[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on!]
Monday, 1 November, 2004
We've reached the halfway mark for THE WIRE, and last night's episode was among the best so far. It felt pivotal as it pitted many of the integers in its equation against each other.
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Stringer Bell, the visionary, against his boss Avon Barksdale, who is still "still a gangster." McNulty against his boss, Daniels, who has been resistant to investigate Bell. Bell against the developers, and McNulty against the rising pol Carcetti, whose political operative McNulty has just lured into an affair. And Omar versus Bunk, who is still trying to track down an officer's missing gun (in a rather weak scene that struck me as very "written" or staged or "actorly" in a series that is relentlessly realistic and plausible). Cutty versus himself, unable to hack being in the game anymore. And the Mayor's office coming down on the police department's upper echelon, who in turn give nothing but grief to their subordinates. So far this season THE WIRE has built with a slow and intricate intensity, but now it is about to blow.
Tuesday, 2 November, 2004
Word comes via VARIETY in a story by Dave McNary that Sherry Lansing is stepping down as Paramount chief. Though the sharks in Hollywood may be circling and the feminists may be gnashing their teeth, and though various web sites may be speculating wildly about the reasons why she is leaving and who her replacement might be, my immediate response is: What does this mean for the future of William Friedkin?
Friedkin is one of my favorite directors, and also happens to be married to Lansing. Paramount has produced and/or distributed all of Friedkin's films since BLUE CHIPS including JADE, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, and THE HUNTED, and the company is slated to release his two current projects, THE MAN WHO KEPT SECRETS, about mob-connected Hollywood attorney Sidney Korshak (adapted by James Ellroy from Nick Tosches VANITY FAIR piece), and BOOK OF SKULLS, a kind of NATIONAL TREASURE sounding tale about college students finding a tomb that hides the secret of eternal life. Friedkin has been married to Lansing since 1991 (his previous wives include Lesley-Anne Down and Jeanne Moreau), and given that BLUE CHIPS was released in 1994 one can say with only a smidgen of cynicism that at the very least Friedkin's nuptials was a good career move.
Good for him, anyway. None of these films has performed well. BLUE CHIPS made $22 million dollars; JADE cost $50 million and made $9; RULES cost $60 million and made $61 million; and THE HUNTED made but $34 million. But Friedkin's disappointing returns are only a part of Lansing's problems at Paramount. Friedkin can be a good, indeed great director (SORCERER and TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., to cite two examples) so a little bit of nepotism is not misplaced. But in the larger context of disappointing numbers over the past three years, including low interest in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, THE STEPFORD WIVES, and HOW TO LOSE A GUY IN 10 DAYS, Friedkin didn't help, parasitically slaying his host body.
Lansing started out as a cheese - cakey actress in films such as Howard Hawks's RIO LOBOS, became the controversial producer (is anyone of power in Hollywood not controversial?) of THE ACCUSED and FATAL ATTRACTION (two films largely at odds with each other philosophically), and stepped up to run the studio 12 years ago, resulting in an unusually long tenure for an exec. Some of Paramount's recent releases have been damn good, such as NARC, SCHOOL OF ROCK and MEAN GIRLS, and Paramount forged a relationship with both MTV and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, so you'd think that a segment of the youth market would be sewn up, but instead returns have been flat.
In any case, while pundits are pondering "wither Lansing," I'm wondering where Friedkin can and will go, if indeed he has to leave. It must be acknowledged that Friedkin's Paramount films are not among his best, though many of them have interesting aspects. Nolte was good in BLUE CHIPS, but it was a college basketball film that didn't say much that was new, and RULES was internally confusing and politically opportunistic. THE HUNTED, filmed in my back yard, was just downright bad, a dull story rendered without engagement. Friedkin, almost 70 and 10 years older than Lansing, is at an age when some American directors such as Ford were doing their best work. His Korshak film sounds promising and "insiderish" but it is clear from past successes such as THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST that Friedkin needs vital material to engage his mind and stimulate visual ideas, and of late Friedkin has not been in a position to command such material.
Wednesday, 3 November, 2004
The Morning After
Well, there is one good thing about an election that exposes a deeply divided nation: THE DAILY SHOW will be the funniest show on television for another four years. I woke up the day after finding myself strangely undepressed even though little that I believed in was affirmed by the electorate. Perhaps it was the knowledge that THE DAILY SHOW still thrives that gave me sardonic quietude.
This isn't a political column, but if I were in a position to give out any advice I would offer the following thoughts. First, nominate a candidate who isn't going to concede without a fight on election night just because it will be "good for the nation." Second, I would advise against watching any of the news channels, be it C-SPAN, Fox, or CNN. They are all in on the game. Starve them of viewers until a sea change in these channels diverts them from debating facts as if they were mere ideas open to interpretation. Nor am I ever giving money to PBS again either, since it too, with rare exceptions such as certain FRONTLINE docs, is addicted to the retrograde notion of "balance." Finally, let's put to rest the idea that one's vote counts. It can't count if it isn't counted. Greg Palast and others are tracking suspicions of voter fraud in Ohio and New Mexico. If voting doesn't matter, what hope is there? I think it is in the courts, where the only avenue of activism remains. And wouldn't it be nice if many more immigrants moved to the so-called Red states? They could bulk out the voting pool and edge those states toward a salutary "balance."
Thursday, 4 November, 2004
Old Whine in New Bottles
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SIDEWAYS
In light of SIDEWAYS I am wondering how far my appetite for seeing films that contain characters who remind me of me can go. For a long time I thought that Jack Lemmon's J. J. "Bud" Baxter was the nearest realization of what it felt like to be me. Then PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE's Barry seemed to be "me." Along comes ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, and once again I think I am seeing myself on screen in the form of Jim Carrey's Joel. Now comes Paul Giamatti's Miles in SIDEWAYS and the self-image, which has become increasingly darker and neurotic, now reaches its lowest depths (I never felt the urge to identify with Giamatti's last loser, Harvey Pekar, because I have had contact with the real Pekar and he is much more horrible than he is portrayed in the film). I don't know how much more of this I can take. But perhaps there is comfort in the fact that, on the basis of this string of recent films, it seems that there are a lot of other people just like me in Hollywood and out there in the hinterlands.
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All handsome actors are handsome in the same way, but character actors look like no one else. Giamatti is a drooping question mark of a man, with a tonsure in place of hair behind the center of his head and bulging eyes poking out of a hangdog Droopy Dog (or Dawg) face. Defeat is lodged in his shoulders like a landmark. His voice tilts toward the angry whine (hence his perfection as Pekar), and he tends to play losers who know or accept in advance their defeat but use that whine as a Parthian shot to salvage one last shred of dignity from their defeat or to strike out helplessly with a passive-aggressive, but ultimately self-deprecating, blow.
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This presentation is perfect for the character of Miles Raymond in SIDEWAYS, directed by Alexander Payne and adapted from a novel by Rex Pickett, a frequent Payne collaborator. Miles is a sixth grade school teacher, divorced from a wife he loved because he fucked up and had an affair, and with a novel that is continually rejected by publishers. He is still loyal to his friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a television actor in a slump, and about to get married to the daughter of a prominent Armenian businessman. Miles promises Jack a one-week vacation, sort of an extended bachelor party, in the form of a tour of the California wine country, Jack knowing nothing about wine (but hoping to get laid) and Miles being an educated wine snob but who has to steal several hundred dollars from his mom to finance the trip. It's very difficult for Miles to have fun and you wonder how these two manage to maintain their friendship (they were college roommates). But Jack's relentless beach dude hedonism soon breaks down Miles's resistance and they end up "dating" a pair of waitresses (Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen).
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Giamatti is the new Steve Buscemi. He has risen from character parts to quasi sex symbol, or at least cinematic Everyman, standing in for the great unwashed out there worshipful before the screen. Curiously, both have played characters based on Pekar (Buscemi's role in GHOST WORLD is something of a composite of Crumb and Pekar). Giamatti got his start as a retarded kid in a slasher film (written by Quentin Tarantino), and since then has made the usual bounces back and forth between interesting roles and parts as the "best friend." Giamatti has been touted for an Oscar nomination for SIDEWAYS and that is a good call, because though he plays a loser, a guy who assumes he is defeated before he even starts, he does nothing to make this bitter pill of a man easier to swallow.
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But Giamatti's performance isn't the only Oscar worthy turn in the film. Madsen is also great in a very well written role that she makes even better through a sort of earnest stillness. There is a great speech in which she explains why she likes wine, and it has all the qualities that make her character so fascinating and admirable — frankness and maturity and serenity. Her husky alto voice is hypnotic and strangely honest, if that makes any sense. She's a woman divorced from a pretentious academic, now working as a waitress and taking horticulture classes, struggling along, lonely but not depressed, and mature and real every second of her life. She can fight you, but she can also fight for you. Her Maya is a female Miles, but without the clinical depression. She is the best female character I've seen on the screen in a long time, one whom I would actually want to know in the real world.
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I also happen to love Church, and he is engaging as a very despicable rogue who is also a common Hollywood type (and you don't have to be in Hollywood to meet this type). If Madsen has rarely had roles that were worthy of her, Church has toiled in even lower mines of inequity. I've always pictured him as perfect for a project like THE LEE MARVIN STORY, or as playing the Marvin part in some remake of THE DIRTY DOZEN or POINT BLANK. Coincidentally, when the NEW YORKER interviewed Giamatti at the front of its most recent issue, they caught up with the actor just before he was going down the street to watch HELL IN THE PACIFIC at BAM. I wonder if he noticed the resemblance.
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SIDEWAYS is interesting and has an unpredictable story line but I found myself having a few reservations about the total package. I like the fact that it takes the time to tell its story and explore its characters, but a part of me wondered it in the end it's not a glorified teen movie writ large. It shows an adult version of the pair you usually see in teen films such as EUROTRIP, the yearning nice privileged romantic central character and his "best friend" who is feral, selfish, sexually aggressive, an Eddie Haskell figure who constantly gets the uptight hero in trouble. Yet here each of the two men are disingenuous, since in two mirrored or book ended sequences they show their true selfish manipulation of the other. The first occurs when Miles unannounced makes Jack stopover with him at his mother's house. Only later do we learn the true purpose, which is for Miles to steal money from her. At the end, Jack begs Miles to let him drive, but it quickly turns out that he wants to take charge of the car so he can crash it into a tree, thus explaining the broken nose he got under different circumstances.
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But that must be the strategy. Most Americans still live their lives emotionally and intellectually at a fifth grade level. Payne examines what these "teens" find adult life to be. It's like a remake of SWINGERS, with Giamatti in the Favreau role of a man in post-divorce depression. Or it's like a whole movie about the Wallace Shawn character who appears in a minor scene in Woody Allen's MANHATTAN.
The movie also stretches out the moments of intimacy to hugely uncomfortable heights, and the scene where Miles blows his chance with Maya when she is clearly signally intimacy is as painful as the scene in swingers where Favreau leaves 12 self-destructive messages in a row on a chick's answering machine. One already has enough trouble living these scenes to relish seeing them in a movie, but one has to hand it to Payne for making them so intense.
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This is Payne's fourth feature and now its possible to get a larger sense of his personality as a director. Central to his films is the selfish main character, a woman in his first two films, and men in the next two, functioning in tandem with a polar opposite, the uptight paired with the wild (ABOUT SCHMIDT), the sinner teamed with a religious zealot (CITIZEN RUTH), the ambitious contrasted with the self-defeating (ELECTION). His first film, a short, was about the self-delusions connected with finding Ms. Right. Ruth is a force of nature but his other films find Payne scrutinizing weak people confronted with the ruthless. He doesn't go as far as Neil LaBute. He leaves his characters their dignity, and the audience a teardrop of hope.
Friday, 5 November, 2004
Politics, Year Zero
If you are like me the last thing you want to do right now is think about politics. After two years of campaigning, of horrible commercials, of screaming on Fox, it's about time to put away the campaign buttons and toss out the straw boater.
But if you do still have an appetite for films of a political bent, now is the time to find them. Keyed to the season for one reason or another, numerous films have come out on DVD that take the viewer deeper into ideas, philosophies, and reportage on important issues.
Taking them in historical chronology, the earliest is ANIMAL FARM (HVE, 1954, $19.95, Tuesday, November 2), based on George Orwell's fable about the corruptions of communism. Having read the book, and having an aversion to animal deaths in movies, I looked forward to this one about as much as I did UMBERTO D, but it proved to be a beautifully animated movie and they changed the ending. Normally I would howl about that, but in this case I was grateful, because it gave the viewer a sense of hope or inspiration that for some reason Orwell did not see fit to provide.
Seeing the film for the first time, it's easy to guess that it had an influence on Spiegelman's MAUS; what the viewer learns from the helpful supplements is that the film may have been financed by the CIA in an attempt to make it anti-revolutionary. But because the material is essentially vague as to allegiance, today it could be taken just as easily as a call to rout corrupt politicians and rulers.
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This film comes in an excellent full frame transfer, with an authoritative commentary track by Brian Sibley, and a featurette originally aired on a British television program that charts the history of the film and who made it (one guy did all the voices). There is also a storyboards comparison, and a four-page insert with chapter titles, transfer info, and an essay by animation historian Karl Cohen. In the TV show, one of the animators, who once worked for Disney, reveals that a term used there for executive comments on screenplays was "sweatbox notes," which may become part of my permanent vocabulary.
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Speaking of taking action against evil rulers, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (The Criterion Collection No. 249, 1965, $49.95, Tuesday, October 12) is now considered a textbook on how to do it. One thing needs to be kept in mind however. The Algerians may have won the war, but they lost the Battle of Algiers. Another thing to keep in mind is that, lauded as the film is now, in the past it was a controversial and in some cases despised artifact. Andrew Sarris, for example, decried the upper West Side liberals cheering when the rebels blow up a couple of eateries, noting that if Cary Grant or Jane Fonda had been cast in the roles of the patrons, or the West Siders own family members were in that real café, they wouldn't be so sanguine.
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Still, it is a remarkable piece of work because it looks so real. It's probably the ultimate Neo-realist film, with mostly amateur actors, and filmed in the streets, where it recreated actual events in the places they happened. It's rather beautiful to look at, despite the shaky camera work and the grainy black and white image. The Casbah setting is the perfect locale for both the urban revolution and the film about it, as the winding streets become mazes into which gunmen can flee. It's very much the same kind of terrain as found in CITY OF GOD, and I would bet that ALGIERS was an influence on that newer film.
The film comes in a superb restored widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) with a good mono Dolby Digital soundtrack. It's a three-disc set so the package is stuffed, though there is no commentary track (the first disc does have a photo gallery and two trailers).
The second disc focuses on the making of the film ("Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth" (37:00), "Marxist Poetry" (51:00), "Five Directors" (17:00), with Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Julian Schnabel, Steven Soderbergh, and Oliver Stone, past — and future? — Criterion directors talking about the film).
The third focuses on its legacy and its politics ("Remembering History" (69:00), "Etats d'armes" (28:00), "The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study" (25:00), "Gillo Pontecorvo's Return to Algiers" (58:00) which is fairly substantial). Finally, there is a 56-page booklet with chapter titles, transfer info, photos, and essays from film historian Peter Matthews, Saadi Yacef, an interview with screenwriter Franco Solinas, and a cast list of the historical figures.
DR. STRANGELOVE: 40TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION (Columbia Tristar, 1964, two disc set, $34.95, Tuesday, November 2)
If you already own Kubrick's nuclear war film, you might still want to pick up this one, as it is advertised as having a new transfer. Other than that, the supplemental material is mostly the same as the last iteration of the film on DVD, with the addition of a new featurette on the film's take on the bomb, and a celebration of Peter Sellers. There is also footage of Robert McNamara, the great apologist (or non-apologist, really) and self-justifier, blabbing about war, footage which may be new or left over from Morris's film about him.
It's a delight to see the movie again. This time around though, I found Sellers brilliant and subtle, especially as Mandrake, and George C. Scott overdone and slapsticky. But I will probably feel different about that four or five years from now. And I still love the pseudo-documentary look of the film, which helped make it both more funny and more despairing.
Another thing I've changed my mind about is Nixon. Sure, he did Watergate, misused agencies of the government and conspired to subvert the constitution, but he was clearly the last truly liberal president, the nominal author of the EPA and PBS.
He is a fascinating figure of Shakespearean proportions, as Oliver Stone showed us, and in SECRET HONOR (The Criterion Collection No. 257, 1994, $34.95, Tuesday, October 19), based on a one-man play popular back in the early 1990s, Nixon, in a sense, gets to speak for himself.
SECRET HONOR was made back when director Robert Altman was focusing on play adaptations, and in addition to that he was teaching at the time and the film was shot on campus, apparently in the foyer of a sorority. It consists of about two hours in the life of Nixon as he makes notes into a microphone for some kind of speech or closing argument he intends to make to someone somewhere. Gradually the manic Unindicted Co-Conspirator reveals what playwright Donald Freed thinks is the great secret of Nixon's personality.
Freed is a radical and a JFK conspiracy buff and his audio commentary track, recorded for the original CC laser disc, is highly informative if speculative. Altman also has a track, and there is a short interview with lead actor Philip Baker Hall that is new for the DVD.
Secret Honor comes in its original somewhat grainy full frame aspect ratio with a fair mono sound track. There is also a feature length collection of Nixon footage, including his "Checkers" speech, a 1968 campaign film, a 1973 press conference, two speeches or broadcasts, and his farewell speech at the White House. There's also an eight page insert with cast, chapter titles, transfer info, and an essay by Michael Wilmington.
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Criterion usually releases its films in pairs, and more or less accompanying Altman's Nixon film is TANNER '88 (The Criterion Collection No. 258, 1988, $29.95, Tuesday, October 5), an early HBO series (or mini-series) set right in the midst of the 1988 campaign that eventually pitted Bush with Dukakis. It's a noble experiment of a film, shot on video and sliced up into 11 parts, written in a hurry by cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Altman wanted to go on with the series, but HBO cancelled it. Recently, the Sundance Channel revived it and added on new introductions by stars Michael Murphy, Cynthia Nixon, and Pamela Reed, all speaking in character. This set combines the show with the new Sundance material.
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A blend of RAGTIME and the Altman traveling circus style, TANNER anticipated WEST WING in many ways, even down to having a key female aid with initials for a name. But if TANNER evades the emotional high points of WW, it's because Altman and Trudeau want to question and satirize the political process, while WEST WING wants us to feel good about it.
Murphy is awfully confining as Tanner, and thanks to the "modern" interviews we get to find out what happened to some of the characters. Coincidentally, this was Nixon's first HBO show, to be followed a decade later by SEX IN THE CITY. Her character is perhaps the most poignant in the show.
Extras consist of a 20-minute interview between creators Altman and Trudeau, and a 12-page insert with cast, crew, episode titles, transfer info, and essays by Michael Wilmington and Gary Kornblau.
As astute and cynical as Altman can be, he has nothing on the host of British television directors who sometimes stray onto the big screen, helmers such as Ken Loach and Stephen Frears. Probably the most beloved and respected director you have never heard of is Alan Clarke, who made numerous films, many of them controversial and all of them thought provoking. Now, in THE ALAN CLARKE COLLECTION (Blue Underground, five-disc set, $99.95, Tuesday, August 31, 2004) American viewers can get a good, solid sample of what the director was all about.
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Right now, Clarke is probably most famous for making an earlier film also called ELEPHANT, like Gus Van Sant's recent film on high school slayings. Van Sant's film is a blend of Bela Tarr, and Clarke's cool, dispassionate examination of political murder. Clarke's film is only about 40 minutes long, and consists solely of 18 scenes with long tracking or steadicam shots of men walking up to presumed strangers and executing them. Set in Belfast, the film doesn't even tell you which side is shooting whom. The effect is to make you an innocent bystander uninformed of the political context and thus horrified at the lack of humanity. As a blanket attack on religious assassination I assume that the film must have irritated Irish combatants, but Clarke has obviously a larger point to make. ELEPHANT is one of the four films included on this packed set. The others include the original TV series version of SCUM and the theatrical version (the film is about brutality in British youth prisons and stars a young Ray Winstone). SCUM was banned for some five years by the very network that commissioned it.
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Also on hand are MADE IN BRITAIN, a portrait of a neo-Nazi starring Tim Roth, THE FIRM, with Gary Oldman as an ambitious football hooligan, and an hour long documentary about Clarke, who died in 1990, from 1991.
This set is also packed with supplements, all of them featuring people who revered Clarke as a great director of actors and an engaged political filmmaker. MADE IN BRITAIN has two tracks, one by the film's writer and its producer, the other by star Roth, whose first film this was. There's also an archive interview with Roth and a photo gallery. THE FIRM only has a stills gallery, but Oldman turns up in the extras for ELEPHANT's short new retrospective documentary. The film also has a track in which producer Danny Boyle talks to critic Mark Kermode about the film.
This is probably one of the most important DVD sets to be released this year. Clarke's films are hard to see, and here is a treasure trove of them, with remarkably detailed supplements that both tell you the basics and offer a lot of technical detail. Clarke's vision is uncompromising and difficult, and the Blue Underground set gives a healthy sample of this prolific filmmaker's work.
If the set inspires more interest in Clarke than the place to go is the book ALAN CLARKE, an oral history of the director's life edited by Richard Kelly. Published by Faber and Faber in 1998 (originally $21, 243 pages, ISBN 0 571 19609 8) after Clarke's death and probably in sync with the TV special on him excerpted here, the book can be a little hard to find (some British bookstores offer if for almost $100). I managed to find a copy for sale on line only at Powell's Books for much less than that, and it proved to be a valuable addition to the shelf of Faber "director on director" series.
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Clarke's vision is bleak, but there is hope in the work, as show in Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson's DEADLINE (HVE, 2004, $14.95, Tuesday, October 5). Ostensibly about the death penalty in America, it is really about how one man wrestled with his conscience. That man was George Ryan, the governor of Illinois, who, after several students in a college journalism class proved that a succession of inmates were innocent, installed a panel to investigate the death penalty in the state, mounted a clemency hearing, and finally, in the last days of his stewardship, debating with himself even up to a few minutes that he made the announcement, gave clemency to over 100 people on death row.
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Ryan later found himself in hot water for a different scandal, but this Republican farmer and pharmacist's decision is inspiring. The directors don't stop there, however. They are interview inmates, members of the commission, film the painful clemency hearings which were open to cameras, and various speeches by Ryan. The disc also comes with an interview with the filmmakers, which is helpful in showing the sometimes circuitous route that documentarians sometimes take to arrive at their final subject. There are also about five deleted scenes, plus a six-page insert with chapter titles, transfer info, and an essay by Howie Movshovitz.
Probably the premiere documentarian of our time, for better or worse, is Michael Moore. But is he really a maker of documentaries? I don't think there is a term for what he does, exactly, which is a blend of stand up comedy and polemical essay.
THE MICHAEL MOORE DVD COLLECTOR'S SET (MGM, 1997 and 2002, $29.95, Tuesday, October 5) brings together two of his recent films, the big one and bowling for columbine, with an additional disc that features 13 minutes of excepts of Moore on the lecture circuit pumping for the then-release of his book DUDE WHERE'S MY COUNTRY?
My views on BOWLING are established; BIG ONE is a more minute endeavor in which Moore criss-crosses the country and tries to challenge various corporate CEOs to talk to him; only Phil Knight of Nike dares to.
But the big Moore release of the year is the DVD of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (Columbia Tristar, 2004, $28.95, Tuesday, October 5). It's a powerful piece of work, and I was impressed with its opening 20 minutes again when I re-watched it. I find myself less taken with the comedy sequences, or the second half of the film, which focuses on one person, the mother of a boy killed in Iraq.
It's amusing to compare F911 with the other surprise hit of the year, Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. Both films are made independently. Both have an uninhibited political agenda. And both have lengthy sequences in which the body and soul of someone is scourged, literally in the case of PASSION, and metaphorically in the second half of F911, as Lila Lipscomb attempts to cope with her loss and understand the decisions of her government.
The parallels are thin but enlightening because both films are religious experiences in their way, Moore's the secular religion of righteous, head-shaking outrage. I would guess that the response of the two audiences to their diametrically opposed films was mighty similar.
Like many propagandists, for good or ill, Moore likes to bypass the head and appeal to the heart. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The technique is neutral. It's the information or the intent that may be good or bad. But there is information in F911. The film was attacked when it came out by pundits who maintained that Moore was twisting facts and figures and eliding qualifications.
He answers these charges in the book THE OFFICIAL FAHRENHEIT 9/11 READER (Simon and Schuster, 263 pages, $14, ISBN 0 7432 7292 7), which prints a transcript of the movie and a healthy sampling of reviews and articles about the movie, plus point-by-point support for many of the film's assertions. It makes for an excellent companion piece to the DVD.
Around the same time, two fellows who are highly suspicious of Moore and run a web site about him brought out MICHAEL MOORE IS A BIG FAT STUPID WHITE MAN (Regan Books, 246 pages, $22.95, ISBN 0 06 076395 7). David Hardy and Jason Clarke attempt to go through all of Moore's movies and books, and analyze his CV, to show how much he distorts and prevaricates. In tandem the two books are maddening, because you end up with a he said she said back and forth counterpoint that doesn't bring clarity but confusion.
One thing that the two authors could have raised but don't seem to is the actual authorship of Moore's later films. Much of the footage in F911 is purchased from independent filmmakers out in the field in Iraq or borrowed from television broadcasts. He also has a team of editors. I'd be curious to know just how involved Moore is in the moment-by-moment assemblage of his films.
But this makes it sound like I don't care for F911, which isn't true. I love the first 30 minutes, but I also don't want to be snowed by it. F911 comes in a fine transfer with good sound, and a small clutch of extras. Among them is about eight deleted scenes, the most interesting of which is footage shot outside the Abu Ghraib prison, gathered before the prison became famous for its interrogation methods.
Dead Men Do Tell Tales
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SPECIAL EDITION 3-DISC GIFT SET
It turns out that extras now even get deleted from DVDs. Which means that after a few months a company can release a set with the deleted extras restored, which appears to be what has happened with PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN (Buena Vista Home Video, 2003, three discs, $29.95, Tuesday, November 2). It now comes with a third disc, with about 10 new making of featurettes on it. The new disc is in some kind of flimsy plastic and cardboard device; the film itself is just the same two disc set from before (the disc starting out with a trailer for the "forthcoming" HIDALGO).
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I suppose that PIRATES fanatics will be pleased to have this stuff, and clearly the studio was diligent in sending down DVD supplement makers to record this material. I found it no better and no worse than any of the features that were already provided the first time around, and perhaps faintly unambitious. But maybe they will go into more depth on the next go around. I see no reason why we shouldn't have three, five, ten copies of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN.
The feature I found most interesting was the history of the original ride, with its footage of Disney explaining it to the TV viewing public and interviews with some of the artisans who created the animatronic devices. Disney was a fascinating visionary and took a big risk with the whole Disneyland concept. Yet he also employed people who were able to come up with ride concepts that really clicked with the public, and this was one of them.
As for the film itself it continues to be what it is, a vastly entertaining well-cast trifle with a superb star turn by the usually big Hollywood film resistant Depp, who, as is now well known, took Keith Richards as his role model. It's the first successful pirate film in probably 50 years, and so therefore is much more than a footnote in cinematic history.
Letters
From Theron Neel:
"Peter Sarsgaard has become my favorite actor to watch, too. For an actor with no discernible style, he's played a wide range of characters quite convincingly. I believe his character in THE SALTON SEA, in particular, was one that wouldn't have worked if it'd been played by anyone else.
Beyond its "controversy," THE CENTER OF THE WORLD was a great character study in which Sarsgaard and Molly Parker, as well as a scene-stealing Carla Gugino, did very admirable work. It's too bad that film got lost, eh?"
NEXT TIME: MARK OF THE DEVIL, THE STEPFORD WIVES, THE CLEARING, MULHOLLAND FALLS, Guy Maddin's COWARDS, several STAR TREKS and more!
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