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January 9, 2004
DVD of the Week
Mackeyivelian
THE SHIELD, SEASON 2
Original Series:
- Aired: 7 January, 2003 through 1 May, 2003, on the FX cable channel
- NR
- Fox Televisions
- Cast: Michael Chiklis (Vic Mackey), Catherine Dent (Danielle Sofer), Walt Goggins (Shane Vendrell), Michael Jace (Julien Lowe), Kenneth Johnson (Curtis 'Lemonhead' Lemansky), Jay Karnes (Holland 'Dutch' Wagenbach), Benito Martinez (David Aceveda), CCH Pounder (Claudette Wyms), David Rees Snell (Ronnie Gardocki), Cathy Cahlin Ryan (Corrine Mackey), John Diehl (Ben Gilroy)
- Directed by Peter Horton, Scott Brazil, Paris Barclay, and others
- Credited writers: creator Shawn Ryan, Jim Manos, and others
- Cinematography: Rohn Schmidt
- Significant music: Matthias Weber's opening theme
Premise in one sentence: The exploits of a Ramparts-style corrupted police task force in the mythical LA suburb of Farmington.
Disc Stats:
- Fox Home Entertainment
- $59.98
- Thirteen 40+ minute episodes, plus several hours of extras
- Four single sided, dual layered discs
- Color
- Full frame transfer (1.33:1)
- Animated, musical menu with 16-chapter scene selection per episode
- Dolby Digital Stereo surround (3.0)
- Close captioning and English subtitles
- Region 1
- Street Date: 30 December, 2003
- Book-style fold out digipak keep case in cardboard slip case
- Extras: Disc One
- Audio commentary track across episode 1 with Shawn Ryan, Michael Chiklis, and Benito Martinez
- Extras: Disc Two
- Audio commentary track across episode 6 with Shawn Ryan and writers Kurt Sutter, Scott Rosenbaum, and Kim Clements
- Extras: Disc Three
- Audio commentary track across episode 12 with Shawn Ryan and casting team Barbara Fiorentino and Rebecca Manieri
- Extras: Disc Four
- Audio commentary track across episode 13 with Shawn Ryan, and FX execs Kevin Reilly and Eric Schrier
- 37 deleted scenes, about an hour of material
- Editing Room: "Connie Gets Shot, editor's cut (6:04); final air version (5:51); with optional audio track by Ryan
- Sound Surgery: a 1:46 scene broken down into its components of production dialogue (:44), sound effects (1:01); ADR (:58), and Music (1:07), with a :35 intro
- Wrap Day (26:59), a documentary about the last day of shooting season two
- Directors' Roundtable (48:21), Ryan hosting a discussion among Scott Brazil, Peter Horton, and Paris Barclay
- Raising the Barn (9:19), on set design with Kitty Doris-Bates
- Season Three teaser (1:01)
- DVD-ROM game for Windows users
- Optional English subtitles, close captions
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In a tight field of competition, THE SHIELD proves to be one of the best shows on television, which these days is to say one of the best films, period. I think it is widely acknowledged that the best work in cinema is being done on television, mostly HBO and FX, but also on some of the networks. If I rate THE SHIELD slightly below THE WIRE, it is only slightly, and due to the edge that THE WIRE has in sheer realism. But THE SHIELD has an intensity and force that few other shows have. Both THE SHIELD and THE WIRE excelled last year when THE SOPRANOS seemed to be in a holding pattern as it tried to figure out what it wanted to do next.
The heart of THE SHIELD is Michael Chiklis, who struts through the show with his arrogant buffed chest and defiant shaved head. Chiklis has come a long way from the days when he played John Belushi in WIRED, with several hit shows in between. His career in doubt, Chiklis decided to get into shape and peddle a show about the Ramparts police scandal. Little did he know that writer Shawn Ryan, late of NASH BRIDGES and ANGEL, had the same idea. Somehow they came together, and the FX channel, interested in expanding its base, bought into it. The show went through a couple of title changes (THE BARN, RAMPARTS) and ended up being one of the most popular and award winning programs on the tube.
Chiklis is Vic Mackey, lead cop of the Strike Force attached to the police station in the troubled burg of Farmington, California. If he evokes memories to you of the equally chrome-domed Kojak, fuhgetabouitit. Mackey may be the best cop in the "Barn," as they call the police station housed in a converted church, but he is also the most corrupt, using his strike force to suborn pushers and take a cut of their action. The character Mackey most resembles is Richard Gere from INTERNAL AFFAIRS, both in his wit and but his feats as a superman in the sack.
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The first season of THE SHIELD followed Mackey as he tried to stay a few steps ahead of his politically ambitious station captain (Benito Martinez). He was also coming to the end of an affair with a street cop named Danny (Catherine Dent), whom the hype-intellectual detective Dutch (Jay Karnes) had a crush on. Other characters are Dutch's partner (CCH Pounder), an assistant police chief (John Diehl, who pops up briefly in season two), and the Strike Force members (including Walt Goggins). The final two hours of THE SHIELD season on were among the best 120 minutes of cinema to be put on film last year.
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Season two carries on the story: Mackey is estranged from his wife and kids; he and the team are hot after something called the money train, in which local gangsters ship out their money to be laundered; and Mackey's boss is in a tight political race. The way that THE SHIELD works is that there are several through stories going on, with one or two self-contained "B" stories each hour, often concerning Dutch and his over-reaching.
As with THE SOPRANOS, in THE SHIELD the viewer is invited to like, even admire, people he wouldn't want to associate with in the real world. And admire Mackey one does, even though he killed a cop who was investigating his team at the start of the first season, and even in normal moments doesn't think twice about planting evidence.
The Fox discs of the first season were packed, with commentary tracks on every one of the 13 episodes, and a final disc full of extras, including a making of, the script to the pilot, audition tapes, and 17 deleted scenes. On set for season two is only slightly less packed. There are only commentary tracks for a third of the shows, but what are there are insightful and riveting Ryan acts as the "host" of these and the other extras and does a fine job of guiding the others through the shows and asks interesting, sometimes challenging questions. If he ever wants to get out of television, I'm sure he could find a job making excellent extras for otherwise conventional movie DVDs.
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All the disc four extras are top notch. There are no less than 37 deleted scenes, which Ryan says candidly is a measure of how the show was getting a little of his control in season two. There are two excellent making of style features, Editing Room, which shows how one scene was put together, and Sound Surgery, which illustrates how one scene how noise, dialogue, and other sounds layered onto it to make it make sense and feel real. Both these features are educational and show how really hard it is to make a TV show. Wrap Day is a cute 25-minute documentary celebrating the last day of shooting, and the Directors' Roundtable feature is a very informative discussion among Scott Brazil, Peter Horton, and Paris Barclay, led by the ever-challenging Ryan. Finally, Raising the Barn is a nice, short featurette about set design. All in all, the DVD set for season two is a great celebration of one of the best shows on TV.
For further info on the show, and fevered anticipation of season three, the reader can consult the official SHIELD web site.
Other DVDs of the Week
I Want to Live
IKIRU
Death is bad enough, but personally I can barely even watch movies about it. Oh, sure, I can zip through a Schwarzenegger actioner or a Leone oater with no problem. But real death, that's a little difficult. Koreeda's AFTER LIFE, for example, is one of my all time favorite films. Only seen it once. Have the DVD. May never watch it again. It's too painful, too sad, and too evocative of life's pain, its pointlessness and injustices, as well as the preciousness of our memories and our happiness, and their ultimate fragility. But then, I can't even watch D.O.A. with ease, or even the remake.
Akira Kurosawa's IKIRU (1952) is perhaps my favorite AK film, but normally I can hardly bring myself to watch its 140 minutes of somber contemplation of a dying guy. But I steeled myself for the DVD, knowing that Kurosawa, as an existential humanist, would find some ray of hope in the bleakness, and because I hadn't seen the film in a long time and wasn't sure exactly what happened in it. Thus I was surprised at both its unusual structure, it's unflinching scrutiny of one man's imminent death, and yes, indeed, the existential good faith it encourages.
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IKIRU (translated as "To Live") concerns a gray bureaucrat named Kanji Watanabe (AK reg Takashi Shimura) who learns that he has stomach cancer. In this bleak state of mind he begins to reflect on his past, his present, and the world that will remain after he is gone. His marriage seems not to have been happy, and his son is a distant creature over whom he feels a great deal of self-pity. Over the course of a few days, he forms a tentative friendship with one of his office underlings, Toyo (Miki Odagiri), an effervescent girl whose unbridled life force makes him both wistful and hopeful.
Then something strange happens. Watanabe more or less vanishes from the film.
Kurosawa is doing a lot of things in IKIRU. He's creating a portrait of post war Japan. He's examining the class structure of Japanese society. He's attacking the lethargy of the government's bureaucracy. But most of all he is wondering aloud if there is any point to life itself. His vehicle for his is Watanabe. Yet at the same time, he keeps us shielded from him, keeps him at something of a distance. Though there are times when Shimura is on the verge of achieving the vulgar cartoon obviousness of Giulietta Masina in LA STRADA, Kurosawa metaphorically pulls back, refusing to settler, as it were, for sentimentality. And in his larger plan to critique Japanese society he needs to show the impact that Watanabe had on his peers and employees. To that end, Kurosawa daringly divided the film into two, with the portrait of Watanabe forming the first half, and an account of his legacy forming the second.
The Watanabe story proper is the tale of his diagnosis and immediate reaction to it. The second half of the film is dedicated to a CITIZEN KANE-style examination of Watanabe's life, conducted by his former colleagues at a drunken wake. There we learn that somehow Watanabe was energized enough to put through a small park in a run down neighborhood on behalf of a group of mothers whose previous protests and demands for attention went unheeded throughout the bureaucracy. Watanabe is a hero to these women, but his peers aren't even sure what, if anything, he did. As they compare notes, they are shamed to discover that Watanabe bucked the system in order to leave a small legacy of his brief presence on the earth.
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It's all beautifully done and what's amazing about the film is how layered it is. There are basically three narrative lines here, and Watanabe links them all. There is Watanabe's own dire story. There is the tale of the mothers. And finally there is the portrait of the bureaucracy. Kurosawa insists that we spend a lot of time with Watanabe as he has a bit of a freak out about his condition, and among the things he does is have a blow out with a drunken writer, who takes him on a characteristically Kurosawean tour of Tokyo's under-life. Kurosawa also likes to privilege the viewer to inside information, so that only we know that an off chance remark by Toyo leads to his awareness that he could achieve redemption.
The film also looks great. It contains some of those characteristic AK compositions that place three figures at odd angles to each other, and has beautiful photography by long time AK collaborator Asakazu Nakai.
The Criterion Collection two-disc edition of IKIRU fleshes out their selection of Kurosawa films from the Janus Collection, joining THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, HIGH AND LOW, RASHOMON, RED BEARD, SANJURO, THRONE OF BLOOD, YOJIMBO, and SEVEN SAMURAI (said to be due for a refurbished release sometime in the future), and leaving by my count STRAY DOG and DRUNKEN ANGEL. Later Kurosawa films are owned by other companies, and many of his earlier films are available on videotape, though I hope that eventually someone gets around to putting them all on DVD, with the same dedication that Criterion shows.
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In this case the dedication is shown through an audio commentary by Stephen Prince, a Kurosawa expert who wrote THE WARRIOR'S CAMERA, and two documentaries, A MESSAGE FROM AKIRA KUROSAWA: FOR BEAUTIFUL FILMS (1:21:16), a 2000 documentary about the director made by his heirs, and AKIRA KUROSAWA: IT IS WONDERFUL TO CREATE (41:35), an entry in the Toho Masterworks series, which I gather has the company doing little docs on its best films. MESSAGE ranges across AK's whole career, from SUGATA SANSHIRO, his first film as a director, to MADADAYO, his last, shot five years before his death. In fact, there is such an emphasis in this doc on one of his later films, RHAPSODY IN AUGUST, with its footage of Kurosawa on the set directing the actors that you wonder why it is on a disc of IKIRU and not RHAPSODY IN AUGUST. One answer is that it pads out the package and makes it a double disc set. The second documentary is more obviously focused on IKIRU, and is a blend of scenes from the film, archival interviews with AK, and new chats with cast and crew members, including Miki Odagiri, who is just as vivacious today as she was then (this was her only Kurosawa film).
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It's a good little making of doc but the best supplement on the DVD is Prince's audio track. In an easygoing manner that doesn't sound (too much, anyway) as if it is being read, Price walks you through the movie in the spirit of Michael Jeck's track for SEVEN SAMURAI, which remains the gold standard for great commentaries. He is truly engaged in the film and at one point even infectiously laughs spontaneously in anticipation of a Kurosawa gag. Prince's authority on the film is dazzling. He points out how Kurosawa is carefully delineating the class structure of the film's society, and how this being one of the first Japanese films made after the cessation of western censorship, Kurosawa was unusually free to criticize the bureaucracy. He also provides revelations about how cancer was viewed by medical science in Japan (the victim was not informed that he had cancer, which is what happens in IKIRU), and explores some of the film's ambiguities, such as why the yakuza back off from thwarting Watanabe's efforts to make the park. He also notes interestingly that despite the fact that Kurosawa occasionally worked with different key crew, his films have a consistent look, which to my mind puts him in the category of Hitchcock, Ford, and Kubrick for being true auteurs (in case there was any doubt).
At $39.95, the two single sided, dual-layered discs offer, first, a full frame transfer (1.85:1) from what the packaging says is a new 35mm print, then digitally restored, and with Dolby Digital mono, and on the second disc, the two documentaries. The static, musical menu offers 25-chapter scene selection. An eight-page insert bears the film's cast and crew, the DVD credits, chapter titles, and an excerpt from Donald Richie's book on Kurosawa. IKIRU hit the streets on January 6th.
Bamboozled
OUT OF TIME
Reuniting director Carl Franklin and actor Denzel Washington (DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS), OUT OF TIME has the earmarks of an off project, something to do between more "important" films. It's a mystery with lots (well, not lots) of sex, and strives for the steaminess that a PG-13 rating will allow. It's in the tradition of BODY HEAT and WILD THINGS, and other convoluted thrillers with a Florida setting. It works and it doesn't work at the same time.
OUT OF TIME, which made its theatrical debut in October of 2003, concerns Matt Whitlock (Washington), the sheriff of a small Florida town called Banyan Key, who finds himself enmeshed in a honey trap. Recently broken up from his wife, the ambitious cop Alex (Eva Mendes), Whitlock has been seeing Ann Merai (Sanaa Lathan), his old high school girlfriend, on the sly. The only problem is that she is married, also, to his arch rival, Chris Harrison (Dean Cain). When Ann Merai tells him that she has terminal cancer, he comes up with a plan to get her the funds necessary to pursue an experimental course of therapy. Any more than that would be spoiling what the trailers and commercials for the film seem intent on destroying.
Denzel Washington is all wrong for this part. Dave Collard, originally wrote it, for a white guy, but once Washington got involved the seediness of the premise evaporated. Washington has too much dignity and class to play a sleaze. He can do evil, as in TRAINING DAY, but he can't (or won't) do a sleaze. So immediately the film lacks a sense of despair or urgency that it might have with someone such as Jason Patric. That's the problem with these neo-noirs (or films soleils, as I like to call them); too often they want to whitewash the decrepit world in which noirs usually take place, as if the sun cleansed things instead of hardening and drying them out.
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And as usual in this kind of trick film, like THE USUAL SUSPECTS, the realization of the master plot, by people who don't seem that brainy, is contingent on a whole lot more luck than you'd find in the real world. Also, because it shows an ordinarily pristine figure racing against time before he is identified, OUT OF TIME is an unofficial remake of NO WAY OUT, itself adapted unofficially from the novel THE BIG CLOCK, made into a movie in the '40s with Ray Milland. But again, you don't feel a sense of urgency because Washington is too noble at his core to ever be party to the complex and ambiguous moral scheme as the one the film proposes.
On the other hand there is a great sequence in which Whitlock tumbles off an old balcony. This is a pretty good sequence and really suspenseful. But then it is over, and the film returns to its ethereal calm in the face of danger.
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This leaves the viewer to contemplate Eva Mendes. This actress seemed to come out of nowhere to appear in about four films simultaneously. Her first film was CHILDREN OF THE CORN V (there've been five of those things?!), but has also been in EXIT WOUNDS, TRAINING DAY, 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, and STUCK ON YOU. If familiarity breeds lust, one could not avoid developing a crush on Mendes, who was delightfully game in STUCK ON YOU, and sultry in her limited role in MEXICO. Here she is a smart, sharp woman with amusing quirks who can hold her own with the guys around her (she might qualify someday for a RESIDENT EVIL type role). Mendes has one of those — how do I put this — extreme faces that you can't but look at (and maybe photographs better than most people's).
For a movie that only made $16 mil off its $50 million dollar budget, OUT OF TIME comes with a wealth of supplements. There's a commercial making of doc (which, if you can read between the lines, casts Franklin as a hardass), "profiles" of a few of the main characters, two outtakes of under a minute each, three screen tests for Sanaa Lathan, and two tests for Dean Cain, an animated and scored stills gallery of about two and a half minutes, the trailer, and trailers for ANTITRUST, DARK BLUE, BARBER SHOP, and DIE ANOTHER DAY. The main supplement is the audio track by director Franklin who basically walks you through the production and some of the choices made.
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MGM Home Entertainment 's OUT OF TIME, at $27.95, comes in a sparkling widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced for widescreen televisions), and with an adequate DD 5.1 surround, and also offers Spanish and French language stereo tracks, with English, Spanish, and French subtitles. The single-sided, dual layered disc has an animated, musical menu that offers 32-chapter scene selection. OUT OF TIME hit the street on January 6th.
NEXT TIME: KING OF THE HILL, Cary Grant, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, and more!
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