transfer information, and a chapter list, along with an essay by film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon, who makes lavish claims for the adaptation.

Domestic Comedy

THE HOUSEKEEPER

Original Movie:

• AKA: A HOUSEKEEPER; Une femme de m2!nage
  
• Theatrical premiere: 13 November, 2002, in France
  
• 91 minutes
  
• R
  
• Producer/distributor: Le studio canal+
  
• Directed by Claude Berri
  
• Credited writer: Claude Berri from a novel by Christian Oster
  
• Cast: Jean-Pierre Bacri (Jacques), Èmilie Dequenne (Laura), Brigitte Catillon (Claire), Jacques Frantz (Ralph), Axelle Abbadie (Helene), Catherine Breillat (Constance), Apollinaire Louis-Philippe Dogue (Ernest, the barman)
  
• Cinematography: Eric Gautier
  
• Editing: François Gédigier
  
• Significant music: Frédéric Botton
  
• Awards: one Cesar nomination
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $455,000 in the US

Plot in one sentence: A recently single Parisian has a romance with his new much younger housekeeper.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Theatrical trailer (1:34)
  
• Trailers for DEMONLOVER, MORVERN CALLAR, and THE DIRECTOR'S LABEL music video series
  
• Web links
  
• One sheet insert with chapter list (not present in the screener)
  

THE HOUSEKEEPER is a light trifle from Claude Berri, whose long career in movies also includes the lavishly novelistic two-parter JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON DES SOURCES. Here he takes a slice of life as we might see in a film by Eric Rohmer, a precise examination of Parisian social minutia, except here the old guy actually gets the young girl.

The set up is that Jacques, who seems to be a music engineer, is living alone in a pig-sty following the break up of his romance. Finally sick of the stench and filth, he summons a housekeeper via her pull down announcement in a café. Laura, however, proves to be many years younger, with two-toned hair and an interest in the kind of raucous pop music that the usually meticulous Jacques must abhor. She sweeps instead of vacuums and has other jarring habits. It comes to pass that Laura has to move out of her own apartment, and Jacques agrees to put her up for a while. Inevitably, they become lovers and the second half of the movie finds them on vacation on the coast, visiting a friend of Jacques's, and seeming to get engaged. But there remain differences between the two lovers, and the first signs of their drifting apart occur on the beach one day when he finds Laura chatting up a kid her own age and Jacques is left behind to talk with the kid's mother, who is getting a divorce. When the woman prods the reluctant Jacques into a swim he suffers a cramp and must hobble back onto the beach, delineating yet another difference between himself and Laura. The film ends with Jacques looking out onto the ocean from the beach.

The 69-year-old Berri, adapting a novel, is good at capturing the selfish focused determination of old age but also the nagging sensation that life's opportunities have been missed. Jacques is essentially an unpleasant person but that doesn't mean that the viewer can't identify with him. It's rather mysterious that Laura likes him but her interest seems more than mercenary, in that she makes a lot of accommodations to please him, among them modifying her hairstyle more in the fashion of an older person he might be more likely to be seen with. Their May-September romance is of a type that has been covered extensively already in many French romances and comedies, but Berri likes to take time to explore the subtly expressed recriminations, doubts, worries, and jealousies of the older characters. Jacques has a friend, Constance who is also recently single. Dialogue and a few looks suggests that she has something of a thing for Jacques that she has never revealed. The grumpy Jacques, who neither likes to dance or to swim, is blithely unaware of this wrinkle, and when Laura pulls him onto the dance floor her face expresses a strange and interesting mixture disappointment, contempt, and amusement. Constance is played by the actress and movie director Catherine Breillat, whose hard-edged films about female sexuality (FAT GIRL, ROMANCE, 36 FILLETTE) are as far from the sunny regret of HOUSEKEEPER.

Palm Pictures distributes the film with a small handful of extras on the disc (though not the "making of" featurette advertised on the box), a good transfer and good sound.

Pretty Boring

PRETTY BABY

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 24 May, 1978, in France
  
• 106 minutes
  
• R
  
• Producer/distributor: Paramount
  
• Directed by Louis Malle
  
• Credited writers: Polly Platt and Louis Malle
  
• Cast: Brooke Shields (Violet), Keith Carradine (Bellocq), Susan Sarandon (Hattie), Frances Faye (Nell), Diana Scarwid (Frieda), Barbara Steele (Josephine), Laura Zimmerman (Agnes), Gerrit Graham (Highpockets)
  
• Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
  
• Editing: Suzanne Fenn
  
• Significant music: Ferdinand "Jelly Roll' Morton and Scott Joplin
  
• Awards: Technical grand prize at the Cannes film festival, plus two various nominations
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: A photographer's relationship with a New Orleans prostitute and her daughter in 1917.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• One sheet insert with chapter list
  

© 1978 by Carl Bennett and D. K. Holm.

This high-brow Mort Drucker homage first appeared in the Fall 1978 issue of CINEMONKEY magazine (No. 15, pages 24 and 25). It was drawn by Carl Bennett and written by Carl Bennett and D. K. Holm.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From the Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens commentary track on the extended THE TWO TOWERS: "This is probably the longest continuous CG shot ever done for a film, in actual fact. I think it is something like over two minutes long. And it was a nightmarish shot. It was the very first Gollum shot I ever gave to Weta to do, which I handed it over to them about two weeks after we shot it, which would probably be about three years ago. And it was the last shot that they finished! [Laughs] Which was kind of the way it was always going to be. But it was so difficult. We filmed Andy Serkis doing this exact performance and then we had to then film with our steadicam — because it wasn't motion controlled, it was just shot with a steadicam — we then had to have the steadicam operator film an empty version of what Andy had just done, trying to remember all the timing and remember exactly where Andy was, because he was basically filming absolutely nothing, he had no reference as to where his camera should be. So it took us all day. It was a shot that took all day long, filmed right from the morning until the evening. And then much, much later we had Andy reproduce his performance again and in a motion capture suit, so we had our motion capture stage laid out with where these pine trees were, so he could grab on to a piece of wood that was suppose to represent the pine tree. It was all measured out very carefully and reproduced in the studio. And it was just a very technically long and … but it was always thought of as one continuous shot with no cuts. It's kind of audacious, but I just thought it would be a nice way to end the film." Walsh [I think]: "It certainly helped make him feel more real, that you do something like this." Jackson: "Yeah, well, it's … I just think that if you are dealing with something artificial like Gollum, if you can do then, on top of that, do something weird like do a long continuous two minute shot with no cuts you sort of somehow draw people's attention from the fakery. Because it's not the way you are used to seeing that sort of thing presented." Walsh: "Emm."—New Zealand based film director Peter Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens on THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS, disc 2, 01:45:52.

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