All Unbored
THE STATION AGENT
The good thing about DVDs is that "quiet" "little" movies have a life beyond the screen. When people go into movie theaters they expect something big, overwhelming. TROY. THE MATRIX. TERMINATOR. When a film focuses on ordinary people, it can almost seem like a major letdown to some viewers.
In THE STATION AGENT, the main character is literally small. Fin (short for Finbar) McBride (the charismatic Peter Dinklage) is a "little person," a train freak who has walled himself off in his hobby, away from what he takes to be an intrusive and judgmental society. When he inherits a small railroad station, he moves from Hoboken to rural New Jersey and sets up shop in what he must hope is joyous isolation (though you wouldn't be able to tell from the expression on his face). But three people keep forcing themselves on him: Joe (Bobby Cannavale), the talkative operator of a nearby hot dog stand; Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), an artist whose marriage has fallen apart after the death of her son; and Cleo (Raven Goodwin), a little girl who accepts Finn for what he is.
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There isn't much of a story in THE STATION AGENT, written and directed by actor-turned-helmer Thomas McCarthy, and the only villains are the self-destructive impulses of its main characters. Yet each of them makes a gradual step towards health, or change, or love (they often mean the same thing in stage-oriented American dramas). Fin even falls into a relationship with a cute blonde local librarian (Michelle Williams) with a troubled background. It's a powerful, if not entirely perfect film, and the DVD release is a fine antibiotic to the onslaught of truly big pictures we are getting in the movie theaters right now.
Buena Vista offers up this Miramax release THE in a modest but respectful package. It comes with a good widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) with DD 5.1 audio (not fully exploited by the film itself), with a French language track and English and French subtitles.
Supplements consist of several trailers for other Miramax releases, a commentary track with McCarthy, Dinklage, Clarkson, and Cannavale, and four deleted scenes. The deleteds add little to the story, except for an additional ending beyond the one that stands in the film, and which hints at a romance between Joe and Olivia. The yak track is very good, with each of the participants holding their own, making jokes, talking out of school, but also providing insight into low budget filmmaking. It's more of a celebration of the film, which fans will appreciate, than an in-depth analysis, but it is still useful.
The animated, musical menu offers 21-chapter scene selection, and the disc comes in a keep-case. THE STATION AGENT hit the streets on June 15th and retails for $29.99.
Cliffhanger
TOUCHING THE VOID
My idea of nature is a nice park with mowed lawns and cement sidewalks that wend their way through the carefully manicured trees. So you can imagine how inconceivable to me it is that people would want to climb mountains, risking disorientation, blackened digits from frostbite, and a horrible death — one that might lead to your permanent residence on the slopes for all to see, like the doomed Japanese party that can still be gawked at on the climb up Everest.
But one of the virtues connected with knowing nothing of the outdoors is that when a movie like TOUCHING THE VOID comes along, it is doubly suspenseful and painful to watch because its contents are unknown, despite the fact that the film is based on a book by Joe Simpson, one of the two Britishers at the center of the film's real life story.
Simpson and his friend Simon Yates decided, in 1985, to climb the then-unconquered 21, 000 foot Siula Grande peak in Peru. On the way down, they ran into trouble. The usual storms, but also Simpson fell and broke his leg; Yates, in a moment of desperate confusion, cut the lifeline. Simpson ended up in a crevasse with his lower leg jammed up his knee. Yates made his way back down to camp, and Simpson, without fire or water, had to find his way out of the crevasse and down the mountain's rocky lower regions, hoping that Yates, who thought Simpson was dead, was still there.
It's an exciting, if eventually kind of tedious, story, and it is recounted by the actual participants, in talking head mode, with actors re-enacting some of Simpson and Yates's actions (but on the Alps, not in Peru). It's beautifully photographed, and appears to be a fully fleshed out tale.
But boy, thank god for DVD extras. It turns out that Simpson and Yates no longer agree on how close their friendship is or was, and Simpson turns out to be something of a hotheaded guy with a tendency to temper tantrums. We don't learn this in the film proper, but in the three extras on the disc.
You can't really call this film a documentary. It falls into a new genre, one that blends doc footage and re-enactments, and is as manipulated as a fiction film. It's the kind of thing one is likely to see on one of the several hundred cable non-fiction channels. But then, can any film really really be non-fictional? Director Kevin MacDonald does his level best to just lay out the facts, but only in the supplements do some of the complexities of the case come to light. Yates is a little sour on the mountain community's reaction to his rope cutting, and perhaps a tad jealous of Simpson's international success with the book. Simpson, for his part, is unaware that Yates thinks that they were never really friends, and that the Siula Grande incident is a self-proclaimed minor one in his life.
When MacDonald gets Simpson and Yates back together on camera 17 years later, along with base-camp companion Richard Hawking, up there on Siula Grande, Simpson acts like Ripley, asked to return to the Alien moon just one more time, and he can't escape the feeling that something dreadful is going to happen. The practical minded Simpson is also irked by the filmmakers' obsession with the technical side of their job at what appears to be the expense of the emotional side of the story and his own triumph over adversity. This side of the events is told in "The Making of Touching the Void" (22 minutes), "Return to Siula Grande" (22 minutes), and "What Happened Next" (nine minutes) which feels like the real end of the film and recounts the descent from Siula Grande to Lima, and then London.
MGM's DVD of TOUCHING THE VOID comes in a gorgeous widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) with DD 5.1 audio, and English and Spanish subtitles. The remaining supplement is the theatrical trailer, along with some other MGM trailers. TOUCHING THE VOID retails for $29.95, and hit the street June 15th.
Forget Me Knot
50 FIRST DATES
A mainstream ENDLESS SUNSHINE, a MEMENTO without the murder, a more romantic CLEAN SLATE, 50 FIRST DATES was another surprise hit from Adam Sandler. My views on the original film are already transcribed, but Columbia Tristar has now brought the film to DVD, so it commits a trans-column migration.
DATES is just the right size for the screen. In fact, it is even smaller. It comes in a full frame option, which is the disc I received. Weirdly, the menus and the extras are all in widescreen, though in some cases non-anamorphically.
This disc comes loaded with extras. The main one is a commentary track between star Barrymore and director Peter Segal. They form something of a mutual admiration society, but Barrymore impresses with her authentic interest in film and her producer's moxie, and Segal obviously knows what he is doing and thinks things through. It's a pretty good chat that, as usual, almost makes you like the movie, or feel hard-hearted for not liking it, especially the moment when Segal says that he received a letter from a disabled person thanking him for not "curing" Barrymore from her syndrome and instead showing the characters working around it.
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Next up are five deleted scenes with optional commentary. They don't add much but completists will enjoy them. There are also three music videos, filmographies for seven cast and crew members, trailers for 15 other Columbia discs (including the forthcoming SEINFELD season discs), three "making ofs," including an episode of Comedy Centrals REEL COMEDY, a "blooper reel," and an ad for Sandler's forthcoming comedy album (the ad parodies Tarantino's trailer for KILL BILL). 50 FIRST DATES retails for $28.95 for either the widescreen or the FF version, and hit the streets on June 15th.
NEXT TIME: Some SPIDERMANs, THE SNAKE PIT, A WOMAN IS A WOMAN, MAMA ROMA, RENO 911, and more!
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