Extras Disc One:

• Commentary with Lee Tamahori and Michael G. Wilson
  
• Commentary with Pierce Brosnan and Rosamund Pike
  
• Datastream: footnotes and video supplements
  
• Trailers for THE JAMES BOND COLLECTION
  

Extras Disc Two:

Here's how weak the James Bond series is.

It was hijacked by a chick.

There's no way to prove this, but I would guess that more people went to DIE ANOTHER DAY to see Halle Berry than James Bond. Oh, it was nice to have Bond in the film, sure. His presence was a guarantee of action, nice material possessions, and cool cars. But he was rendered rather secondary to Berry's secondary sex characteristics. On the audio track for this disc, Brosnan himself reveals that he hadn't seen so many people behind a camera in his life than on the day they shot her famous "emerging from the water" scene.

It's an odd situation for good old James Bond to find himself on his "official" 40th anniversary. Indeed, if you see but one James Bond film in your lifetime, make it DIE ANOTHER DAY. That's because it contains enough bits of previous Bond films to serve as an espionage smorgasbord, a Chuck Workman-style TMC "great moments" anthology barely disguised within an often derivative, often clever, and all too often agonizingly boring spy story. In the end, it's a film with more visual effects people than plot.

The 40th Anniversary Bond film takes that date seriously. It makes sure to acknowledge almost all the previous Bond films, mostly the earliest batch with Sean Connery. You get to see the short-term mini mouth-oxygen tank from THUNDERBALL; you see the jet pack from YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE; you see the bomb-rigged attaché case from FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE; you see a laser torture-death device from GOLDFINGER; you see Rosa Klebb's stiletto toed boot. Who knew that Bond was collecting this stuff and depositing it in a reliquary supervised by Q? Unfortunately, Pierce Brosnan's Bond looks over some of this stuff like he's never seen it before, which is basically true. The movie even vaguely, if perhaps unintentionally, quotes the original James Bond— that is, the ornithologist from whom Ian Fleming borrowed the name of his hero when he sat down to compose the first Bond book back in the '50s. This happens when Brosnan tucks a bird book under his arm for cover.

This is all fine, if a tad distracting, but it does give the critical press a chance to belch up their boilerplate remarks about the decline of the Bond franchise. But guess what: it was never all that good to begin with. Recently I re-watched GOLDFINGER, which cost $3 million dollars at the time, and it has a lot of dud portions. Like the other early films, it often looks like a TV movie. If it weren't for the John Barry music score a lot of the "action" would be dull shots of men in funny little costumes running madly.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Bond films, bad as they sometimes are. I still remember the first Bonds I saw, GOLDFINGER and THUNDERBALL on a double bill at a neighborhood theater. I was just the right age to fall in love with the whole cool Bond ethos, a sort of animated PLAYBOY philosophy, and I even had a James Bond Action Toy Set with the Aston Martin DB5 with the ejector seat, the pool table that flips over to a map, and the laser torture table, which today would probably go for a small fortune on Ebay. Later I read all the books in the series several times over. And talk about boring. Try reading FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE again as an adult. Yeesh! The tedious "getting back to England" chapters are pure chloroform.

What gets lost in all the semi-annual Bond brouhaha is that basically Bond is an assassin, in the employ of the British government. In the books, the "license to kill" is not permission; it is a mandate. He's supposed to take people out. Instead in the films he is often more like The Saint (and not just because Roger Moore played both characters), a soldier of fortune wandering from one escapade to another. One of the recurrent complaints is that the newer Bonds lack the "ruthlessness" of the first two or three Connerys, which by the way, isn't true. Alexander Cockburn noted Bond's real mandate in his clever coverage of the franchise in a 1987 American Film magazine article. Indeed he blames Bond's creator with a list of Kissingerian crimes. "Without Fleming, we would have had no OSS, hence no CIA. The cold war would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars." He makes a viable case for his charges.

DIE ANOTHER DAY starts out with a typical Bond entrance (quasi-borrowed from GOLDFINGER) in which Bond and two other agents surf onto the coast of North Korea. There, a few surprising, non-Bondian things happen, among them a rather long leap in time. The rest of the film is about a disgraced Bond seeking slightly irrational vengeance against a North Korean soldier named Zao (Rick Yune). To that purpose he is actually financed by the Red Chinese for a time. His quest takes him to Cuba, where he meets Jinx (Halle Berry) rising out of the sea in Ursula Andress's clothes, then to London, where the Bond film goes suddenly hip by quoting The Clash's "London Calling" on the soundtrack, and where Bond meets the official villain, one Gustave Graves (Toby Stephens) who is not all he seems. There Bond also meets Madonna (actually a fencing mistress), and Graves's assistant, Miranda Frost (the exciting Rosamund Pike), who is not all she seems. The plot takes a long, rather unmotivated but action-filled detour to Iceland, in keeping with the frost theme, where Bond hitches up with Jinx again. Finally, even bigger fireworks take place within the film's official climax, which returns us to North Korea.

Once again Brosnan's Bond proves to be a one-man demolition derby. Wherever he goes, explosions follow. Along with bad puns. I must say, the morbid and sexual badinage is getting worn with time. Yet the writers even flub an opportunity. When Bond finally unties Jinx from a device designed to kill her, she asks, "What took you so long?" Since he just spent 15 minutes racing across glaciers, avoiding avalanches, lasers, bullets, and bombs, he could have said something cunningly droll. Instead, Bond is speechless. Perhaps that's because he is joining us in gazing at Halle Berry once more.

To say that the four Brosnan Bonds are the best since the early Connerys is neither surprising nor helpful. The question is, where do the dull parts come from? Current co-producer Michael G. Wilson goes out of his way to hire competent craftsmen and interesting auteurs as his directors, yet still there are those long exposition passages, and the down times that seem to rival the whole of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS for sheer tedium. This tendency toward the tedious seems to transcend whoever is making a given film. A tension between timidity and product placement seems to be the cause. On the one hand, the stories need to be set around exotic locations that facilitate close ups of the merchandise that manufacturers have paid to have highlighted or lent to the production, and the films cannot deviate far from the template solidified as long ago as GOLDFINGER in order to enhance those placements by attracting the biggest crowds in the world. The consequence is that you never feel that Bond is truly imperiled. About the last time you worried about Bond with real suspense was when the red laser was riding up his crotch. Movies such as last summer's xXx and any number of Hong Kong (and Korean!) action films tend to make the helplessly pro forma Bond seem pale and flaccid. As director Lee Tamahori says in the November SIGHT AND SOUND, admitting defeat, "We're stuck with Bond as he is and we can never be as cool as movies like xXx. But at least you know what you're dealing with, you know what the history is and you don't want to fuck up. You don’t want to make a bad Bond movie."

He hasn't. But there is a Bond backlash this time around, led by Anthony Lane in the THE NEW YORKER, whose article in the November 4 issue was a backhanded compliment handed to the franchise, a blend of nostalgia and impatience that praised the Bond films for everything except the films themselves, which he often finds wanting ("Have you ever tried to watch A VIEW TO A KILL, a work so bereft of ideas that it chooses to employ Grace Jones as a special effect?"). Who doesn't? But if ever there was a franchise that is critic-proof it is the Bond series. The backlash couldn't come at a more awkward time, given that the movies are actually getting modestly better. When the morbid reports of the franchise's death are wittier than the movies, you know it's in trouble.

The film comes with two commentary tracks, the first with Lee Tamahori and Michael G. Wilson, which is mostly technical, and one with Pierce Brosnan and Rosamund Pike, which is funny, anecdotal, emotional, and not afraid to dabble is character motivation. In a way, Brosnan is more convincing as a commentator on Bond than as Bond himself. He comes across as a true fan of the franchise. I wish that the two screenwriters, who are volatile and entertaining guys, were given a track. See their lively interview with IN FOCUS magazine).

One of the most informative features on the disc is called Datastream, a sort of pop up video-infinifilm approach to providing Bondiana to the viewer. But unlike infinifilm stuff, I couldn't get the pop up stuff to play at the same time as the commentaries and subtitles for full media overload. The supplements on disc one end with trailers for THE JAMES BOND COLLECTION

Disc two is all extras. The most substantial is a feature length making of called "Inside DIE ANOTHER DAY." It's safe to say that there is little left over that you will not know about the making of this film from watching the material on this disc. The side also has detailed storyboard to screen comparisons, a segment on the making of the title sequence, an informative and revealing account of how the film is digitally enhanced, a brief survey of the Bond equipment, and an extensive stills gallery.

The discs winds down with the theatrical trailer, two teasers, TV spots, the Madonna music video and the making of Madonna's music video, an ad for the Bond video game and the making of the game, DVD-Rom features for consumers with PCs, and finally trailers for EVELYN, WINDTALKERS, AGENT CODY BANKS, and BULLETPROOF MONK.

Two with Pierce Brosnan

LIVE WIRE

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 3 September, 1992
  
• 85 minutes
  
• R
  
• New Line Cinema
  
• Directed by Christian Duguay
  
• Credited Writers: Bart Baker
  
• Cast: Pierce Brosnan (Danny O'Neill), Ron Silver (Frank Traveres), Ben Cross (Mikhail Rashid), Lisa Eilbacher (Terry O'Neill), Philip Baker Hall (Senator Thyme)
  
• Cinematography: Jeff Jur
  
• Editing: Christopher Greenbury
  
• Significant music: Craig Safan
  
• Awards: None
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: A Washington, D.C., bomb squad cop comes up against terrorists with an unusual explosive.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Theatrical trailer (2:00)
  
• Theatrical trailers for 15 MINUTES, THE CORRUPTOR, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, BLADE 2
  
• DVD-ROM web options for PC users
  

DETONATOR

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 14 April, 1993
  
• A.K.A.: DEATH TRAIN
  
• 100 minutes
  
• R
  
• British Lion
  
• Directed by David S. Jackson
  
• Credited Writers: David S. Jackson from the novel by Alistair MacLean
  
• Cast: Pierce Brosnan (Mike Graham), Patrick Stewart (Malcolm Philpot U.N.A.C.O.), Alexandra Paul (Sabrina Carver), Ted Levine (Alex Tierney), Christopher Lee (General Konstantin Benin)
  
• Cinematography: Timothy Eaton
  
• Editing: Eric Boyd-Perkins, Peter Musgrave, Dubravka Premar
  
• Significant music: Trevor Jones
  
• Awards: None
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: A retired agent is summoned for one last job, stopping terrorists from ferrying a nuclear bomb to Iraq and exploding it.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Trailers for 15 MINUTES, THE CORRUPTOR, RUSH HOUR 2, KNOCKAROUND GUYS
  
• DVD-ROM web links for PC users
  

Before Brosnan became James Bond in 1995, he made a series of bad made-for-TV action movies. He'd been asked to be Bond, but apparently commitments to REMINGTON STEEL (1982-1987) prevented him from diving into the part. Well, Bond waited, and while he waited, Brosnan made a series of other quickie films. Many of them are bad, but these are among the lamest. DETONATION is slightly better than LIVE WIRE, because it betrays fewer of its TV movie roots.

In LIVE WIRE, Pierce Brosnan plays Danny O'Neill, a DC bomb squad cop going through a divorce from his wealthy wife Terry (Lisa Eilbacher), who is having an affair with a senator (Ron Silver) with a bad haircut. Soon, O'Neill comes up against a terrorist (Ben Cross), who is blowing up a series of senators (Philip Baker Hall among them) for relatively obscure reasons. Naturally, O'Neill also learns at the end that the senator bumping uglies with his wife is part of the conspiracy, such as it is.

LIVE WIRE is a series of clichés with little life to them: the divorcing cop living in squalor and still loving his wife still loves him (so why are they divorcing?); the unsmiling terrorist who kills people with steely ease; the goofy partners. As O'Neill, Brosnan yells a lot, but his acting acts ease in the part.

DETONATOR is only a little better. Most of it takes place on or around a train. It is not a great train film, however, like THE TRAIN, or DARK OF THE SUN. It's like a train film that takes place on about two miles worth of track and a helicopter or two.

Apparently, the U.N. has a secret agency. It's boss is Patrick Stewart. One of its agents is Brosnan, who really wants to be a motocross racer. Also in the firm is BAYWATCH refugee Alexandra Paul, who jumps for joy when she gets to go on a mission with the boys.

The mission is to stop a terrorist (Ted Levine, at the behest of string-puller Christopher Lee) who is taking a bomb into Iraq to blow it up and somehow reaffirm the now disabled Soviet Union's primacy. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but Lee gets to wear a big medal laden uniform and make suspicious telephone calls from phone booths.

It's all a lot of nonsense, but at a certain point you begin to wonder if maybe Brosnan is not exactly suitable for an action star. He is a thin, small animal. He doesn't have the broad shoulders and huge jaw and the masculine physique of your average action star. He looks better in a tuxedo than in racing togs, which is probably why he was hired to be the sophisticated Bond. The thing that worries me the most, however, is that sometimes his line readings seem inauthentic. But I suppose that is attributable to the fact that it takes a year to make a Bond film, with all the retakes it requires to make it perfect, while these TV movies were probably shot quickly in a few weeks time. It's probably the great secret of movie acting that it isn't as easy as it looks; unfortunately, when it doesn't work, it's up there on the big screen for all to see forever and ever. What pressure.

Both these films are advertised as offering both a full frame and widescreen version (with a more erotic and violent version of LIVE WIRE available in both formats). But this is a pose. The "widescreen" version of both films is really the full frame version cropped at the top and bottom and blown up a little. Technically the viewer gets more visual information and a clearer picture with the full frame version.

About Jack

ABOUT SCHMIDT

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 27 December, 2002
  
• 125 minutes
  
• R
  
• New Line Cinema
  
• Directed by Alexander Payne
  
• Credited writer: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the novel by Louis Begley
  
• Cast: Jack Nicholson (Warren R. Schmidt, Hope Davis (Jeannie Schmidt), Dermot Mulroney (Randall Hertzel), Kathy Bates (Roberta Hertzel), June Squibb (Helen Schmidt), Howard Hesseman (Larry Hertzel), Len Cariou (Ray Nichols)
  
• Cinematography: James Glennon
  
• Editing: Kevin Tent
  
• Significant music: Rolfe Kent with themes from Erik Satie
  
• Awards: Two Oscar nominations, Golden Globes to Nicholson and Payne, along some 40 other nominations and wins
  
• Budget: $30 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $65 million

Plot in one sentence: A retired and widowed insurance executive visits his engaged daughter in order to try and convince her not to get married.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Nine deleted scenes with text introductions. Intro (1:00), scene 17, derived from A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE (3:51); scene 22, Schmidt in the lobby of the Woodman building (1:54); scenes 34-37, Schmidt interrupted as he writes a letter to Ndugu (1:34); scenes 68-71 (5:15); scenes 88-93, Schmidt gets arrested for shoplifting Preparation H and a bottle of Jim Beam (3:48); scenes 110-113, the scene preceding the urination on the floor scene (5:12); scene 152, Schmidt in his camper on the shoulder of the road (2:51); scenes 161, a reference to the waitress scene in FIVE EASY PIECES (2:52)
  
• Woodman Tower sequences with introduction and play all function (13:36), basically variations on the credit sequence
  
• Theatrical trailer (2:30)
  
• Additional theatrical trailers for I AM SAM, UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
  

I used to be a fanatical Jack Nicholson fan. I collected articles about him; read books; saw all the movies, even the bad ones (GOIN' SOUTH), and more or less viewed him as the heir to Brando. Gradually over time, however, he grew more popular, and more mannered. Maybe he always was and I didn't notice. Or maybe all actors are ultimately mannered and it just takes a while to get sick of it. In any case, my interest faded in the '80s, when every actor seemed to be having a bad decade.

Nowadays, Nicholson is something of an impediment to my enjoyment of what seems to be otherwise good movies (AS GOOD AS IT GETS). The eyebrows that evoke memories of Sam Irvin and the Watergate hearings; the slow drawl that hogs screentime; I'm just plain sick of it. But when I heard that Nicholson had specifically attempted to squelch those tricks and ticks for ABOUT SCHMIDT a small soupcon of interest was aroused in me; that, plus the fact that director Alexander Payne was at the helm.

Well the sad truth is that Nicholson, finally willing to play a character his age, is still addicted to his tics. True, he has modified them to a certain extent, but they still dominate his aspect and manner. Still, ABOUT SCHMIDT contains Nicholson's first truly good performance in a long time. He's as good as Bill Murray in RUSHMORE.

A not inapt reference, since ABOUT SCHMIDT is something like RUSHMORE squared, an unofficial sequel, a variation on a theme. It's got that whole Wes Anderson thing going of attention grabbing still shots in a motion picture that tells you what to think and makes a drab world more pictorial. It's also the latest in a series of movies I rejoice in called Heroic Alienation (OFFICE SPACE, CLOCKWATCHERS, AMERICAN BEAUTY), dire accounts of life in the work space.

Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) retires, then his wife dies. Out of sorts and keeping despair at arm's length, he gets in his Winnebago and drives out to see his daughter (Hope Davis, once again playing the irritable shrew) in an effort to keep her from marrying her mullet-wearing fiancé (Dermot Mulroney). He fails in this project, but along the way has his horizons broadened by the fiancee's ex-hippie mother (Kathy Bates in her SIX FEET UNDER force of nature mode). Middle-class himself, Schmidt is something of a snob about the orders below him. Yet he develops a correspondence with an African child that he uses as a confessional diary, perhaps the first time the buttoned down executive has ever opened himself up to anyone.

ABOUT SCHMIDT is controversially adapted from a novel by Louis Begley, controversial because Payne basically through out the novel, kept the title, and transferred the setting from New York City to Omaha (Begley's Schmidt was also an anti-Semite, which was the whole point of the book). Payne has the same obsessive love-hate relationship with Nebraska that the Coens have for Minnesota. FARGO isn't a big laugh (more of a mini-ha-ha), and Payne doesn't extract much more than cruel observation from his similar setting. It's Joe Queenan's world of Olive Gardens and CATS, portrayed in his hilarious travelogue, RED LOBSTER, WHITE TRASH, AND THE BLUE LAGOON: JOE QUEENAN'S AMERICA The film is something of a travelogue in the RAIN PEOPLE mode, lonely person hitting the road looking for truth and freedom. All in all, it's a pretty depressing film, given that it coughs up all the bleak despair we have about life we accrue just walking down the street and looking at people and the mediocre culture we're stuck in. I suppose that's why Schmidt cries at the end. I'm not entirely sure. But I would like to feel more confident that Payne is in the same mindframe as Schmidt and not mocking the characters in a LaButian-Solondz mode.

ABOUT SCHMIDT comes in a nice, succinct disc with little in the way of extras beyond a bunch of deleted scenes. Payne apparently wants to keep his human voice out of the proceedings: each of the deleted scenes is preceded by a written introduction instead of the usual "video introduction." The scenes are interesting, and, as usual, in my view could have just stayed in the movie were it not for the commercial exigencies of keeping movie-goers rotating through the theaters.

The first deleted scene, number 17 from the script, is derived from a similar scene in A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE of almost physical revulsion from the excesses of comfortable, smug people eating and indulging themselves. This scene serves to make explicit Schmidt's own revulsion from his society, which is only implied in the finished film. In the deleted scenes 88 through 93, Schmidt is caught shoplifting a tube of Preparation H and a bottle of Jim Beam and spends the night in jail, an unusual detour from the rest of the story. Another interesting one is the last deleted scene, which is an elaborate reference to the waitress scene in FIVE EASY PIECES, which Nicholson was game enough to go along with.

Other extras include what is called the Woodman Tower sequences, which are variations on the first few scene-setting moments of the movie, showing Omaha in all its glory. There's also the theatrical trailer and additional trailers for I AM SAM and UNCONDITIONAL LOVE.

Two with Sigourney Weaver

HALF MOON STREET

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 17 October, 1956
  
• 90 minutes
  
• R
  
• RKO Pictures/Showtime/20th Century Fox
  
• Directed by Bob Swaim
  
• Credited Writers: Edward Behr and Bob Swaim from the Paul Theroux novel Doctor Slaughter
  
• Cast: Sigourney Weaver (Lauren Slaughter), Michael Caine (Lord Bulbeck), Nadim Sawalha (Karim Hatami), Janet McTeer (Van Arkady's Secretary)
  
• Cinematography: Peter Hannan
  
• Editing: Richard Marden
  
• Significant music: Richard Harvey
  
• Awards: Best Actress for Weaver at MystFest
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $1.3 million

Plot in one sentence: An American economist in London who turns to prostitution to supplement her income finds herself amid international intrigue.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Theatrical trailer (2:13)
  

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 23 December, 1994
  
• 103 minutes
  
• R
  
• Film Four/Fine Line Features
  
• Directed by Roman Polanski
  
• Credited Writers: Rafael Yglesias and Ariel Dorfman from Dorfman's play
  
• Cast: Sigourney Weaver (Paulina Escobar), Ben Kingsley (Dr. Roberto Miranda), Stuart Wilson (Gerardo Escobar
  
• Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
  
• Editing: Hervé de Luze
  
• Significant music: Wojciech Kilar, plus Franz Schubert's string quartet "Death and the Maiden"
  
• Awards: Two nominations
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $2.1 million

Plot in one sentence: A woman meets up by accident with the man who tortured her during a reign of political terror.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Theatrical trailer (1:55)
  
• Trailers for INVINCIBLE, BITTER MOON, STORYTELLING, HUMAN NATURE
  
• Web access features for those with a PC
  

I have a theory about Sigourney Weaver.

This isn't a bad theory. She is one of my favorite actresses, despite her best efforts to be unlikable. She tried to kill the ALIEN series that made her famous, and she often plays patrician or unpleasant characters (THE ICE STORM). But she can also be very funny, as the recent HEARTBREAKERS revealed, and I think one could argue that she hasn't really found a post-ALIEN project that utilizes her unique, powerful, calm demeanor and leonine grace.

Anyway, my theory is simple. I believe she is the model for the actress Julia Roberts plays in NOTTING HILL.

Let's look at the facts.

NOTTING HILL is written by British TV comedy writer Richard Curtis, who was born in 1956. In the script to NOTTING HILL, he mentions that the character of William Thacker (Hugh Grant) was based on a friend of his who indeed had an affair with an American actress who came to London to make a movie. In NOTTING HILL, Anna Scott (Roberts) is in London to shoot a science fiction film. You can see her face on bus advertisements zipping by in the background. She returns later to shoot another movie in the Merchant-Ivory "heritage" mode.

Weaver was born in 1949. Her mother is British. She went to London to shoot ALIEN around 1978, when Curtis was working on NOT THE NINE O'CLOCK NEWS, just beginning his career. Weaver returned to London in 1985 to make HALF MOON STREET, where her character lives in … Notting Hill. During this time, Curtis was working on BLACKADDER. It is well known that Weaver likes a good laugh, and in college and on stage collaborated with her favorite playwright, Christopher Durang. She married a filmmaker named Jim Simpson in 1984 after a rather protracted romantic entanglement, and returned to England to make ALIENS in 1986. Thus there were ample opportunities to encounter friends or a friend of Richard Curtis.

In NOTTING HILL, Anna Scott makes three trips to England, and ultimately ends up with Thacker. That's about how many films Weaver has shot in London during this time frame.

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on Weaver with all this. I'm just speculating on a hypothesis, and I know I don’t know nuthin’. But the coincidences are intriguing. But part of my fascination with the possibility is that, rank sentimentalist that I am, I love NOTTING HILL, and it fulfills a particular fantasy of mine (and surely all film buffs). I even cried reading the damned screenplay, before I saw the film itself. And Weaver herself starred in the similarly theme EYEWITNESS in which William Hurt has a crush on a newscaster and actually manages to meet and "date" her. Certainly if I had a choice of actress crushes to meet one of them would be Weaver. Also, like Kate Winslet, she isn’t bashful about getting naked in movies.

Oh, HALF MOON STREET. It's sadly a lesser Weaver effort. It's based on one of Paul Theroux's characteristically weird novels called DR. SLAUGHTER Theroux is one of those novelists who likes to diddle with his readers, and here he is diddling with their expectations about what makes a feminist. Weaver plays an American economist in London who ends up as a member of an "escort service," where she meets the same powerful types of British businessmen she analyses during the day. Eventually one client, Lord Bulbeck (Michael Caine) takes a special fancy to her, and they have a complicated romance. Their alliance is compromised by the situation of some mysterious agents watching him and conspiring against him. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, though I suppose if you sit there and take lots of notes and watch the film two or three times it will come together, but who has time?

Weaver gets to vamp and scamper about naked while still maintaining her intellectual credentials, but in the end it's a dull film, and the disc comes with nothing, as if the world were always awaiting it on DVD and willing to take it on bare bones. More successful is Weaver's passionate performance in Roman Polanksi's adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's play, DEATH AND THE MAIDEN.

Here, Weaver plays Paulina Escobar. As the film begins she is alone in her coastal house in an unnamed Latin American country waiting for her lawyer husband Gerardo (the great Stuart Wilson) to arrive for dinner. On the radio, she hears that her husband may have been named to a commission assigned the task to investigate the widespread torture that occurred under the country's previous military regime. Pauline is an edgy, argumentative, even not very pleasant person, but we soon learn why when the neighbor who delivers Gerardo in a rain storm turns out to be Dr. Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley). Miranda is the doctor who tortured and raped Paulina in prison during the last regime's rampage.

The rest of the film charts an interplay of power and shifting loyalties as Pauline knocks out the Doctor and confronts him with the truth of their past, which he denies. Meanwhile, the lawyer, who is torn about whether to believe his own wife, finds himself compromised because his wife is forcing him to take an action that the commission is probably going to whitewash. In terms of its being originally a play about a woman who takes a man prisoner it sort of resembles the play EXTREMITIES, about the woman who takes her potential rapist prisoner and engages him in ethical debates, later turned into a movie.

Once you see the film it strikes you as a perfect project for Polanski. Like his first feature, KNIFE IN THE WATER and several films after, it's a three-character chamber play set in a confined space in which the trio struggle for dominance over each other. This is Polanski's specialty, the Darwinian (or LaButian?) warfare between people usually based on the power of sexuality or the desire for sex, and his films suffer (with the exception of CHINATOWN) if he isn’t fully allowed to explore these obsessive themes. His films can make you feel as lousy as Neil LaBute's, especially THE TENNANT, which dwells in the same world of weaklings and bullies and superfluous characters that LaBute favors.

Here, Polanski has a solid script and three of the best actors in the world and a "social problem" story that has ideological resonances with his own past. He does a great job, and though the film is elegant in its photography and camera movements, Polanski chooses to be "invisible" as the filmmaker behind it all. The dominance and submission stuff gets pretty intense (Weaver even stuffs her panties in Kingsley's mouth as a gag, in an odd nod to S&M play), but none of these people, even the villain, lose their humanity.

Like HALF MOON STREET, this disc comes unadorned with supplements, but it looks and sounds much better.

Blue MOON

BITTER MOON

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 23 December, 1992 in France
  
• 138 minutes
  
• R
  
• Fine Line Features
  
• Directed by Roman Polanski
  
• Credited writers: Gérard Brach John Brownjohn, Jeff Gross, and Roman Polanski from the novel by Pascal Bruckner
  
• Cast: Hugh Grant (Nigel), Kristin Scott Thomas (Fiona), Emmanuelle Seigner (Mimi), Peter Coyote (Oscar), Victor Banerjee (Mr. Singh), Stockard Channing (Beverly)
  
• Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
  
• Editing: Hervé de Luze
  
• Significant music: Fausto Fawcett plus numerous contemporary pop tunes
  
• Costume design: Jackie Budin
  
• Awards: None
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $1.86 million

Plot in one sentence: A pair of international couples on a cruise fall into each other's bizarre sexual pasts .

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Theatrical trailer (1:55)
  
• Additional theatrical trailers for INVINCIBLE, SLEEPING DICTIONARY, DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, and INVISIBLE CIRCUS
  

Speaking of Polanski, another one of his films from exile comes to DVD and it's a fine addition to the Polanski DVD library. It's an odd film, not to everyone's taste, and like DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, it's about power plays among a small group in isolation within a hothouse atmosphere. Also, made in 1992, it has nudity and "sexual situations," much to everyone's relief.

The film concerns Nigel (Hugh Grant, in an early role before he became an icon), who is on a cruise with his wife Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas, Grant's frequent partner on screen). Nigel encounters the wheelchair bound Oscar (Peter Coyote) who is also on the ship with his ravishing younger wife Mimi (Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner). The abrasive Oscar lures Nigel into listening to a series of stories about his past with Mimi. Returning each night to this Scheherazade's stateroom, Nigel is given a walking tour through Oscar and Mimi's sexual past, in which the couple progress through sexual obsession, bizarre games, and then a kind of WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE situation, in which the disabled Oscar is at the mercy of the tormenting Mimi, revenging herself on her husband for the phase of their relationship when he grew bored with her. As Howard Stern likes to say, for every beautiful woman, there's a guy out there tired of fucking her.

Before it reaches its surprising, ambiguous ending, BITTER MOON jumbles the four characters like bebes in a puzzle. But despite the racy sex scenes the emphasis is on the two men. Even Seigner, despite all her nudity and leather dress-up, seems secondary to the two guys talking. It's like that old Jules Pfeiffer cartoon in which the man says that all he could think of while making love to a beautiful woman was, "Wait `til I tell the guys!" Sex, apparently, exists so that men can relive it during conversations in their decrepitude.

The disc is movie-only, and the print source isn't the very, very best in the world, but its great to have this sexy, difficult, weird, haunting movie in the best of all transfer media.

'Trix and Treats

THE ANIMATRIX

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 9 May, 2002, Australia only
  
• 101 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Silver Pictures/Warner Bros.
  
• Directed by Peter Chung ("Matriculated"), Andy Jones ("The Final Flight of the Osiris"), Yoshiaki Kawajiri ("Program"), Takeshi Koike ("World Record"), Mahiro Maeda ("Second Renaissance Part 1", "Second Renaissance Part 2"), Kouji Morimoto ("Beyond"), Shinichiro Watanabe ("Kid's Story" and "A Detective Story")
  
• Credited writers: Peter Chung ("Matriculated"), Yoshiaki Kawajiri ("Program", "World Record"), Andy Wachowski ("Second Renaissance, Part 1,", "Second Renaissance Part 2,", "Kid's Story", "The Final Flight of the Osiris"), Larry Wachowski ("Second Renaissance, Part 1", "Second Renaissance Part 2", "Kid's Story", "The Final Flight of the Osiris"), Shinichiro Watanabe ("Detective Story")
  
• Cast (voices): Hedy Burress, Mindy Clarke, Dane A. Davis, John DeMita, John Di Maggio, Bette Ford, Rick Gomez, Tom Kenny, Phil LaMarr, Tress MacNeille, Carrie-Anne Moss, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Michael Richardson, Pamela Adlon, Tara Strong, James Arnold Taylor, Clayton Watson, John Wesley, Victor Williams
• Significant music: Don Davis
  
• Awards: None
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: A series of short films set in the world of THE MATRIX.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Voices: Audio commentary tracks for four of the films (42:30)
  
• "Scrolls to Screen: The History and Culture of Anime" for seven of the films (22:22)
  
• Creators: Bios of the filmmakers
  
• Execution: "Making ofs" for seven of the films (55:13)
  
• Trailer (2:51)
  
• DVD-ROM web access material for those with PCs
  

The release of THE ANIMATRIX this week gives me a chance to pontificate about the "case" of Larry Wachowski. As is well known by now, David Poland reported in his column last week that Larry Wachowski is alleged to be preparing to undergo a change of sex operation. This was a notion that was only hinted at in an IMDB news report about Wachowski. Poland's shocking column sent internet chat boards reeling. His column, however, possibly explains the unusual picture that appeared in TIME's People in the News section of a soft if happy-looking Tim Robbins-clone-like Wachowski at the Los Angeles opening of THE MATRIX RELOADED, garbed in black knit hat and large earrings. Time did not include a photo of his date, a dominatrix named Karin Winslow, now identified by the IMDB as the real name of Ilsa Stix. Surely they mean Ilsa Strix, a rather famous dominatrix, whose websites have all been pulled down, but whose web company ProDominiation.com is still live, as are numerous interviews with her if you do a Google search. Wachowski has apparently "stolen away" Stix or Strix from her mate, a female-to-male transsexual named Jake Miller.

The story has evolved in three stages. First there was word that Wachowski was leaving his wife. TIME links to a Smoking Gun.com collection of legal papers about Wachowski's divorce from his wife Thea Bloom, which sounds as contentious as the recent Gandolfini divorce. Then Miller spilled his guts to the MAIL ON SUNDAY in a story by David Edwards that is rife with gossip that hasn't been reiterated in any subsequent stories about the case and which includes a photo of the fetching Winslow, looking like a blonde Mira Sorvino, in "vanilla" garb. At this point, Miller only accused Wachowski of being a secret transvestite. The story reached its third stage when Poland exploded his bomb. It's enough to make you run back and search for clues in last year's THE MATRIX REVISITED promotional disc, with its rare interviews with the Brothers Wachowski.

We thought that Freres Wachowski were making the liveliest, most advanced science fiction films of their times when in fact they thought they were making the THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW RELOADED. But wait. PACE Poland, I'm not to make jokes about Wachowski. But I sympathize with the director, I really do. In any case, the level of gossip about Larry Wachowski puts to shame the stories about Michael Cimino that circulated a few years ago before finally surfacing in a VANITY FAIR article last year.

Joking aside, what's interesting to me is how this revelation about his private life contributes to an understanding of the MATRIX series. It's not just the emphasis on Trinity's sexy fetish garb. Wachowski's presumed desire to switch sexes provides an insight into the fluctuating identities of the Matrix world. The morphing and shape-shifting that lies at the heart of MatrixWorld now appears borne of an agonized discomfort with one's own identity, a turmoil that finds solace in a fantasy world of easy transmutation. That this is also a hazardous world in which being transformed has its hidden dangers and horrible hang-ups suggests that Wachowski has also been reading that dissident on transsexualism by Dr. Robert Stoller, whose books on the subject reveal the tense Freudian family dynamic that "causes" transsexualism. Stoller's findings, for what they are worth, are that the actual act of sex change does not "solve" the internal feeling of incorrect gender assignment (but then, Stoller was himself a disciple of the now bankrupt religion of Freud; he also annoyed certain pro dommes such as Stephanie Locke, whom he wrote about in disguised form in one of his last books, PAIN AND PASSION).

But enough digression. I want to use this temporary soap box to plead with Wachowski not to go through with the alleged sex change, if indeed he has a mind to do so. He is a great writer and director and I want him to stay in that identity, not a faux created by corruptions of science. I urge him to read Stoller's book SEX AND GENDER (Science House, 1968), a thorough and saddening account of the consequences of sex change. I will lend him my copy if he wants it (or photocopy it at his expense. Hey, he's rich). I would also like to remind him that one of the premiere sex change clinics in the country, Johns Hopkins, refuses to do them anymore, for the very reasons extolled in Stoller's book. Weirdly, I have known two transsexuals in my life (that I know of). Neither were happy with the augmentation. I don't mock Wachowski's sexual tastes at all. I do think that he would truly be happier to engage in them as he is, regardless of how unhappy he may feel in his current state of mind or body.

That all being said, THE ANIMATRIX is a great little disc. The nine short films on it are miniature masterpieces of the art of animation, convincing and funny and scary and sad (evil usually wins, as a prelude to getting you to see the two MATRIX sequels). I've heard some grumblers say that the disc of cartoons is better than the second movie (which I haven't seen yet), and I'm almost ready to believe them, this films are so tight, well-thought out, and interesting. Who knew that so many minor variations could be rung from the MATRIX manner?

Not only are the films themselves superb, but the subsidiary material is great, too. I'm not much of a fan of anime per se, but the segment dedicated to the art form almost had me convinced to give it all another try. The "makings-ofs" are also thorough and detailed. But as per contractual protection, the Wachowskis are not themselves a presence on the disc.

Sex on the Brain

THE GURU

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 21 August, 2002 (at a Norway film fest)
  
• 94 minutes
  
• R
  
• Working Title/Universal
  
• Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer
  
• Credited writer: Tracey Jackson
  
• Heather Graham (Sharonna), Marisa Tomei (Lexi), Jimi Mistry (Ramu Gupta), Michael McKean (Dwain), Malachy McCourt (Father), Christine Baranski (Chantal), Rob Morrow (Goldstein), Sally Jessy Raphael
  
• Cinematography: John de Borman
  
• Editing: Bruce Green and Cara Silverman
  
• Significant music: David Carbonara, and "You're the One That I Want," from GREASE
  
• Costume design: Michael Clancy
  
• Awards: None
  
• Budget: $11 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $3 million in the U.S.

Plot in one sentence: An aspiring actor from India ends up as a fake sex guru.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Director and writer commentary
  
• Lead actor commentary
  
• Seven deleted scenes (8:57)
  
• Animated gallery (1:18)
  
• Theatrical trailer (2:13) and teaser trailer (1:11)
  

Speaking of dominatrixes, Heather Graham makes a fine one, if briefly, in THE GURU. It occurs in chapter 11 (I think), and shows her on the set of an adult video in boots, bustier, and bullwhip (for a movie called GLAD HE ATE HER). Regular readers of this column will recall my affection for Graham, even in dreck like KILLING ME SOFTLY, which promises more than it delivers. In THE GURU, Graham plays another cute, nice, conventional girl who happens to be a sex worker, a variation on the hooker with the heart of gold (that rarity). She bedazzles the viewer with that engaging smile that is almost too much, too bright, too happy.

Of course, the movie isn't really about Graham. It's really about Ramu (Jimi Mistry), who has immigrated from India in order to become a movie star. To his surprise, he becomes an extra in adult videos, and then a sex guru, servicing the rich and famous of the upper west side. Meanwhile, he eventually discovers that Graham's character is the true love of his life, and not the rich deb (Marisa Tomei, very good and sexy in her thankless secondary part) who has taken him on as her savior.

THE GURU is a gentle comedy despite its sex worker settings, and has a happy ending. It also has a couple of dancing numbers inspired by Bollywood cinema, in which people sing and dance in a way that breaks the fourth wall in western culture. Director Daisy von Scherler Mayer (PARTY GIRL) and writer Tracey Jackson are aware of all that, as they reveal on their audio track, as they go into details about how they came to shoot the film. Among other things, they note how Tomei has the knack for playing her comedy roles seriously, an observant remark. I don’t think that the Mistry audio track really exists. He hardly talks at all.

You're Getting Sleepy

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, SEASON 3