Extras Disc Two:

I used to think that the one character in all film who most resembled me was C. C. Baxter in THE APARTMENT. Wilder and Diamond's creation, embodied by Jack Lemmon, seemed to be "me" to me, or at least what I think about myself inwardly (and I find that when I don't think of myself, I don't think at all). I'm sure I'm not at all like C.C. Baxter to others, but that's the way I used to feel inside.

Now I know that the character who really represents the inner experience of myself is Barry Egan, Adam Sandler's harassed character in Paul Thomas Anderson's fourth feature film, PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE. The first 20 minutes of the film is basically about me.

The similarities between this writer (whom you don't know) and Barry (whom you do, or will) are amazing (to me). Like Barry, I am afraid to fly, and in fact have never flown (he does so for the first time in the middle of the movie). Like Barry, I am afraid of bullies. Like Barry, people say the rudest things to me about me and I have no idea why. Like Barry, I'm on the phone a lot but don't really know how to talk to phone people, and am bugged by the fact that greetings ask you to type in numbers only for operators to ask you for them again. Like Barry, I do things and — as he says — "I'm not exactly sure why." Like Barry, I do things out of momentary loneliness and end up embroiled in complicated situations (Barry calls a phone-sex service and gets taken by hoodlums). Like Barry, I start to say yes when I mean no. Like Barry, I am a terrible liar. Like Barry, I tend to say things at the most inappropriate time, as if I don't really know what's going on around me (which is true), or use the wrong word (Barry says "very food" when he means "very good"). I don't cry all the time, like Barry, but I want to. Like Barry, I have an older sibling(s) (me one, Barry seven) who had a disastrous impact on my life and destroyed my ability to have normal relations with women. Like Barry, I look away quickly when women catch me looking at them. Unlike Barry, I've never had a fox like Emily Watson get a crush on me from a distance and chase me down. And unlike Barry, I am not the president of a successful company.

Barry is the owner of a manufacturing company in the Valley that makes novelty plungers. He is the victim of continual contempt and belittlement from his numerous sisters. The normally meek and quiet man expresses his passive-aggressive inner angst by bursting into sudden self-destructive rages in which he tears bathrooms apart and smashes glass doors, the sort of "acting out" that gets you sent to the quiet corner in a Montessori school. As an adult, I manage my rage by criticizing my betters in acerbic if ultimately futile movie reviews.

When he is indulging these rages, Sandler really looks like a little kid, a miniature Jerry Lewis. His next film after this one, ANGER MANAGEMENT, suggests something akin to a theme across the run of his work (I haven't seen all his movies, but he does tend to have temper tantrums in them).

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE consists of a fairly slight story. The force of the film derives from its interesting, unusual characters. Barry is a put-upon fellow who spends a lot of time alone and obsessing about things no one else notices, such as a loophole in a frozen-food promotion that accrues the consumer millions of hours of airline mileage for little expense. He is shy but good to his employees, who support him. Unexpectedly, he meets a woman (Emily Watson) who turns out to be the love of his life. But unusually, he is her ideal, too. Though she is introduced to him by one of his harridan sisters, she somehow breaks through his strange resistances. Like a scene out of KICKING AND SCREAMING, Barry decides to fly and meet her in Hawaii (but unlike the similar scene in the earlier film, he is successful at getting out of the airport). In a wonderful scene, a frustrated Barry tears up his own office, and then suddenly snaps out of his slough of despondence and starts to work at fixing his situation and solving his personal problems.

Don't be confused into thinking that PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is a comedy. You might want to call it instead a "discomforter." Barry is a dissonant character, out of place in his new blue suit (like Elliott Gould's from THE LONG GOODBYE ) and unloved by anyone but his employees, led by Luis Guzman. The point of the movie is that the new lovers don't "work" in the conventional sense because everything has been made jangly in Barry's world. The script, which is brilliantly plotted, might seem diagrammatic in retrospect. There's Watson, who is in contrast to the sisters. And there are the employees of the plunger shop, who are in contrast to the sisters. And there is the vile gang of brothers who harass Barry in a parallel plot, and who are in contrast to the sisters. Barry himself is contrasted with a doppelganger played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, another small-business owner with an anger-management problem. Imagine a satanic marriage of Lars Von Trier (Emily Watson from BREAKING THE WAVES, from which he also borrows scene-transition art) and Robert Altman (this is Anderson's version of Altman's A PERFECT COUPLE ) and you have PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is one of the best films from last year. The sequence about 30 minutes in where Barry gets calls from a phone-sex thief and his sister stops by with Watson is brilliantly edited and scored, like the frenzy scene at the end of GOODFELLAS. But though the transfer of PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is excellent, the supplements confused me. They are all on the second disc (New Line has been very good to Anderson). They lead off with "Blossoms and Blood" (12:02), basically like a big music video. There are 12 short "scopitones," which in Anderson's definition are colored patterns set to music. There are three theatrical trailers, and a faux "Mattress Man" commercial. There is also a montage of artwork by Jeremy Blake (2:42)

The most substantial portion of the disc is the set of two deleted scenes, "The Sisters Call" (7:18) and "Are You From California?" (2:23). They seem to be variations on already included scenes; for example, in the first deleted scene, Mary Lynn Rajskub (of the LARRY SANDERS SHOW and other films by Anderson and Cameron Crowe), as Barry's sister Elizabeth, talks to him on the phone, unlike in person, as in the finished film. But I'm sure I'll read a brilliant review of the disc later today by an Anderson fanatic like Kim Morgan and everything will make sense to me.

Oh, and there are Korean subtitles.

Canned Laughter

POPEYE

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 12 December, 1980
  
• 114 minutes
  
• PG
  
• Paramount and Walt Disney
  
• Directed by Robert Altman
  
• Credited writer: Jules Feiffer from E.C. Segar Comic strip
  
• Cast: Robin Williams (Popeye), Shelley Duvall (Olive Oyl), Ray Walston (Poopdeck Pappy), Paul Dooley (Wimpy), Paul L. Smith (Bluto), Donald Moffat (The Taxman), Bill Irwin (Ham Gravy, the Old Boyfriend), Linda Hunt (Mrs. Oxheart, his Mother), Dennis Franz (Spike), Van Dyke Parks (Hoagy, the Piano Player)
  
• Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
  
• Editing: John W. Holmes and David Alan Simmons
  
• Significant music: Harry Nilsson
  
• Stunt Coordinator: Gary Hymes
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: $20 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $24.5 million

Plot in one sentence: Popeye, a one-eyed sailor, lands in a small fishing community while in search of his father.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Zero
  

The '80s got off to a pretty bad start with this embarrassing adaptation that no one wanted, a re-creation of Segar's famous POPEYE comic strip and star of a series of great animated cartoons. The film was directed by that most unlikely of catalysts, Robert Altman.

On paper, the film seemed to have a good pedigree. Co-produced by Disney and Paramount (whose executives would soon go and take over Disney). Produced by Robert Evans. Directed by Altman, then widely considered the greatest living American director. Written by Jules Feiffer, himself a cartoonist and the author of an esteemed history of comic books. The film debut of Robin Williams, stand-up comic and TV sit-com star. What seemed like pro-forma casting of Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl. And songs by Harry Nilsson.

Oh, did I mention that it is also a musical? Yes, POPEYE is that modern rarity, an original musical made for film. But it's a musical the way dogme would make a musical (in fact, dogme did do a musical, and it was a little better than POPEYE).

But things went awry. Evans was busted for cocaine trafficking during the production, and also almost caused an international incident regarding Malta, where the film was shot. The finished film was savaged by contemporaneous reviewers. Its financial returns were modest to its cost (though it made a lot of money in Europe and Asia, and should not be viewed as a flop). Perhaps the worst thing POPEYE did was inspire later comic strip to film adaptations, such as DICK TRACY. Perhaps the real legacy of POPEYE is that, as an Altman film, it has a place in the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson, who borrows one of the songs for the soundtrack of PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE.

The film might have been much different. As Evans recounts in his cult memoir THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, the film was originally going to star Dustin Hoffman as Popeye under the direction of Hal Ashby (see pages 293-299). Evans notes that taking on Altman meant taking on the whole Altman troupe of actors and technicians, but what Evans doesn't mention is that Altman also shanghaied the film, turning it into another Altmanesque film in which everyone talks at once and small pockets of people mumble at the corners of the screen. POPEYE resembles no other film more than Altman's own MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, another tale about an outsider who stumbles into an isolated community where he wins over the residents and finds true love amid the rustic, crowded, all-purpose saloon where they hang out. Of course, there are significant differences: POPEYE has a happy ending, and Popeye isn't a villain tricked up to be a sex god.

POPEYE is one of the favorite childhood films of our esteemed POOP SHOOT editor, Chris Ryall. "I was a huge fan of the black-and-white Fleischer Popeye cartoons (the color ones, other than the extended-length Aladdin ones, mostly sucked), and I thought the likenesses in the movie were about perfect, especially Poopdeck Pappy and Olive Oyl. I thought the filmmakers mostly captured the spirit of the strip nicely (other than the fact that Popeye could already kick some ass without the spinach)."

Mr. Ryall adds that there are also sentimental reasons for his affection: "It was the last movie I saw with my whole family," he told me, adding that "I saw it in theaters when I was 10, and I tend to remember fondly everything from when I was 10. Also, I had this big, photo-novel book of the movie, where they took pretty much every still from the flick and put the dialogue in it like a comic book, but with real pictures. That was fun, and made me think even more fondly of the movie. Did I also mention that I was 10 at the time?" The key thing that Anderson borrows from the film is the Olive Oyl song, and Chris notes that "The songs didn't bug the shit out of me," adding that, perhaps like Anderson himself, "most of them are still somehow stuck in my head."

Perfect casting and good songs don't save the film, however, though it does come across much better on the small screen. I can't say I enjoyed watching it. It seems too interior for a musical, and the characters are surprisingly isolated from each other. I wish that Feiffer, or the rewrite guys (if there were any) had come up with a better story. Today, it has the importance of being one of the several thousand influences on P. T. Anderson. But I could be wrong.

Handmade Films

BY STAN BRAKHAGE: AN ANTHOLOGY: THE CRITERION COLLECTION

Original Movies:

• 26 short films
  
• Theatrical releases from 1959 to 2001
  
• 243 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Directed by Stan Brakhage
  
• Significant music: Paul Smith
  
• Awards: Brakhage won the American Film Institute's 1986 Maya Deren Independent Film and Video Artists Award
  

Plot in one sentence: Impressionistic short films in the "film poetry" manner, usually without sound.

Disc Stats:

Extras Disc One:

• Two video interviews with Brakhage (9:06 and 8:40)
  

Extras Disc Two:

I am not a well-rounded movie viewer. I am not much of a fan of animation. I liked cartoons when I was a kid, and respect the artistry and wit that goes into anime, or THE SIMPSONS, and all the Pixar films, but I don't dash out to see them. And I'm not much for avant-garde, experimental, underground films (unless, of course, they are clear and focused works about sex). I take the position of Andrew Sarris, who, in the VILLAGE VOICE in May, 1976, broke ranks with his presumed colleagues and announced that he didn't care about underground films, biting the hand that fed him, so to speak, because his guardian angel in film-writing jobs was an independent filmmaker and proselytizer for them, Jonas Mekas. "My heart and mind," Sarris wrote, is "overwhelmingly committed to the 'narrative' film." He rejects the spurious arguments about why underground films demand the same audience participation and critical scrutiny of narrative films, and notes how the long, long films by Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, and Michael Snow, the big shots at the time, "achieve tedium in so short a time" (this essay was reprinted in Sarris's book POLITICS AND FILM).

So I am not the ideal person to review this anthology of films by one of the premier underground, independent, experimental film poets of the time, Stan Brakhage. But it came in the mail, so there you have it.

But then, perhaps I am an ideal reviewer for this work. I have nothing invested in it; I am a disinterested viewer. As an average, middle American moviegoer, maybe I can get something out of these films, and synthesize their meanings for other average viewers. Unfortunately, by the end of the second disc, I was an uninterested viewer.

The problem is the use of the word "experimental" in connection with film. I don't know if Brakhage uses the phrase, or even considers himself an experimental filmmaker. Indeed, he may instead view himself as a film poet, or a painter whose canvas is, literally, the filmstrip (he scratches in his titles frame by frame, and uses the physical piece of film in all sorts of ways, including smashing bugs on it). In science, the point of an experiment is to test the validity and the possible unexpected consequences of procedures and processes. What would a film "experiment" produce? You'd think that it would offer up new ways to make films that are clearer, sharper, better told, fun and that expand the possibilities of film for everyone, both viewers and other filmmakers.

Except for the light show at the end of 2001, I can't think of a film that incorporated the fruits of "experimental" films. And at the risk of sounding like a middle-class philistine (which is what I am), I must say that I got little out of these two discs worth of Brakhage's films, created from the late '50s to the start of this century. Others, those who don't own televisions and hate Hollywood, will probably find it a treasure trove. At the very least, the two-disc set is of importance to film history, and makes these films accessible to those who in fact do like experimental films.

The first disc contains three films, DESISTFILM, from 1954 (6:43), an unsettling and dissonant collection of footage from a party. After that is WEDLOCK HOUSE: AN INTERCOURSE (10:48), from 1959, and which is much more interesting when Brakhage talks about it — much more personal and confessional — than as you actually watch it. DOG STAR MAN, compiled from 1961 to 1964, is more or less Brakhage's most famous work, comes in five parts and is incomprehensible to me. THE ART OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES, from 1971 (31:50), consists of footage from actual autopsies, and reflect Brakhage's confessed obsession with death, though that doesn't really come through in the footage itself. All of these films are silent.

Taking these first disc films together evokes for me another passage from Sarris' essay: "I happen to believe," he writes, "that filmmaking involves obligations to the audience as well as privileges for the filmmakers," i.e., obligations to make sense.

Disc Two contains the bulk of Brakhage's work. The first films you see are CAT'S CRADLE (1959, 6:26), WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959, 12:13), MOTHLIGHT (1963, 3:14), EYE MYTH (1972, :09), THE WOLD SHADOW (1972, 2:28), and THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (1981,1:27), all moving wallpaper. Things start to get slightly more interesting with THE STARS ARE BEAUTIFUL (1974, 18:32), because sound becomes an element in Brakhage's work. In this film, Brakhage reads passages from sun-earth-sky myths while his wife and sun clip the wings of a chicken. Here, Brakhage says interesting things about the earth's relationship to the sun and to light. One consistent theme in Brakhage's work is an obsession with the earth as a sole rock assailed by the light of the sun, and man's relationship with those things in the sky. Behind the experimentalist's stance is a traditionalist's sense of wonder at the grandeur of the sky.

For the record, the rest of the films on the second disc are KINDERING (1987, 2:52), I … DREAMING (1988, 6:36), THE DANTE QUARTET (1987, 6:05), NIGHTMUSIC (1986, 00:32), RAGE NET (1988, :52), GLAZE OF CATHEXIS (1990, 2:59), DELICACIES OF MOLTEN HORROR SYNAPSE (1991, 8:19), UNTITLED (FOR MARILYN) (1992 , 10:34), BLACK ICE (1994, 2:05), STUDY IN COLOR AND BLACK AND WHITE (1993, 1:37), STELLAR (1993, 2:20), CRACK GLASS EULOGY (1996, 6:06), THE DARK TOWER (1999, 2:21), COMMINGLED CONTAINERS (1997, 2:42). The disc concludes with LOVE SONG (2001, 10:49), made not too long before Brakhage died. The final batch of films are short paint-on-celluloid works that have a nice light show quality, like Jackson Pollock paintings come to life.

Don't let this turn you off Brakhage, though. The website Senses of Cinema published two nice little essays about the man after his death, the first a remembrance by Phil Solomon,, the second an essay by Fred Camper, who also supplies the helpful, engaging, and detailed liner notes for the Criterion collection of Brakhage films, which consist of an overview of Brakhage's work, and film by film annotations.

Also on the discs are four video interviews with Brakhage, in which he "humanizes" his work for the viewer, and most interesting of all, film-by-film audio interviews with Brakhage, which, to me, are often more interesting than the finished work.

Criterion has put together a nice, respectful package, but I have noticed of late a tendency of the designers to embrace the hoariest and most disreputable of web-design styles, i.e., red letters against a black background. I hope they drop this unreadable style soon.

Physical Properties

BODIES REST AND MOTION

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 9 April, 1993
  
• 95 minutes
  
• R
  
• FineLine
  
• Directed by Michael Steinberg
  
• Credited writer: Roger Hedden from his play
  
• Cast: Phoebe Cates (Carol), Bridget Fonda (Beth), Tim Roth (Nick), Eric Stoltz (Sid), Alicia Witt (Elizabeth), Sandra Lafferty (Yard Sale Lady), Sidney Dawson (TV Customer), Peter Fonda (Motorcycle Rider)
  
• Cinematography: Bernd Heinl
  
• Editing: Jay Cassidy
  
• Significant music: Michael Convertino
  
• Awards: Director's award at Fantasporto 1994
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $764,000

Plot in one sentence: A few days in the lives of four young Arizonans

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Commentary track with director Steinberg, writer Hedden, and actor Stoltz
  
• "Behind the scenes" (6:50)
  
• Making of featurette (6:00)
  
• Rehearsal footage (3:15)
  
• Theatrical trailer (2:02) and TV spot (:32)
  

There was a time when BODIES REST & MOTION would have been considered a yuppie or slacker comedy, a tale about four uninteresting people whose obsession with their own problems is out of proportion to their true weight. Now we can see it for what it really is, one of the first films in the genre of "heroic alienation" that led to such fine films as OFFICE SPACE, CLOCKWATCHERS, and even FIGHT CLUB. Heroic-alienation films deal with the traumas and trials of life in the workaday world, something the cinema hadn't been interested in for a long time.

The premise of the film, based on a play, is that four people come together over the course of a few days and radically alter their lives. The quartet are Nick (Tim Roth, doing a form of American accent) and his wife or girlfriend Beth (Bridget Fonda), followed by Carol (Phoebe Cates), Nick's ex-girlfriend and now neighbor and best friend to Beth. Into this triangle comes Sid (Eric Stoltz), a housepainter there to refurbish the house that Nick and Beth are abandoning so that he can take a new job in a different city. Carol and Nick really still love each other, and Sid and Beth fall for each other; at the end, Nick seems to return to Carol, and Nick runs after a departing Beth, searching the parking lots of motels for her Volkswagen.

It's a small-scale film that comes across much better on the TV screen. But more important, some 10 years later BODIES seems to be about something else entirely than what it seemed at the time (but should have been obvious): It's really a story about how jobs grind us down, but how some of us find freedom in labor. Nick is miserable in his role as video salesman; though Sid is quite happy in his role as physical laborer. This may have been a side issue for the filmmakers at the time, but these days, in the wake of so many fine heroic-alienation films, it has suddenly become the main thing.

Image Entertainment has provided a nice little package of supplements for this disc of a modest film. There's a commentary track with director Michael Steinberg, the writer of the original play and the screenplay, and Roger Hedden, with appearances by Eric Stoltz. Mostly they talk about the background of the film and what its like to shoot in Arizona in the summer. There is a making of featurette, but also a "Behind the scenes" feature that shows unnarrated footage of the cast and crew rehearsing and putting the film together.

One of the most interesting supplements is rehearsal footage of one scene between Fonda and Stoltz, who were courting at the time. The camera follows them from a bathroom out onto the street where she drives away. In the frame you see both the finished film and the rehearsal footage. The viewer has the option of hearing either the rehearsal audio or the final audio. The supplement subtly contrasts some of the additions made to a scene in the rehearsal process. Finally, there's the theatrical trailer and a TV spot.

Dead Heads

WES CRAVEN PRESENTS THEY

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere, on video: 27 November, 2002
  
• 89 minutes
  
• PG-13
  
• Good Machine, Focus, and Radar
  
• Directed by Robert Harmon
  
• Credited writer: Brendan William Hood
  
• Cast: Laura Regan (Julia Lund), Marc Blucas (Paul Loomis), Ethan Embry (Sam Burnside), Dagmara Dominczyk (Terry Alba), Jay Brazeau (Dr. Booth)
  
• Cinematography: Renè Ohashi
  
• Editing: Chris Peppe
  
• Significant music: Elia Cmiral
  
• Creature effects supervisor: Jake Garber
  
• Awards: Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards 2003 for best photography
  
• Budget: $17 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $12 million

Plot in one sentence: College students who suffered night terrors as children are revisited by what turns out to be actual demons in adulthood.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Alternate ending (3:52)
  
• Trailer for CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND
  

Probably for the rest of my life, I will confuse THEY with DARKNESS FALLS. Both films are about bogeymen empowered by the absence of light. Both films are about adults haunted by their experiences as children. Both films feature doctors who are skeptical of the adults' outlandish tales of real monsters. Both films begin with a little kid left alone in his bedroom at night by a reassuring mother whose reassurances soon prove to be groundless. When I am an old doddering fool (as opposed to a young doddering fool) I will probably wipe the drool away from my lower lip and shake a withered finger and complain, "It's like that damn horror film, THEY, or THEY FALL, or DARKNESS FALLS, or THEY FALL IN THE DARKNESS, or … oh hell, whichever one it is."

For the time being, however, I do know that this is the one about the blonde psychology major (Laura Regan) whose best friend from childhood kills himself right in front of her in a cafè at night during an ominous thunderstorm. Both suffered night terrors as kids. We the viewers, unlike any of the characters, know that these night terrors are based on a firm foundation of truth, that there are squirmy little creatures who hide in the dark and make clicking noises (clicking noises now being the official sound of darkness-dwelling monsters). We know this because at every opportunity a major character, when alone, will venture forth into the dark and spend an unconscionable amount of time there wondering what all the clicking noise is coming from before getting offed by the mostly unseen creatures.

Apparently, the principle is that the monsters come to you when you are a kid. If you show fear, they "mark" you and come back looking for you in adulthood. This may be wrong, but even the "right" version doesn't make a lot of sense, except that it creates several opportunities for solo people to go wandering off into the dark. Naturally, when they occasionally survive temporarily, they then go off to try and tell someone about this, a boyfriend or a shrink maybe, and of course no one believes them.

That's one of the annoying and boring things about poorly written horror films: there is a disconnection between what the viewer knows and what most of the characters know. I suppose that's the foundation for suspense, but in the hands of poor craftsmen it means that we, the viewers, have to sit through redundant exposition and chatty scenes that dissipate the very suspense the filmmakers are trying to create, even as people wonder aloud about things we are already fully informed about.

When the rather unappealing heroine is assailed by terrors, she turns to her ambulance-driver boyfriend, who discounts them as unreal because he is out there amid real reality, unlike her. When she turns to her Oliver Sacks-looking shrink, he chastises her for not knowing better, as she's a med student. At the start of the film, she fails to listen to her best friend and grasp what is obvious to the viewer: that the monsters exist. But then as she comes to believe, she finds no sympathetic listeners, and we grew impatient with her ineptitude.

Two other surviving friends of the suicidal kid are no more compelling. One is a faux-Jackson-Pollack-style artist (Ethan Embry) and the other is a young woman (Dagmara Dominczyk) who seems to have stolen Amy Irving's voice. They both go in for side trips into dark rooms and hallways, she no less than twice.

The film is a collection of suspenseless suspense scenes with people we don't really know and whom we wish not to spend any more time with. Interestingly, the film has an alternative ending, in the disc's sole supplement, which actually would have made it a better movie. The other ending undermines the very thing I'm complaining about, the disparity between viewers and characters about what is going on in the movie. My argument won't make any sense unless I clearly describe the alternate ending: It turns out that the heroine has been mad the whole time, and that all the characters she meets are actually her imaginary recreations of fellow patients and attendants in the madhouse. This is no less somber and despairing then the release version's ending, but it does have the virtue of rendering the otherwise tedious slow-dawning-of-knowledge chunk of the movie moot.

Not Too Fast, But Too Fatuous

BIKER BOYZ

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 31 January, 2003
  
• 110 minutes
  
• PG-13
  
• DreamWorks SKG
  
• Directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood
  
• Credited writer: Craig Fernandez and Reggie Rock Bythewood
  
• Cast: Laurence Fishburne (Smoke), Derek Luke (Kid), Orlando Jones (Soul Train), Lisa Bonet (Queenie), Kid Rock (Dogg)
  
• Cinematography: Greg Gardiner
  
• Editing: Caroline Ross and Terilyn A. Shropshire
  
• Significant music: Camara Kambon
  
• Stunt Coordinator: Gary Hymes
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $21.7 million

Plot in one sentence: The leader of a gang of black motorcycle racers is challenged by an upstart.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Six deleted Scenes (18:05)
  
• "Behind the Action" (21:01)
  
• Cast and crew bios
  
• Production notes
  
• Photo gallery (35 images)
  

There was a proud time, just a few decades ago, when a hit film would instantly inspire its ethnic counterpart. Gangster films, westerns, romances, all had their black counterpart. There was even a black MANSTER, adding yet another title to that small, fascinating genre about men who grow another head or limb.

Reggie Rock Bythewood is keeping the tradition alive in his own modest way with BIKER BOYZ. It is an uninhibited rip-off of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, the BLACKULA to its DRACULA. The other element of this tradition that Blythewood keeps alive is that the film, like most of those blaxploitation imitators, isn't very good.

But in an increasingly segmented society, we may be seeing more targeted knock-offs. Just as every monster hit soon generates its "porno title" version, we may now be seeing "ethnicized" or "urban" versions of films that have kidnapped the popular consciousness.

BIKER BOYZ, despite its lineage as a descendant of F&F, won't itself inspire imitators. For one thing, it wasn't popular enough. For another, it's macho posing wears out its welcome fast. This film is structured around a number of challenges, in which one posing, trash-talking Village Person after another browbeats a competitor into racing down a city street on a motorcycle. Their code requires it. We don't care, though. Our laughter is commensurate with the seriousness with which the characters take these "challenges" to their "manhood." "Be a man" is the most vocalized prompt. Yeah, these guys really look like men, with their shiny helmets and their unscuffed leather outfits and theatrical "performance art" way of talking in large crowds. In THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, a movie I liked quite a bit, you felt there was something at stake among its characters. Here you are not compelled to share the characters' obsession with their racing rituals and macho posing. It's just a bunch of roosters in a barnyard puffing out their chests.

FAST was itself a loose remake of a Corman film (or at least they rented the title from him), and like BIKER BOYZ was inspired by a magazine article chronicling a interesting and intense car subculture — only to abandon the core of the story to rehash teen-movie conventions (FAST's original article, reprinted on the disc, was about New York City street racers who specialized in certain models of cars). Both films are about street racers. As in FAST, an older, commonly acknowledged leader takes a neophyte under his wing. Also like in FAST, the lead character goes into a "zone," like Neo in which he sees the "matrix" of the world, as he speeds down his tunnel vision. By the way, why do so many people in these movies gather at the starting line of a race? Don't they really want to go down to the finish line and wait there?

The story of BIKER BOYZ is conventional and offers few surprises. Smoke (Laurence Fishburne) is the natural leader of a motorcycle club. The fastest racer, he is also a supreme sexual athlete (as in any cave, the cavemen throw the choicest bones to their brutish leader). His antagonist is a newcomer named Kid (Derek Luke), the son of a gang member.

When Kid's dad dies in a freak accident, Kid becomes competitive with Smoke (it's not clear why). He forms his own multi-ethnic club (more like a cult), and attempts to leave his mark on the motorcycle scene. Meanwhile, Smoke learns that, like a low-rent Darth Vader, he is in actual fact Kid's biological father. The film crawls to its final showdown, after which, like John Milner at the end of AMERICAN GRAFFITI, Kid rides off into the distance alone. Orlando Jones also stars as a pretentious master of ceremonies called Soul Train, the mute Kid Rock is the white villain Dogg, and Lisa Bonet pops up occasionally as Queenie, Smoke's former squeeze, who, like the rest of the cast, spends most of her time sitting around on a motorcycle trying to look bored and tough at the same time.

Supplements are modest for this film. The most significant feature is a set of six deleted scenes (18:05), one of which features Lisa Bonet at her most sleepy-eyed. The scenes didn't feel so deleted to me, but maybe that's because I found it hard to concentrate on the actual film itself. There's also a USA/SciFi channel-style making of featurette called "Behind the Action" (21:01); a photo gallery and text matter on the cast, crew and the production.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Stan Brakhage: "I have to teach Hollywood films, and I never in the world saw a Hollywood film that needed more than coffee-table exposition, after-the-movie chitchat, never saw one that needed furtherance of thought. And in fact isn't that the point? It's at least one of the reasons that I go, that is, that it suspends the burnt-out brain for a couple of hours. But people insist on making much of it, and indeed of course they can, I mean, in honesty they can, and so can I, so I use the time to try and increase our visual possibilities, our psychological sensibilities." —Avant garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage on his attitude to narrative films and teaching.

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