By D.K. Holm
April 15, 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.]
28 Days Later
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
Like many people way back in 1979, I had never heard of the Amityville "horror." Indeed, I had never heard of Amityville, a shoreline enclave in south Long Island. I went to the movie because that's what one did in the 1970s — went to every horror film that came out. But I was talking to my colleague Ed Goldberg the other day just before the screening, and though he was raised eight miles from Amityville, he had never heard of the Amityville horror either.
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The Amityville case, such as it is, may loom larger as a template for modern ghost stories instead of as a proof of paranormal happenings. In fact, the whole thing is a hoax, as one of the participants admitted. It's true that a certain a Ronald "Butch" DeFeo killed his family — parents and four siblings — in fall of 1974. And it is true that a year later the Lutz family, contractor George and his wife Kathy, and her three children from a previous marriage then moved into the home at 112 Ocean Avenue. It also appears true that the Lutz family moved out abruptly 28 days later.
But did green stickum ooze from the walls? Did hoards of flies attack a priest? Did glowing red eyes appear in the window? Did the Lutzs find horned footprints in the snow? Was Mr. Lutz slowly consumed with a blood lust? Did the Lutzs really flee the house never to return?
It appears not, especially given that William Weber, Butch DeFeo's lawyer, admitted in an radio interview that the "hauntings" were a hoax, hatched over several bottles of wine one night as a means for the debt-burdened Lutz to get out of a terrible mortgage and Weber to use the alleged haunting as a basis for a new trial for his client. The ooze was made up, the red eyes turned out to be those of a neighbor's cat, the footprints in the snow turned out to have occurred when there wasn't any snow in Amityville, and the Lutzs came back a few days after "fleeing" to hold a garage sale.
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THE EXORCIST, which had just come out, helped fuel the conspirators' imagination. Local news stories and the ghost hunting of Ed and Lorraine Warren initially spurred the story, which led to a feckless book by Jay Anson followed by a movie and seven sequels and a documentary, and now this recent remake produced by Michael Bay. The full details of the hoax are recounted in a story by Joe Nickell in the January-February issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, and earlier in the book THE AMITYVILLE CONSPIRACY, by Stephen Kaplan.
Bay's film, directed by first time music video convert Andrew Douglas, roughly follows the trajectory of the first film, and also continues the pretence that all of this really happened. Real names are used. But because the "reality" of the Lutzs experience is somewhat undramatic, and just sorta trails off in the end, we also get a FRIDAY THE 13TH style confrontation in the rainy forest, with axes and screams and dream moments. Credited screenwriter Scott Kosar (THE MACHINIST, Bay's CHAINSAW MASSACRE) essentially follows Sandor Stern's original script while adding his own variations, rather than re-investigate the actual case.
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This should sound familiar: After a preface in which we see Butch slaughter his family at exactly 3:15 am (the iconography of this time slot is never explained) we leap ahead a year to meet the Lutz family, a struggle lower middle class unit led by the well-meaning George (a bearded Ryan Reynolds of TWO GUYS, A GIRL, AND A PIZZA PARLOR fame, here looking like Jason Lee), his wife Kathy (Melissa George, my favorite villainess from ALIAS), and three resentful step-children. That the kids are somewhat hostile to the new dad displacing their deceased father at first looks like it is going to serve as a plausible psychological explanation for the poltergeist activities, resembling a similar set up in THE EXORCIST, a refuge for rationalists, I guess.
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The action commences when Kathy finds an ad for an expansive house on Long Island, dirt cheap. Despite the fact that the realtor confesses that a grisly murder took place a year ago, the Lutzs go for it (realtor scenes are becoming standard in horror films: see THE RING 2).
From here on it, the film is a series of escalating shock moments, with an increasingly eerie mood and the narrative engine of a date with fate, i.e., George, possessed by the spirit of an insane Colonial preacher who tortured and slaughtered supposedly possessed New Yorkers in an abattoir concealed in the basement, gearing up to mimic Butch on a winter evening 28 days into their inhabitation of the home.
AMITYVILLE HORROR is not the worst horror film you will ever see. It sets out to do one thing — give you the creeps — and by that standard it succeeds. Mostly they are "startle" effects, such as the light going on in a closet where a girl is revealed to be clutched to the ceiling by bloody arms, unseen by the person entering the closet. None of it is believable of course, and there is a wild inconsistency as to what the haunting entities can do (just as in POLTERGEIST).
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One of the things I liked about Bay's version of CHAINSAW was its beautiful photography by Daniel Pearl (in fact, it may be the best photographed movie of 2003). Peter Lyons Collister's work here is more in the tradition of the '70s films we remember: grainy, brownish, and straightforward. Not a lot of arty angles or tracking shots. Generally, horror films are a wonderful opportunity for DPs to experiment, to strive to be formalists, to really tell the story visually. But as many of us remember, most horror films fail to avail themselves of this option, usually because of imposed time and budgetary constraints. Still, there a few nice touches, such as the shot of a doorknob, which has a cross on it, turned to "locked" position, which flips the cross to Satan's emblem.
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The best sequence in the film features a babysitter named Lisa (Rachel Nichols) who shows up one night to give the parental Lutzs a break and ends up scaring the kids by spilling the beans about the DeFeo slaughter. Like a character in the RING series she ends up carried out of the house on a stretcher. This sequence, however, leads to the most insubstantial segment of the film, which is Kathy seeking out a priest to help her. Philip Baker Hall proves to be a most ineffectual exorcist, fleeing the house just because a bunch of flies came out of the air vents.
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THE AMITYVILLE HORROR is, of course, the second Bay production taking an iconic 1970s film and remaking it with up-to-date special effects (a prequel to CHAINSAW and a TRANSFORMERS movie are also in the works). In that regard it joins other recent '70s revival films such as HOUSE OF A 1000 CORPSES, Romero remakes or re-releases, WRONG TURN, and CABIN FEVER. Since the financial success of the source film is not a prerequisite here, but only cult status, THE WICKER MAN, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER, THE OMEN, and VIDEODROME might also qualify for the Bay treatment.
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The film also is the latest in a recent series of horror knock offs in which a "troubled" family moves into an isolated house that serves only to exacerbate their woes. Besides THE RING TWO, recently we had, THE BOGEYMAN, Anna Paquin's DARKNESS, De Niro's HIDE AND SEEK, and DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, with DARK WATER to come. These films show the immediate influence of the J-horror sub-genre but in fact we can see that this is an indirect, filtered influence from the original American haunted house films of the '70s. I don't mind this trend at all. When they work (which is rarely), haunted house are the scariest movies of all. I guess that's because they get us where we live.
SIN CITY Directory
I'm waiting for the SIN CITY backlash. I've already heard some demurrals from a few friends and fellow film geeks. In some quarters, Robert Rodriguez's film is not being fully embraced. You'd think that it would be perfect geek fodder, but in some haphazard conversations I learn to my surprise that not every comic nerd likes Frank Miller or SIN CITY. Further, I've heard a lukewarm response to the film from a few people, underwhelmed by its digital advances and anthology story structure. It's even been charged with not really being noir. Anthony Lane in the NEW YORKER basically called it heartless, which staggers me.
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Dissenters are going to find a lot of material in FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY: THE MAKING OF THE MOVIE, credited to Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller but edited by Chris Roberson (Troublemaker Publishing, 272 pages, $30, ISBN 1 933104 00 7). A blend of the script, behind the scenes stills, and transcripts of conventional "making of" featurette encomiums (Willis on Miller, Miller on Tarantino, Own on Miller, Miller on Rodriguez, ad infinitum) that will probably appear on the DVD via their original medium of video interviews.
The book also includes numerous testimony from the Troublemaker visual effects team, the costumers and prop people, a section just on the film's cars, and special intros and interview excerpts from Miller and Rodriguez. The abundance of black and white stills of the actual shoot give an idea just how much of the film was conceived in the computer hard drive. It's a fabulous package and probably tells you everything you need to know about the film's making (until the next issue of CINEFEX comes out). Unfortunately, for SIN knockers it may only reaffirm that the film is an utterly artificial construct with no real communality with noir.
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I am perplexed as to why viewers seem so accepting of and indeed were very exciting by SKY CAPTAIN but not this film which is after all based on an award winning series that proved its merit in another medium. In any case, aren't most films these days artificial constructs in the same way as SIN CITY but created thus in much more secrecy (until the DVD comes out)? JURASSIC PARK is mostly special effects, created in a computer. But so was GLADIATOR. In fact, half the movies on the screen probably have some kind of visual enhancement. And now that I think of it, lighting is an artificial enhancement, and so is make up, and these functions go back to the birth of cinema.
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That SIN CITY is really noir also baffles me. As Miller reveals in his intro, he started out loving Spillane and Chandler, mysteries and noir and really only got into costumed heroes because that's what they were buying. But, like Thomas Hardy late in life reverting back to his first love poetry after a divergent career as a novelist, Miller says that "when I got enough popularity and freedom to do what I wanted to do, I went right back to the stuff I had been doing when I was fourteen." Miller goes on to discriminate between movies and comics and asserts that comic books can be accurately transferred to film and that SIN CITY is to date the best example of that. He also contemplates SIN CITY's noir roots, emphasizing that noir is more than just chiaroscuro, it's "what's going on behind the eyes of the people," that noir is really about "emotional darkness."
Media Notes From All Over
You know what must be the most contentious area of competitive Merchandizing? Mattresses. In my burg, there are no less than three mattress peddlers, each of them mounting homey commercials that lay claim to offering the best deals. There is Mattress World, another one run by a guy in a big cowboy had who goes by the moniker Ger-Bear, and a third, which is a general furniture company with a major sideline in mattresses. All of these business' commercials are shot on site, look "zoomy," flash big whitewash lettering, and feature the owner's family and / or underlings. Since what they are selling is the intimate armature of sleep, they strive to make their selling environment has cozy as possible. Yet just how many mattresses are needed by a citizenry of just over a million in the urban area that comprises about eight distinct municipalities? It can't be that many. Mattresses are things like cars that the average middleclass citizen or lower buys but once or twice in a lifetime — mainly because they can cost almost as much as a car. These mattress companies don't explicitly attack each other but they are probably struggling for a thin market share of consumers, people they are going to lure onto their premises once, or twice, at best, in a lifetime. And these are just the companies that advertise on TV. In addition there are another 28 mattress merchants scattered throughout the city … The competition must be tight. But does advertising really prove cost effective? Look at another product but one that is nationally advertised. Lipstick. Cosmetic companies spend millions to promote these products but the individual units cost, at the low end, only a few dollars, and at the high end from $12 to $15 dollars. Is that much lipstick really sold in America? To support the kinds of campaigns that cosmetic companies mount on behalf of lipstick they would have to sell more Mac Paramount Satin than people buy food … Do advertisers still specialize in intentional grammatical mistakes designed to irritate the guardians of language and thus lodging the advert in the otherwise resistant mind? Or is that there is such illiteracy now even in the advertising world that commercial makers don't notice when they are fucking up? Regardless, these little slips are enough to make the purists go mad. Take the recent Century 21 ad in which a woman in the market for a new house is running up to a school bus in an attempt to interview the kids on the quality of their school. "What is the teacher to student ratio in your classroom?," she says at one point. Huh? Doesn't she mean teacher to student ratio in your school? Presumably there is only one teacher per class, a traditional formula of education that I thought was common. Did no one, not the writer, the ad firm, the director, and even the actress, notice that the sentence did not make sense? … That Michael Bay is a very clever fellow. Like his compadre Quentin Tarantino he's gone and made himself a weblog, and it's one where his gross, short-sighted personality is on continual unironic display. This blog's Bay is a self-characterized sexual behemoth, a rogue constantly in search of a Playboy mansion party to crash. When Bay was a kid he wanted to be the villain in a Billy Wilder film when he grew up. But as I say he is also a clever fellow. " Dating Fez has become a euphemism at Casa De Bay; it means you're stretched out. This kid is a Scott Biao for the 21st century," he writes, coining a new phrase — "to fez," i.e., to lose your fuckability appeal have being dumped by someone higher than you in the sexual hierarchy. This may sound naïve, but it is entirely possible that this Bay blog is a fake (like the Tarantino blog?) and that it won't even be there by the time you read this. Too bad, if so. It's a comic masterpiece. … Does a bear shit in the woods? In Charmin ads, he does. Please, spare me more of this.
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Coincidently, the Polish pope died just as I was diving into the mammoth, massive, and magnificent three-box set, ANDRZEJ WAJDA: THREE WAR FILMS (The Criterion Collection, No. 282, three discs, A GENERATION: 1955, No. 283, KANAL: 1957, No. 284; ASHES AND DIAMONDS: 1958, No. 285; $79.95, Tuesday, April 26, 2005). He might have approved of these slightly religiously inflected tales about Poland during and after World War II. He certainly lived through their events, when he was a part of at least the cultural resistance and writing plays, many of them widely respected. These films director, Wajda, has not quite achieved the stature of the late pope, but aesthetically at last he should have. He is probably the greatest film director whom you haven't paid any attention to in a long time.
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This set kicks off with A GENERATION (the three films are also available individually). Essentially, this film tells the story of a young man's coming to awareness in fighting oppression. Conveniently, the oppression that matters at hand is Nazi rule, but the film is in fact very ambiguous about just what is going on.
The story behind the plot is that the film (like the novel on which it is based) is tilted toward the communist fighters, who were a minority, instead of the Home Army, which was anti-Nazi and commie, and who are here also portrayed as villains. Wajda tries to explain this in his interview on the disc, but it's a complex issue and for a satisfying explanation for his approach one needs to turn to various books about the director, such as THE CINEMA OF ANDRZEJ WAJDA edited by John Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowska, from Wallflower Press, and from the published screenplays to the unofficial trilogy (by the way, look for Roman Polanski in a small part).
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The full frame image is as good as one can hope, and the mono sound is audible. Extras include a 30+ minute video interview with Wajda, plus a short film he made at film school about the folk ceramic arts of Ilza. There is also a healthy gallery of stills and other images. A 20-page insert contains a long essay that sets Wajda and the film in an historical context, chapter titles, cast and crew, DVD transfer information, and credits.
His next film, KANAL (or, THE SEWER) is probably the very definition of a bleak Eastern European film about defeat and desolation. It's about a group of Polish soldiers fighting the Nazi's who are driven underground, into the Warsaw sewers. Things don't end too well for them.
But again, there is a story behind the story. One controversy behind the later Soviet rule of Poland is that the Russians could have saved Warsaw from demolition by the Germans, but held back, essentially letting the Germans do the work of "ethnic cleansing" for Stalin. Thus depopulated of non-communists, the country was ripe for use as a buffer between Russian and any future German excursions. This is a bitter reality that is the real meaning behind the forlorn gaze out through the bars of a drain opening, and Wajda explains it thoroughly in his video interview.
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This full frame image, too, is as good as one can wish, and the mono sound is again audible. Extras include another nearly 30-minute video chat with Wajda, plus an interview he conducted with the elderly Polish diplomat Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, which gives a lot of background (it might be wise to watch this before the feature). There is also another round of stills and promotional images. A 16-page insert contains a new critique by John Simon, chapter titles, cast and crew, DVD transfer information, stills, and credits.
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Widely considered to be the masterpiece of the trilogy, the beautifully shot ASHES AND DIAMONDS is more morally complex than the other two films, and clearer in its meaning. It stars the charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski as a hit man for the communists, who, with his partner, shoots the wrong man, and, in the course of one day, faces his own form of judgment. Cybulski who is glimpsed at the beginning of A GENERATION, is, in the standard appraisal, the James Dean of Poland, and Wajda later made a film about the actor, who died young.
With its war time setting, unity of time and place (unlike the source novel), and breathtaking images (and upside down Christ statue, a white horse wandering the streets, an image borrowed by numerous other filmmakers from Bergman to Costa-Gavras) ASHES AND DIAMONDS is the very definition of a European art house film, and we don't see its like very often.
The widescreen image (1.66:1) is beautiful, and the mono sound is again audible. Extras include another 30+ minute video interview with Wajda, and newsreel footage of the film's making. There is also another gallery of stills and promotional images. A 16-page insert contains an appreciative essay by Paul Coates, chapter titles, cast and crew, DVD transfer information, and credits. The main bonus feature is an audio commentary track by Annette Insdorf, who knows Wajda and is familiar with Polish history. Her methodical commentary may lack zest but it does show a passionate appreciation of the film.
The original "they don't make 'em like they used to" movie, THE PROFESSIONALS (Columbia, 1966, $19.95, Tuesday, April 5, 2005), like DARK OF THE SUN and FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (or indeed THE DIRTY DOZEN). It gathers together some very masculine action stars in an oft weepily sentimental narrative that makes the typical American male viewer squinge in tearful sympathy.
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At first you almost think it is based on an Elmore Leonard western, since it concerns a kidnapping. But it's not. In fact it's based on a book called A MULE FOR THE MARQUESA by Frank O'Rourke (unless that is a Leonard pseudonym) and reconceived by writer - director Richard Brooks. It doesn't appear to be an allegory for anything, not Vietnam, not American imperialism, as it would be in the hands of Robert Aldrich, and it is not a celebration of bedrock male dignity, as it would in the hands of Ford. Hawks would have interrupted the flow of the story with anecdotal episodes of high comedy among the more eccentrically delineated secondary characters. Rather, Brooks stays focused on the linear narrative in classic mainstream Hollywood style. There's no fat — and perhaps also no spice, as well.
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The plot is simple. An obviously corrupt big rancher named J. W. Grant (Ralph Bellamy) hires one Henry 'Rico' Fardan (Lee Marvin) to gather up a team whose assignment is to fetch Grant's wife Maria (Claudia Cardinale) from the clutches of Mexican revolutionary Jesus Raza (Jack Palance). Fardan comes up with his pal Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), an explosives expert, Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), the horse wrangler, and Jake Sharp (Woody Strode), a bowman. The quartet crosses the border, encounters a few impediments, retrieves the woman, encounters more impediments on the way back, and come to know the real story behind the one Grant told them. It's one of those westerns that looks like it was shot all in the same spot, and rides superficially over its densely political and social foundation.
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Still, it's great to see Lancaster, Marvin, Ryan, Strode, and Palance all together. THE PROFESSIONALS comes from Columbia TriStar in a new excellent widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) with both DD 3.0 and 5.1. Extras new for this release include the 13 minute "Burt Lancaster: A Portrait" with reminisces by daughter Joanna and biographer Kate Buford and plenty of home movie footage, "Memories from THE PROFESSIONALS," a nearly 30-minute retrospective "making of" with Claudia Cardinale, Marie Gomez, and the late cinematographer Conrad Hall, the only surviving filmmakers involved (and featuring lots of between-shots home movie style footage), and a short piece of puffery called "THE PROFESSIONALS: A Classic," with director Martin Campbell, Buford, and Cardinale. Finally, there is the theatrical trailer and an ad for Sony's classic westerns package. The single-sided, dual layered disc comes with an animated, musical menu and 28-chapter scene selection, all in a keep case.
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SUSPECT ZERO (Paramount, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, April 12, 2005) was tagged with being SE7EN lite when it came out, and it does have a number of features in common. For one thing, it is about a "moral" serial killer. For another, it ends up in a desert setting for its grand denouement. And finally its main investigator heroes are troubled human beings.
The film comes with a good pedigree. It's co written by Zak Penn, who also did the Herzog-Lock Ness mockumentary (and who didn't liked what was done to the film here, if his testimony on the Loch Ness yak track is to be trusted), and Billy Ray, who did one of my favorite movies, SHATTERED GLASS. And it is directed by E. Elias Merhige, who has one of the most interesting careers in film today. He made short films before his first feature in 1991, the mysterious BEGOTTEN, and then, after a nearly decade long hiatus, did SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE, a blend of Guy Maddin, Mel Brooks, and David Lynch.
Thus, SUSPECT ZERO seems to be a counter intuitive project for Merhige, but he seems to have taken it seriously, as shown in the various makings ofs. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite master the material or inflame it the way Fincher did SE7EN, who made his film perhaps THE film of the 1990s.
The plot of SUSPECT ZERO had the potential to be almost overly complex. A troubled FBI agent Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) is transferred to New Mexico, where he ends up on the trail of a serial killer (Ben Kingsley) whose victims are — other serial killers. His prey faxes in clues, and Mackelway's old partner (Carrie Ann Moss) also comes on board. The rest of the movie follows its path to the previously mentioned desert show down.
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Paramount's DVD acts as if the film is a major release (which might have seemed likely when the DVD was being prepared). It comes in an excellent widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) and a good DD 5.1 audio, in English and French, with English and Spanish subtitles. Extras start off with a commentary track by Merhige, followed by a 30-minute "making of" broken into four parts. Merhige himself becomes the star of an additional featurette on "remote viewing," which figures in the plot. Finally, there is an alternate ending, which is really an additional ending, the film's Internet trailer, and trailers for other Paramount releases.
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When did pedophilia become the topic du jour of pop culture? It seems like every episode of CSI: MIAMI is a grisly tale about pedophiles out of control, and WITHOUT A TRACE started out as a potential pedophile fest. But while the network TV shows are trying to scare the pants off middle America with its horrific stories of male sexuality gone mad, the movies are offering strangely sympathetic accounts of child molesters.
Besides the documentary CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, there was LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND, with John Hurt as a modern Ashenbach, and Brian Cox as a run of the mill molester in L.I.E. A running theme of these films raises the question, What the hell is wrong with Long Island?
In any case, the latest pro pedophile movies starts with BAD EDUCATION (Sony Pictures Classics, 2004, $26.95, Tuesday, April 12, 2005), the newest film from Pedro Almodovar. Like a Tarantino film it tells a multi-tiered tale that switches between the contemporary (1980) story of a young actor (Gael Garcia Bernal) trying to convince a director (Fele Martinez) to hire him to appear as a drag queen in the movie he has written (kind of a perverse switch on the story behind ROCKY), with scenes of the director reading the script (which the movie enacts) and other flashbacks. The story is a little more complicated than I'm making it sound here.
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By the end of the story you are given to understand that there are a bunch of victimized people in this version of Spanish society and that even the priest turned sugar daddy is to be pitied, if not somehow respected. While being technically accomplished, Almodovar's films have been increasingly uninteresting me, but maybe I just prefer his earlier, funnier movies. In any case, while admiring the technical achievement I found this a struggle to get through, and I kept wondering if there was something wrong with me, given that BAD EDUCATION is heralded as Almodovar's crowning masterpiece by most critics. There are various visual hints that this is some kind of homage or variation on film noir but I didn't get it.
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Columbia TriStar offers BAD EDUCATION in a superb widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio in Spanish with optional English subtitles. Extras start off with a confessional and clarifying commentary track by Almodovar (in Spanish with English subtitles). There are also two deleted scenes that resolved one of the film's plot threads, and "Red Carpet Footage from the AFI Film Festival," a lengthy selection of B-role footage that, for some unaccountable reason, includes a lot of Penelope Cruz. Finally, there is "The Making of BAD EDUCATION," a two-minute collage of images, two trailers for the film itself, and other Sony art film trailers.
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Even more sympathetic is THE WOODSMAN (Sony, 2004, $26.95, Tuesday, April 12, 2005), a star turn for Kevin Bacon but a film that achieved low returns at the box office. I suppose that THE WOODSMAN, adapted by one Nicole Kassell's from a play by one Steven Fechter, qualifies as the more "moral" project because Bacon's Walter Rossworth is attempting to change, go straight, and is struggling with his quirks.
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After serving 12 years for molesting a little girl, Rossworth gets out and finds a job in a lumberyard (hence the title, I guess). There he takes up with the slutty quasi-dykish coworker (Kyra Sedgwick, Mrs. Kevin Bacon), tries to get through to his sister (who is shielded by his brother-in-law (Benjamin Bratt), and is harassed by an angry cop (Mos Def). It all goes in the direction you think it is heading, and Rossworth is even sort of "cured" at the end of the film through an encounter with a young bird watcher, a scene that feels like the heart of the movie and which had potential to be poignant and, if broadened to a series of mysterious encounters, could have been the substance of the whole play, or movie, with a much greater payoff.
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Columbia TriStar is releasing this Newmarket in a good widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) with DTS and DD 5.1 audio. Supplements include a conventional commentary track from director Nicole Kassell (the actors were all "generous" with each other, that sort of thing), a five minute "making of," three deleted or extended scenes, and the trailer.
THE CORPORATION (Zeitgeist, 2004, two discs, $29.99, Tuesday, April 5, 2005) is the kind of movie that usually ends up preaching to the converted (unless a right wing MBA picks it up by accident). Like FAHRENHEIT 911 at one end of the scale and the numerous Moveon.org produced docs at the other, it doesn't pretend to be neutral, but it does include a vast amount of fascinating history and information (the film, made by Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar, who also did the doc on Noam Chomsky, is based on Joel Bakan's book).
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The premise is that, since the corporation is legally recognized as a "person," it should be judged as one, and the concept is held up to psychological evaluation and found to be psychotic. In fact, by the end of the film's 145 minutes you are likely to be thoroughly depressed and feel helpless. However, in the film's last 25 minutes there are causes for hope: a South American city that rebelled against a corporate maneuver, and even a CEO who awakened to the consequences of his company's behavior.
To me, the most fascinating information in the film concerned the American general Smedley-Butler, who was approached in 1930 by a coalition of corporate leaders to stage a coup. Instead of complying, he denounced the men and became a hit on the lecture circuit talking about his military career before that as being essentially a cop for his corporate masters. The event is little written about, though there is a book on the subject, and it did later inspire SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. But still, I think the case of Smedley-Butler would make a terrific HBO movie.
THE CORPORATION comes absolutely packed. On disc one, there are two audio commentaries, the first an editing together of comments by editor-director Abbot and Achbar, the other by writer Bakan, who goes into more detail about the historical background of the film.
Other extras on disc one include a descriptive audio track for the vision impaired, eight question and answer sessions between the three filmmakers and various audiences, and Bakan’s appearance on the radio show MAJORITY REPORT. Finally there is a seven-minute featurette on how the film was marketed, plus the trailer, DVD credits, a trailer for the filmmakers' Chomsky doc, and eight deleted scenes.
And that's just disc one. Disc two presents promotional material such as the posters (in PDF form), plus many more hours of video interviews with the 40+ subjects who appear in the film. This material is available in two ways: person by person, or by topic, which re-edits interviews all together. This really is one of the most remarkable DVDs that has come my way.
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From the Zucker school of comedy came SLEDGE HAMMER! (Anchor Bay, 1987-1988, $39.98, Tuesday, April 12, 2005), which to the surprise of its creators ABC approved for a second (and last) season. Essentially a parody of Clint Eastwood and vigilante cop shows, SLEDGE had the potential to devolve into a one-note wonder, but in fact the show managed to wring numerous variations out of its limited premise.
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Sledge (the excellent David Rasche) is the loudly dressed police detective prone to spouting right wing platitudes in the manner of J. T. Hooker. His boss is the epitome of the frustrated African American chief (Harrison Page), reduced to yelling. Sledge (and the series) is humanized by the presence of Dorie Doreau (Anne-Marie Martin, who went on to marry Michael Crichton and co-write TWISTER), the inevitable female partner who is appalled at Sledge's crudity but who manifests a sneaking respect for him (one of the funnier episodes has Doreau conked on the head and waking up to out-Sledge Sledge.
It is a show with a heart, despite its cruel surface humor. In one episode, set in the world of horror movies, creator Alan Spencer evokes sympathy for actors who are viewed as past their prime and Bud Cort and others turn in subtly poignant performances.
The 19 episodes are spread across four single sided discs and as usual with Anchor Bay there is a wealth of extras. Each disc has one yak track, usually by just Spencer, but he is joined by Martin for one episode.
Spencer is well primed with funny material, but he does take a crack at the fans who write in wanting to know the location of Sledge's headquarters, often shown in establishing shot scene transitions. He claims to not understand the source of this interest. The fact is, people do like to know locations, both for the trivia of it, but also because cities change so much and often movies and TV shows are a vital record of the way a town used to look (such as Los Angeles in old Keaton and Chaplin shorts). Worse, after complaining about this, he still doesn't say where it is.
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There is also a making of, with interviews with the three main actors and Spencer; a brief tribute to Bill Bixby, who directed most of the second season episodes; a goofy "top 10 questions" about SLEDGE HAMMER!, answered, or not, by Spencer; various promos and TV spots, a stills gallery, a trivial game, an answering machine greeting, and two of the scripts in downloadable DVD-ROM format. The four disc set comes in a convenient book-style multi disc folder.
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I didn't care that much for the fourth season of this show, but everything changed with A TOUCH OF FROST: SEASON 5 (MPI, 1997, three discs, $49.98, Tuesday, March 29, 2005). I'm not sure what the difference is. The previous season felt confusing. I couldn't follow the plots. The season felt visually crummy, the setting of Denton both visually flat and chaotic. For some reason, season five was completely different (or an improvement). The mysteries were clever, easy to follow but also surprising, and DI "Jack" Frost (David Jason) was less of a bully and much more rounded as a character, at least to me.
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As in the previous season, Frost runs through a series of partners as he investigates a kidnapping (in a tale that slightly resembles Kurosawa's HIGH AND LOW), looks for the man who murdered a whole family, tries to convince a priest to sacrifice the sanctity of confession to solve a case (inspired perhaps by I CONFESS), and seeks out the abusing member of a troubled family (the box copy, by the way, spoils the surprise ending of this fourth episode).
There are no extras on the set but the transfers are excellent with adequate sound values. The sixth is the last season, and I'll do a more detailed summing up at that time. For the time being, this is a good introduction to the character and the series.
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If buzzed under my radar while it was on, but now I can see that THE PRETENDER: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (Fox, 1996 - 1997, four double sided discs, $39.98, Tuesday, March 22, 2005) is very much in the tradition of conventional episodic television drama, whose own roots go back to live TV dramas. In other words, you've got the central character, in this case Jarod (Michael T. Weiss), a highly sensitive genius who has escaped the clutches of a mysterious corporation that controls him in order to search for his parents, who each week encounters another person in trouble whom he rescues before passing on mysteriously, like the Lone Ranger, in this case pursued by Miss Parker (Andrea Parker), the ruthless daughter of the head of the Center, who has been assigned the task of rounding up Jarod. THE FUGITIVE, ROUTE 66, and THEN CAME BRONSON, this is the template. In addition, THE PRETENDER has a little X-FILES conspiracy mongering going for it too, but it is of the very softest blend.
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Miss Parker is the most interesting character in the series. A sort of ur-Bride, she is a dominatrix figure in a batch of weak males. She is introduced squashing a cigarette with her boot and spends the rest of the first season alternating between withering stares at disappointing males and futile efforts to quit smoking.
It's almost impossible for a sentimental series such as this one not to affect you and its tales of salvation by the "angel" Jarod can be touching. It is also the role of the central character to be tortured, and his story arc is presumably not resolved until the third and last season (Jarod alternates between steely precision and a dufus's fascination with an ice cream cone). Fox's set of the first season should do its fans right. The transfers are excellent and there are numerous sound options (DD 2.0 in English, Spanish, and French). Available subtitles come in English and Spanish.
The 22 episodes are spread out over eight sides, and so are the supplements. There are two commentary tracks and a "making of" is divided among three of the sides, along with interviews with most of the lead characters, and a set of TV spots.
Letters
From Max Reich:
"I thought FROM HELL was a good movie, at least with respect to the acting and cinematography — okay, if you didn't compare it to the fantastic and un-filmable Alan Moore source."
From Pavan S. Shamdasani:
"You should read Miller's original SIN CITY graphic novels — the film pales in comparison."
From Andrew Lindo:
"DAREDEVIL is one of the worst comic book adaptations to date. I know Smith helped out on it and all, but it's still a lousy flick."
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: THE INTERPRETER, more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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