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July 6, 2004

The Black Arts

SHADOWS, LIES, AND PRIVATE EYES — THE FILM NOIR COLLECTION, VOLUME NO. 1 [THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, OUT OF THE PAST, MURDER, MY SWEET, GUN CRAZY, THE SET-UP]
If movies are the greatest art form of the 20th century (and now the 21st), and genre movies the subdivision that shows off the power of movies the best, than film noir is the greatest kind of film of all. It gets the movieness of movies right without insulting the intelligence of the audience.

Sure, the other genres each have something to recommend them. Along with everyone else, I like westerns well enough, but in the end they are too "sunny," both in locale and disposition. Everyone needs a good laugh now and again and comedies at their best are truly great. Musicals are the most swoony and delirious of all the genres, blending reality and artifice, but for me they veer toward the animation end of the cinema spectrum.

But film noir reflects both the audience and the world it lives in. There aren't any movie theaters out in the old west. On the other hand, a guy having woman troubles can wander down the street and on impulse duck into a movie theater and see in a typical film noir some of the feelings, fears, and suspicious he is living through enacted up on the screen. Such a guy is likely to have a rather bleak view of life, and film noir is going to mirror that mood (and anyway, if you want western-like outdoors in your films, plenty of noirs confound expectation by have sunny settings, as found in Jacques Tourneur's OUT OF THE PAST and NIGHTFALL).

So having established that film noirmakes for the best of all possible movies, a question that might occur is, where did the genre come from?

(Noir is not even really a genre, but that is a topic too complicated to address right now. Suffice it to say that Raymond Durgnat in his book on Renoir and James Naremore in his brilliant MORE THAN NIGHT explore the definition of noir in detail.)

Pundits generally ascribe the birth of film noir to postwar gloom, but one can find film noirs as early as the late 1930s. As is well-known, film noir as a genre distinct from the general run of murder mysteries was first noticed by French critics seeing 10 years' worth of American films for the first time in the post-war period, and noticing a darkening, not just of mood and philosophy, but of camera style. But where did this "darkening" come from?

I think that a clue comes from the new Warner Home Video box set of five key films noir from the '40s. Here's the set up. As is well know, Turner bought MGM and then bought the Warner back catalog. Somewhere along the line he also acquired al the RKO films, which were owned by either Warner or MGM. Three of the five films in this package were made at RKO (ASPHALT JUNGLE was an MGM film, while GUN CRAZY was distributed by United Artists). And what was RKO famous for? CITIZEN KANE, low budgets, and Val Lewton.

Lewton made horror films, but with a sickly subtlety that was a far cry from the crude frights over at Universal, with all its vampires and werewolves. As a producer Lewton hired Tourneur and Wise, represented also in this package, as directors. I'd make an argument that the roots of film noir actually lie in the horror genre. No writer on film noir has mentioned this possibility that I know of (and I have far from read all the great books on the genre), but it seems kind of obvious, so someone must have linked the two genres.

Film noir is a blend of the murder mystery and the horror film. It takes the hide-your-low-budget lighting technique of RKO and other poverty row studios and marries it to crime stories that in turn borrow from horror films — but not the monsters part. Instead film noir takes terror as an emotion and the horror of personality aspect of monster movies which was later to find fruition in PEEPING TOM and PSYCHO a decade or so later, when it came into its own as a separate genre (evolving into the slasher film). Not all of the films in the Warner Home Video box set support this notion, but some do.

Taking the films in chronological order, the set starts off with MURDER MY SWEET, the 1944 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. It's the Marlowe novel in which Moose Molloy (Mike Mazurki), just out of jail, hires Philip Marlowe to locate his Velma, the floozy he left behind. Velma proves interestingly hard to find. Meanwhile, Marlowe is pursuing a parallel case involving a Mrs. Grayle (Claire Trevor).

Dick Powell's version of Marlow, directed by Edward Dymtryk, happened to be the first of Chandler's novels to be adapted to the screen. But starting off with a more or less straightforward private eye movie is a little misleading for the Warner noir set as a whole. However, the film is perhaps the first to introduce noirish elements into what was no doubt meant to be a mainstream kind of entertainment. The key noir element consists of the sequence in which Marlowe is drugged and held hostage. The film enters his mind, and surveys a landscape of paranoia and pursuit. The fact that this state of mind contradicts Marlowe's persona as conceived by Chandler and Marlowe's persona in the rest of the movie is less important than the fact that the zeitgeist demanded that sort of panic.

Another key noir element is that the film is told in flashback, convolutingly making explicit what is implied in the first person novels themselves, i.e., that Marlowe is telling us a story. The film's Marlowe is in a little bit of peril, as he is telling his story to the cops. Again, what is important is less the faithfulness to Chandler than the tilting of films toward firs person horror. The cops in noir are not your friend; and elsewhere you only find threats and terror.

The transfer of this film struck me as pretty good, and the sound audible. Each of the discs has at least a commentary track and the trailer, and this one features noir specialist Alain Silver chatting about the movie. Silver, the author or co-author of many helpful books on the subject, goes over some fundamentals; it's a track for beginners, rather than specialists. Also on hand is the film's rather shredded trailer.

On the other hand, OUT OF THE PAST (1947) is probably the quintessential noir. Funny, then, just how un-noirish it is.

For one thing it too starts out as a hardboiled detective story, with Robert Mitchum's Jeff Bailey hired to track down Kathie Moffat (played by Jane Greer, the definition of the femme fatale), who has absconded with $40 grand of her boyfriend Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas)'s money. Bailey finds Kathy in Mexico, but falls in love with him. He runs off with her, then she runs off. And Bailey stays on the run; until Sterling's henchman finds Bailey hiding out in Bridgeport, California, running a gas station. Bailey is summoned back to Sterling, who has another job for him that will take Bailey to San Francisco, which will mend the fences between them. It is, or course, all a set-up.

This is not how the story, based on a novel written by Daniel Mainwaring ("Geoffrey Homes"), called BUILD MY GALLOWS HIGH, is told, however. Instead, it's told in a series of long, long flashbacks. This provides the opportunity for Mitchum to drawl out a voice over narration. For another, it's not just set in an urban environment. Besides the Mexico sequence, it has the Northern California feeling of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, and the 'Frisco feel of THE MALTESE FALCON. In fact, you could argue that film soleil, the modern opposite contrary to crime story subjects.

But this all makes it sound like OUT OF THE PAST is all on the surface. In fact, it's a multi-layered tale, with an interesting internal symmetry, and for further elucidation on the mysteries of this mystery, I can direct the reader to Chris Fujiwara's excellent book about Tourneur, JACQUES TOURNEUR: THE CINEMA OF NIGHTFALL.

Would that Fujiwara had done the audio track here, for the one provided by James Ursini, a frequent collaborator of Silver's, is also pretty basic stuff. Mr. Ursini also has a slow delivery and his speech is peppered with qualifying "sort ofs" and "kind ofs" making him sound like a valley girl more than a film scholar.

GUN CRAZY (1949) is not only one of the most influential noirs but also one of the sexiest. It's also one of the hardest to see, or at least I've always found it so. Seeing it on the Warner DVD was my first ever viewing (though there is or was a VHS tape of it out there). I can say that it sure lived up to its rep, although it is also important to add quickly that the film is a lot odder and different from what you might expect.

For one thing, the film has a reputation for on-location realism, when in fact there are only a couple of scenes that use long takes and on location shooting, the most famous of which, showing them drive into a town and robbing a bank, actually very much like a similar shot in the earlier OUT OF THE PAST. Most of the rest of the film is shot on sets of delirious artificiality and moodiness.

In fact, like OUT OF THE PAST and many other noirs it is about four or five films in one. First it starts out as a troubled-lad social consciousness story as it tells of young gun-obsessed Bart (who grows up to be John Dahl). Then the film becomes a circus story, a fragile offshoot of both the horror film and the crime drama (NIGHTMARE ALLEY). This section begins when Tare and two of his now-adult childhood friends go to the carnival and see sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (the British Peggy Cummins, who has a deliciously curvy mouth). Tare and Starr practically eat each other up with their eyes, and on stage, when Tare rises to compete with her, use the guns on stage as flirtation devices. Soon enough, Tare joins the show, but there is sexual tension and jealousy in the air and soon the boy and girl leave the carnival. Now GUN CRAZY becomes what it's famous for, being the premiere couple on the run film, in the tradition of THEY LIVE BY NIGHT to THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS.

GUN CRAY is so many things that it adds up to a great deal. A measure of the film's enduring fame is that when writer Elizabeth Ward interviewed an aged Cummins about the film she asked the actress if she could have the coat and beret used in the film — and got them (as recounted in the audio track). Director Joseph H. Lewis is closely associated with noir but technically speaking this film is more in the tradition of film maudit, or outsider film, with its blend of tones and on-the-fly feel, like a Edgar G. Ulmer movie.

Somehow, GUN CRAZY also manages to have a sweeten black and white look, like MILDRED PIERCE, black and white that almost looks like color. The transfer is excellent. Extras consist of course of the trailer, plus a commentary track by Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant over at DVDTalk.com. It's a highly informative track that is also well structured; Mr. Erickson obviously worked very hard to make this track a standout.

Probably the weakest film in the batch is also the most ambitious, and THE SET-UP (1949) is the only one not only with a director track, but with additional commentary by Martin Scorsese.

THE SET-UP is told in "real time" and concerns a broken down aging boxer named Bill 'Stoker' Thompson (Robert Ryan) pressured to take a dive. He is also on the outs with his girlfriend (Audrey Totter). When Thompson elects to beat the crap out of his opponent anyway, the gangsters in turn beat him up after the fight (there's a little bit of the Butch Coolidge story from PULP FICTION to the story — or should I say that it's the other way around). Thompson maintains his integrity but at a real physical cost.

THE SET-UP feels more like a Stanley Kramer film than, say, a Jacques Tourneur movie. It is protesting the way its world works, though not to the extent of a true anti-boxing movie such as THE HARDER THEY FALL. Most noirs tend to be existential, however, not usually so specifically politically active, or I guess I should say so obviously so.

Another thing is that under the direction of Robert Wise the movie, despite its structural trick, has a sluggish pace and leaden and obvious characters. The boxers and the men who help them don't feel like fully fleshed out characters but signifiers of political points or variations on the theme of humbled struggling humanity. It doesn't have the racy urgency of, say SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, and its knack for deftly sketched characters.

What's funny is that Scorsese seems to like it so much. And what's even funnier is that one of the first things that Wise says on his part of the track is that he doesn't go in for flashing angles and attention-grabbing tracking shots — elements that Scorsese has almost built his career on. It makes you wonder just what Scorsese is seeing in the film (he praises it highly and talks about using it as research for RAGING BULL, obviously, but also about showing it to the cast and crew of his forthcoming THE AVIATOR). Scorsese even says at one point that he, too, dislikes attention-pandering filmmaking. What makes all this even trebly odd is that in fact the whole film is an exercise in attention grabbing, what with its real-time storyline, its dark shadows and harsh angles, and — yes — tracking shots.

Still, THE SET UP is a noir and ipso facto is fun to watch. Wise and Scorsese's comments are not unhelpful or uninteresting.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950) is probably one of the first films that pops into the general public's head when they think of film noir. It has the urban setting, the criminal milieu, the sense of dreams dashed and hopeless struggle against fate, and the chiaroscuro that so defines the genre. THE ASPHALT JUNGLE is also one of MGM's rare forays into noir territory, and that it is effective probably has much to do with the strength of its source novel and Huston's experienced direction.

Like me, some other viewers may frequently mix up in their doddering mind this film and Kubrick's heist film THE KILLING, both because the plots are vaguely familiar and both star Sterling Hayden (along with a bunch of other second tier actors including James Whitmore, Marc Lawrence, Louis Calhern,), whose character is fawned over by a dame. But in fact they are quite different: THE KILLING is actually more of a film soleil, and has a more detached view of its protagonists. Kubrick is also attracted to the tableaux morts which can have a (unintentionally?) comic effect. Kubrick is interested in the mechanics of how the thieves get there; Huston in how it all goes awry due to human weakness.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE has one additional feature unique to it, a short introduction to the film by Huston himself. It's not very long (00: 50) and is hard to hear, but an important historical artifact nevertheless. The commentary track is arguably the best of the lot, featuring college prof Drew Casper intercut with remarks by James Whitmore culled from an oral history. As with the rest of the discs, it also features the theatrical trailer.

The Warner Brothers box set of SHADOWS, LIES, AND PRIVATE EYES comes in a box with each disc in its own keep case (unusual for Warners, which prefers snap cases). All five films, which are all black and white, are full-frame (1.37:1), and have audible DD Mono, with subtitles in English, French and Spanish. The whole box goes for a mere $49.92, though the films also sell individually for $19.97. The package hits the street on Tuesday, July 6.

Break A Leg

WISEGUY: PREY FOR THE CITY
By its second season WISEGUY had developed something new if not unique in the history of series television, the mini-series approach to a weekly show, telling one big story in weekly chunks. From the nature of the earlier Sonny Steelgrave series, you could tell that the filmmakers weren't able to fully break away from the self-contained weekly story. Each episode of that arc tells one complete tale from beginning to end within the larger context of Vinnie Terranova's (Ken Wahl) infiltration of the New Jersey gangster's operation.

But by the second half of season one, however, with the Mel Profitt series, the writers finally were able to blow apart the traditional concept of series television (derived from radio) even further. Much more like a serial or a soap opera continuing over several weeks, each ep of WISEGUY built to a suspenseful cliffhanger within the overriding trajectory of Vinnie getting deeper into and learning more about the mysterious world of Mel Profitt (based perhaps on James Mills's survey of secret drug cartels, THE UNDERGROUND EMPIRE).

With the enthusiastic beginning of its second season, WISEGUY was poised to refine its unusual approach even further. They had a fascinating pair of stories, the first set in Vinnie's home town and concerning a racist organization led by a bombastic cynic (Fred Dalton Thompson) and his maniacal aide de camp (Paul Guilfoyle) making in-roads into Vinnie's working class peers, the other set in New York's garment industry, with a great gangster villain (Stanley Tucci) and an interesting family drama (between Jerry Lewis and Ron Silver) and some unusual twists and turns (mostly concerned with the character played by Patricia Charbonneau). Than, as often happens in the entertainment industry, disaster struck. Wahl broke his ankle on the set. If the series were going to continue, he had to be replaced, quickly and the story line revised. The producers summoned Anthony Denison, late of Michael Mann's CRIMEWAVE, to step in as a new character, John Henry Raglin. The story line creaked under the weight of the added implausibility, but yet it still survived. Still, the viewer can't help but view this part of the season through the prism of what Wahl would have done with this heady mix of over-achievers. If nothing else, the garment district story line shows how dependent TV shows are on personality. Denison isn't bad as the replacement. It's just that, like a Sergio Leone western, the program was built around its star, which thrived with its perfect marriage of actor sensibility and crime scene material. Raglin's story is more like something out of DONNIE BRASCO, a tale of a guy haunted by a past failure and eager to get back to his family, like William Petersen in Michael Mann's version of RED DRAGON (another Mann connection is that Charbonneau was in scenes deleted from MANHUNTER).

Now, for its third set of WISEGUY discs, StudioWorks Entertainment has pulled together this group of related episodes, from the first half of season two (the second half of season two had Vinnie entering the music industry, like Chili Palmer in Elmore Leonard's BE COOL).

The transfers are either better, or the shows themselves improved, as this box looks much less dingy than the earlier ones. The sound is what it is from those pre-stereo TV days, but the set does come in DD 51 and Surround. There are no subtitles.

Extras are a little less than in previous sets, in that there are no making ofs. On the other hand, there are four extras or off episodes that don't fit into the regular arcs, and they all have audio tracks from Wahl. The shows are the two-part "Stairway to Heaven" and "White Noise," from the middle of season two, and "The Reunion" and "Romp" from the third season. As before, Wahl sounds like he is answering questions (deleted after recording) that guide him to certain points. Among the interesting things he points out is an actor playing a doctor in one episode who kept improvising in order to bulk out his "reel" only to have his part rendered even less in the editing booth. Wahl tends to be pretty franks about things like this on his yak tracks.

The story arc business allows StudioWorks to issue WISEGUY in more subdivided chunks than a conventional TV show which would come out all at once. So basically, the consumer is paying about $120 bucks per season for about eight discs. In any case, the set hits the street on Tuesday, July 6, for $59.95 retail.

Just the Facts

CSI MIAMI: SEASON ONE
Proliferation is the name of the game in TV these days. If a producer hooks you with one show, be it LAW AND ORDER or SURVIVOR, they assume that you have an unquenchable thirst for more shows almost like it but not exactly. It seems to work. There are scores of reality shows, and about four LAWS AND ORDER, but each new spin-off has to first define what the audiences like in the source show while at the same time offer something new and different within that context.

So that's the trick with CSI, too. When deciding to do a spin-off, the makers had to figure out how to make it both new and old. The choice was to do the reverse of Vegas, which emphasized science, and had only a little bit of soap opera. MIAMI reverses that. It's mostly soap opera with a little bit of science. It's also more of a tough guy show. David Caruso plays a harder kind of guy than the more distant and intellectual Petersen.

As I began watching CSI: MIAMI, I kept asking myself, Who is Caruso reminding me of? He is hard-bitten, ungiving, bossy, by-the-book unless it suits his morality to bend the rules. As each of the 22 or so rolled past me, I realized, Caruso's clumsily named Horatio Caine is — T. J. Hooker! He has Shatner's sternness, his anger at the street scum who make his city a toilet,

I realized, there are two kinds on cops on TV. There are the nice guys, the friendly, sensitive cops who care, like Belker on HILL STREET BLUES. Then there are the mean guys, who always remind you of your dad, like Jack Webb from DRAGNET. By the book, just the facts-type guys with a soupcon of contempt for the very people he is obliged to protect. You've got Hardcastle, and you've got McCormick.

So the spirit of T. J. Hooker lives on in Horatio Caine (and please, Columbia Tri-Star, please release the original T. J. HOOKER series on DVD!) Suffice it to say, Caruso's hard guy routine gets pretty wearying after 22 hours. The other characters, who come and go and don't convince, don't offer much leavening to Caruso's unremitting fierceness. They are all kind of thought up real quick and don't change and don't really mesh.

Paramount has issued CSI: MIAMI looks great (it's in 1.85:1, enhanced) and sounds great (DD 5.1, and DD Surround, also in Spanish). There are four audio tracks by Danny Cannon and the various writers and producers, and five makings of, which don't really address, by the way, the departure of Kim Delaney after the sixth or so episode. CSI: MIAMI THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON hit the street June 29th and retails for $89.95.

Pizza Driver

MY VOYAGE TO ITALY
If there was one film that I have been really looking forward to seeing over the last five years, it has been MY VOYAGE TO ITALY (1999), Scorsese's sequel to his earlier A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES. It's one of my favorite minor genres: a great filmmaker talking about other great filmmakers. There aren't all that many examples of this genre. Actually, off the top of my head I can only think of one other, Peter Bogdanovich's film about John Ford. But do any of us doubt that if Tarantino were to make a doc based on his selections of and personal discussions about his favorite films in Austin every year would also be great?

In any case, Scorsese's film walks you through postwar Italian cinema, as he experienced it first on TV with his family and later as a student. First he talks mostly about Rossellini, Visconti, and De Sica. There is a brief transition to a key early Fellini film (I VITELLONI, about to come out on DVD via Criterion), and then some comments on Visconti's SENSO, back to Rossellini for VOYAGE IN ITALY, then to Antonioni, and finally Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA and 81/2.

A problem with a film such as this is that you instantly want to rush out and see all the films he is talking about. That's the problem I've had with PERSONAL JOURNEY (and I am still looking for THE RED HOUSE). One wishes to have the luxury of a Scorsese, who is able to luxuriate in film viewing, freed of the workaday worries of holding a job (who trying to write a book on Tarantino, like this reviewer). But Scorsese's summaries of the films are thorough, evocative, and he shows a keen attention to detail, both in matters of framing, as in L'AVENTURA, for example, and acting, as in a little seen De Sica film called THE GOLD OF NAPLES, in which he shows us how to see through the fraud that one character is perpetrating on the others.

This is an excellent, excitement inducing film, especially if you love Italian cinema, as I do. There are no extras on this two-disc set from Miramax, via Buena Vista, but at four hours the whole film is an "extra." Its format is 1.85:1 (enhanced), but that is a little misleading, as the disc recreates the dimensions of the original films, "windowboxing" the older non-widescreen movies. The audio is DD Surround, and though the Italian language is subtitled, you can also turn on English subtitles for the rest of the film (i.e., Scorsese talking). MY VOYAGE TO ITALY goes on sale Tuesday, July 6, and retails for $29.99.

My Dinner without Arcand

THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS
A snippet of Italian cinema intrudes into THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, but neither Scorsese nor any of the cast members comment on it further. It's a scene in which the main character, near his deathbed, tells the story of his life through the women in the media he has been successively obsessed with, Francoise Hardy being one of them. But his first love was the angelic Inés Orsini, star of the film CIELO SULLA PALUDE (HEAVEN OVER THE MARSHES), a now obscure but once fabled Italian film of 1949.

Regular readers of this reviewer's other manifestations at MoviePoopShoot.com may recall the previous account of THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, in which the director, Denis Arcand, was nearly a party to the author's demise. I do not hold this against him, however, and when I received the DVD I watched it all over again, and got teary eyed in the same spots I liked before. It remains among my top three favorite movies of last year (along with KILL and BILL LOST IN TRANSLATION).

What the disc (from Miramax via Buena Vista) adds to the mix besides an excellent widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) in DD 5.1 in French with English subtitles when necessary, is an hour long television show about the movie.

It is no ordinary "making of" promotional affair. Instead it is something that probably wouldn't or couldn't appear on American television, and is a measure of how powerful the film was to its original Canadian audiences.

Most of the film's cast gathers at an empty house and have a meal (not unlike the last meal in the film). Arcand doesn't show up, but almost everyone else does, and they eat, talk, philosophize, smoke, drink wine, and sneak off to the bathroom. Among the cast members who arrive for this "Dinner Without Arcand" are my beloved Marie-Josée Croze, Rémy Girard (who plays the character dying of liver cancer in the movie), and Stéphane Rousseau (who plays his son, and who is a stand up comic in real life, though he is particularly funny here). They discuss the medical industry, which figures highly in the film, the educational system, American, the differences between this film and its predecessor, THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, and the differences between the generations, especially poignant given that there is a generational mix among the cast. Though normally sitting around and listening to actors talk isn't the most edifying of experiences, here it is because the thespians aren't just talking about themselves or sharing old horror stories about bad directors or producers, but engaging with the ideas in the film and the state of their country.

It's not an audio commentary track by the wonderfully articulate Arcand, which would have perhaps served to explain to non-Canadian viewers the social issues at state in the film, and the hour long show does require that the viewer know something about the state of the world and conflicts in Canada, but nevertheless it is a pleasure to spend the time with this interesting and interested people. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS hits the shelves next Tuesday, July 13th, and retails for $29.99.

What's Your 20?

RENO 911: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
It's inter-texuality gone mad. First there were sit-coms. Then there were reality crime shows. Now there is a sit-com parodying reality crime shows. It also happens to be one of the funniest shows on television, a program that finally gives Comedy Central a right to its name. It is also a thrilling example of the last new genre to be invented by the movies, the mockumentary.

The premise is simple. We are in Reno, simpleton younger sister to Las Vegas, amid a group of clueless, selfish, self-absorbed cops. There's Deputy Raineesha Williams (Niecy Nash), Deputy Trudy Wiegel (Kerri Kenney), Deputy James Garcia (Carlos Alazraqui), Deputy S. Jones (Cedric Yarbrough), Deputy Travis Junior (Ben Garant), Deputy C. Johnson (Wendy McLendon-Covey) and Lieutenant Jim Dangle (Tom Lennon). As in the old WKRP IN CINCINNATI, the crew always has a timesaving scheme or attention-getting device on hand, but almost always their plans go horribly awry.

The first season of RENO 911 only goes 14 episodes, and since each show is only 30 minutes long or less, so the season only takes up two convenient discs. However, this show is so funny you'll think it is a full four or five discs. There really hasn't been a program this amusing since SEINFELD, or the old days of Nat Hiken, when sit-coms were truly comedies of situation, not insult humor.

Paramount's disc edition of the Comedy Central show is full frame (1.33:1) in to-be-expected excellent transfers, and DD 2.0.

Paramount has also offered a wealth of supplements. The first episode has an audio commentary from actors Niecy Nash and actor and co-creator Thomas Lennon. That's followed by episode two finding the cast of the show trying to recreate the real audio track of the show from memory. Director Michael Jann and actress Wendy McLendon-Covey do the honors on the third episode. Skipping a few eps, on number nine actress and co-creator Kerri Kenney and actor and co-creator Ben Garant chat. Finally, episode 13 features actors Cedric Yarbrough and Carlos Alazraqui. Finally, the DVD includes 32 minutes of alternate scenes/takes and outtakes, as well as promos for other Comedy Central shows. There is also supposed to be an Easter egg on the disc, but frankly, if the manufacturers want me to view the extras, they won't come as fucking buried Easter eggs. RENO 911 retails for $29.95 and hit the street Tuesday, June 22.

Park Rows

SOUTH PARK THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON
Our colleague Damon Houx writes in:

SOUTH PARK is still one of the most exciting, fresh, and funniest shows running, and for SEASON FOUR creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone took the series further into new depths of depravity and incorrectness.

Two major changes (and one minor one) mark the season. Most notably, the main cast grew with the inclusion of a character named Timmy. Though Comedy Central was scared of adding an obviously handicapped child who ran around in a wheelchair and only seemed capable of saying his name, they reluctantly let Parker and Stone put him on air. What Comedy Central almost failed to recognize is that pushing buttons is what the show is best at, and quickly Timmy became the thing that rejuvenated the show for those sick of the first season catchphrases (that noted, Timmy really only has one catchphrase: "Timmy!") In "Timmy 2000" (Ep. 404), Timmy even bests Phil Collins (a favorite target that season because Trey and Matt lost a Best Song Oscar to Collins) through his band "Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld," and Collins gets even more abuse as it's suggested only people on Ritalin would ever enjoy his music (which may be a fair assessment of his recent output).

The other major change happens midseason when the boys graduate to fourth grade and are taught by a bra-less Janet Reno look-alike named Miss Choksondik, while Mr. Garrison moves to teaching Stan's brother Ike in Kindergarten. The minor one is that bit-part player Butters, the stuttering mama's boy, becomes more of a major player in the show (he is developed further in SEASON FIVE). Here, his comic possibilities start to become apparent towards the end of the season, especially in "A Very Crappy Christmas" (Ep. 417).

This season also marks the point where the boys started wading more directly into the flow of current events. Though they had touched on some national issues previously, this is the first season where the boys were on top of them; so much so that in the episode entitled "Quintuplets 2000" (Ep. 403) the boys were making Elian Gonzales jokes at Janet Reno's expense only days after the incident happened (Parker and Stone usually have episodes ready the day before air, and the nature of production allows them this freedom). In fact they were able to beat THE SIMPSONS with a joke (the two complained on the SEASON THREE audio commentary that they are often thinking up material THE SIMPSONS have already done, and even poked fun at themselves in the appropriately title episode "Simpsons Already Did It" in Season Six) as they got to have their young male members appear in a boy band named FINGERBANG, as part of Cartman's desire to get a million dollars by being rich and famous. They were also able to parody the Florida recount in "Trapper Keeper" (Ep. 413) by having a kindergarten election hang on an absent student, which leads Rosie O'Donnell to try and interfere with the election while main characters Kyle Stan, and Kenny, try to keep Cartman from the trapper keeper that becomes much like THE TERMINATOR'S Skynet.

The quality of comedy is so high in this season, that there's few episodes that don't offer a good laugh or two, with "Something You Can Do with your Finger" (Ep. 409), and "Fat Camp" (Ep. 415) the obvious standouts. "Fat Camp" may be the best of the bunch; it's an episode in which Cartman's bastard nature shines through, as he tries corrupting other children who are also stuck in a fat camp, while Kenny becomes famous for performing JACKASS/Tom Green-centric stunts.

Paramount presents the series on three discs in 2.0 stereo Surround. Extras include the mini-commentaries also done on SEASON THREE, in which the boys talk from generally two to five minutes on each episode. Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like they stop before interesting tangents could have been explored, but then, they don't exactly seem excited to be recording them. That said, there are many nuggets of insight offered on their changing work plans (with this season, they tried to reduce the number of subplots in each episode), and about their love and frustration with their wordless characters like Kenny and Timmy. SOUTH PARK THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON hit the street June 29, and retails for $49.99.

NEXT TIME: Some SPIDERMANs, THE SNAKE PIT, and more!

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