[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on!]
Monday, 8 November, 2004
BIRTH's Defects
BIRTH
I went into BIRTH with some apprehension, founded on two causes. One was because advance word on the film was lukewarm at best and controversial and just plain weird at worst. One reviewer categorized BIRTH as "creepy pedophilia," and another as "jaw dropping crassness" (the film has a 69 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating). The second apprehension was a consequence the first, because I loved SEXY BEAST and feared seeing director Jonathan Glazer stumble through the so-called "sophomore curse."
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I might as well mention a third reason. As mentioned in past columns, I prefer the old style Nicole Kidman of the early years, the macho spear-gun wielding survivalist, boyish and girlish at the same time with her diver's watch and sunburst of hair. I really haven't liked the increasingly pinch-faced actress whom Hollywood's masters want to promote as a hyper feminine sex goddess out of the silent era or '30s femme fatale. I wasn't looking forward to the wan short-haired elegance of a Manhattanite Kidman character.
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But from the very first shot, I found BIRTH to be mesmerizing. The opening image is a long take from behind a jogger running through a snow bound Central Park, a tracking shot that would warm the cockles of Miklós Jancsó's heart (not to mention Gus Van Sant's). With uplifting symphonic music welling behind the image, the camera, raised someone high and looking slightly down on the running figure, tracks behind him down the slippery lanes, the sequence ending, after a couple of additional shots, with the jogger pausing at the lip of a tunnel, then leaning over as joggers do to catch a breath, and then collapsing, dead like a modern day Jim Fixx.
The substance of what is to follow is probably well known by now. Kidman plays that jogger's husband. Ten years later, the widow, on the verge of remarrying, encounters a kid also named Sean (Cameron Bright), who claims to be her reincarnated husband, and appears to warn her off from marrying her fiancé Joseph (Danny Huston).
But DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS this is not. Kidman's Anna is tortured by the revelation of the kid, and in the face of all reason, starts to think that yes, he is the reincarnation — he knows too much about Anna and her upper west side family (who live on another floor in the same doorman apartment building).
That it eventually falls apart more or less is due less to problems of psychological realism or lack thereof than to its sheer ambition, as it skirts absurdity and unintentional laughs. But I didn't mind its collapse. And I should rush to say that the "solution" to the mystery was to me, very clever and beautifully done (the script is credited to Milo Addica who did MONSTER'S BALL, Jean-Claude Carrière, the prolific screenwriter who wrote some of Buñuel's movies, and Glazer).
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The film is set among the rich. As in a Woody Allen film, especially one of the "serious" dramas such as INTERIORS, Allen focuses on rich Manhattanites because, for one thing, it is a social group he knows, and second he can concentrate on social dynamics and not get bogged down in how they make their money or survive from day to day. Here, Glazer wants to focus on Anna, a woman of means who was so obsessed with her husband, with the idea of love, that even on the verge of another union, she is drawn in, she tricks herself, into thinking or believing or wishing that her dead husband were still alive.
Think also of DESPERATE CHARACTERS, the obscure movie by Frank Gilroy based on a novel about neurotic New Yorkers. Or even Carl Theodore Dreyer, with its frigid faith in the notion that the dead can rise. That's the tone of the film. The most remarkable element of the plot is that the group of moneyed elites would even believe the possibility that Little Sean is the reincarnation of Big Sean. But once that is stipulated, the rest of the tale plays out with agonizing finality.
I also love the way this film looks. It has the muted quality of a painting by Grant Wood or Thomas Eakins. The film looks lit through those glass squares you sometimes see in old sidewalks, or through aquarium glass. Shot by Harris Savides, BIRTH is prone, as is this DP, to long takes. Personally, I didn't care for Savides work with Van Sant on FINDING FORESTER, where he would occasionally pose figures in from of back lighting windows, which I was under the impression was a fundamental error of photography. But here the film is beautifully consistent and moody. Most important of all, it just seems damn real, a crucial component to a film that toys with a belief in reincarnation. Also, under the influence of Van Sant, Savides adopted something of the style of Bela Tarr, whose long take films have cured insomnia the world over. Here the takes serve to "connect" rather than just follow, and there is a great close up of Kidman at a concert that is the mesmerizing heart of the film, a shot that serves as a interesting contrast to a similar moment in Frank Oz's THE STEPFORD WIVES.
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Set decoration and costuming all conspire to create a semblance of a clear, ordered, even rigid place, a Whartonian social world where the least break from protocol sets off quiet ripples of disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, the blue collar Sunday afternoon crowd with which I saw the film ended up having little patience for these desperate characters, and hooted at the screen, demanding that Kidman's Anna "do something." Offer pearls before these swine was like showing a to Bergman movie to children.
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This is only Glazer's second film but despite its utterly different setting, BIRTH does share a commonality with SEXY BEAST. Both films are about a figure from someone's past who invades his newly settled and ordered world. In SB it was the unstable Don Logan seeking to lure Gal Dove from the Mediterranean back to rainy London for one last job. As in BIRTH, Dove's new "family" watches in frozen horror as events transpire. In BIRTH, it is the specter of a dead husband, his possibly presence creating chaos in the refined order of settled New Yorkers. In this regard the film is also a slim member of that small genre in which a rogue invades a family and basically takes it over, like Joe Orton's ENTERTAINING MR. SLOAN, or Dennis Potter's BRIMSTONE AND TREACLE, or even Pasolini's TEOREMA. The point of these works is to show the pond surface fragility of Family, so easily discombobulated, its illusions so quickly shattered, by the intrusion of a stranger. BIRTH is a difficult film that most viewers will either love or hate, but despite its courting the ridiculous, I find myself rather admiring it.
Tuesday, 9 November, 2004
The holiday seasons are right around the corner, with their lighted wreaths, and carolers, and spiced apple punch, and soon it will be time for me to pencil in a night to watch my favorite Christmas movie — DIE HARD. Go ahead, laugh. But the film is set during Christmas, and embodies the spirit of family reconciliation so ineptly handled in conventional feel good Christmas dramas.
You can watch your HOLIDAY INN. You can have your A CHRISTMAS STORY, fine films though they may be. But give me DIE HARD's hilarious and sexy villain (Alan Rickman), it's stripped down hero adorned in only a pair of pants, and it's sentimental phone sex relationship between Bruce Willis's John McClane and the patrol cop Sgt. Reginald VelJohnson — it's so much more intimate than his own marriage that McClane must have called a 976 number instead of 911. I'll take DIE HARD's shattered glass, its rooftop explosions, its stoic FBI agents, its "The policemen have themselves an RV" and "The quarterback is toast" over Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas" and Ralphie putting his eye out with a BB gun. DIE HARD is a brilliantly crafted screenplay, with every click of the plot thoroughly motivated. Visually it's the most influential film of its time.
Action films are no longer to everyone's tastes these days, however. But there was a time — mostly the 1980s — when what I call the "siege film" was just about the only genre that captured the attention of filmgoers and film nerds alike. It was a robust genre, fairly standard in story line, but with the potential for numerous variations, from PASSENGER 57 to THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT.
As a genre the action film has for a long time deserved a sympathetic and dedicated critic to parse its sequences and analyze its meanings, and now it finally gets due attention in Eric Lichtenfeld's ACTION SPEAKS LOUDER: VIOLENCE, SPECTACLE, AND THE AMERICAN ACTION MOVIE (Praeger, 336 pages, $39.95, ISBN 0 275 98054 5).
Mr. Lichtenfeld, a freelance writer who has written for FILM SCORE MONTHLY and numerous other publications, traces the '80s and '90s action film back to its roots in Westerns, with its lone hero and vigilantism, and how it transmogrified into the cop film, in which the western vigilante is more or less dropped into an urban arena in order to single handedly clean up the town. He tracks the evolution of the modern action hero from Billy Jack through Clint Eastwood to Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis.
ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER crackles with unexpected insights on nearly every page. There are very good passages on the faux religious elements of DIRTY HARRY, and the standard montage of the action hero preparing for battle, scenes that "do not merely show the character but assemble him." It's a remarkably error free book (I only caught one typo, calling TAXI DRIVER's Betsy "Betty" on page 44). And the book can be funny. About the industrial setting of THE TERMINATOR's climax, he writes, "It's what Hell would be if Hell were a union shop." About XXX, he deems it a "rush that manages to drag." It's the best film book I've read since OPEN WIDE and STORYTELLING IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD.
Mr. Lichtenfeld consented to a brief e-interview about his new book and about action films in general.
Do I detect in your book something of a love-hate relationship with the action film?
I've never thought of it as love-hate. I do love action movies, as few great ones as there are. If my book ever seems ambivalent, it's because the deeper I got into this genre that I love, the more I had to confront its dark side: it is founded on myths that are inherently racist, its thrust comes from the obliteration of human life, it fetishizes torture and weapons. Plus, it's all a little easier to swallow when spread out over 30 years, rather than squeezed into a year and a half.
You are fairly subtle about conveying to the reader which action movies you like and which you don't. If you decided to watch one single action film tonight, which would it be?
Funny you should ask. Tonight I'm going to see THE WARRIORS projected in 35mm at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles. I'm thrilled to be going. (Making the plans was the first thing to pick my spirits up since the election.) If that weren't on the table, I'd probably put on FIRST BLOOD: something short, swift, uncluttered, and no less exciting because of it.
For the most part, I did try to be subtle about my own feelings on the films. It was a difficult line to walk. My goal was to get inside these movies and illustrate their connections to the culture, to the industry, to the past, and to one another. So I was concerned that if I was too forthcoming with my own opinions, I'd end up with a book on how DIE HARD is great, and how THE DELTA FORCE is garbage, a book where all the discussions are isolated rather than cumulative, and where I was stating the obvious, to boot, rather than the book I hope I wrote. I tried to imply the difference between the good and the bad, but more importantly, to draw out what they share.
Still, there are a few cases where I was more direct, where I thought it was important to state my position because something was at stake, be it the beauty I find in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME or the anti-intellectualism in Michael Bay's films. I tried to be judicious. And sometimes I just couldn't hold back.
Action films of this period, especially the ones with Vietnam vets, are often viewed as symptoms of America's post Vietnam War depression. But I wasn't depressed about the end of the war. I was ecstatic about it. Yet I still love most of the action films you describe. How does the "liberal" or radical film viewer fit into the whole post-Vietnam action film scheme, if at all?
I think the reason you love these Vietnam movies while you hated the war is that these movies indulge a part of the American imagination that actually prefigures the war. These movies never feel to me like they're about that war — not per se, anyway. They're about the same mythological structures that underlie other action movies, film noir (to a certain extent), Westerns, Western writings, and even the frontier literature of the 17th century, only here they're embodied by the landscape— and the enemy— of Vietnam. In my book, I note how in certain foreign territories, bootleggers altered RAMBO so that it was no longer set in Vietnam, but during World War II. That says something about how the themes and scenarios in the film are not so tied to the reality of the war.
Even in light of this, Hollywood's RAMBOs and MISSING IN ACTIONs can be a little troubling, but there's still something interesting here for people who don't agree with their politics. Watching some of these movies desperately mythologize the Vietnam War as a way of justifying it, you can feel almost embarrassed for them. It's not like it was during the early years of World War II, when the movies mythologized the losses we were suffering at the time. The Vietnam-themed action films were all coming out 10 and 15 years after the fact. Add to all of this the films' obvious anti-authoritarian bent, and I'd say that liberals can enjoy these movies at least as guilty pleasures.
One of the unique features of the book is that you track how films are treated, sometimes in contradiction to their main thrust, by the publicity department of the releasing studio. Most of the pix in the book come from "the author's collection," and you quote a lot of press kit material to show how the studio is positioning or spinning its movies. Where did you get this material? Did you track it down for the book or had you been collecting it for years?
Both. I'm fortunate in that Los Angeles has a wealth of movie memorabilia shops that had much of the material I was looking for. When selecting photos, I had one rule: I wanted the images to be as fresh for the reader as possible. So even though I mainly used publicity stills, I tried to use action shots and more generally, photographs that most people wouldn't immediately recognize. With an exception here and there, I tried to avoid images that I remembered seeing on, say, video boxes. As for the press information, much of that I found at the Margaret Herrick Library, the library run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where I did the brunt of my research. It must be the world's single greatest resource for researching American movies, and it's one of my favorite things about Los Angeles.
How do you view the trend toward women-oriented action films such as the early THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, which you do mention in the book, and the more recent KILL BILL?
I don't really view it as a trend. It seems more like every once in a while, a major action movie or two comes along with a female star— the movies you cite and LARA CROFT would be good examples— that generate a lot of writing and a lot of buzz and then it dies down again. Jennifer Garner's ELEKTRA seems poised to be the next one. I remember someone once had a great line about Sigourney Weaver: "She's the only American actress who's paid to kick ass instead of wiggle it. " This was in 1992— after the summer of 1991, which gave us the strong women of T2 and THELMA AND LOUISE. The rest of the '90s saw the rise of both political correctness and the influence of foreign action movies— notably those of Asia and France— which seem to be more comfortable with female heroes. And yet the biggest inroads women have made into the action genre in America have been on television— Buffy, Xena, ALIAS, and maybe a few others. But as for some change in the genre where women become major action movie stars, if nothing has made it happen by now, I have a hard time imagining what would.
There are numerous inner contradictions and silent self-mockeries and in-jokes in a lot of action films. Would you agree with the proposition that in a larger sense action films can only be taken seriously as parody? Or are Schwarzenegger and Stallone too serious about their politics?
The genre has a sense of humor about itself, but I don't think it should be necessarily mistaken for parody. It's tempting to do so because with some of these movies, it's hard to take them seriously as anything else. That is, until you do a little scratching and see the huge bedrock of myth and ritual on which they're built, some more shabbily than others. I like how one critic at the time called COMMANDO "a comic book. " I think that term captures the sensibility of the genre — particularly back then — more than the word "parody " does. I think "parody " may give some of the filmmakers too much credit …
Would you say that TEAM AMERICA is less a political satire than a parody of action film traits? The partner who dies at the start. The hero who has a crisis of conscience before rallying. The angry guy with a single motivating cause of his anger. In fact, this might make the film seem a little dated.
That's a complicated question. Those elements of the movie that parody the action genre and those that satirize our political situation probably balance each other out. But people are more keyed in to the political satire because the movie was released in the tense weeks leading up to the election, and because some of the action parody elements are pretty subtle. TEAM AMERICA's use of a rack focus is a much less obvious satire than its use of a binge-eating, suicide-bombing Michael Moore puppet.
I think the first half of TEAM AMERICA, where the movie is more overtly an action spoof than a political one, works better than the second half. What interests me is that the part of the movie that parodies America's fantasy life parodies the right, but the part that parodies America's political life parodies the left. I mean, the sweater on the Martin Sheen puppet made me laugh, but how great would it have been to also see a Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter puppet? Or Dick Cheney?
You're right to pick up on the dated aspects of the movie, though. How about the montage sequence, with the song about montages? Movies don't really have montages anymore. But that's often the funny thing about parody. TEAM AMERICA is a send-up of our collective sense of what the action movie is, even though in reality the genre has mostly evolved past that. If I had to pick one real action movie that TEAM AMERICA most reminds me of, it would probably be a pretty forgettable one: NAVY SEALS. The '80s were barely over when that movie came out, and it looked anachronistic to me even then.
I'm wondering what you think about a few action films that appeared after the time frame of your book, such as
THE HUNTED (a post-Rambo RAMBO?), or THE BOURNE SUPREMACY and THE SUM OF ALL FEARS (as films endeavoring to create action stars out of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck).
What concerns me most about the genre's future is the infiltration of video games into action movies — not only as source material, but also as sources of style and structure. For me, the great thing about action movies is their potential to show you some physical extreme and give you a visceral feeling of it. The Stephen Sommers school of CG action robs us all of that. The adrenaline rush of a FIRST BLOOD or a ROAD WARRIOR or a DIE HARD or an AIR FORCE ONE seems poised to become the simple dizziness of a VAN HELSING. These heavily computer generated sequences can be dazzling, but the more over-indulgent they become, the less physical, the less primal they feel. It's pretty ironic. At the most basic level, an action sequence is about things happening to a body, and while these CG sequences may overload your senses, there is nothing tactile about them. Even SPIDER-MAN 2, which I liked, lapses into this. Compared to VAN HELSING, SPIDER-MAN 2 has much more gravity, but only a little more mass.
Still, I try to keep it all in perspective. To read certain reviews in 1983, you would have thought the End of American Film was at hand with UNCOMMON VALOR. That is, until 1984 brought us RED DAWN and MISSING IN ACTION, and then that was going to be the end of American film. And then came RAMBO in 1985, and the end was really nigh that time. We heard similar grumblings about the Death of Cinema with the coming of digital— grumblings that had also been heard with the coming of sound. This sensibility may be just another form of Americans' fascination with all things apocalyptic. Or maybe we just overreact. Either way, the state of movies is usually not as bad as it could get. That's both the good news and the bad.
Friday, 12 November, 2004
Living Conditions
The ad hoc theme linking most of today's DVDs is abject living spaces. But in reality, that could be just another term for Crazy Ladies or Bad Relationships, since all three are inexorably linked.
That's especially true of THE SNAKE PIT
(Fox Home Entertainment, Studio Classic No. 19, 1948, $14.98, Tuesday, June 1), the famous Fox film about Bedlam. Like I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG, it's one of those movies that caused laws to be changed, but in the actual experience of it the film is less about how horrible asylums are than about one woman's turmoil, as befits a weepie, or a female version of LOST WEEKEND. The doctors and staff in this film are very different from Nurse Rachett, and like THREE FACES OF EVE and THE WRONG MAN, it has a "happy ending."
However, one thing finally occurred to me while watching this recent Fox Studio Classic. I suddenly "got" what this numbered series is all about: it is the Criterion Collection for chicks. Most of the titles in the series are "woman pictures," romances, or weepies. Even the John Ford titles have a female-ish orientation. With their cleanly designed packages and modest price for bargain hunting femmes, the series seems primed to lure older female DVD consumers.
Or maybe it is just that, in his wisdom, Daryl Zanuck, honcho of Fox during much of the time that the Studio Classics were released, knew that luring woman viewers was half the battle of getting seats filled. I think if one went through the Fox catalog from the '40s and early '50s the run of films would be of the kind that would appeal to the typical, if there is such a thing, wife of the house, a blend of tear jerkers and social cause films with nice clothes and exotic locales.
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Like I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN, the film is based on an autobiographical novel, by Mary Jane Ward and it is directed by Anatole Litvak, who did SORRY, WRONG NUMBER among many other bland films. The film was nominated for numerous Oscars, including Best Actress for Olivia de Havilland, but won only for Best Sound. The disc comes with an excellent black-and-white, full-screen transfer, along with Dolby Digital audio in English stereo or English, French or Spanish mono, with English or Spanish subtitles. There is another excellent audio commentary track by Aubrey Solomon, who co-authored a history of Fox that is one of my bibles now that the studio has initiated its Classics DVDs. As with his EVE track, he is highly informed and even attains a moment of poignancy at 1:46:28 when he discusses how the movies changed quickly after the release of THE SNAKE PIT. The disc also includes five Movietone News items about the film, trailers for other Fox Studio Classics DVDs, a stills gallery, and the theatrical trailer.
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The premiere film about cramped living conditions is THE MORE THE MERRIER
(Columbia Tristar, 1943, $24.95, Tuesday, November 2), the George Stevens comedy from early in the war years about the romantic foibles of people living in a man-deprived but over-populated Washington, D.C. Stevens is becoming one of my favorite directors and I may have more to say about him when a deluxe set of Stevens movies comes out later this year, but for now what is interesting about this movie is that it is the last one Stevens made before going to war and coming back a changed man. No career in Hollywood has the division in its middle that Stevens's has. He went from the Marx Brothers to Anne Frank, from THE WOMAN OF THE YEAR to THE GREATEST STORY EVERY TOLD to, from BELOW ZERO to GIANT. Of all directors, the war appears to have had the deepest impact on Stevens, who could no longer do comedies, but large, sweeping social dramas that exposed the corruptions of society, until he got sucked up into the studio systems' last convulsions, leaving him high and dry.
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Whereas his later films were all bold and big and slow and about social hierarchies, his pre-war comedies were about precision and the humor of working together. This film, about a guy (Charles Coburn, who won an Oscar) coming to Washington to pitch to a senate committee a scheme to increase housing and ending up playing matchmaker to a pair of youngsters (Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea), is like a full length version of the scene at the end of WOMAN OF THE YEAR, when Hepburn tries to make Tracy breakfast. It's about the beauty of living together, of arranging your life around bumping around others. His post war movies (except ANNE FRANK) were about people in the wide open spaces, with room to move and breath, though still strangled.
All that being said, this is a lousy transfer, from a rotten print full of scratches and other problems. It is to be hoped that next year or later, when Stevens mania seizes the cinematic nation, that this and other early Stevens movies will receive the DVD publication they deserve.
There is nothing worse than getting stuck in a small backwards town where nothing is happening. I SUSPICIOUS RIVER
(Tartan, 2000, $24.95, Tuesday, November 9) the main character's solution to this boredom is to become a hooker. It's easy for her, because she works at a motel, and can sell her body at will. She saves up the money, but for what? She appears to have no real intention of leaving, being stuck with a husband who seems to have an illness of some kind.
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This motel madam is played by Molly Parker, who was in director Lynne Stopkewich's previous feature film, KISSED, about a mortician with an erotic relationship with the corpses she processed. Clearly, Stopkewich is one of those artists fascinated by women who are at the extreme edge of sexuality, but as weird as the women are, they don't hold a candle to the evil of men. Parker's Leila ends up involved in an abusive relationship with a john who basically takes Leila for a ride. Meanwhile, she has developed a friendship with a 10-year-old girl who, in fact, is a fantasy ghost from her own past. It's all kind of obvious, but also terribly slow paced, with that terrible low budget ambiance of the same old run down locations used over and over. It might evoke memories of TWIN PEAKS or THE SECRETARY or THE PIANO TEACHER or even ROMANCE but you don't feel that the film has the intellectual rigor, so to speak, of those previous films.
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What is the time frame here? Parker is garbed and coifed like a 1950s chick, but the cars and the whole ambience is Everytown USA now. The movie also has a tendency to explain its own jokes. When the cruel face punching john asks her if she wants a beer, she says, "I can't I'm working," but the dialogue doesn't stop there with the working bit It has to be explained more. This is a subtle film that doesn't trust its audience to get the subtlety.
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Having come down hard on it, I can now say that Parker is a very sultry actress who has appeared in other movies such as CENTER OF THE WORLD in which she is happy to be a complex slut. The movie tends to support her sensuality, such as the moment (at 13:06) when she tests the heat of a car engine by placing her hand on the wet hood. It's a very erotic scene, more erotic than the vaguely hinted at fucking scenes. The finished disc will have an audio commentary track by the director, but the screener I received was bare bones, so I'm not sure what further insight Stopkewich can bring to her original intentions.
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For Neve Campbell completists there is LOST JUNCTION
(MGM, 2003, $25.95, Tuesday, November 9), which casts the actress as a woman stuck in a small town in a dead end marriage and who uses a drifter to help herself get out. It's about a 25-minute story stretched out to an agonizing length, accompanied by a slow plinking guitar and piano music score that tells you when to feel something. When Neve says something "philosophical" the piano tinkles meaningfully.
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This film's ancestors are THE HOT SPOT, BODY HEAT, and, thanks to its car trouble plot igniter,
U TURN. Like these films LOST JUNCTION has a passive hero (Billy Burke, from ALONG CAME A SPIDER) who has to be prodded into doing anything, but who is suppose to be highly attractive to the viewer but who irritates with his brooding irritation and his worm of agony that turns out to be a super-unimportant act he committed several years earlier. The film goes from erotic thriller to mega-happy comedy without really justifying the transition. The disc comes with no extras.
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I can think of no worse living space than a field in the woods in a kidnapping situation, but that is the locale of THE CLEARING
(Fox Home Entertainment, 2004, $27.95, Tuesday, November 9), which in its first 20 minutes sets up a contrast between the luxury in which Robert Redford's executive Wayne Hayes lives and his wife Helen Mirren live and that of his kidnapper nemesis Arnold Mack (Willem Dafoe) and the woodsy realm in which Hayes is led.
It's difficult to determine what the point of this film happens to be, and the audio commentary track doesn't exactly help. This somber, dull film comes with a commentary by director Peter Jan Brugge, a producer turned director, writer Justin Haythe, and editor Kevin Tent. The disc also features six deleted scenes with optional commentary by Brugge, scenes that flesh out the story agreeably, and the screenplay, along with a making of and the trailer.
Offered up as a terrible place to live, the town in THE STEPFORD WIVES
(Paramount, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, November 9) is much different from the similar town in the previous film based on Ira Levin's hot button novel. But what was once a horror film about the encroaching power of feminism has now become the equivalent of an episode of WILL AND GRACE. What was once a suspense story has become a comedy. There is usually an element of humor in most horror films, but this is ridiculous.
It's actually a clever idea to gayify STEPFORD (writer Paul Rudnick introduces a gay couple) but its done at the expense of both the suspense and the implicit (perhaps not even intentional) political complexity of the source book. Here, the politics are clear: women are always right, men are awful, their petty scheme to gain a modicum of ground is futile. But Rudnick takes the adaptation a step further, by having the brains behind the whole scheme one of the wives herself. For those who remember Rudnick's hilarious script for ADAMS FAMILY VALUES this film just isn't as funny as it is clever; it doesn't live up to its premise.
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Director Frank Oz is that rarity, a director without a personality. A puppeteer, an actor, a voice for animated creatures, and a director, Oz still defies any kind of thematic or aesthetic consistency. He means nothing. On the rather enjoyable audio track he provides for this film, he says all the right things, he obviously thinks hard about his films, but there is nothing visually, thematically, dramatically, or actorially distinguished about DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, WHAT ABOUT BOB?, HOUSESITTER, IN AND OUT, BOWFINGER, THE SCORE, and now STEPFORD, except that Hollywood seems to have gotten it into its head that Oz is the go-to guy for big comedy stars. In the making of, Kidman says that Oz told her, "Trust me, I know what I'm doing," and he may, as far as being a metteur en scene in the manner of an Arthur Hiller, know what he is doing, but what he does has no lasting effect.
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What's funny is that Oz may have a vision. In his audio track he talks about an elaborate opening sequence set in New York portraying an army of business suited women in a man-free world. It's not clear if he actually filmed it or if he only planned it (it is not included in the deleted scenes), but the reason he gives for not including it may not be accurate; such a sequence would tilt the film away from the anti-male bias of the bulk of the story. That appears to have been only one of many cuts. In fact, at a root level, the film doesn't make sense. Are the women robots? Or are they programmed human beings? It is simply not clear. It is the kind of confused story telling that would not have been acceptable to the studio chiefs of even 1975 when the beautiful Katharine Ross was the misfit wife.
Paramount's disc of STEPFORD comes in a fine widescreen transfer (1.78:1) and good Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Other extras include five "making-of" featurettes produced by Laurent Bouzereau which amount to aboutu 50 minutes in all, plus six deleted scenes, a gag reel, the theatrical teaser and trailer, and some trailers.
Stage Boor
There is something seriously wrong with BROADWAY: THE GOLDEN AGE
(Data Films DVD, 2004, $19.98, Tuesday, November 9). This movie assumes that you are in love with the idea of theater. The backstage stuff. The 10 cent hamburgers that aspiring actors such as Carol Burnett used to eat back in the late 1940s.
But sadly, that is the least thing that the public wants to know about actors and the world of theater. We don't care about how hard it is to audition, or about acting classes, or about being "green" and landing in a big city like New York coming from Indiana or Texas and being terribly naïve.
No, what the public is interested in is plays. Stories. Emotions. And after BROADWAY: THE GOLDEN AGE has cleared its throat and let a bunch of actors tell you about what it is like to be in theatuh it hunkers down and presents three of the best sequences I have seen in documentaries this year. Each one consists of several actors describing the impact that three specific actors — Laurette Taylor, Kim Hunter, Marlon Brando — had on them. How they inspired them. How these human beings on the stage made magic that stayed with their spectators for nigh on 50 years.
These sequences are amazing and inspirational and make this DVD a must-see for anyone interested in movies, acting, plays, the theater, and art.
DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Frank Oz on patience: "And this is the scene, where she's [Nicole Kidman's Joanna] gonna get fired. And this is Mary Beth Peal, a marvelous actress. She was on Broadway at the time, in NINE. She's just a wonderful actress. There's a moment here when she's fired, which is a close up of Nicole. And I thought about this for a year prior, I mean I knew what I wanted to do a year prior. For a year I was waiting, or maybe less than a year, I was waiting for the moment I was going to shoot this, because I just love the idea of seeing Nicole, or rather the character Nicole plays, Joanna, totally deconstruct. You'll see it in a moment. I tried several, several takes, and Nic did it many different ways and this is my favorite take, where she is totally in denial. She just doesn't believe.
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I told Nic, I said, You know Nic, you're going in there don't think you're going to be fired. Go in there — I gave her direction and suggestions saying — go in there thinking you're going to get a promotion, thinking that was great television. Just think about it that way. So she's smiling accepting a promotion, expecting a promotion. So when she realizes she 's fired, it's such a long distance to travel from what she thought was gonna happen to what's really happening. And this is what I looked forward to for about a year. This. Shooting this. And that deconstruction in her mind. This woman, Joanna, has made her work more important than her children and her husband. Her work is everything. It's how she defines her life. And so once her work is gone she is totally, completely lost, and of course she's putting up a brave face here. And I told Nic to hold in as tight as you can, hold that emotion as tight as you can. Put as much cover as possible, don't let anybody know you're hurt, don't let anybody know, and then she'll let it out in the elevator when she screams. "—Frank Oz from the audio commentary track for STEPFORD WIVES, 0:8:46.
Letters
From Carl Bennett, editor of SilentEra.com:
"Regarding your review of new Columbia/Tristar DVD of TESS, I noted something that is missing from the disc.
After Tess has first visited the Stokes/D'Urbervilles and she receives a letter extending an invitation to work on their poultry farm, she is seen off by her mother and the children, riding a slow cart. Before she goes down the lane, Alec D'Urberville shows up with his carriage. Tess's smaller sister says, 'Oh, Mother. I wish our Tess aren't going to be a lady.' And Alec's carriage pulls alongside the cart.
The footage is there, but what is missing is the foleyed-over dialogue of an older sister ('Is that the gentleman who's going to marry our Tess?') and the mother ('If God be willing, my girl. That's the one!').
I think that it is pretty obvious that the engineers who mixed the DVD for Surround missed including this snippet of dialogue. And for someone who knows this film as well as I do, this omission is infuriating. The last time I saw TESS in 'scope was in 1980. For 20 years, I have been waiting for a letterboxed edition of this film to replace the awful-looking pan-and-scan laserdisc I have had to endure since the mid-1980s. For this DVD edition not to be complete in every way is a tragedy."
NEXT TIME: Three films by Guy Maddin, BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY: THE EDGE OF REASON, I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD, A TOUCH OF FROST, several STAR TREKS, 45 Asian films, and more!
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