Joust the FAX

TIMELINE
In the voluminous bonuses to PANIC ROOM there is one moment when Jared Leto is filmed mock-complaining about what a terrible task master Fincher has proved to be, just as Fincher materializes behind him, wondering if he is joking or not. The repartee ends in a hug.

In the almost as voluminous extras for TIMELINE, something similar happens. I can't remember if it is an actor complaining about Richard Donner, or Donner complaining about the actors, which he does throughout the making-ofs, but I am too lazy to try and look up the moment. Suffice it to say that this coincidence of extras jokery is a sad reminder of the achievement of one and the disaster that is the other.

My views on the movie were enunciated at the time of its release. Here I can only add that though both movies were in their production histories akin to disasters, TIMELINE would have benefited from the kind of ravenous attention to detail that Fincher brought to his project.

The extras on Paramount's TIMELINE disc, if viewed in close proximity to PANIC ROOM, only point out the differences. The transfer (1.85:1, enhanced for widescreen TVs) is good as they are for most new movies, and the sound is evocative (the DD 5.1 makes the battle sequences slightly more tolerable). There is also the DD 2.0 and French 5.1 audio options and English subtitles.

There is no audio commentary track, and I am guessing that that's because the participants were so sick of the troubled and long delayed project that they didn't have much good to say about it. There is, however, a three part making of. The only really cool element of the extras is a fabulous panoramic shot of the film's central castle and its environs assembled from hundreds of still camera shots, the images employing a variety of different lens sizes. When the panoramic map's creator lays it out the setting seems stunning. Sadly, the film's creators then went on to fuck up the guy's hard work. TIMELINE hit the street April 13th for $29.95.

Sea Sick

MASTER AND COMMANDER
For every DVD that I am really looking forward to there is usually one specific aspect of the movie or its production history that I am hoping to learn more about. With PANIC ROOM it was seeing surviving footage of Nicole Kidman in the Foster role. In TIMELINE, it was why the release was delayed so many times. And in MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (henceforth MC for short), it was some kind of featurette on the sound production. I wasn't disappointed. That feature on the disc is itself worth the purchase price.

My views on MASTER AND COMMANDER have already been enunciated. The new two disc set offers an opportunity for a softening of those views, because with subtitles it's now easier to follow what people are saying, and the core friendship between captain and ship doctor is clearer, though the movie is still a gross betrayal of the books.

This two-disc special edition from Fox (though the film was also co-produced by Universal and Miramax), comes rife with featurettes:

• Excellent anamorphic transfer (2.40:1) and Dolby Digital 5.1 (in English and French) and DTS 5.1 audio, plus Dolby Digital 2.0 (Spanish) and English and Spanish subtitles.
  
• An hour-long documentary, "The Hundred Days."
  
• A 20-minute visual effects featurette, focusing on WETA, which also did the LORD effects.
  
• Peter Weir talking about his approach to adapting Patrick O'Brian.
  

• What is presented as six deleted scenes (amounting to 24 minutes of additional screen time), but which are really numerous bits and pieces tracking ship life.
  
• Conceptual art galleries.
  
• An HBO "First Look"
  
• Three theatrical trailers.
  
• "Interactive Multi-Angle Battle Scene Studies."
  
• Finally, there is the 18 minute sound design featurette with Richard King. I've been interested in the sound for this film since I read an account of it in the NEW YORKER several months ago before the film came out (in one of its "movie" issues). This featurette turns out to be one of the most interesting I've ever seen (and makes an interesting contrast with the sound design feature on PANIC ROOM). From firing off real cannons in an empty field in Michigan to recording flapping sails out in the desert, this doc is a fitting depiction of why many consider King to be the best working in his field today. The NEW YORKER article goes into more amusing aspects of the sound design, but this feature is remarkably detailed. It is paired with an "Interactive Cannon Demonstration," which separates the elements that go into one edited sound effect.
  

Suppurated at Birth

STUCK ON YOU
They really must plan DVDs a long time in advance before they come out. The DVD for STUCK ON YOU is all suited up as if it has made $160 million dollars rather than $33 million (on a budget of $55 million).

It's an OK movie. It's more of the same from the Farrelly Brothers, another one of their sweetly sentimental tales cloaked behind a tastelessly intrusive tale that "pushes the envelope" of what the audience will tolerate. All the Farrelly Brothers movies in one way or another are about people who were meant for each other, either fated to be in love, or remain friends through thick or thin. Here the people destined to stay with each other are, as is now well known, literally fused at the hip, conjoined "twins" Walt and Bob (Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear). Here they play typical Farrelly naifs, not as dumb as Lloyd and Harry, but not as aware as Ted Stroehmann from THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY.

All their lives Bob and Walt have gotten along well over there on Martha's Vineyard, working in a diner, playing hockey and other sports, and with Bob, coping with the actor's itch, appearing on stage locally in the "one man show" of TRU (with his painfully shy brother trying unsuccessfully to recede into the background). The film gets its narrative mojo from Bob's sudden urge to go to Hollywood, where they rent a motel room, get an agent, and soon star on a program with Cher (the "real" Cher). Everything ends nicely, though, despite the fact that the feuding brothers finally elect to have separation surgery. (The movie also stars Eva Mendez, who has joined the ranks of my top 500 movies actresses).

Weirdly, STUCK ON YOU defies criticism because, as far as Farrelly Brothers films go, there is nothing particularly wrong with it. It's funny where it should spark laughs; it's somber where it should solicit tears. But despite the conjoined twins element, there is a feeling that we have been down this path with the brothers way too many times before. Were it not for the fact that the jokes are really good the film would be another dim Hollywood exercise in faux outrage. It also exposes the sloppily sentimental side of the Farrellys more than their previous films. It's not hard-edged enough. Yet having said that, time may very well claim this movie as the best of all the Farrellys' efforts.

Fox Home Entertainment's disc of STUCK ON YOU is of a piece with previous Farrelly releases. Below the surface of its fine anamorphic widescreen transfer (2.35:1, with a separate pan-and-scan edition) DD 5.1 audio, it's loaded with extras, beginning with a commentary by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who spend most of their time pointing out all the friends and neighbors they plastered into the molding of the movie (though it is nice to hear that they liked the excellent SWIMMING WITH SHARKS). There are also eight deleted and extended scenes, some outtakes, three making ofs (on the Farrelly Brothers approach to humor, on the film itself, and on the special effects), trailers for STUCK and other comedies, and a new Fox feature called "Inside Look," which offers previews for four upcoming Fox movies. STUCK ON YOU hit the street on the 27th, and retails for $27.98.

Elementary

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
Before Basil Rathbone made a series of some 12 Sherlock Holmes films for Universal, he played the character over at Fox. That studio, for some reason, decided not to continue making Holmes films, and so Universal instead contributed partially to the birth of film noir.

Rathbone seems born to play Holmes; and HOUND seems like the most cinematic source story from the Holmes "canon." However, it has one major structural problem: Holmes vanishes for the whole middle third of the book. No one attempting to be faithful to Doyle's novel has ever been able to get around this problem, and so in Fox's film we must endure straight the idiocy of Nigel Bruce's Watson for a very long stretch of the film.

Nevertheless, it is enjoyable, in HOUND, to see the first pairing of these actors as the famous duo. In addition, this Fox film provides an interesting contrast to the Universal series and the differences between the studios. All the major studios in the '30s and '40s had individual styles — in fact, the auteur theory probably has its roots in noticing studio style first and an individual director's variation from it second. Warners films look and sound (those gunshots!) much different from, say, Universal, its sometimes equivalent in budgets. While Paramount was lush and pricy, Fox tended to be cheaper and more stage bound, but on the other hand more inclined to "social protest" films. There is one scene in HOUND that is so like a Fox film, and that is the flashback in which the legend of the hound is introduced. There is something in the way those old Baskerville Hall denizens are sitting around, the way their good fellowship is so loud and forced, in the way they march up the stairs later in that sequence, that just reeks of Fox (go back and look at THE MARK OF ZORRO with Tyrone Power for similar sound and visual linkages to this little scene). Like Warners, Fox was run by one man, but also both studios tended to hire and keep employed for many years the same technicians and craftsmen, who each contribute to the look and feel of their studio's product in subtle ways.

ADVENTURES is a much more cumbersome tale than HOUND, ostensibly based on the William Gillette's popular play based on the characters. In fact it is a convoluted tale of revenge by Moriarty, in a film that doesn't move fast enough to distract from its incoherence, or its weirdly episodic, stop-and-start nature. SCARLET STREET editor Richard Valley goes some way toward explaining the inefficiency of the plot in both his audio track for this disc and in the eight-page insert, in which he quotes at length from dialogue deleted from the finished film that would have explained and tied together all the film's incoherent strands.

Valley also has an informative eight page booklet in HOUND, and taken all together, the booklets for these two films, and for each of the 12 Universal films that MPI has released on DVD over the past several months, make up one of the best books on Holmes films ever written. Both MPI Fox transfers are excellent full frame affairs, crisp and dark and multi-tonal, with good DD 2.0 monaural audio. Valley does the audio track for ADVENTURES, and David Stuart Davies, author of HOLMES OF THE MOVIES does one for HOUND. Both are well worth listening to, among the best audio tracks yet released. Both HOUND and ADVENTURES hit the street April 27th, and retail for $19.98.

A Real Bomb

FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY
There was a moment in the 1980s when I thought, "It's over. They don't know how to make movies anymore. They've had almost 100 years to figure out how to do it and they've failed."

That moment occurred about 40 minutes into FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY.

What a tedious, inept, flat, suspense-free, well-meaning-but-obvious film. Almost every little thing about it is wrong, from the casting of Paul Newman as General Grove, the Army supervisor of the A-bomb's construction, whose shredded voice fails to command, to Laura Dern and John Cusack as the chemistry-free "love interest" whose story is wholly unconnected to the overriding tension between Grove and lead-scientist Oppenheimer (A-TEAM refugee Dwight Schultz), down to such things as well a scene ends, or when or why one scene succeeds another. FAT MAN is an object lesson in how not to make a movie.

Directed by Roland Joffé from a script credited to Bruce Robinson (WITHNAIL AND I), FAT MAN has many great contributors, from Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography and Ennio Morricone's music. But none of it gels. A TV movie on the subject would be better (in fact, I vaguely recall one broadcast on PBS). There, at least, they would have the time and latitude to fully explore the fascinating scientific and political contexts of the Bomb's invention. Reading Richard Rhode's fantastic book on the subject, from which this movie is shamelessly cribbed, is a better and more enriching experience.

Paramount's DVD of FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY (the names of the two bombs dropped on Japan) is excellent, as far as deploying the skills of DVD transference to honor the fantastic look of Zsigmond's work. But otherwise there is nothing. The movie must stand on its own (as all films, indeed all of us, must), and that is its downfall. FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY retails for $14.95 and hit the streets on April 27th.

Fish Story

BIG FISH
Our friend Damon Houx writes in:

Where are we with Tim Burton's career? For a while, he was on fire, and though he made films that seemed to be for the studios to cement his career (most notably the BATMAN films), with EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, BEETLEJUICE, and PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, he seemed to be able to put his personal touch on everything, and for which he developed a strong following.

But after the one-two punch of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and ED WOOD, Burton seemed lost: MARS ATTACKS was personality-less, or it played to Burton's most sadistic instincts, SLEEPY HOLLOW seemed made in Somnambulist mode, while the less said about his PLANET OF THE APES remake, the better. And then comes BIG FISH. The first truly adult Tim Burton film, it deals with the real consequences of death, and the dreams of a storyteller. It is probably his finest work to date (with the recall on the ED WOOD DVD, I'm still waiting to see how that one holds up), and arguably his best cast film. So, it seems, he's pulled out of a career funk, or perhaps this is a last gasp (his next film is CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, a remake that comes with loaded expectations).

BIG FISH tells it's story through Will Bloom (Billy Crudup, doing great work here), who's always felt in the shadow and second best to his father Edward Blume (played as an old man by Albert Finney, and by Ewan McGregor in his prime), whose fantastical stories used to entertain him, but he now feels that they're the boundary between himself and his father. Called home from France with his pregnant wife, it seems Edward is not long for this world, and Will uses his father's last days as a chance to finally suss out how much of his father's tall tales are really true. This journey highlights his father's fabulous and possibly fabricated stories that tell of how Edward left the town he grew up in, how he met and married his wife (played by Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange), his time in Korea, and how he helped rebuild a town — which may or may not have led to infidelity.

Like most of Blume's stories, it's not the story itself, but how it's told, and Burton pulls out all the stops here without ever overwhelming the story with his sensibilities. The film is about trying to understand or get a better grip on a person you've known all your life, and it's powerfully conveyed as the film heads towards its down- and upbeat conclusion.

BIG FISH hits home, especially if you're like me, because — like most men my age — I have deep rooted father issues that (much like Will's) stem from not feeling I ever got to know my father as a man. The main thrust of the film is Will trying to get over the resentment he had for his father's stories, as he felt they obstructed his being able to connect with his father, but comes to realize that his stories are as much true as they are exaggerated, and the film tries to explain how creating fictions is both a base human element, and how we use fiction as a tool to deal with our lives, but especially to put things in perspective. Many viewers were critical of Will's character, perhaps because they never felt that resentment that he does for his father (and surely the dividing line of this film is how people relate or related to their parents) but in some ways Crudup gives the best and hardest performance in the piece.

That said, no one in the world could play the younger Edward Bloom but Ewan McGregor. Though the Lucas films he's been involved in are tedious at best, this Scottish actor has shown himself to have wonderful range (from Junkie to Jedi), and he seems totally unafraid of doing anything (be it full frontal nudity or a musical number). Yet Edward's character is someone with gleam in his eyes and teeth, and treats everyone with respect and tenderness. He plays Bloom as the most perfect fabrication, who always uses his Southern gentility to deal with problems, and lives in a fantastical world. When he falls in love with Lohman's character it's hard not to both empathize and fall for Ewan as well.

Before I dive off the homoerotic deep end as I swoon as hard as any heterosexual man has ever swooned over another, he is well-met by his supporting players (including a brief bits from Steve Buscemi, Helena Bonham Carter, Missi Pyle and Danny DeVito in one of the few roles he's not irritating in), though the film boils down to the Bloom men, and how they are able to make peace with each other. Though the film has one funeral too many, it's still a powerfully affecting work, something that suggests Burton career may have turned another corner. A good corner.

The DVD presents the film in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) and in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. Burton does another commentary here, but this may be his best since he's guided through it by Burton on Burton author Mark Salisbury, or at least one assumes it's Salisbury since whomever it seems to be mentions Burton on Burton. Also included is a pop up icon that takes you to the seven featurettes that are also included and visible separately. This whole pop up icon thing only seems to work for New Line's Infinifilm series, so I don't know why other people bother. Also included are trailers for this and other Sony related products. The film streets April 27, and retails for $28.95.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From PANIC ROOM: "Yeah, Fincher directs three other directors in this film. But I think there's nothing that Dwight, myself, and Forrest like better than to have a director who knows what he wants. And the more he directs the more you appreciate the director's vision, someone who has a firm hand and a real signature. And in all of my career with all of the directors that I've worked with I've never worked with a director who had as much of a vision and as strong a signature — as strong an imprint on the final film — as David Fincher does. There isn't one section, there isn't one prop or costume or an acting decision — a facial gesture — that isn't something that he dreamed up or thought of and that directly came from his own mind. And you either embrace that or you don't. There are certain actors who like that and certain actors who don't. And I happen to love it." — Jodie Foster on the attention to detail that David Fincher brings to a film, at, 00:06:19 in the "making of" supplement.

NEXT TIME: Ingmar Bergman, REEFER MADNESS, and more!

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