Brotherhood of the Wolves

When THE BROTHERS GRIMM (Dimension, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, December 20, 2005; also in UMD) originally came out, I noted in my theatrical review that it struck me as something of a parable about working within the studio system, or rather, a thinly disguised account of the Weinsteins versus Disney.

But the big screen demands big ideas. Seeing it again on the small tube, I found it both less grand but also less boring. Perhaps it helped that Gilliam himself was chatting me through the cinematic "text."

Gilliam nowhere makes any note in his audio commentary track of a hidden theme or subtext reflecting modern times. Instead, he is at pains to emphasize how difficult the experience of making the film turned out to be and how his various actors came to his spiritual rescue, cheering him up and making him able to get the job done.

For it was just a job. Gilliam admits both that he disliked the script when originally presented to him some four or five years ago, and that he was also in need of work. The director goes into a little bit of background about the film's genesis and eventual presence in the hands of the Weinstein Brothers at Dimension, but not much. He does have a few acerbic things to say about working for them. For example, he notes that the Weinsteins hate facial hair in their posters. They seem to think that if you can't see the actors' faces clearly the poster won't work. Gilliam takes it as a small triumph that he was able to get a whiskered Heath Ledger into both the film and the poster.

All in all, this time around the film was rendered much more entertaining by Gilliam's humorous and robust chat. Dimension's disc also happens to be reasonably loaded with additional elements celebrating the film.

There are 12 deleted scenes, with an optional commentary By Gilliam, and a play-all option. As a whole the deleteds flesh out some aspects of the story, or enhance character, or offer over-the-top turns by Peter Stormare and others whom Gilliam heartbreakingly had to cut out. For the record, the chapters are: Escargot, Brothers In Cages, Cavaldi Warns Will, In The Forest, Cinderella Story, Will To The Rescue, The Chef Gets The Chop, "No Hidey Hidey Secrets", The Fat Soldier, "Where Is This Tower?", Sasha's Funeral Procession, and "Ready For the Life On the Road?" The most significant is a scene with a malevolent tree. The scene appears here slightly unfinished, and Gilliam's explanation is that the sequence itself was too big to appear at that juncture in the film, though one wonders if perhaps the prominent walking trees in the LOTR series served as too much of a cinematic yardstick.

There are also two making ofs, Bringing The Fairytale To Life and The Visual Magic Of The Brothers Grimm, which are straightforward EPK stuff, except for Gilliam's irrepressibly rebellious disposition.

The widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) is quite good, and the DD sound DD 5.1 good, especially in echoing castles and grand halls, and in wind swept forests. There is also a French language track, and Spanish and English subtitles. The animated, musical menu offers 22-chapter scene selection.

Thank god for Luc Besson. He's the best thing that has happened to French cinema since a bunch of critics got 'hold of cameras in the late 1950s and decided to remake cinema. Pauline Kael famously decried the advent of Besson in her review of LA FEMME NIKITA, basically seeing him as a Spielberged Gaul; though she was allegedly a big fan of De Palma and other visual technicians of violence, for some reason Besson's innovations were adjudged dire, probably because they were foreign. To instant fans, however, Besson supplied a much-needed dose of zest in a national cinema that for the previous 15 years had concentrated on programmatic sex comedies with no sex and domestic dramas that covered well-worn ground.

But Besson is more than just Besson. As a figure of some importance, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, yes, indeed, the French Spielberg, he produces the films of others, and he has become something that other filmmakers aspire be.

One entry point into Besson's importance to European cinema and in fact international cinema is his insinuating influence on CRIMSON RIVERS and its sequel, a terrific pair of action-laden films that blend the policier with the serial killer genre, a la Fincher, and the horror tale. Via CRIMSON RIVERS-style movies, the French action film Besson has influenced American actioners in an indirect method, and the two (so far) BOURNE movies, with their blend of gritty street work and tireless score, show the influence of Besson and his acolytes.

EMPIRE OF THE WOLVES [L'Empire des loups] (Paramount, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, December 20, 2005; also in UMD and full frame) is only the latest offspring from the Besson aesthetic to reach my DVD tray. Like CRIMSON RIVERS (and even the Vincent Cassel western based on the BLUEBERRY strip, RENEGADE), it starts out seeming to be one thing, and becomes another wholly other thing. But even that may be saying too much because now you'll be primed to anticipate a major narrative jump.

I'll only say this much: that the film begins with a woman, Anna Heymes (the five-ten Arly Jover from the first BLADE), having horrible nightmares and imagining that her social set, including her wealthy husband, are all wolves disguised, CARPENTER FILM-like, from normal prying human eyes. Meanwhile, a young police detective Paul Nerteaux (Jocelyn Quivrin, also in SYRIANA) is investigating what may turn out to be a string of serial killings in the Turkish sector, and for entree he needs disgraced former cop Schiffer (the essential Jean Reno). To say any more, much less to account for how these seemingly different narrative threads intersect, is to spoil the pleasure of this excellent, fast paced, unpredictable, polished thriller.

On a side note, I've noticed something of a shift in the standard for female beauty in recent films. This is common, and with film being an "always present" art form, the fluctuations in taste are always there to remind you. From Clara Bow to Gretta Garbo to Carole Lombard to Veronica Lake to Grace Kelly to Audrey Hepburn to Karen Black to Margot Kidder to Meg Foster to Julia Roberts is to trace a particular evolution from commonness to exoticism to classicism and back all over again. If EMPIRE is any measure (and it may not be), the new standard of female beauty is a rather square jawed fashion model mien (I also had a hard time telling the two main women in EMPIRE apart, they looked so much alike). I also suspect Jover was assigned to this film because she evoked both Anne Parillaud of FEMME NIKITA and Carrie-Anne Moss of MATRIX.

As is common with Sony (and before that Columbia's) discs of recent European B films, the supplements are nil while the transfer and sound (widescreen 2.35:1 enhanced, with DD 5.1) are excellent. The static, silent menu offers 28-chapter scene selection, and there are trailers for THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE, THE CAVE, USS POSEIDON: PHANTOM BELOW, 8MM2, RAMPAGE: THE HILLSIDE STRANGLER MURDERS, LA MENTALE (THE CODE) and THE ESCAPIST.

One of my favorite pop novels is Mickey Spillane's obscure stand-alone thriller, THE DEEP. Spillane always liked to have surprise endings in his books. With his comic book pop cult sensibility he wanted the reader to rise to the ending which would build and build and build to the last page, the last paragraph, and, in the case of THE DEEP, the last word. It's got a great premise, though I'm not sure how plausibly it all is as you read the thing, but the whole book doesn't make sense — you don't even really know what that premise even is — until you get to that last word.

This trick is hard to do in movies, but CRY WOLF (UNRATED) (Rogue-Universal, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, December 20, 2005; also in UMD and full frame) manages the unusual task of confining its surprise ending to the last shot (technically, the penultimate shot). It's a nifty little thriller (it's not a horror film, where it will most likely be found in video shops), which was possibly mis-served by its trailer which, in order to fool you over the surprise plot twists, gave the impression that CRY WOLF was another '70s-revival serial killer teen slasher film.

I had wanted to see CRY WOLF in the theaters when it first came out, but missed it, and now I'm glad that I caught up with it on DVD. I won't go into the plot much except to say that it takes place on the grounds of a private school for bored rich kids some of whom have a private "liar" game that they play among themselves. When a student is stabbed to death in the woods, the liars game intersects with the suspicion that there is a serial killer amongst them. In tone or setting, the film might inspire memories of the first URBAN LEGEND in some viewers, but it's much better than that (and for the first few minutes, the film felt more like a foreign import, though it was filmed at an existing school in Richmond, Virginia). Among the cast are Lindy Booth as the femme fatale, and a virtually unrecognizable Jon Bon Jovi as a school official.

The film is directed by Jeff Wadlow, who has been kicking around as in various capacities in the film biz and even appeared as an actor in PEARL HARBOR and ROSWELL. He's also made a number of short films, two of which are appended to the DVD. Horror films are generally opportunities for up and coming filmmakers to show not only that they can create a coherent story but that they have some visual zest and acuity. Here, Wadlow emphasizes the story, but his visuals are subtly geared toward putting the viewer into the minds of alternating consciousness. In some scenes, you can leap from as many as three different perspectives.

CRY WOLF is about the seventh film (of about 20) from Rogue Pictures I've seen since 1999, and almost all of them have at least some facet that separates it from the pack. Rogue distributed the nice little Alec Baldwin film THICK AS THIEVES, produced the clever CHERRY FALLS, distributed SHAUN OF THE DEAD in the US, and produced and distributed SEED OF CHUCKY and the remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (which I alone appear to have liked). There is usually something vigorous, risky, or sexy about their films so far, even though they appear to rely on remakes or sequels thus far.

The widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) is good, with fine DD 5.1 audio, along with English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The main supplement is a commentary track with director and co-writer Waldow, producer and co-writer Beau Bauman and editor Seth Gordon. The trio also chat over virtually all of the other supplements in optional yaks. These include a host of deleted or extended scenes, an alternate scene, "Wolves, Sheep and Shepherds: Casting the Roles," "Behind the Scenes: Enter the Sinister Set," a tour by star Julian Morris, and "Before They Cried Wolf: The Filmmakers' Short Films," offering TOWER OF BABBLE and MANUAL LABOR, which won the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival. The animated, musical menu offers 18-chapter scene selection.

I worry about Jennifer Connolly. I really do. It's not just her mellifluous name, or because I deeply love her and worship the ground she walks on. We all do that, because she represents something akin to the perfect American girl, cute yet beautiful at the same time, ageless yet also mutable. I know nothing about her personal life, but her Oscar acceptance speech, full of unease and uttered from a corpse-like vessel, must have been a symptom of some kind of inner turmoil.

She seems to seek out projects that reflect that inner agony. Since she's reached her majority, Connolly has played a series of tormented and tortured women, usually abused wives of one kind or another, but also debased drug addicts, and a woman with an irrational obsession with her house. For the most part, they are not very good films: they don't sing, and they won't live, and I fret that she is lured to this scripts by their psychotic elements instead of the quality of the talent behind them.

In DARK WATER: UNRATED WIDESCREEN EDITION (Touchstone, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, December 20, 2005; also in UMD, full frame, and rated edition) she plays another nut, a recently dump mother of one who suffers migraines and other ailments. Based on a J-horror film (Hideo Nakata's 2002 Honogurai mizu no soko kara), it's another recent film, like PANIC ROOM and HIDE AND SEEK, in which a single parent moves into a creepy new abode with a female child only to find bad things starting to happen. The main issue is that there is a horrible leak from the apartment above, and neither the landlord (John C. Reilly) nor the super (Pete Postlethwaite) seem to be willing or able to do anything about it.

I am going to guess that this DEEP WATER is significantly different from its Asian progenitor, that it is less about the ghost and its impulse to revenge and more about the woman's descent into madness. Curiously, on the disc's supplements, director Walter Salles and the others are eager to liken it to Polanski films such as REPULSION and ROSEMARY'S BABY, and seem disinclined to acknowledge its Japanese predecessor. Again I am guessing that that's because the filmmakers have taken significant liberties with it. Here, Connolly's Dahlia learns that something bad happened to the little girl who lives or lived up stairs (I got the impression from the trailer that the whole floor above them was abandoned but that appears not to be the case, which may explain why the trailer is not on the disc). But abandonment issues are more important to Japanese audiences than to American's, who are more interested in endangered adults and supposedly safe havens that bite back.

Anyway, Dahlia eventually solves the "mystery" but at the cost of her life and / or soul. I thought that this film offered up a hell of a bummer of an ending, but even before that, Dahlia is so depressed and degraded by city life in the film that it feels only a few steps up from the aggressive despair of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.

There are several supplements on the disc, and of course none of them address the issues presented here, and how could they? As usual with EPK material, the speakers are woefully unaware of how bad what they are making is going to turn out. It leads off with Beneath the Surface: The Making of DARK WATER, traditional EPK stuff in five parts, and is followed by The Sound of Terror addresses the sound production on the film (which is pretty good), while Analyzing DARK WATER Sequences is not as intellectually robust as its title sounds. An Extraordinary Ensemble celebrates a great cast that has been put to waste.

There are two deleted scenes, one of which shows Dahlia washing her laundry at a public Laundromat (after a bad experience in her apartment building's facilities). Here she is shown on the talking to a girlfriend, which makes her seem less isolated, which is probably why the scene was cut. The second one shows her daughter appearing strong in the face of a terrible loss.

Touchstone's widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) is excellent, and the sound, as mentioned, is great. It also has French, Spanish, and English subtitles, and a couple of trailers, for FLIGHTPLAN and other recent releases. The animated, musical menu offers 24-chapter scene selection. As for Jennifer, I'll wager that in person she is a really funny person. Could someone please convince her to get into a comedy, something like RUMOR HAS IT, where she can delight us and endear herself to us all over again?

Letters

From Paul Saadeh:

"What disturbs me most about these "Passholes" is not their obsession, but their rudeness and anti-social tendencies. It's their abhorrent behavior that I wonder about — which came first — their obsession, or their rudeness? It could be that their obsession and rudeness are all symptomatic of anti-social personalities. Instead of the momentary escape we get from film, they use it to totally disassociate themselves from society. Therefore, they have trouble when they actually have to deal with other people."

From Iman Crawford:

"Regarding BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA, it's interesting that you think there are only six human Cylons. I'm thinking twelve, as in the Twelve Lords of Kobol. It appears the Cylons are using the religion of the human beings to influence their actions. What would be better than to present themselves as archangels to the one true god? It appears you haven't watched season two. It's highly recommended, and season three starts Jan 6th. A few spoilers on Sci-Fi hint at the fact the Cylons may start to behave just like human beings in their inter-Cylonian(?) relationships. IMO, it's the best show on TV right now — though I haven't watched the mini-series yet. My wife keeps telling me to go rent it, and quit asking her questions about the origins of the Cylons."

From Barry Hertz:

"In your review of BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA SEASON 1 you wonder whether the show creators have mentioned if there are more than four Cylon replicants/models. In fact, towards the end of the mini-series, Adama receives a note (from whom we never find out) in his room, which says there are actually 12 Cylon models. It will be interesting to see how this plays out."

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, December 28, at 9 AM.

COMING SOON:The best and worst of 2005, a package of Hithchcock movies and TV shows, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!

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