Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
It’s not one of the biggest days of the year for DVD releases, but it may well be the day that one of the single biggest discs of the year is released, and for that reason alone, it’s a great day at the DVD Shelf. We’re going to run down today’s list quickly, since I actually have to be up at a human hour tomorrow. As always, anything marked with an asterisk (*) is already here at the Labs and recommended, while everything else represents titles I’m planning to pick up myself.
And don’t forget to visit my new DVD Blog, where we’ve just kicked off The 12 Days Of Hitchcock, and where you can read new reviews every day. More and more of you visit every week, and it’s turning into a really fun supplement to the work I do here. For now, though, it’s time for the list:
9 SONGS
Michael Winterbottom is one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers working right now, constantly experimenting with form and content, and 9 SONGS was his attempt to demystify movie sex. It’s also a way of showing how we connect memories to music, and how hard it is to separate the two. It’s not a great film, but it’s a provocative movie, and yes, the sex scenes are fairly explicit. In the end, though, what makes the film work for me is the way it plays with memory. Winterbottom understands the strange way we all live somewhat unstuck in time, and he approximates that with the way he’s structured this film. The entire arc of this relationship takes place over a year, and each key moment seems to be connected to a rock concert the couple saw together. This allows Winterbottom to alternate between concert footage he shot of bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Dandy Warhols, and the sexual trysts between Matt (Kieran O’Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley). I’ve read complaints that for all the onscreen sex, there’s very little passion on display, and no hint of love. I’m not sure Winterbottom was making a film about a couple in love, though. Hell, you can only loosely define the film as a narrative feature, since he eschews all the conventions of drama that we’re used to. This is a failed relationship, so the film is simply about those little details that stick with us even after something is over. It’s about the way someone touched you, or a particular move they did one evening, or an especially satisfying orgasm. It’s not about love so much as it is about fucking, and it makes perfect sense that Winterbottom wanted to push the envelope of what you can show, since this is a movie entirely about the connections forged by sex. It’s a relatively brief picture (not quite 80 minutes long), but memorable. Even if you end up thinking of it as a complete failure (which many people do), you’ll have to acknowledge that Winterbottom is the sort of director that we should be celebrating, determined to try something new every time he makes a film.
*ALIEN VS PREDATOR: UNRATED DIRECTOR’S CUT
Don’t get fooled into thinking you’re going to see a radically new version of this film on this UNRATED DIRECTOR’S CUT DVD. You won’t. Instead, you’ll see a bit more gore and a bit more action, and a few extra moments to explain some of the characters. It makes very little real difference to the film. Many of the special features on disc one are simply ported over from the previous release of the movie last year, including two commentary tracks and an alternate beginning scene. However, disc two really does feature a much more in-depth look at the production of the film, and it’s the second disc that will probably provoke hardcore fans of these franchises to pony up and take the double-dip. Sound and picture quality is outstanding, so if you do trade in the first edition and pick this one up, rest assured that you’re getting the best version of the film, and you can still watch the regular PG-13 cut thanks to seamless branching.
AEON FLUX: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED COLLECTION
*THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW: THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON
KING OF THE HILL: THE COMPLETE SEASON FIVE
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
*SEINFELD SEASONS 5 & 6
Loads and loads and loads of TV on DVD today, and all of it’s pretty interesting for different reasons. There’s the AEON FLUX collection, which finally gives you every one of the half-hour episodes as well as the earlier LIQUID TELEVISION shorts to sort through, plus a wealth of extras about the way the series evolved. I always loved the original super-short AEON FLUX cartoons more than the actual series, and I loved the way she seemed to die and then come back in the next cartoon with no explanation. I’m still not sure how Paramount plans to take something as hyper-stylized and perverse as these cartoons and turn it into a mainstream SF film, but we’ll see in a few weeks. Until then, I’m looking forward to revisiting these cartoons.
Then there’s THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW. Hats off to Paramount for the speed with which they release these box sets. I can’t believe all the Mayberry I’ve already got on disc, and it’s nice to finally be able to watch this entire series in order. I don’t think I ever saw the build-up to Gomer Pyle leaving to join the Marines, and tht’s the way this season ends. Before that, there’s a whole lot of great Barney Fife material since this was right at the height of Don Knotts’s work on the show. The producers obviously knew it, too, because they give him plenty to do. Seeing as how he’s one of my favorite TV characters of all time, this is a delight all the way through.
KING OF THE HILL is sort of the red-headed stepchild of Mike Judge’s career. For some reason, it doesn’t even get the sort of respect that BEAVIS & BUTT-HEAD gets, and that’s a shame. The story of Hank Hill and his family and their friends in Arlen, Texas, is one of the most honest portrayals of an American family on TV right now, either in live-action or in animation. It’s not outrageous or shocking like SOUTH PARK or FAMILY GUY, and maybe that’s why it doesn’t get the respect it deserves.
You want to see the exact opposite of shocking or outrageous? Well, Universal steps up today with the first season box set of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, one of the squeakiest clean sitcoms to ever air on American television. There’s a real charm to watching a show like this and the world it portrays. I’m not sure I’d revisit it often, but for fans, the wait is finally over.
And finally today, there are another two seasons of SEINFELD to contend with, and again... I’m really pleased by how quickly Sony Home Entertainment is getting these box sets out. Even more impressive is how packed each box set is, and how they seem to really work to make sure that each one is filled with features that are unique, instead of just doing the same thing over and over. Seasons five and six represent this show at its most confident, and there are so many amazing moments here that it’s hard to sum them up. Season five just revels in the weird, right from the start, with “The Mango” dealing with faked orgasms, fruit stand bans, and the power of the mango. On the rest of disc one, you’ve got puffy shirts, sniffing accountants, a shaky mohel, and the pigman, while the rest of the season brings such oddities as non-fat yogurt that isn’t, a “lowtalker,” a “closetalker,” a lip reader, a ball boy, a bad barber, a masseuse who won’t, a cigar store Indian, Kramer’s coffee table book, the “mimbo,” the marine biologist and the golf ball, babkas, mannequin look-alikes, little people stand-ins, a fake marriage, a fire at a children’s birthday party, making out at SCHINDLER’S LIST, shrinkage, and the triumph of the opposite. The best special feature on this season is called “JASON + LARRY = GEORGE,” a look at how Larry David inspired the character of George Costanza that will please fans of both SEINFELD and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM.
Season Six contains even more of this stuff, featuring chaperones, Mr. Pitt, a full season of Steinbrenner, a big salad, the slowest car chase ever, trashpicking, couch peeing, persnickety Snickers eating, Jon Voight’s car, Bania and the suit, Kramer’s first name, a really bad Santa, the label maker, Risk, Newman’s leftovers, beards and toupees, kissing hello, the manssiere or the bro, The Jimmy, Mel Torme and the mentally ill, Puddy (ohhhhhh, god, do I love Puddy), George the racist, Bette Midler, the introduction of J. Peterman, and monkeyfighting. In addition to a great feature that follows themaking of one episode from script to air, there’s also a really odd thing here where certain scenes have been animated. For fans of the series, you can pick up the special gift set edition of these two seasons that comes with a puffy shirt. Whatever you pick up, though, it’s worth it. These are box sets that fans will revisit for a long time to come.
THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED
This is a strange, groovy little French film, a remake of James Toback’s cult classic FINGERS, and if you haven’t seen the original, track down the WHV release of it from a few years ago. Harvey Keitel played a classical pianist who moonlights as an enforcer for the mob. It’s a great character piece, and it’s one of those largely-forgotten gems from the ‘70s well worth revisiting.
This remake is director Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to his very good READ MY LIPS, and he seems to be one of those guys who will reward our continued attention. He makes smart, adult thrillers that draw their charge from intricate character work. In this case, Tom Seyre (Romain Duris) is his lead, a guy who works for his father, a total douchebag slumlord. Tom does all the dirty work, whatever his father wants, and the result is a wellspring of anger that he can barely keep bottled up all day. It’s a great character piece, and a real showcase for Duris’s performance. If you’re a fan of French cinema at all, Audiard’s a name to remember, and this is a film to find.
BRIAN ENO: 14 VIDEO PAINTINGS
THE HIVES: TUSSLES IN BRUSSELS
RADIOHEAD: THE ASTORIA LONDON LIVE
Three totally different musical acts, and three totally different types of music DVDs. Of the three, the Radiohead title is the one that I’m drooling over. I’ve never heard this set, and the reviews I’ve read suggest that it’s one of their best early shows. I’m excited to finally hear it, but I’m also looking forward to seeing what’s on the Eno title. I love these types of discs because you can put them in while you’re working and leave them on repeat, which tends to get annoying with a movie. If you’ve seen any of these and have any strong feelings in either direction, let me know in the talkback.
THE TALES OF HOFFMANN - Criterion
RAN - Criterion
Two truly classic films are getting the full Criterion treatment today, and I plan to get both of these at some point soon.
It’s hard to explain the appeal of Powell & Pressburger films to someone who hasn’t seen them. Like THE RED SHOES, this film is drunk on opera and ballet and the sheer visual potential of cinema, but this is a collection of four distinct stories, each one a different movement from the Offenbach opera. This isn’t meant to be realistic filmmaking. Instead, it’s a dream of the opera, a completely artificial thing that celebrates music and dance and color and motion. Each of the stories can be seen as a different stage in the development of our ability to love. It goes from innocent to sexual to selfless and pure, but even if you don’t want to dig for subtext, this is an amazing movie. I haven’t seen the disc yet, but I’ll pick it up for the commentary track by Martin Scorsese. There are very few people who are more entertaining when they speak about film, and he has always been a particularly passionate advocate of the work of Powell and Pressburger. There’s also an interview with George A. Romero (yeah, it surprised me, too) and a short film by Michael Powell, so this sounds like an impressive package all around.
And then there’s RAN, which I’d say was the last true masterpiece by Akira Kurosawa, and one of the great films of the ‘80s in any language. Another in Kurosawa’s loose adaptations of Shakespeare plays, this is KING LEAR envisioned as a grand historical epic. An aging king gives up his kingdom and leaves his sons to fight it out to decide who gets to claim the throne. It’s a dark, pessimistic film, a movie that appears to have been greatly influenced by the ten years that Kurosawa lived through before making it, the ten most difficult years of his personal life, filled with setbacks and death and suffering. Still, Kurosawa is such a keen observer of human behavior that he can’t help but find moments of hope and humanity amidst the chaos (which is what RAN actually translates to) of the story. This is the third release of RAN on DVD, but the first one that appears to have actually been done properly. I’ve heard great things about the transfer, and I’m frothing at the notion of being able to sit down and check it out. Again, the two-disc set is packed with extras, including a 74 minute documentary called A.K. that was directed by Chris Marker, released the same year as RAN.
When you’ve got one company releasing two titles this good in one day, it’s easy to see why Criterion is still held up as one of the standards that the rest of the industry aspires to.
THE EXTERMINATOR
Okay... enough touchy-feely French films and classic Japanese cinema. THE EXTERMINATOR is trash, pure and simple, a DEATH WISH ripoff that makes no pretense at being anything more than that. It’s not the best of the genre by any means, but it’s got a few nasty bits of business and Robert Ginty doing his very best tough-guy attitude. This is basically THE PUNISHER before THE PUNISHER existed, a Vietnam vet who decides to take the law into his own hands to memorable effect. I haven’t seen this since it was a cable mainstay in the ‘80s, and I won’t be able to resist picking it up so I can see it again.
*KING KONG (1933)
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG
SON OF KONG
I’ve got the collector’s edition of the 1933 KING KONG that was sent out by Warner Bros. in the special collector’s tin, and all the little goodies you get inside are nice. I think I would have been just as happy picking up the box set that also includes MIGHTY JOE YOUNG and SON OF KONG, though, because ultimately, it’s the content on the discs and not the packaging that makes this one of the best releases of the year, and one of the finest catalog titles that Warner Home Video has ever put out.
It blows my mind how many people have confessed to me in the last month or so that they’ve never seen the original KONG, but that may be good news for Warner Bros. I have a feeling that many people are going to be checking it out before they go see Peter Jackson’s mega-budget remake next month. I’m curious to see if they’ll be able to put the film in the context of when it was made and appreciate its significance to all of fantasy cinema, or if they’ll simply see it as “old,” since so many modern audiences seem jaded because they’re used to seeing cutting-edge FX in every TV commercial or crappy summer film that comes along.
Of course, most of what we accept as commonplace began with KONG, and we owe so much to the pioneering spirit that seemed to exist among every member of this amazing crew. The film stands as one of the great testaments to the power of pure imagination, and it unfolds with the perfect simplicity of a dream. Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) has a map of a fabled island where something called “Kong” is rumored to live. Denham is determined to shoot a film on the island and capture some footage of this mysterious Kong figure, but at the last moment, he finds himself ready to leave but unable to find a lead actress. That’s when he lucks into an encounter with Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), who agrees to join the expedition. What they find on the island surpasses Denham’s wildest dreams, and thanks to the work by Willis O’Brien and his amazing team of effects wizards, it remains one of the most fantastic worlds ever realized on film. It’s no wonder this movie inspired generations of filmmakers and writers and artists and performers. Skull Island is a gorgeous dreamscape full of impossible jungles and unreal creatures and wild natives, and Kong really is king of it all. O’Brien’s stop motion animation gives Kong a soul, not just movement, and it’s amazing to see how well the work holds up, especially with the lovely new restored print that was used to create this transfer. There’s a great commentary on the disc by FX wizards Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston, with bits and pieces of interviews with Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray dropped in to fill out a few moments.
Beyond the film itself, there’s the second disc, which is a high watermark for the Warner Home Video label. There are two documentaries here, the first of which deals with the life of Merian C. Cooper, who comes across as a fascinating character in his own right. The main attraction, though, is the second documentary, “RKO PRODUCTION 601,” a 2 ½ hour epic that offers the most complete explanation ever of how KONG was made. Because it was produced by Wingnut Films, it would be fair to suspect that this might be shameless shilling for the remake, but that’s not the case at all. Instead, Peter Jackson has taken the opportunity to pour all of his love for the original into creating a documentary that not only details all of the innovations that had to happen for this film to exist, but that also sees the WETA team working to understand the production of the film better by recreating scenes from the film using the exact same techniques that O’Brien and his team had to use in 1933. The stretch of the documentary where they reproduce the long-lost Spider Pit Sequence is one of the purest expressions of geek love that I’ve ever seen. Jackson brings in friends like Frank Darabont and Rick Baker to help him recreate the scene, and the result is bliss.
If you sit through this documentary and don’t walk away impressed by the artistry of Max Steiner or Murray Spivack or Marcel Delgado or Linwood Dunn, then you aren’t a film fan. It really is that simple. These were people who had to invent everything they used on this film, and all of that imagination is right there on the screen, even now, over 70 years later.
SON OF KONG and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG may not be the same sort of artistic accomplishments that KING KONG is, but they both still feature some great stop-motion work, and moments that make them special, and they’re worth having if you’re a fan of fantasy film. In the end, though, today’s all about KONG, and if there’s any one DVD released this fall that everyone should buy, this is the one.
NOVO
This sounds like it falls somewhere between MEMENTO and 50 FIRST DATES in terms of plot, the story of a man who has to struggle with having no long-term or short-term memory at all. When he meets a pretty temp worker in his office, she is drawn to him because of his illness, seeing it as the ultimate erotic thrill since he’s constantly rediscovering her. The film was released in 2002, and it’s one of those titles that I’ve always meant to get around to, mainly because I like Eduardo Noriega (THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, OPEN YOUR EYES, THESIS). If I do pick it up, I’ll try to remember to review it on the blog.
*THE POLAR EXPRESS (2-disc edition)
I wasn’t very kind to POLAR EXPRESS when I reviewed it last year, but I decided to revisit it on DVD to see if I’d mellowed towards it at all. I still think the film’s all over the place, with some remarkable technical accomplishments and some truly bone-headed creative choices, but the sound and picture on this DVD are breathtaking. The second disc is fairly shallow as far as special features are concerned. The various behind-the-scenes featurettes are incredibly short, and they just touch on a process that deserves some real exploration. Also, I find it incredibly annoying that the second disc mentions easter eggs but makes them impossible to find. Just give me the content you’ve put on the disc and stop turning it into a game of hide and seek, please. If you’re a fan of this film, you can’t go wrong with the disc. If you’re hoping for an extensive look at the technical end of things, you’ll probably be disappointed.
RINGERS: LORD OF THE FANS
One of the reasons I’m looking forward to seeing this film is because it appears to be a movie by fans that doesn’t mock fandom, something that seems to be hard to pull off. For the most part, films like TREKKIES mock their subjects, and in this case, RINGERS seems to have been made by people who have a genuine affection for LORD OF THE RINGS and for the passionate fanbase that has sprung up around the series. It sounds like fun, and I’ll definitely have a full review of this one on the blog sometime in the next week.
SCARY TRUE TALES: TEN HAUNTING STORIES FROM JAPAN
I’ve never seen this, but it’s one of the earliest titles in the modern wave of J-horror, and it seems to be a sort of ground zero for many of the guys who went on to create films like RINGU, PULSE, and JU-ON. Reason enough for me to pick it up and finally check it out.
SPIKE & MIKE’S SICK AND TWISTED FESTIVAL: CONTAGIOUS
Spike Dekker’s been doing this for a lot of years, and by now, animation fans pretty much know if they agree with his sense of humor or not. I always enjoy these compilations, and even the worst cartoons he finds are relatively painless to sit through because you know there’s always something else just around the corner. This is the fourth DVD release in this series, and it offers almost three dozen different cartoons. Shout! Factory does nice work, and I’ll definitely pick this up.
*SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE
If you’ve been following the career of Chan Wook Park for the last few years, then you know that this is the film that really put him on the map for critics around the world. I’m a fan of his earlier movie JSA, but this is the movie where he seems to have found his voice and his theme: revenge. This is a deeply fucked-up look at the price of vengeance and the personal toll it takes on you, but it explores those ideas in a totally different way than OLD BOY. If you want to understand what makes Park so intriguing to his fans, this is the place to start, and Tartan Asian Extreme has done a stupendous job with the disc.
WAR OF THE WORLDS
Here’s another film I had a mixed reaction to that I plan to revisit on DVD, and I’m looking forward to digging into the extra material on the second disc. Despite my issues with the movie, I find that it’s stuck with me since I saw it this summer, and there are parts of it that I’m actually eagerly anticipating again. I credit Spielberg with that. No one else builds moments the way he does, and even if that’s all I like about the film, moments this good can sometimes be enough.
And with that, we bring another Tuesday column to a close. Toshi’s waking up now for about the fourth time tonight, so I’m going to run be a good daddy and make him a bottle. I’ll be updating the DVD blog all week long, so I’ll see you over there. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
