Here is something that I sort of look for in DVDs: Insight into how a potentially good movie could go so awry. That possibility occurred to me that the disc of BE COOL (MGM, 2005, $14.95, Tuesday, June 7, 2005) might provide such insight. I naively thought that maybe the filmmakers actually knew that their film was bogus, corrupted, empty, a waste of everyone's time and a great opportunity blown (as I suggested in my original review of the movie).

No such luck. A), there is no audio commentary track, and B), there is the usual panoply of unhelpful making ofs and two minute actor profiles, where the cast sit and tediously explain to no one who and what their character is. How did this thin presentational form ever come to be de rigueur in film publicity? In league with trailers, it's all an attempt to continually spoil movies for consumers.

On the DVD screen one can see how frozen Travolta's face has become while his body continues to be lithe and flexible. He is a great dancer. And though she is no Ginger Rogers, Thurman brings a certain sentimentality to the cinematic notion of dancing with Travolta again in a sort of 10-year reunion. Yet the dance scene is flubbed. It's not particularly highlighted, and the duo is simply presented in a clutch, neutral. Either the director, F. Gary Gray, didn't know what to do, or the choreographer, or the producers lapsed at the last minute in keeping Gray in line. I don't know, something happened. And the producers are in denial about it. There is a hilarious moment in the electronic press kit material that passes for an "extra" on this disc in which one of the producers goes on and on about Gary Gray's creativity (see below). Laying down one cliché after another, he talks about the gun-toting, sports-garbed posse behind Cedric's character as if they were some wholly original creation. Does this guy watch movies?

If GET SHORTY is the CASABLANCA of modern movies (a happy accident, a fully fueled collaboration among numerous talents, an effortless seeming example of Hollywood filmmaking at its best), then BE COOL is BEAT THE DEVIL, a nice idea but confused, confusing, a waste of a broad array of talents, and made with seemingly no cinematic imagination at all.

The transfer (2.40:1, enhanced) looks good, and the various sound options are adequate to the film's limited if preposterous needs.

Extras seem abundance but are in reality sparse. Besides the 30 minute "Be Cool… Be Very Cool" there are deleted scenes that feature Lakers coach Phil Jackson and several others, plus a "gag" reel mixing flubs with candid shots of the cast dancing between takes, all followed by five PR featurettes one on the Travolta and Thurman dance number, and "profiles" of cast members Andre 3000, Cedric the Entertainer, and Christina Milian. Finally, there are a couple of music videos.

Just as the old CAHIERS DU CINEMA magazine in the 1950s deemed itself "Hitchcocko-Hawksian," announcing an allegiance to the classical serenity of the style of Hitchcock and Hawks over the bombast of, say, Kazan and the vulgar excess of Huston, with whom the boys over at the competing POSITIF aligned themselves, it followed that there were two kinds of fans of the new wave of young directors who emerged from the critical hothouse of the magazine's enterprising editorial positions: those who favored Godard, whose jagged, unnerving blends of romantic angst and political track were like a saw taken to your brain, and those who preferred Truffaut, whose films offered a reassuring world view, a sweet-tempered arrivist's outlook on society, that of a Woody Allenish nebbish with a loser's relations with women who finds solace in the great adventure of creating screen dramadys. Where Godard decried, Truffaut celebrated. Tarantino is a Godardian; Robert Benton is a Truffautian.

Actually, there is no reason to choose between these two directors. Both are great, or can be great, and each sate a different appetite. And Criterion owns the right to many of both Truffaut and Godard's films and has been methodically issuing discs (five of Godard's so far, and five of Truffaut's) lavishly accompanied by supplements. Of late, Criterion has preferred to confine the film to one disc and offer the main visual supplements on a secondary platter. I suppose this saves space for better digital compression or something else that I don't understand, but in any case, it also makes for a much more abundant package (and an additional ten bucks on the asking price).

Criterion has a head start on supplemental stuff because it issued a lot of its movies once before on laser disc, so the company can simply reissue that same material, as it does in part here with JULES AND JIM (The Criterion Collection, No. 281, 1962, two discs, $39.95, Tuesday, June 7, 2005).

In the waning and waxing of reputations Truffaut is currently down and Godard is up, just as, among other older directors, Bergman is in a form of twilight (there must be a death watch on the guy) and Antonioni is way up. It's partially because Godard is still alive and making movies, and partially because the temperature of the times seems to favor Godard's despair over Truffaut's child-like yearning. I would also guess it is because Godard has made a more consistent body of work over the years, while Truffaut's distinctive style and personal content dissipated after a handful of strong movies at the start of his career.

JULES AND JIM is very much in danger of being one of the most overrated films from the 1960s. Truffaut's third feature, it tells of a friendship between a Frenchman and a German that spans the first part of the century, and the woman whom they both loved, came between them, and destroyed them. The woman is Jeanne Moreau, and she plays it (or better, the part was written) to be mysterious and impenetrable, a force of nature whom the men can't control. This is very much the vision of women found in, say, early Woody Allen, but not the view of woman that a rake might have. The men are intellectual, passive, befuddled, and unable to control or really even interact with her on a level that the viewer can really relate to; in other words, for the audience to believe that Moreau has this much power, the audience has to love her too, and there is something a little worn, ungiving, and preoccupied, if not downright insane, about Moreau in this film. I like women too, but the directors who have "love affairs" with Woman all too often don't really appear to understand them, or at least offer up viable portraits of them. Bergman liked women, too, but his portraits are much more complex, realistic, grounded.

Still, the film is of at least historical interested, and Criterion honors that with an excellent widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) of the black and white film, along with a DD 1.0 audio track.

Supplements begin on Disc One with two audio commentary tracks. Track one comes from the 1992 laserdisc , and offers an edited collection of comments from screenwriter Jean Gruault, Truffaut aide Suzanne Schiffman, editor Claudine Bouche, Truffaut scholar Annette Insdorf, and Truffaut (some of these voiced by actors translating the comments into English). The second track is a new one with Moreau, who is much warmer "in person" than her character in the film is. Criterion also has a habit of presenting excepts from documentaries instead of the whole thing, and in this case the excerpt is from THE KEY TO JULES AND JIM, 30 minutes of a documentary about the life of novelist Henri-Pierre Roché, whose source novel Truffaut loved. This, Truffaut affirms yet again in an interview on the French TV show BIBLIOTHEQUE DE POCHE (7:00).

The second disc is more of a celebration of Truffaut himself, commencing with five Truffaut interviews that cover the range of his public career: a 1965 episode of the French show CINEASTES DE NOTRE TEMPS (8:00), a 1969 episode of L'INVITE DU DIMANCHE (32:00); an interview from 1977 with New York Film Festival director Richard Roud (9:00); an AFI Q&A moderated by Insdorf from 1979 A (28:00); and an audio only interview captured over a period of two years in the early 1980s. Also on hand is a new video interview with DP Raooul Coutard (19 min.), an older, refreshingly unvarnished discussion with Gruault (20:00), who also worked for Godard, and the video record of a chat between film scholars Robert Stam and Dudley Andrew, the biographer of Truffaut mentor Andre Bazin (23:00). Finally there is a stills gallery, and the theatrical trailer. A 44-page insert gathers chapter titles, cast and crew, DVD credits and transfer info, a review of THE NAKED DAWN by Truffaut (which has some relevance to JULES AND JIM) plus other writings, an essay by John Powers, and Pauline Kael's original review.

There is a very good idea as why Trey Parker and Matt Stone work with pieces of paper and, in TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE UNCENSORED AND UNRATED (Paramount, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, May 17, 2005). They hate actors. They really hate actors. And it all comes out in the abundant supplements that reward the viewer of the unrated edition of the film.

I suppose it should have been obvious from the film itself, in which actors are presented as and from several years of SOUTH PARK. They must have had some very bad experiences on the sets of BASEKETBALL and ORGAZMO or maybe back at Columbine High. Actors, it turns out, are vain, foolish, politically backward and can tell a good story as long as someone else tells it to them first. I mean really, if for no other reason the DVD of TEAM AMERICA is a must have for Parker's diatribes against actors.

On the big screen, the film somewhat wears out its welcome in the second hour, but with the addition of gross extended scenes the film picks back up its energy, though you have to go fetch them from the deleted scenes section. Paramount's DVD of TEAM AMERICA comes in an excellent widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) with a good DD 5.1 audio. Aside from the deleted scenes there are seven making of featurettes that address most aspects of the film's production (though this section lacks a "play all" option). Also on hand are animated storyboards, screen tests, and trailers.

Reasons For the Decline of STAR TREK, No. 368

Nobody, it turns out, is ever satisfied. On the one hand, the viewer doesn't want new TREKs to embrace the campy histrionics and bald faced politicizing of the Classic TREK, with its Styrofoam boulders and unyielding line of Ensign Expendables. On the other, the consumer realizes that the new TREKs could use a little of the old show's zing and sexiness.

I think that if one have a problem with post Roddenberry TREKs but don't quite know what it is, the new double disc version of STAR TREK: INSURRECTION (Paramount, 1998, two discs, $19.95, Tuesday, June 7, 2005) can help. It's a snoozefest, it is TREK sung in a very minor key, it is an over long TV episode and an underwritten movie. What it lacks most of all is urgency as it tries to tell a story of conflict between an isolated group of human like beings who have been granted seeming eternal life by the Saturnal rings around their adopted planet, and the rotting aliens with a grudge who want to secretly hijack them and take over the planet, all with the connivance of the Federation.

That's the planet. Meanwhile, up on the Enterprise, Commander William T. Riker (director Jonathan Frakes) is becoming a couple with Deanna Troi, and never was there a duller relationship in the annals of TV or movies. It's the kind of romance determined to please your aged grandmother with its teasing modest hints of sex and its celebration of old, unattractive people getting it on in what appears to be a Florida retirement home. Seeing them frolic is like being trapped in an airport lounge on a Saturday night. But Prime Directive be damned! Full steam ahead on the saggy sex and imperialist violence!

It got worse of course. DS9 "gayified" Trek, and VOYAGER turned it into a LOST IN SPACE clone. Meanwhile, ENTERPRISE was waiting in the wings, to cleverly bring the show to pre-Prime Directive action and show the birth of clumsy technology not quite up to par. It is (or was) a mentally interactive show, requiring that you remember enough of Classic TREK to get the jokes about limp warp speeds and bridge doors that don't open properly. Naturally it was cancelled. I don't blame the show. I blame its predecessors, which diluted the brand.

Anyway, INSURRECTION promises, with its title, some kind of battle for freedom, but in fact offers a quiet little tale of paradise almost lost. It's not an action movie, it's an atrium on a Sunday afternoon in March, with slow-moving peaceful alternative medicine groupies giving you advice on your aura. That it casts the Federation in a shadowy, sinister role should offend peacenik fans of Classic TREK.

Be that as it may, Paramount still goes all out in its efforts to lure you into buying the film again. This two disc set features a wealth of supplements that serve as a reminded that even a bad film demands a lot of energy from its makers.

Extras start with Michael and Denise Okuda's trivial filled text commentary track on Disc One, delivered in subtitles. By Disc Two, we're bathed in the extras. "It Takes a Village" explores the design of the Ludite inspired Ba'Ku village. "Location, Location, Location" shows the bucolic mountain settings used and gives anecdotes about some cut scenes. "The Art of INSURRECTION" is an interview with concept illustrator John Eaves, while "Anatomy of a Stunt" unveils the ultimately wasted labor behind a particular scene. "The Story" is an interview with Michael Piller, while "Making STAR TREK: INSURRECTION is a general round up.

Moving on, "Director's Notebook" offers Frakes's insights into his craft, while "Michael Westmore's Aliens" is what it sounds like and should be familiar to followers of the DVDs. In a section called "Creating the Illusion" three featurettes concentrate on specific scenes ("Shuttle Chase," "Drones," and "Duck Blind"). The weirdest supplement is "STAR TREK's Beautiful Alien Women" which has the misfortune to remind the viewer how sexy Classic TREK used to be in comparison to its modern successors.

There are seven deleted scenes (12:30) one with even more embarrassing love play between Riker and Troi.

Finally, there is an "Archives" section with storyboards, a photo gallery, teaser and theatrical trailers, the electronic press kit, and an ad for a Borg Invasion attraction in Las Vegas.

THE INHERITANCE [ARVEN] (HVE, 2003, $24.95, Tuesday, June 7, 2005) may be one of the best films you've never heard of. It's a product of Lars Von Trier's production studio in Denmark, which Home Vision Entertainment is apparently now drawing upon. It's directed by Per Fly, and has some but not all of the earmarks of the dogme approach: jump cuts, hand held cameras, natural lighting, and mostly diegetic music.

But also like some supposed dogmes, such as MIFUNE, it is also free of these constraints (which were always a game anyway). Writer and director Per does whatever it takes to tell his story, and in fact his story goes wherever it may, in some cases down paths that may baffle and challenge the viewer's notion of motivation.

The film's set up is that Christoffer (Ulrich Thomsen) is a comfortable bourgeois restaurateur in Sweden, with an actress girlfriend (Lisa Werlinder) and living in what we soon learn is a healthy distance from his family. One day his dad comes by unexpectedly to visit, says only a while, and then leaves. Later, Christoffer learns that the man has hanged himself. Christoffer returns home for the funeral and then finds himself sucked back into the family business, a steel foundry that apparently had some financial problems. Against the wishes of his girlfriend he stays and takes control of the empire, slowly finding himself becoming what he despised.

If this sounds a little like the narrative trajectory of THE GODFATHER, then you're right. Just when Christoffer thinks he's out, they pull him back in. The bulk of the film shows in subtle delineations the hardening of Christoffer's spirit, but helplessly, inevitably. We all become our fathers — or in this case, our mothers, as Christoffer more resembles the matriarch of the family.

Christoffer reach's bottom during a vacation to a bright sunny villa. Abruptly his girlfriend leaves him. He descends into alcoholism. In fact, in the film's most shocking moment, he attempts to rape the villa's maid. The moment is shocking not just for its unabashed presentation of the act but because we thought we knew Christoffer, and yet that presumption is confounded by the attempt. The mom steps in, cleans him up, and henceforth Christoffer is a captain of industry.

The bulk of the film is told in flashback. Like his dad dropping in without announcement, Christoffer, finds himself back in Sweden at the film's start, and looks up his girlfriend, who is in the park with their two-year-old child. She invites him to her show that night. He doesn't go. Why? We aren't sure (but might be more informed if two other films by Fly, which complete the trilogy of which this is the middle, were readily available). But it is one cinema's great meetings that didn't take place, like Grant and Kerr in AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, or Delon and Vitti in LA NOTTE, and DeNiro and Minnelli at the end of NEW YORK, NEW YORK. We are there, but they are not, and unlike them, who must writhe in mystery; we suffer the agony of knowledge, which is really bafflement at the underlying mysteries of human interactions.

Unusually for HVE, which is coming to seem more like the Anchor Bay to Criterion's numbered prestige releases, the disc comes with several supplements, one a making of featurette, the other an audio commentary track from Fly, in Danish, but with subtitles. He explains several things that should be obvious but aren't, among them the Shakespearean tropes that are woven into the film's narrative and visual presentation. Also on hand is an insert with an essay by Richard Schickel. It's all enormously helpful, and makes for a great package, along with the excellent widescreen transfer and DD 5.1 audio.

Remember when Joe Bob Briggs used to run a "title search" in his column back in the 1990s? Readers would write in with dimly remember movie scenes and other readers would write in with guesses or solutions. I have two "Joe Bob Briggs" movies. One of them stars Terry Thomas and ends with a huge chase sequence that takes place in a garden hedge maze. I saw it on the B-side of a drive in double bill many years ago, and have no idea which Terry Thomas film it is. I thought it might be THE NAKED TRUTH (MGM, 1958, $14.95, Tuesday, June 7, 2005), also known as YOUR PAST IS SHOWING, but it turned out not to be the one.

Instead it is an "Ealing" style comedy from Rank staring Terry Thomas, Peter Sellers, Bond girl Shirley Eaton and a few others as prominent personalities under a blackmail threat from a self-styled CONFIDENTIAL style publisher, who wants 10, 000 dollars from them all or he will run the exposés. Terry Thomas is a philandering lord, Sellers the fake Scottish host of a cozy TV show popular with old folks unaware that he is also a slum lord, and Eaton is a "top model" with embarrassing secrets that didn't seem all that serious to me.

It's obvious that the five victims are going to get together sooner or later and plot to eliminate the publisher but it is much, much later in the storyline. Before then, there are numerous disguises, goofy near-encounters, and missed chances, while the publisher coolly appraises his victims like a serial killer in a modern slasher film.

Blackmail appears to have been much on the mind of British citizens back in the late 1950s. A near contemporaneous film is VICTIM, about the attempted blackmail of a gay elite played by Dirk Bogarde. Perhaps it was the last concern of an uptight society on the verge of exploding. In a few years, anti-gay laws would be changed and the swinging 60s would bring most people out of their shell and say fare-thee-well to oppressive judgmental attitudes.

THE NAKED TRUTH may have indeed contributed to this break down. It is a terrible lewd film in its way, filled with terrible double entendre that could not find their way on to the equivalent American screen at the time. A fan asks Sellers's character for an autograph. "Can you put 'To Frida'?" and he leers forward assuring, "Of course I can put to Frida." But after this elaborate set up and string of lewd jokes and happenstances the filmmakers, director Mario Zampi (on whom rising star Sellers would unload anger in fits of star temper) and writer Michael Pertwee, don't really know how to get out of the situation. The problem is that most of the characters are vile, and one is unable to laugh with them or laugh at them with ease. So, like a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE skit, the film essentially just stops, leaving all of its characters in a strange limbo. MGM's disc of THE NAKED TRUTH comes in an unenhanced widescreen transfer with adequate sound and no extras.

It may be the most disastrously influential film ever released, in terms of the way it shaped the sexual identities of numerous American kids. WHAT'S NEW, PUSSYCAT? (MGM, 1965, $27.95, Tuesday, June 7, 2005) was written by Woody Allen at an early stage of his career, and marked his first screen appearance after a career as a TV writer and stand up comic. In it he introduced to the masses his persona of shmo, of sexual loser, of the guy who can't get the girl, yet who is funny enough to still be appealing, to provide succor to the real losers in the audience who can console themselves with the thought that, OK, if I didn't get the girl I can still be funny. Allen's self-deprecating sense of humor was a disaster for kids of the 1960s and beyond, and it came just at the start of the swinging era when it should have been easy to have sex or to cross social boundaries and have sex with girls who would normally not give a guy a break. Woody Allen set sexual happiness back several decades.

It was all part of a conspiracy. This film, and all subsequent Woody Allen comedies, were part of an elaborate brainwashing exercise in which the satanic sexual elites would put into the minds of young men the idea that the way to get girls was to make fun of one's self. In fact, as we all now know, girls like guys who are arrogant, confident, and domineering. They look down on self-deprecators as losers, and are in fact grateful for the fact that such boys have sexually erased themselves from the competition so that they can concentrate on the truly worthy, the rich, the powerful, the drivers of fast cars.

As is well known, WHAT'S NEW, PUSSYCAT? is modeled on the life of Warren Beatty, whose catch phrase used to be the title phrase. I believe that Beatty and Allen (who is also no sexual slouch in his private life) got together and conspired to manufacture this film (perhaps with the complicity of the CIA's psych squad) to undermine the confidence of the American male so that they, Allen and Beatty, would secure yet more women for themselves. How could any woman resist the actor and the comic when the rest of the American male public had adopted a whining, self-analyzing, paralyzed sexual demeanor? Their cunning plan worked admirably. In a strange, horrific way they should be proud of themselves

Sellers bought into the conspiracy himself, possibly to be able to bed more beauties of the Britt Ekland quality. His role in the conspiracy is to mock intellectuals and make them, too, seem unworthy of sexual favors. He plays the shrink whom Peter O'Toole's character visits in order to cure himself of his sexual compulsion. As an editor at French VOGUE (read "movie star"), O'Toole's rake has his pick of the litter. But he also loves his girlfriend, played by Romy Schneider. The comic crux of the story is somehow reconciling philandering with love, or reconciling O'Toole's editor to a life with only one woman. It should come as no surprise that the film fails to adequately solve this conundrum, probably because it is still bound up with the typical American middleclass view that marriage is the happy ending of a long romantic flirtation. The Satanists in Hollywood know that truth: that if you have power and wealth, you can have as much sex with as many people as you want all the time, as long as you don't disobey Satan's strictures. MGM offers this crucial social document in a non-anamorphic transfer with truly execrable audio. The movie sounds just as bad as it did coming out of the speakers at the drive in where I first saw it lo those many impressionable years ago.

There is a real cult around the PROPHECY series starring Christopher Walken and started up by director Gregory Widen in 1995 with his film soleil horror story about the angel Gabriel seeking a soul on earth that will end the war in Heaven. The PROPHECY movies play all the time on the USA and Sci-Fi channel and the cult is strong enough to inspire two sequels with Walken and now a fourth (with a fifth to follow shortly), with helmer Joel Soisson taking over the series.

Soisson is an adept at sequels. A prolific producer and director of low budget or straight to video thrillers with an apparent special relationship with Dimension, he has already done sequels to MANIAC COP, CHILDREN OF THE CORN, HIGHLANDER, HELLRAISER, and he's the brains behind the Wes Craven straight to video DRACULA series, with more of all to come. Having worked on the earlier PROPHECY films he's familiar with the material and he apparently knows how to get the most out of a small, quick shoot.

Now, in PROPHECY: UPRISING (Dimension, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, June 7, 2005) Soisson carries the story forward, setting up a new trilogy and introducing a new central character. If this new film lacks anything it is Walken and all he represents of wit, grace, and menace. This first entry begins afresh, with a story about a scared woman (Kari Wuhrer) coming upon a rare manuscript in the basement of the church she haunts that turns out to have crucial information important to the angels battling away in heaven.

This is a rough approximation of the plot. In reality had a little trouble following it. This may be my fault, but also the fault of the straight to video style, which is to stretch out some scenes and rush through others without obeisance to sense or narrative rhythm, and to include way too much pointless talk, conversation (as Andy Warhol used to say) being the cheapest special effect.

PROPHECY: UPRISING is, unfortunately, not particularly thrilling, scary, or clever, and doesn't have much in the way of gore effects. But it does have talk. Lots of talk. Lots and lots of pointless talk in which people say the same thing they said about 15 minutes earlier. And if you didn't get enough of the dialogue the first time around, you can hear it again in the supplements, which includes video cast auditions for actors John Light, Doug Bradley, and Sean Pertwee.

But there is more. Much more. Also on hand is an audio commentary track with star Wuhrer, Soisson, co-star Georgina Rylance, producer Nick Phillips, and F/X man Gary Tunnicliffe. It's an amiable and focused chat and should be handy for those who enjoy the film itself. Following that is a short featurette on the climate, i.e., how Soisson dealt with the sudden onrush of snow in Romania, where the film was shot. There is also an extended ending (with yet more dialogue), a deleted scene, and a stills gallery.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From the making of on BE COOL: "It's so amazing to see [the characters] come to life, the way they are so wacky. It all adds up to being a really entertaining mix. I mean, the Dub MDs. Perfect example of this movie. Pure Gary Gray. Nobody could have thought that group up. I mean these guys are seriously from another planet. You see them getting out of their matching Hummers, in their coordinated sports outfits full of bling bling and bejeweled guns and shades and beanies and everything I mean that is some imagination Gary Gray's got going." — Producer Michael Shamberg on why BE COOL is such a good movie.

Letters

From Paul Saadeh:

"Hey, what happened to the CRASH review you promised?

Maybe it's been too long since the movie's come out, and these days people tend to forget what movie came out last week, much less last month. I'm really interested in your review, mostly because I loathed the film, yet it's been getting tremendous reviews. And most of the people that have seen it are falling over themselves in praise of it.

So I had some really high hopes for it, and I was completely let down. Maybe I would have liked it if I had no hopes for it … but I doubt it. First off, it was severely heavy-handed, with absolutely no trace or sense of subtlety which is crucial in addressing such delicate and difficult issues — it came off like an R-rated after-school special about racism in LA. "Hey look, people are intrinsically racist in their own ways without really being aware of it." No Shit. Tell me something I don't know! This was all obvious stuff I've already dealt with many years ago, and I guess I was disappointed that a lot of people saw things in this film they never realized before on their own.

Now, I don't have a particular problem with "heavy-handedness" per se. But in this case I felt that the film's sledge-hammer approach made it seem really awkward and rendered its thesis trite. What Haggis was going for deserved a lot more time than 100 minutes, which could have made room for the subtlety and depth it was lacking. It was also far, far too contrived for it's own good, which just made it look silly. I don't mean the tenuous character relationships — I'm fine with those — I mean the contrived situations that happen which are improbable, illogical but mostly unearned because they happen so unnaturally that they feel like a writer's device fabricated just to get a cheap reaction without really addressing anything. "Oh look, the girl who's afraid of getting shot happens to get "shot" by a guy who was tricked into using blanks" — but if you couldn't figure it out, don't worry, there's a nice close-up of the box letting you know that they were blanks — thanks for treating me like a retard.

But mostly, the movie's just utterly spine-less. It trots out race issues and lets them dangle out there for us, without really saying anything of value or substance. I expected A LOT more from the writer of MILLION DOLLAR BABY. Though I really liked Matt Dillon's performance … what little there was of it. And also, Keith David's one scene was great. Still, I prefer Cronenberg’s CRASH."

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.

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK, which is available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, June 8, at 9 AM.

COMING SOON:MR. AND MRS. SMITH, WAR OF THE WORLDS, more Asian action films, several STAR TREKS, and more!

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