With the arrival of HILL STREET BLUES: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (Fox, 850 minutes, 1981, NR, full frame, DD mono in English, French and Spanish, with English, French and Spanish subtitles, animated musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection per episode, keep cases in slip case, three discs, $39.95, released on Tuesday, January 31, 2006), we get to rehearse the same old things that we have all be saying about the show for decades: that it was groundbreaking, that it pushed the limits of taste, that it promoted the ensemble approach to episodic television, that it introduced story arcs, that it cast real looking people instead of stars, that it blended drama and comedy, that it adapted the structure of the soap opera for nighttime TV, and so on. What I have to say is, HILL STREET BLUES had one fine damn theme song by Michael Post. And even that observation isn't original.

I know that most TV snobs probably view Post as a prolific hack, but his themes often capture some aspect of the show that the viewer himself won't finally get to know until about seven episodes in. NYPD Blue's theme captures the jangly driven edginess of its view of New York life. HSB's theme is surprisingly romantic and mellow for a cop show. What that suggested but which one didn't realize until much later is that the music is announcing that this isn't a cop show but a job show, a romantic sitcom disguised as a cop show. Originally, the show wasn't even going to leave the station, just like a sit com. And when it did, it went straight into typically overlit downtown Los Angeles street scenes.

Watching the whole first season again I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the show was set. It's never officially stated where it is, but the uniforms look Chicago. It's definitely east of the Mississippi: the local television station's call letters begin with a W; and at one point one of the characters says that he's never been west of Illinois. But I could never find a license plate to freeze the frame on, or a driver's license or anything with an address. It's like trying to get the name of the janitor on SCRUBS.

Anyway, Post's theme is great and sticks in the mind long after the flaws of the first season are forgotten. They include making public defender Joyce Davenport too icy and Faye too needy and bitchy. The common tropes of the crime show are lazily included, such as Furillo always getting a phone call just as he is about to kiss Joyce. Often the humor is a little too low and doesn't fit in with the contrasting drama. It got a little preachy about AA. But eventually, the show got better in subsequent seasons when the villains, such as Police Chief Daniels, got better.

Ultimately, it's the casting of the show that is outstanding, even down to the momentary criminals who pass through the precinct, such as Michael Tucker, David Caruso, and Mimi Rogers. And the show had a group of directors who really knew what they were doing, such as Scott Brazil, who went on to do THE SHIELD. My favorite character was Belker's girlfriend from 1983 to 1987, Officer Robin Tataglia, played by Lisa Sutton, who had the smilingist eyes in all television.

Supplements are surprisingly meager for a show that has had such an influence, and I wasn't too happy with the transfers, either. They seemed dark and muddy (but then, so did the show). There is a commentary on the pilot, with Bochco and others, and on the episode "I Never Promised You a Rose, Marvin," with Bochco, Joe Spano, and James B. Sikking. The sixth side of the set has "Roll Call: Looking Back at Hill Street Blues," in which Marinaro, Hamel, Haid, Sikking, Spano, Warren, and Bosson form a half circle in director chairs and reminisce for an hour about the show. Haid (one of several HSBs actors who went on to direct) notes interestingly that when they made the first seven episodes, it was in a vacuum. It wasn't until the first few episodes aired that HILL STREET mania struck the nation, won them Emmys, and affected the show.

Like Truffaut, I love the look of book text on the big screen. And I am helpless before the sentimentality of book learning. In the recent Arcand film THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, I am always moved to tears by the climactic scene in which a man whose father has just died more or less bequeaths the man's whole house and its huge library to the troubled once-heroin addicted childhood friend (Marie-Josée Croze) whom he just might have had an affair with. The way she looks and handles the books is more sensual than most sex scenes shot that year. Being a sucker for such scenes I was deeply moved by a similar scene and plot point in the adaptation of the pink lit novel IN HER SHOES.

IN HER SHOES (Fox, 130 minutes, 2005, PG-13, 2.32:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English, and DD Stereo Surround in French and Spanish, with English and Spanish subtitles, animated musical menu with 28-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, January 31, 2006) is a stylish, sluggish, quasi-predictable and apparently faithful adaptation Jennifer Weiner's popular novel, here put together by the team of credited screenwriter Susannah Grant (POCAHONTAS, ERIN BROCKOVICH) and, counter-intuitively, Curtis Hanson.

Hanson, whose name suggests Nordic origins immerses himself in this essentially Jewish and Woody Allen - Seinfeldy milieu (tony Philly law firm, Florida old folks home, a Jewish family with long held secrets and resentments) with great determination, distancing himself even further from his roots in horror (THE HAND THAT ROCKED THE CRADLE), action (THE RIVER WILD), and crime (L. A. CONFIDENTIAL). As he did in WONDER BOYS, he takes the source book seriously, and only augments it creatively.

It's well acted. Cameron Diaz is great as the troubled Paris Hilton clone, hedonistic but hiding the secret that she is a poor reader, possibly due to dyslexia. Toni Collette is once again trying to look dumpier and less glamorous than she really is. Shirley MacLaine is unusually subdued as their grandmother, severed from her family and unknown to the girls by a conspiracy conduced by their father (Ken Howard) and unsubtly evil step-mother.

Diaz gets little credit for a fine performance in IN HER SHOES, here and elsewhere. She has a wonderfully flexible face, one that can widen into a goofy teeth-shielding grin that makes her look like Steve Martin, or contract into a disturbed scowl of struggling self-reflection, and she has a taut cheeked stern look that gives her the feel of a '60s Bond girl. But being rumored as the model for the ditsy actress in LOST IN TRANSLATION probably has done more harm to her career than any number of tabloid stories.

The film optimistically believes in the power of people to change, but otherwise is a rather conventional story, except that it reverses the usual stereotypes of male and female behavior. Here it is the men who want to talk, be open, express feelings, and the women who clam up. Also, curiously, sympathy shifts away from Collette's character about 20 minutes in, as she densely refuses to understand her sister. It all feels rather contrived, but things smooth out and the last 20 minutes of the film are interesting and realistic.

Supplements are modest. There are three featurettes, "The People in the Shoes," in which Hanson gets very specific about his intentions even down to the art on the walls of the various apartments, "A Retirement Community for Acting Seniors," and "From Death Row to the Red Carpet: The Casting of Honey Bun" which ends up as a plea to adopt dogs from the pound.

The estimable NoShame, still on its (permanent?) Italian film kick, now issues two on the surface minor films from the early 1970s, a time period that just a while ago seemed like yesterday but now seems like ancient history, the way the 1920s seemed to me in the 1960s.

MASSACRE IN ROME [Rappresaglia] (NoShame, 111 minutes, 1973, NR, 1.66:1 enhanced, DD mono Italian and English tracks and optional English subtitles, static musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, 12-page insert with essays by Richard Harlan Smith, keep case, two discs, $29.95, released on Tuesday, January 31, 2006) is a film that would have spoken directly to its ideal viewers in 1973, citizens of Rome who still remembered the Nazi retribution against a guerilla attack on marching soldiers, in which over 300 random Romans were rounded up and executed, 10 for each single soldier slain. The film doesn't necessarily dramatize the event so much as chronicle it, a tad like Corman's ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE. The average ideal viewer probably knew what was going to happen, so there was no suspense, and I guess the allure of the film was the coming together in remembrance through the movie of the 300-plus martyrs.

The film comes with a high profile cast that includes Marcello Mastroianni as a priest who restores paintings, and Richard Burton as the German functionary who must implement the order of his insane superior, Leo McKern, but otherwise has little to recommend it, which makes one wonder why NoShame singled it out, but more about that in a second. MASSACRE also happened to be the second directorial effort by George Pan Cosmatos, who latter when on to a modest Hollywood career as an action director, who probably gets a lot of credit that his editors deserve (MASSACRE begins with, and contains at least one other "montage" sequence, leading up to the partisan attack on the soldiers, the only visually distinctive passages in the film).

No, this is one of those "international" productions such as IS PARIS BURNING?, that neither make history "real" nor grind a good tale out of it. As the excellent essays in the accompanying booklet make clear, no one involved with the film really distinguishes himself — except maybe Ennio Morricone, who also does the score for the companion release, DESERT OF THE TARTARS. I suspect that the impetus for releasing these two films was mainly or in large part the wonderful music Morricone did for them.

Supplements on disc one of this two disc set include a brief introduction by director of photography Marcello Gatti before the film starts, both the original Italian and English theatrical trailer, and a poster and stills gallery, and on disc two, "George P. Cosmatos On …" "Lensing a Massacre," an interview with Gatti, "Amarcord Marcello," an interview with Mastroianni, "The True Story Behind the Massacre," and interview with partisan Mario Fiorentini, followed by an interview with another partisan, Rosario Bentivegna, in "Fight for Freedom," and finally, "The Facts, the Lies, the Victims," an interview with historian Sandro Portelli.

On the surface a sluggish anti-war film, THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS [Il Deserto dei Tartari] (NoShame, 141 minutes, 1976 NR, 1.78:1 enhanced, DD mono Italian and English tracks and optional English subtitles, static musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, 14-page insert with essays by Chris D. on the film and its cast, keep case, two discs [the second a CD of Morricone's music], $29.95, released on Tuesday, January 31, 2006) is really a long existential tale that could have been scripted by Samuel Beckett, Camus, or Eugene Ionesco, instead of credtied writers Jean-Louis Bertucelli and André G. Brunelin, who was adapting a novel by Dino Buzzati, written, like Heller's CATCH-22, when the author was bored out of his mind by the bureaucrazy of the company, a daily newspaper, he then worked for.

The tale begins traditionally enough. A young solder Drogo (co-producer Jacques Perrin) rides off to join the big fight, leaving behind a girl and a best friend. He drives his horse on and on to his posting on the border, a bleak desert where skirmishes are likely to occur between the empire and its mysterious enemy, the Tartars. Drogo's posting is in a fortress overlooking a ruined ghost village (scenes shot in the Iranian city of Bam, destroyed by an earthquake). Despite their isolation, the soldiers carry on intricate formal and military protocols. Drogo is joined by an occasionally visiting general (Philippe Noiret), the fortress commander Filimore (Vittorio Gassman), a by-the-book colonel Mattis (the Nazified Giuliano Gemma), and a do gooder captain (Max von Sydow).

The key sequence occurs when a white horse appears in the desert. Tronk (Francisco Rabal) conveys to the green recruit that all the horses in the fortress are black, and that Tartar horses are white, thus the mysterious horse out there is a stray from the Tartars. Drogo suggests that they go out and get it. But that would require a password to gain reentry, and due to Byzantine procedures the Lieutenant with the current reentry password is already outside. Later, on his own initiative one soldier goes out at night to fetch the white horse, only to be shot by one of his own when he fails to know the password. In an ecstasy of Nazi protocols, Mattis demands that the dead soldier be buried without honors, and when the deceased's company silently rebels Mattis metes out torturous punishments.

All this happens basically because the soldiers are bored. They want to fight, but in fact none of them have been in battle. In the film's final irony, Drogo has fallen ill (the walls of the ghost village are filled with centuries-old deadly microbes that modern man has no defenses against), and is finally getting his wish to be sent home, just as his comrades gear up to finally face the Tartars. The desert is McAnywhere, and the fort itself evokes comparisons with CASTLE KEEP, THE KEEP, A MIDNIGHT CLEAR, and THE NINTH CONFIGURATION, and all manner of directors who use isolated wartime outcasts to comment on the existential futility of war, from Ford to Boorman. Despite its glacial pace that verges on a tedium that only the Warhol who loved THE CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS could relish, the inaction is the point, and its uniformity of visual palette reinforces the stasis. Yet I found TARTARS fascinating, and unexpectedly deep.

Once again there is a Morricone score, also present on a second disc in the box, a CD of the original soundtrack record. His score for TARTARS is subtle. Dissonance is overlaid over a jangly military theme, and there are haunted waltzes and eerie tones that capture the wind, the desert, the sheer distance of things. The music is so much a part of the movie that you really don't notice it until you play the CD itself.

Extras include a brief vintage" interview with Gemma (conducted by a female reporter as they speed down a river) and a more recent one in which he talks specifically about TARTARS. At one point he notes that director Valerio Zurlini, whose last film this was, became vexed over one actor who wouldn't get into the spirit of the military protocols that he insisted prevail on the set. Gemma says he won't say who it is, but the visuals undercut him by showing the scene with Noiret.

There is also a lengthy interview, more like a monologue, by the DP Luciano Tovoli, who also worked with Argento and Antonioni and who has shot most of Schroeder's late movies. There is also the original Italian trailer and a poster and stills gallery.

D. K. Holm's 2006 Film Diary (Otherwise Known as a Blog)

Wednesday, 25 January, 2006

I've been watching BONES since it started. I don't know why. Probably because I am watching everything on TV these days. Now, BONES has moved to Wednesday night, slightly disrupting my viewing patterns, as three other shows that I follow are on at the same time. If there is one of the bunch I should drop it's BONES. It's got way too much backstory getting in the way of the story, it's not funny enough, and the central character is not only terribly annoying but impossible.

"Bones," or Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) is not only a forensic anthropologist, but is the author of a series of bestselling murder mysteries, which she apparently writes while on company time, as one episode suggests. Not only is she a know-it-all about scientific stuff, she is, as early episodes illustrated but later was dropped, also an expert in self defense. Yet at the same time she doesn't get really obvious cultural references, such as to Scully and Mulder. Why the inconsistency? And why would a person be a successful book author without knowing facets of pop culture? If fact, why would someone who obviously hates pop culture even write a pop novel? And why does she have to be arrogant in her ignorance? And why is the show determined to make her always humorlessly "right" in every situation? Only once that I remember has there been a chink in her armor, when she vows that she will be a good witness and continually fails. Also, I hate the way she dresses, with that fucking faux ethnic look.

I guess that I've decided that the only way I can continue with the show is if I imagine that it's really about David Boreanaz as Special Agent Seeley Booth, wondering what is up with this strange chick and her odd friends and co-workers.

Here is my audio diary entry about BONES.

Saturday, 28 January, 2006 I haven't watched SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE but sporadically despite numerous chances over 31 years. As Gilbert Gottfried is said to have summarized it, the longevity of a show almost devoid of wit is due to the formula of "bad service in a great location." So it happens that a few weekends ago I was in the neighborhood and sat down, expecting bad service as usual. It was the Jack Black episode and it kicked off with a bang, Jack Black singing a proposed theme song to KING KONG that Peter Jackson supposedly passed on. It was, it is hilarious. Black utterly commanded the stage and gave one of the greatest guest host monologues ever.

OK, brilliant idea for a biopic to rival WALK THE LINE. Just visualize the poster that goes with these four words: "Jack Black is Meatloaf!"

Anyway, the fun didn't stop there. Later in the show, Chris Parnell and Adam Samberg presented a music video, "Lazy Sunday," that also has to be seen and heard to be believed. Which is easy, 'cause it's all over the internet.

Since the show aired, I have listed to "Lazy Sunday" every single day. It makes me laugh. It makes me feel good. I can't even make out all the words (there is something about duct tape in there), but I still laugh helplessly and admiringly as Parnell and Samberg take the verbal tropes and visual cues of '80s rap and apply them to the idea of two guys loading up on snacks on their way to the upper West Side to catch a Sunday screening of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. Though lodged specifically in the time of its music and the now of NARNIA, but yet the tune is also ageless and timeless, like the parodies of Tom Lehrer, which retain the luster of their brilliance long after, say, the European Multi-Lateral Force has lost its currency.

Not only do I love its form and its verbal invention, but "Lazy Sunday" is about movie love. The two guys, who can't possibly really exist (though I suspect that when I don't get an SNL routine it's because the joke is some kind of insiderish reference to something in Manhattan that the cast know about only) have a recognizable obsession with movies. The food ("Mr. Pibb and Red Vines = crazy delicious"), the trickery of smuggling it in, the monetary braggadocio, the pride in getting the trivial slide question right, it is so movie buff. It should also be noted that this NARNIA citation appears in a show with a star from KING KONG, NARNIA's rival for the top box office spot for several weeks.

Anyway, this is all a prelude to the fact that I tuned in to the next episode of SNL and tonight's with the hope that the show would maintain the high level of wit the Jack Black show showed. But it was a repeat.

Sunday, 29 January, 2006 Maybe for you Christmas is your favorite day of the year, with all its presents and family gatherings and such, or your birthday or wedding anniversary. Mine is the Sunday in late January when the L. A. TIMES publishes its "Sneaks" supplement in the Arts calendar. A day of movie fantasy begins as I envision the films coming out over the next year. Sadly, as Proust has pointed out, the anticipation is all too often better than the experience. What I'm also looking for is that dark horse movie that comes out of nowhere and seizes attention, like MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING or CRASH. I see no likely prospects in this year's batch. But there are some curiosities. There will be another Truman Capote movie, INFAMOUS, with Toby Jones playing the writer as he composes IN COLD BLOOD; Todd Field has another book adaptation, LITTLE CHILDREN, with two of my favorite actresses, Kate Winslett and Jennifer Connolly; Sofia Coppola (MARIE ANTOINETTE [!!]) and Curtis Hanson (LUCKY YOU) have new movies; there's a movie about Betty Page, and one about Keith Moon. FREEDOMLAND sounds like TSOTSI; and there are several movies about 911, the best of them sounding like Paul Greengrass's on FLIGHT 93. Pulse is a remake of a J-Horror film, SILENT HILL comes from a video game, and THE HILLS HAVE EYES comes from the Wes Craven film. There's a new Bond film, a new MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, a new X-MEN and SUPERMAN, a new PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and a new BASIC INSTINCT. There's also a new Terry Zwigoff - Daniel Clowes collaboration (ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL) and a new Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Shakespeare (AS YOU LIKE IT). And Christopher Guest takes on Oscar season in FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. Oh, and there are at least two Lindsay Lohan films.

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, February 9, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.

COMING SOON: Italian horror films, giallo, and action flickers, plus Italian poster books, a package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!

<

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES