By D.K. Holm
April 1, 2005
[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.]
CITY Limits
SIN CITY
I love SIN CITY.
I can't wait to see it again. I can't wait for the DVD. And I can't wait for the two disc SE DVD after that.
Few movies of late have inspired similar feelings of delight and identification. KILL BILL comes to mind, and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, COLLATERAL, or LOST IN TRANSLATION. Out of 1200 movies released by Hollywood over two years, that isn't a lot.
SIN CITY is a great chick flick (i.e., it's got a healthy diet of hot chicks in it). It's a great guy movie (I saw it with a friend who drooled over Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Madsen, and Mickey Rourke). It's a great car movie (Jags, T-Birds). In short, it's a great drive-in movie — which is really to say that it address heavy moral issues and a critique of society in the guise of cheap entertainment. It's also a fine modern take on popular film noir themes without in the least feeling out of date or old fashion. And it instantly becomes the gold standard by which all comic book adaptations will come to be judged.
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Oh, the pain that comic book fans have suffered over the years! From the campy TV version of BATMAN to the gayification of the character in the 1990s. From the thin takes on SUPERMAN with Christopher Reeve that strove for iconic force but which via lousy casting were glorified TV movies, to the pre-lingual adaptation of the slyly witty and acerbic HOWARD THE DUCK. From the limp movie version of the Ninja Turtles, to the listlessly thought out THE PHANTOM. All these films suffer from the sin of not taking the source material seriously. Perhaps at some point someone involved with these projects loved the original comics or strips, but the results are there for any knowledgeable comic fan to judge.
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To my mind, recent years have not been so kind either despite the influx of comic book nerds into the film industry and advances in computer animation and effects technology. To utter the titles LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, ELECTRA, FROM HELL, the chick-flick version of HULK, and CATWOMAN is to voice a litany of horribly failed opportunities. Though most buffs and audiences were fine with the recent SPIDER-MANs and X-MENs, to me they were quasi-enjoyable but bombastic enterprises that showed at their hearts disdain for the Marvel originals (I take the outsider view that only DAREDEVIL really captured the essence of its source material). I like to point out that of all the comic book movies of the last 30 years only ROBOCOP captured the real feel of what it is like to read a comic book — and it wasn't even based on an actual comic.
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Until now, that is. Robert Rodriguez's version of the series of serials and graphic novels collectively known as SIN CITY, done in close collaboration with their creator, Frank Miller (and with an assist from Quentin Tarantino as a cameo director) goes beyond fidelity merely to the narrative of the stories to try and replicate the nourish quality of Miller's inky, two-toned drawing style and his progressive framing. I will leave it to the expertise of my esteemed colleagues, editor Chris Ryall and fellow columnist Scott Tipton to celebrate Miller's style and its accurate transference to the screen. I will only add that Miller is a great storyteller and that like R. Crumb and all too few other comic book artisans, he is as much a fine literary stylist as he is cartoonist. He is a double threat and thus a comic book auteur to be reckoned with.
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If someone were to knock SIN CITY I guess it will be by likening it to Warren Beatty's literalist version of DICK TRACY, which itself had too much of the campy BATMAN flavor to it. To counter these critics it might have been a mistake to start off (after a brief prologue that rhymes with the films coda) with Marv's story of vengeance (now called THE HARD GOODBYE) against those who killed the hooker Goldie (Jaime King) right under his nose. Marv is played by Mickey Rourke in a part that would probably have been played by Burt Lancaster if this film could have been made in the 1940s, and Rourke, who is already a monument to prosthetic experimentation, is here padded with yet more plastic in order to line him up further with Marv's profile, making him look not unlike Al Pacino as Big Boy Caprice in DICK TRACY. But Marv is one of only two characters so outlandish in appearance that they required extra help in replication. The rest of the cast looks as they are not as their characters were drawn.
With Rourke, Rodriguez could be said to be pulling a Tarantino, reviving the career of a once famous B actor — except that Rourke also appeared in his ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO. Here, though, Rourke's character is better suited to his persona, and the context is moodier and clearer.
SIN CITY may also prove to be a test case over the links between comics and movies. Rodriguez's fidelity to the frames on the page is founded not only on a love of the comics themselves but of the assumption that comics and movies speak in the language of imagery and rhythm. SIN CITY has already been attacked for strangling on its faithfulness, but in fact SIN CITY shows the truth, finally, of this assumption. Movies are like comics. Or is it that comics are like movies?
Sin City is short for Basin City, a presumably Midwestern burg like Personville in Hammett's RED HARVEST. It's the corrupt center where "everything goes" is a city ordinance and where various crooked enterprisers, be they gangs, cops, cardinals, or politicians, live in uneasy harmony. I suppose that 'sin City and SIN CITY is a cartoon, but it is a beautifully written one and reducing it to "just" a comic book adaptation is to miss the complex moral force of Miller's imaginary world.
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Miller (who has a cameo has a doomed priest) has said that to him the tales of SIN CITY are love stories, and each of them positions some lost soul at the center of a tale of corruption in which he must stand up to save some speck of innocence in the hazardous waste zone that is Basin City. Marv is going to make the men who killed Goldie pay. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is going to preserve the innocence of a little girl (who grows up to be Jessica Alba) under threat from a pervert (in a tale that slightly resembles the concurrent OLDBOY). And a rogue (Clive Owen) lands between the cops, a gang of tough women, and some gangsters when he takes the side of an abused woman (Brittany Murphy). Love is at the center of each of these tales, but so is a sense of justice that transcends the rigid, middlebrow, conventional "morality" of society, itself a sham set of laws that those in power flout with impunity.
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Basin City is run, as the reader of the whole SIN CITY series quickly grasps, by the powerful Roark family, which contains a senator and a cardinal at one end, and powerful if mad murderers at the other. Marv and Hartigan go up against this powerful family and their bittersweet victory is to die making Basin City slightly safer for its hookers, grifters, and thieves. Dark Horse comics has now released all the SIN CITY graphic novels in a new uniform set in smaller dimensions and with the spines forming an image of Nancy. The volumes most relevant to the movie are THE HARD GOODBYE, the original SIN CITY ($17, ISBN 1 59307 293 7), THE BIG FAT KILL ($17, ISBN 1 59307 295 3), and THAT YELLOW BASTARD ($19, ISBN 1 59307 296 1). The are all essentially brutal revenge tales out of the old E.C. horror comics, and are reminders that much of the foundation for noir is found in horror films, especially those of producer Val Lewton.
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I can say enough about how wonderfully acted and well written this meaty, rich, ever amusing and gripping film happens to be. Miller is a great writer in his tough guy voice which here is augmented by the elegiac thought balloon overvoice pioneered (or popularized) by Miller in THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. To hear Rourke and Willis intone Miller's letter perfect hardboiled syntax is to immerse oneself not in an old fashioned homage to pulp fictions past but to see how vital that genre remains to this day. If it weren't for the fact that 99 percent of the film takes place at night I might have tried to claim it as an entry in the neo-noir genre I've dubbed film soleil.
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Rodriguez is a counter intuitive choice for helming this remarkable film. Personally I find Rodriguez's films wildly uneven in contrast to his public buddy Tarantino. QT's films are each of them strong, solid genre efforts that are quintessentially Quentin, instantly identifiable as his from just a few seconds of viewing. The effort to make his films is so intense that Tarantino must relax for several years between projects. Meanwhile, Rodriguez, a true film geek, seems to have three films in production simultaneously at any one time), films on which he does everything from operating the digital camera to getting spring water for the crew. The superficial thing to say is that Rodriguez is spreading himself too thin and that subsequently some of his films such as the later SPY KIDs and ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO and a few others suffer. But it difficult to mount that argument in the face of SIN CITY which shows if nothing else that Rodriguez has a fine sense of what makes great cinematic material. In a sense he also pulls a Tarantino by jiggering with the chronology of the three main tales and invites the viewer to piece it together the way viewers of PULP FICTION did in the wake of its fame.
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I hope I've given some idea of how rich Rodriguez's film is, though I suspect I am preached to the choir. Nevertheless, in Frank Miller and now Rodriguez's hands, Sin City — and SIN CITY — is a city without limits.
Mousecapades
Here's the paradox of DISNEYWAR (Simon and Schuster, 572 pages, $29.95, ISBN 0 684 80993 1), James B. Stewart's fascinating new book on Michael Eisner's 20-year reign at Disney. A lot of what Eisner says makes sense. His aphorisms are sound business policy. He just didn't act on his own insights.
The study of decision-making is a large segment of business education these days and those who study decision-making can become gurus to big business. The only problem is that the advisors are talking about a rational system of weighing evidence and studying options, while the captains of industry are irrational to their core, if Eisner is any yardstick.
In an ideal world, you'd think that a CEO would welcome ideas that expand a company's income toward the 20 per cent annual increase that he has promised the stockholders. But within the walls of Disneyland, Eisner continually pooh poohed ideas he didn't like or deals he disapproved up, deals that other companies later made successfully but for a larger investment (that is, Disney missed out on some profitable bargains). ABC, for example, lost both CSI and SURVIVOR to CBS (which isn't to say, though, that the shows would necessarily been hits if ABC handled them).
Eisner was also driven by this strange backstabbing two-facedness that, if I read Stewart correctly, was based on his fear of competitors who were ostensibly on his side. For example, on the one hand he would endorse Robert Iger as a likely candidate for president of the company while almost simultaneously badmouthing him to board members as unready for the position. For years, he complained to his "best friend" Michael Ovitz about Katzenberg; after Katzenberg left, and he was pursuing Ovitz to replace him, Eisner complained about his "best friend" to his lawyer and others. Way before all this, he complained to Katzenberg about Barry Diller. Eisner seems driven by an unnecessary paranoia the kind of irrational element that students of decision-making fail to calculate into their formulae about how organizations work.
The synecdoche for all the problems at Disney is found in a story that plays over a few pages starting on page 91. Bill Mechanic, then in charge of Disney home video, about which essentially knew nothing, wanted to release affordable VHS tapes of Disney animated classics at $29.95 (this was in the mid 1980s, which tapes could be as much as $80 dollars). Everyone was against it: Roy Disney, because it "cheapened" the Disney brand, Eisner because he didn't think people would collect them, the TV unit because video sales would interfere with prestige airings of the movies, and Katzenberg because he was turf conscious. Mechanic went ahead and did it anyway, employing an ad budget of $7 million to alert viewers ("We've got to change consumer habits," he argued). Before Eisner and his advisors even knew what happened, PINOCCHIO sold 1.7 million units. Yet when Mechanic next wanted to sell CINDERELLA on tape, Roy threw a fit and Mechanic ended up with SLEEPING BEAUTY as a second inexpensive tape. Doubling the ad budget, Mechanic sold 3 million units of that film. Mechanic showed that Disney's traditional plan of re-releasing its films every seven years, though it might generate income of $125 million over nearly 30 years, amounted to only about $25 million a year. Mechanic's alternative accrued $100 million right now. It was a good lesson in visionary decision-making but its very success seems to have irritated Eisner and everyone else who became even more crablike in their withdrawal from the real world.
It's hard to be a visionary at a time when so much is changing, so it is easy to see how videotape and the Internet confounded Disney's corporate masters. But these businessmen have access to information that no one else does, and also in the end people are sheep easily manipulated by advertising campaigns, so how much risk is there really in the end? Still, instead of experimenting more, Eisner got bogged down in turf wars, disputes in which "success" was ambiguous. What did Eisner really gain by driving away so many good people?
Many board members began to notice that, stripped of these advisors he had alienated, Eisner was much less reliable a CEO in the 1990s then he was in the 1980s, and the real drama of the book begins when elements of the board turn against him, i.e., the very story we have all been reading about in the press for the last few years.
Stewart tells his complex story, which is still unfolding even as the book comes out, very well, and with gripping detail. Stewart, a prize-winning author and former editor of features at the WALL STREET JOURNAL, writes in a clear, plain prose that provides an excellent window view into the shark invested boardrooms of big business, and the book should probably give pause to young MBAs about to sign up at Disney or any other Hollywood institution. Structurally, the book starts out a little odd: Stewart's survey of Eisner's life leaps from college to Paramount, skipping what might be crucial early years at ABC, where Eisner met and worked with Diller. It's a company that Eisner's Disney later bought. Still, Stewart forsakes interesting foreshadowing to dive right into the Paramount years (maybe some huge early section was cut to make a more agreeable size, like a Hollywood movie trimmed for exhibition). Also, like most business reporters, Stewart probably doesn't really know all that much about movies as movies or the media as an obsessional locus of attention for people who don't write big bestselling books. Thus he calls the love interest in THE CRYING GAME a "transsexual," has SOUTH PARK on the Fox network instead of Comedy Central, and has SEINFELD on Tuesday night instead of Thursday (I was also confused by the discussion of AOL and Yahoo around page 335, which seems to equate both as a "portal," when I thought Yahoo was just a search engine). This little errors, however, don't seem to detract from the book's over all peep inside the chaotic, irrational centers of media power, which succeed because of the obsessionals and despite the decision of a company's leaders.
"Shit has its own integrity"
There are numerous Gore Vidals. There is the novelist whose books the scholars can't figure out where to categorize, in literature or in pop fiction. There is Vidal the TV pundit. There is Vidal the elegant essayist. There is Vidal the politician. And there is Vidal the political rabble-rouser and gadfly to the body politic.
But the Vidal relevant to this column is Vidal the movie star, screenwriter, and adaptee of numerous films. And this Vidal is in fine fettle in a recently published anthology of old interviews, CONVERSATIONS WITH GORE VIDAL (University Press of Mississippi, 196 pages, $20, ISBN 1 57806 673 5), part of the press's new Literary Conversations series, and edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole, editors of a magazine called GARGOYLE.
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Vidal's views on moviemaking, contained in the transcript of an AFI seminar originally published as a "Dialogue on Film" from the April 1977 issue of AMERICAN FILM, are sure to sparks of rage in most conventional film buffs, as it did in me many years ago when I first read it in the magazine. Now I am more sympathetic to his view, which is that directors get way too much credit for what happens in a film at the expense of other creatives, especially the screenwriters. Vidal is withering as he attacks the auteur theory, and, since he has actually been on movie sets and written films and most auteur critics have not, his disparagement has a weight most dissidents don't — and only Vidal of all the Hollywood people who could, would speak out against a critical convention. Dwight Macdonald and Pauline Kael were also adamant anti-auteurists and frankly I don't see what got all these people so riled, aside from the to them appalling idea that the likes of Edgar G. Ulmer would be elevated to the level of artist. At the time I first read it I was irritated at what I took to be Vidal's pro-studio stance (the director is the "brother-in-law"), but now I see that giving due credit is much harder than it appears.
For what it is worth, Vidal also adds that directors are even more useless in the theater than they are in movies (until the early 1900s theaters didn't really have directors, but "actor - managers").
Aside from the AFI interview, GORE VIDAL also has 10 other interviews ranging from 1960 to 2003. The funniest is probably the one from 1992 with Larry Kramer, who keeps trying to claim Vidal for the side of the AIDS protesters and with Vidal, while sympathetic, refusing to become pigeonholed as an exclusively gay author. They are discussing Vidal's historical novels and the two playwrights start riffing dialogue on an imaginary play about George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Vidal starts out by saying, that "Washington was certainly in love with Hamilton, who treated him so rudely when he was his Commander-in-Chief and then when he was Secretary of the Treasury. In effect, Hamilton was prime minister for eight years. Washington was king. Hamilton treated him like a beautiful boy would treat a sugar daddy: standing him up, being rude to him. There was this whole pattern there. For a young writer coming along it's a lovely theme, the love affair between Washington and Hamilton — which invented the United States."
The interview proceeds thus:
LK: But Gore, why not you?
GV: Because I'm out of historical novels. I'm done with it. But I'm throwing out some nice themes here. The ironies — which are the best fun: The United States is then formed, mainly to protect Washington's investment out on the Ohio River. Then they're separated. Hamilton's practicing law down in Mt. Vernon. Washington writes him a hysterical letter: "We've got to start a Republic, a strong federal government. We're about to lose our property. Because the guys who fought in the revolution got nothing out of it, and are being taxed and are angry." So Hamilton said, "All right, I'll give you a Republic." Now throw in the fact that it was a kind of love affair between these two men that started the whole country on this foundation — a more perfect union!
LK: That's what you should call it! "A More Perfect Union." You should do it as a play. You were a very successful and amusing playwright. It sounds like this would lend itself well to a play. Your return to the stage.
GV: "Where's my wig, Alex?" That'll be the first line.
LK: "Where are your teeth, George?"
GV: "I thought I had them in!"
LK: "They're still around my crotch."
One suspects, however, that Peabody and Ebersole are not overwhelmingly obsessive Vidal buffs. There are a few errors that no Vidalian would make. For example in the list of Vidal's books, DARK GREEN, BRIGHT RED and A SEARCH FOR THE KING are transposed from their chronological order. In the chronology of Vidal's life, the editors claim that his first novel, WILLIWAW, has a gay character. Later they have the infamous 1968 William F. Buckley v. Gore Vidal conventions broadcast debate taking place on the DICK CAVETT SHOW (though he later did get into a fight with Normal Mailer on that show). I would also argue that the book could have been three times as thick. Vidal is an always-available interview subject and he is one of the few celebrities to have been interviewed twice by PLAYBOY.
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I was a big fan of THE X-FILES but never caught up with its spin off, THE LONE GUNMEN: THE COMPLETE SERIES (Fox, 2001-2, three discs, $39.98, Tuesday, March 29) until the discs came out. And I can see why the public may have had a problem with it. What's sad is that it did have the potential to be a good show.
If SEINFELD had been cancelled after its first eight shows we would never have been able to enjoy its increasingly complex narrative style. If even the X-FILES had been cancelled after its first season, we would never have seen how we could have been wrapped up in its mix of paranormal and governmental conspiracies. If LONE GUNMEN had lasted more than half a season, maybe it too would have gelled as these two shows did with time and attention.
The Lone Gunmen were comic relief within the otherwise gloomy world of the X-Files. They worshipped Mulder as a god and all had crushes on Scully. But in spinning them off the show's manufacturers decided that the show should be as comic as their appearances on X-FILES, with a bit of a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE tone. They also added the character of the well-meaning Jimmy Bond to the mix, as even more comic relief (and someone to explain the plot to), and made Yves Harlow a regular.
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Had they but world enough and time, the show's writers and producers might have expanded and seasoned and deepened the show. Unfortunately, Fox pulled the plug, and in the most terrible way, after an episode that ended in a cliffhanger. However, Fox was nice enough to wrap up the Lone Gunmen's story in an episode, called "Jump the Shark," from the X-FILES's last season (borrowed from the last season's set to be included here, with that set's audio commentary track). Personally, I found what they did to the LTs appalling, but the producers have elegant arguments in its favor.
Like the X-FILES sets, the transfers of the show's 13 one-hour episodes are excellent (1.78:1, enhanced), with an adequate DD 2.0, also available in Spanish, and with English and Spanish subtitles.
There are several commentary tracks, and among the chatters are director Rob Bowman, cinematographer Robert McLachlan, and writers Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, and John Shiban on the pilot, with Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, and John Shiban on two other episodes, and actors Dean Haglund, Tom Braidwood, Bruce Harwood, Stephen Snedden, and Zuleikha Robinson, director Bryan Spicer, and others on another episode. There is also a fine "Defenders of Justice: The Making of THE LONE GUNMEN" retrospective making of, and four TV spots.
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Now that CLOSER (Sony Pictures, 2004, $28.95, Tuesday, March 29) is out on DVD, free of the fake media brou-ha-ha of big draw actors talking about the differing flavors of semen, it's possible to look at Mike Nichols adaptation with a clearer eye. As I wrote at the time of its release, to me, in the end, the film is like hyper serious sketch comedy, and I still think that ultimately it fails as a movie, both because it was adapted from a confusingly motivated play, and because Mike Nichols is a metteur en scene on the level of a Milos Forman.
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But that shouldn't take away from the remarkable performance of Julia Roberts. Hers is one of two unique performances from calendar year 2004. The first was from Virginia Madsen in SIDEWAYS. There, Madsen played that rarity on the screen, a truly admirable person, a single woman balancing work and school with an eye for bettering her circumstances and leaving behind always disappointing entanglements. She is proud, noble, morally centered, but not off-putting. The filmmakers pull away from making her a harridan despite the temptation of that typical Hollywood moment when she discovers that the man she has been dating has been, in effect, lying to her. Instead, she stays a hero. I've never seen a character quite like her in a movie before.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Roberts's Anna. She is the kind of woman that you are more likely to meet in the real world. Closed. Inward. Bugged by something never stated. Driven by something never acknowledged. Knowing herself but paradoxically unknown to herself at the same time. There is some imp within Anna that compels her to destroy all her romances, to throw them away. You can see the psychosis percolating on her forehead, and in the vacancy of her eyes. As you are watching her, you think that Roberts must have some kind of personal identification with the role because she plays it with such knowing subtlety and you recall that she often plays women running away from men. She never broadcasts any of this. She lets the audience pick up on it — or not — as they may.
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Roberts is an Academy Award wining actress. You'd think that that would accord her some respect after years of playing in light romantic comedies. But Erin Brockovich is a crowd-pleasing role, just the kind of upbeat character with quasi liberal values that Academy members think advertise best Hollywood's standards. It's a fun part and Roberts is good in it, but Anna is the kind of role that is more difficult to pull off and never gets the attention of Academy voters because it isn't showy, although in her willfully masochistic self-destruction she is just as "disabled" as the gimps and 'tards and alkys who populate the best actor winners circle.
Sony Entertainment, the former Columbia Tristar, offers up CLOSER in its SuperBit high concentrate format, which nullifies the possibility of supplements, except for the listless theme song represented by the music video.
Corporate enthusiasm for LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG (Sony, 2004, $16.95, Tuesday, April 19) seems to have faded when it was clear that none of the actors, especially Scarlett Johanssen, were going to receive Oscar nods. But it was a hard sell to begin with. John Travolta in an unbecoming gray dye job that looks blonde, playing an alcoholic barroom philosopher, a Mickey Rourke from BARFLY with a Bartlett's under his belt.
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In fact, LOVE SONG is almost an textbook example of a indie film, a now dying species and one I won't lament seeing the back of. From FEELING MINNESOTA to THE BROTHERS MCMULLEN to LOVE SONG, a certain breed of low budget indie film is identifiable by its adherence to key concepts of conception. The film must be shot almost entirely in one big house (what they call a "practical" set). It must be set in an exotic location that passes as an "additional character." It must present in its cast a blend of rising youngsters with an aging superstar. It must have either morbid piano music or folksy guitar score.
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And yet also like most indie films of this flavor it adheres to the classic predictable structures of conventional Hollywood films. Writer-director Shainee Gabel's script follows a fairly predictable arc. It begins with A) an old boys network, Bobby Long, failed academic, his acolyte and former student, now also an alcoholic in New Orleans, and their coalition of friends and drunkards, into which enters B) Pursy, the daughter of one their recently deceased brethren, who is C) abused and reviled and thwarted and frustrated but manages to win everyone over, until they become what passes for a real family, until D) she learns the secret they have been withholding, which causes her to spurn her new friends, who now batter against her defenses for a second if different round, reconciled only shortly before Long, who has been ill throughout the story, meets his end. These ups and downs, these flowerings and retractions of intimacy have been integral to Hollywood storytelling from GAL YOUNG 'UN to THE STATION AGENT.
What's most shocking currently is what's missing, that key structural element without which the film makes no sense. Like FRIED GREEN TOMATOES, it's really the homosexual love story between two of the main characters. Looked at from this angle much of the movie suddenly makes sense: that Pursy's intrusion into the Tennessee Williams hothouse squalor of Long and his acolyte Lawson disrupts the tidy if fragile union between a gay older man and his young essentially straight but occasionally switching follower, like Blanche disrupting Stanley's menagerie. Lawson's following Long to Louisiana, their living in the same house, their hothouse jealousies when Pursy hits the scene, all now make sense when seen in that light. In the end what makes the film interesting is just this internal debate, disharmony, its being at war with itself.
Instead, the film tries to make a romance out of Long's dissolution. Along the way, it trots out numerous little tropes that you tend to find in first time indie director movies (and novels). My favorite cringe-making moment is when someone says, "Quiet everybody. Bobby is going to tell a story."
LOVE SONG enjoys a nice transfer and adequate sound, and the usual panoply of extras, including a low-key audio commentary track by Gabel and photographer Elliot Davis, each on a different coast buy linked by the magic of modern technology. There is a standard making of (all the actors are "generous" with each other) and a whole host of deleted scenes, one a steamy sex scene in the front seat of a car, and the rest making sense of Deborah Kara Unger's truncated role.
And speaking of John Travolta, he figures mightily in DREAM JETS (MPI, 2003, $19.98, Tuesday, March 29), a 90-minute, two part TV event, which takes the viewer into the world of private jets and the people who both own them and design them.
In fact, this film, really serves as an extensive advertisement for the services of Kim Emery and Cheryl Strack, two Texas women who have parlayed their interior decorating skills into the even more vulgar world of jet interiors. Mostly the film follows this pair as they consult with the agent for a mysterious client on an evolving jet interior, these confabs interrupted by slim IN STYLE profiles of celebrity jet users, such as Travolta, Sidney Pollack, and Carly Simon, among five or six others. It's a celebration of wretched excess, a thin LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS with an even more narrow demographic.
Morbidly, this document will only really be of interest if Travolta at some point dies in a plane crash. You also wonder why Simon chose to participate in this film. She reputedly suffers severe stage fright, of which flight fright must be a close relative, and in any case, she hasn't appeared in enterprises such as this before.
MPI's package of this frothy entertainment featurette comes on a single sided disc with a full frame transfer. The extra consists of B-Roll footage of Travolta flying around the world on a good will tour in the wake of 911 for Braniff Airlines piloting his own jet airliner.
And speaking of Gore Vidal, ISLANDS IN THE STEAM (Paramount, 1977, $14.95, Tuesday, March 29) is a film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. Schaffner is famous for inspiring Vidal to abhor the auteur theory, as he explains in the AFI interview. When Vidal went to Cannes to promote THE BEST MAN he says he say banners all over the place saying "THE BEST MAN: un film de Franklin Schaffner," which irritated the screenwriter, who had adapted his own highly successful play to the screen. Schaffner was simply the executer of Vidal's vision.
Schaffner is one of those old style directors like William Wyler, drawn to middlebrow literary adaptations on "important" themes. Like Nichols, he is more a metteur en scene, a scenery pusher with no immediately grokable visual style beyond what the DP brings.
This is the famous George C. Scott film in which he acted with the back of his neck (when his estranged wife tells him that one of his sons died in the war). It's based on one of Hemingway's lesser, posthumous novels (although to some of us, all of Hemingway is "lesser"). It covers some of the same ground as his TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (itself filmed twice). Scott is himself Hemingwayesque but this project didn't have the impact on the screen that its makers no doubt hoped for. Scott does the rage well, and that quiet back of the head moment well, but is boring in the rest of the movie. The film comes in a somewhat soft transfer from a non-optimum source and contains no extras.
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Like its companion in rage actors, BLUE CHIPS (Paramount, 1994, $14.95, Tuesday, March 29) comes without extras, but it is good to have this William Friedkin film on DVD. It's probably deemed "lesser" Friedkin, and it does devolved into some narrative clichés (the estranged wife arriving at the last minute to see her husband take a public stand on an important issue).
Forget all that, though. BLUE CHIPS, which is about the ills of collegiate basketball, is one of the great anger movies. For one thing, it stars Nick Nolte as the basketball coach who has to cheat to get good players who can win and satisfy the school's alumni sponsors. At the end he gives a great speech, convincingly angry at the way he has been forced to, as he says, "become what I despise."
It also stars J. T. Walsh, the great anger actor, but in the tradition of Scott, Lee J. Cobb, one that is carried on by Titus Welliver. Here Walsh is in mostly anger mode, and has a great scene of dueling embolisms with Nolte at the end.
BLUE CHIPS devolves into nothingness (no one knew how to end this story), but as a succession of acting turns it is great fun.
Letters
From Rusty Crowe:
"Hey Holm, you ignorant fuck. Naomi and Nicole are Australians you wanker."
From Edna Ogundare:
"Your THE RING 2 review states that Kidman and Watts are British, one way or another those facts are wrong. Nicole Kidman is an American born, Australian raised actress, she is not British. Naomi Watts is British born, Australian raised. She is more Australian than British."
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.
NEXT TIME: MELINDA AND MELINDA, more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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