Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

Hey, New Line... check your calendars. Christmas isn’t until next week. I think you got confused. That’s the only way I can explain the delicious bounty available to film freaks today with the release of both David Fincher’s SE7EN and Tarsem’s THE CELL on DVD in jaw-dropping special edition packages.

Now before people start accusing me of reversing my position on THE CELL, allow me to clarify: I may think the film is a giant runny pile of crap, but thanks to New Line and their continuing exemplary Platinum Collection series, it’s one of the most spectacularly gift-wrapped piles of crap in the short and exciting history of this medium. When we were first promised DVDs, we were told how much archival information would be packed onto discs, how extras would become a standard feature. Well, New Line seems to be doing their part to keep that promise to consumers. Every time they set a standard, like they did earlier this year with their dual releases of BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA, they turn around and raise the bar just a little higher.

Again, though, before the lovefest really gets underway, can I make a quick request?

Ahem...

STOP PUTTING THAT FUCKING PC FRIENDLY SHIT ON YOUR DVDs, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!

Twice now, PC Friendly, the most wildly misnamed software product I’ve ever encountered, has managed to screw up every other DVD or CD player on my hard drive. It’s done it to many friends of mine too. Let me be clear about this. PC Friendly is not a good way to play your DVDs... it’s a goddamn virus. It’s a miserable, irritating, ultimately pointless addition to the discs. If you don’t have a DVD player already in your computer, then why would you put a DVD in to play? Please, I beg you to stop putting it on the discs. It loads automatically, and when it does, it can totally destroy a system. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Having said that, I got no other gripes with the way these discs are put together. Of the two, SE7EN is superior in every single way. From the moment you slide the composition book out of the simple black case, you know you’re looking at something that was designed as the definitive record of a movie. You open the notebook style case and are immediately overwhelmed by the list of what’s on each of the 2 discs. Four separate audio commentaries, a killer assortment of surround mixes (all of which were reworked specifically for this release as detailed in one of the fascinating extras on Disc 2), and an image you’ve never seen at home, not even on the remarkable Criterion Collection laserdisc from five years ago. That was as good a picture as I’d ever seen on laserdisc, and once again, it looks like SE7EN has been used to push the envelope in terms of reproducing Darius Khondji’s difficult, challenging film cinematography in the digital realm. Transferred on a Spirit Datacine, this picture is lush, like you could put your hand into the screen, like something could really leap out of these shadows that Fincher employs to such effective ends. The old SE7EN transfer was done using the bleach bypass process, and it was striking. Even the original New Line DVD pressing of the film, which used that old transfer, was a damn fine picture. But this time out, the high def process and the 2K Da Vinci color corrector have created something dazzling and beautiful, something that’s maybe even more visually stunning now than when it played in theaters. In many places, Fincher has gone in and done the sort of fine-tuning work that new technology allows him to do, things he couldn’t have done when timing a film for the theater. The 2K color corrector actually allows him to isolate single items on the screen, to adjust color, brightness, luminescence for each little detail of the frame. This is as radical a special edition visually as what Lucas is doing, in some ways. There’s no content altered, but the very texture of the image has been changed, sometimes to a breathtaking degree. For someone with as painterly an eye as Fincher, this is exciting stuff, and the obvious care that was lavished on this transfer explains where he’s been for the last year since FIGHT CLUB.

I make no secret of the fact that I’m dizzy in love with this film. When I walked into the theater to see SE7EN for the first time in the fall of 1995, I was predisposed to hate the thing. I thought David Fincher was all talk, all hype, a music video director with a muddy style that didn’t know a thing about narrative.

Hey! That sounds just like what you said when you reviewed THE CELL this summer!

It’s totally different. With Fincher, all I had to go on was a film that he didn’t get to truly direct. When you’re making a giant studio cash cow like an ALIEN film, and you’re interested in making an art film while the studio’s trying to make a summer action movie, someone’s going to lose that power struggle. If you’re James Cameron or Ridley Scott, you might win those fights. If you’re David Fincher making your first movie ever, you’re going to lose those fights. And he did. The film that I saw in theaters was compromised and butchered, and I can’t honestly say that it’s his fault. As Tarsem makes plainly evident on THE CELL’s supplemental section, he was in total charge of that film, and there’s no one to blame for its absolute and utter failure but him.

As soon as SE7EN started, I was drawn in. Even now, I am struck by the simple elegance of the first scenes between Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman). This is a case of archetype, not stereotype. Andrew Kevin Walker has built a morality play that depends on our familiarity with certain story shapes. Old cop, young cop, partners for one week as the old cop counts down to retirement. We’ve seen variations on that formula in hundreds of movies and TV shows. From these first quiet moments, there’s no indication that this is going to be something above and beyond what we’ve seen before.

4 minutes, eight seconds. That’s how far into the movie we are when that title sequence by Kyle Cooper, head of Imaginary Forces, kicks in, and we are suddenly taken someplace new, someplace dark, someplace we are not ready for. As we see the meticulously constructed notebooks of John Doe, as we watch him remove his own fingerprints in preparation for his great work, and as a remixed version of Trent Reznor’s "Closer" plays, a tone is set, a seduction is begun. We are drawn into this crazy, terrifying morality play, suddenly submerged in it, and there’s no looking away. There’s no rules. Has there ever been a title sequence that shook an audience more upon first viewing? It’s been imitated dozens of times since, and Kyle Cooper’s as guilty of it as anyone. This mini-movie perfectly captures the grander goals of Fincher’s film, sums it up in a few brief moments. On Disc 2 of this set, you can watch the sequence as early storyboards, as a rough cut, or as the final cut, and you can watch it with one of the surround mixes, a Kyle Cooper secondary track, or Audio Engineers Brant Biles and Robert Margouleff on their own audio track. It’s as complete as exploration as you’d ever need of how a great idea came to be executed so well.

We’re plunged into the world of the film with the next major sequence as Mills and Somerset examine their first body, a gigantic bloated man who appears to have been fed to death. Rob Bottin’s make up in this scene, and throughout the film, is unnerving and beautiful all at once, true artistry. It’s his finest work since Carpenter’s THE THING, and one of the items I wish they’d used from the old Criterion disc was the Rob Bottin commentary. He’s never been given his full due as an artist in my opinion, like Savini or even Baker to some extent, and I’d love to see him given proper respect. This film has definitely been influential on other movies and TV shows since, and watching it again, you realize exactly why that is: Fincher built this film with a brilliant precision, with a mixture of emotional honesty and visual invention that really does set him apart from his peers. There’s a reason he’s been lionized by film geeks like myself. He’s like the Coen Bros or Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese, an intuitive artist who doesn’t just make movies... he lives and breathes them.

Each of the murders that unfolds is terrible and brilliant, and once Somerset and Mills begin to realize what sort of killer they’re dealing with, the film gets a pulse going that Fincher wisely quickens as it progresses. The way he does it is the very model of control. Both Freeman and Pitt give perfectly modulated performances, playing off each other to great effect. Freeman’s only been used better in one film (THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION), and Pitt does the kind of work here that makes 12 MONKEYS, SNATCH, and FIGHT CLUB all so interesting, fearless work that makes him ugly, that gives him permission to rely on more than looks.

One scene of this film haunts me. It really has crept up on me as I’ve been rewatching the film, thinking about this piece. It’s the moment between Somerset and Tracy, played by Gwenyth Paltrow. She’s Pitt’s wife in the film, and for many people, the real world and all the gossip about Pitt and Paltrow might intrude on this moment. That would be a shame, though, because I believe this is the heart of SE7EN, the thing that really makes it hurt. David Fincher could have cut this scene and you never would have missed it. But the ending of the movie would feel more arbitrary. It would be awful, but there wouldn’t be any real horror there. As it stands now, whenever Mills is standing over John Doe, gun up, demanding in that frantic, fearful voice of his, "What’s in the box?!" I flash on the image of Tracy as she talks with Somerset about having a baby while living in this hellish nameless city that he and her husband police every day. She’s not sure if she wants to have it, or if she should tell her husband, and she turns to Somerset for help. He tells her a story about his own decision, many years before, and how he and a woman chose not to have a child together, how he convinced her to have an abortion. Freeman doesn’t lay on the dramatics here. He doesn’t have to. There’s not enough pain to fill in the story he tells. He’s almost detached as he talks, just a hint of regret playing at the edge of things. People do that all the time, take painful pieces of their lives and put them away in little boxes that they never open. It’s the way we all get through things. Tracy hasn’t learned to do that, though, as we see when Somerset finishes. She’s wide open, on the verge of emotion as he looks her in the eye and says, "If you don’t keep... I mean, if that’s your decision... don’t ever tell him you were pregnant."

He’s quieter as he says the second part, but his words are like fists. "But if you choose to have this baby, spoil that kid every chance you get." That’s all it takes. Tracy breaks down, her face flushed by a sudden wash of tears. It’s that face I picture later. It’s the idea that she knew at that moment how fleeting life and happiness could be. Somerset is the voice of harsh, harsh truth in that scene, and all John Doe does is underline things with his actions later.

The level of writing in this film is just astonishing. Walker may never be this natural, this raw, this heartfelt again. I’ve heard the story over and over about how he wrote the film while working at a Tower Records in New York, depressed and desperate, and there’s no denying that this is the voice of a man who is genuinely at the end of his rope with the world around him. It’s a mature work that feels like it was adapted from a novel. There’s suggested density, implied depth. Even though this is built to explore gigantic moral themes, it is ultimately a very personal tale that is told.

And when that ending comes, does it still hold its kick? Yes, it does, and this is where we’re talking about real greatness. It’s easy to build films around secrets and big reveals and surprises, and it always seems to impress audiences to some degree. It can backfire on a filmmaker, though, and it can undermine a film if the surprise is just something that shocks, that doesn’t actually add to the film. SE7EN shocks, no doubt about it, but it also brings the entire picture together. Before SE7EN, the last film to actually get me to come out of my chair during the big finish because of sheer emotional intensity was MIDNIGHT RUN. That’s not to say that film was anywhere near the plunge into stark, nightmarish hell that this one is. Kevin Spacey may not appear until late in this film, but they get full value out of him. He is that match to Brad Pitt’s powder keg, and the results are shattering. Even today, even after all the times I’ve seen the film, I still see the closing scenes through the distortion of tear-filled eyes. As John Doe says, it’s like being hit with a sledgehammer. The final perfect punctuation comes from the voice-over of Freeman’s that closes the movie, one of the great last lines of the movies:

"Ernest Hemingway once wrote,’The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part."

And then there’s THE CELL. I considered not covering the DVD, but there’s a number of you that are going to buy the disc, and you know what? You’re going to love it. It’s packed full of features that should entertain any fan of the film. Hell, I’ll admit to having gotten some severe pleasure out of the DVD. All of the things I complained about in my initial review, all of the things I felt like I learned about Tarsem by watching THE CELL, they’re all borne out in full by the interviews we see here and by the secondary audio commentary track that Tarsem contributes to the film. In the BEHIND THE SCENES section of the DVD is a documentary called "Style As Substance: Reflections On Tarsem." Ahhh... taste the pretension. Let it melt on your tongue. It’s ripe and almost overwhelming. Listen to Tarsem describe how he didn’t really care what THE CELL was about, how he just took a serial killer project because "I guess that’s what people like," and how he didn’t care about the story. Instead, it’s just the visuals that interested him. "Style as substance," eh? Here’s a guy with obvious visual acuity, real command of the camera and the various tools at his disposal. Tarsem isn’t a graceless lunkhead like Renny Harlin or an anonymous hack like Chuck Russell. Instead, he’s got enormous ability, all of it channeled into vigorous visual masturbation, pointless and without any interest to anyone but him. He steals from old paintings and approaches every scene without any sort of adherence to logic or character.

I find that I can’t make it through more than ten minutes of his director’s commentary at a time. I laugh so hard as his descriptions of why he did what he did, his inane ramblings about absolutely nothing, that I have to turn him off. I can’t take it. I am greatly entertained by it, but I have the feeling that’s not what he intended.

As clear as the moral message of SE7EN is, that’s how muddied Tarsem and Mark Protosevich seem to be about what they’re trying to say here. The performances are uniformly awful, with Vincent D’Onofrio set to FULL HAM from the moment he appears. Jennifer Lopez continues to prove that Steven Soderbergh is a genius every time she makes a movie. How he got that warmth and that heart onscreen in OUT OF SIGHT is a mystery, because she comes across as a preening moron in this film, useless to the plot and grating in the extreme. I’ve come to be quite fond of Vince Vaughn’s drunken reprobate FBI agent in the film. I wish he’d gone full-on Rat Pack, playing it with the drink in one hand and the cigarette in the other. The film could have used a little manic-loony-Val Kilmer style energy to liven things up.

I’ll say this for the film: I gave it too much credit the first time around. It doesn’t have the power to offend or to shock that I said it did. Instead, the whole thing comes across as silly. I hope Howard Shore is working in a more subtle mode when he scores THE LORD OF THE RINGS, because I’ve never actually wanted to see a Biblical plague visited upon an orchestra before. This score is like an assault, a dare that Tarsem lost. It ranges from the unlistenable to the unbearable, hitting all marks inbetween. For extra special pain, you can watch the film with everything but the score switched off. It’s guaranteed to make your loved ones leave you.

As with SE7EN, the picture here is startlingly good. I can’t believe the way these films look at home. New Line’s totally gotten past any sort of artifacting or digital noise. They’re turning out pieces of candy, the sound and the picture defining what can be done with the medium at the moment. I’d recommend either of these films to fans, and if you’re shopping for someone who has asked for both of these for Christmas, I’d suggest calling the FBI and checking the crawlspace under the house.

One last minor complaint: the case for SE7EN is one of those that scares the shit out of me. I’m always afraid I’m going to fold my DVD in half trying to pry it loose. Please, find something that allows the consumer to retrieve their disc without destroying it. Aside from that small peeve that applies to a number of companies and titles currently (BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, anyone??), my compliments to the fine people at New Line who continue to lead the field in terms of how they present their product to the home consumer. THE FILTH & THE FURY, MOTHER NIGHT, and a number of other specialty titles are all essential stocking stuffers for fans of these small films given the big treatment, and it’s nice to know that at least one company really does place some value on making sure the consumer gets everything they pay for and more.

"Moriarty" out.