Extras:

• Commentary track with director Michael Mann
  
• Photo gallery of deleted and alternate scenes
  
• Poster and ad art gallery
  
• DVD-ROM: original screenplay
  
• Theatrical trailer
  

Richard Jameson, late of FILM COMMENT and before that MOVIETONE NEWS, used to publish an annual list of cinematic great moments, the kind of moments that defy reason and sense and cut to the very heart of why we love movies, bits of behavior or lines of dialogue that among other things make us yearn to be them, on the screen, someone else. Moments that capture the way we feel coming out of a movie theater into the too bright streets.

Moments for me might include the way Sterling Hayden tosses up his arm and nods at Pacino's Michael Corleone in THE GODFATHER, just before punching him. Another is the way Ray Liotta says, "Fucking cleansing" in COPLAND at the end of a beautifully written and acted speech. And I have never not stood like Clint Eastwood in THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT since I saw it in the theater when the film first came out.

For me, another moment would be in MANHUNTER the way that William Petersen as FBI agent Will Graham puts a Mars bar wrapper into an evidence baggie while looking up to the top of a tree where he now suspects his quarry had hidden himself to observe the family he later slaughtered. I'm not sure why I love this moment. I just love the way Petersen moves, and have since he got out of a truck at the start of TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.

And the way that Dennis Farina's FBI agent stares down an Atlanta police chief who doubted Petersen's forensic acumen. A smiling mouth but glowering eyes. It's special.

MANHUNTER, the first version of RED DRAGON, is full of these moments. Michael Mann worked on the script for this film for three years, and it shows. It is stripped down (Thomas Harris fans would say too stripped), subtle, and leaves lots of room for great visuals, and interesting interpretations. Mann was just about to go on and take over television with MIAMI VICE, and you see the roots of that show's look in this movie.

The film is also what Mann calls the "first iteration" of Hannibal Lecter (his name spelled differently in this movie). He is not the attractive figure of the later films. In fact, he is something of a slimy character, and his arrogance comes through better. He is exactly what Dr. Chilton calls him in LAMBS: "A monster." Brian Cox does a brilliant job at showing Lecter as both charming and cunning, and yet also unsocialized. You see that in the way his sets his mouth while waiting for a guard to take away a telephone. Another nice visual moment.

I could watch this film probably every day of my life. It's gorgeous: funny and cruel and powerful. It's not perfect, and this isn't to take anything away from the recent RED DRAGON, which also has its pleasures and which I enjoyed. But there is something almost mystical about the way Mann can get his actors to move a certain way. Like the way Daniel Day Lewis's hair sways when he runs through the woods, or the way Russell Crowe pushes his glasses up with his forefinger in THE INSIDER.

This is, of course, not the first time that MANHUNTER has been put on DVD. Anchor Bay released a limited edition a couple of years ago and the two-disc set had the "director's cut" on a separate disc and a handful of extras. At the time the director's cut was criticized for looking lousy. The company seems to be sensitive to the fact that that criticism might be laid at their door again (as it has in a few message boards) and so has posted a greeting-announcement-warning that appears before the movie proper starts.

It's an uneven visual experience. Some of it looks great. But the deleted scenes look grainy. And there is a weird close up at 26:43 which is obviously just a re-framed version of another part of a previously used shot (it occurs in Lecter's cell).

What the new disc brings is an independent and affordable version of the director's cut, with Mann's audio track. With his distinct Chicago accent Mann calmly walks the viewer through the movie. There are a few surprises that he pulls out of the past, among them that Brian Dennehy really wanted to play Lecter (Mann doesn't comment on the suggestion that he also wanted William Friedkin to play the part). Mostly he wants the viewer to note the deleted scenes and talk about why they were removed, and discuss the rather elaborate shooting schedule for such a small-budgeted film. Mann also discusses the model for his version of Lecter, a guy in Vacaville whose name I couldn't catch but which sounded like Dennis Wheaton Warren.

The middle section of extras are modest and include a photo gallery of deleted and alternate scenes, a poster and ad art gallery, and the trailer.

However, the real addition to this disc, perhaps even more important than Mann's track, is the original screenplay, in PDF form. What this offers is the version of the film that Paul M. Sammon talks about extensively back in issue 13 of VIDEO WATCHDOG as the "unseen MANHUNTER." Mainly the screenplay, as Sammon noted, draws sharper parallels between Lecter and Will Graham. It's a great addition. More about MANHUNTER can be found in that issue, as well as in Mark Steensland's Pocket Essential book on Mann, and Daniel O'Brien's essential text, THE HANNIBAL FILES (Reynolds and Hearn, Ltd.).

Blind Ambition

DAREDEVIL

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 9 February, 2003
  
• 103 minutes
  
• PG-13
  
• Fox/Marvel/New Regency
  
• Directed by Mark Steven Johnson
  
• Credited Writer: Mark Steven Johnson
  
• Cast: Ben Affleck (Matt Murdock/Daredevil), Jennifer Garner (Elektra), Colin Farrell (Bullseye), Michael Clarke Duncan (Kingpin/Fisk), Jon Favreau (Franklin Nelson), Scott Terra (Young Matt), Joe Pantoliano (Urich), Kevin Smith (Forensic Assistant), Stan Lee (man at intersection), Robert Iler (Bully), Frank Miller (Man with Pen in Head)
  
• Cinematography: Ericson Core
  
• Editing: Armen Minasian and Dennis Virkler
  
• Significant music: Graeme Revell
  
• Costume designer: James Acheson
  
• Awards: BMI Film & TV Award for Film Music to Graeme Revell, and MTV Movie Awards, Breakthrough Female Performance to Jennifer Garner, plus three other various nominations
  
• Budget: $75 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $102 million

Plot in one sentence: A blind lawyer with super senses fights crime at night.

Disc Stats:

Extras Disc One:

• Commentary with director Mark Steven Johnson and producer Gary Foster
  
• Text commentary track
  
• "Enhanced viewing mode"
  
• DVD-ROM content: comic book chronology, web links, for PC users
  

Extras Disc Two:

"Finally, they got it right."

That's what one of my comic book expert friends said after seeing DAREDEVIL. He said this in the wake of a raft of rather disappointing comic book adaptations in recent years, or at least since Marvel Comics aggressively began to avidly pursue film adaptations of its "universe." This friend didn't care so much for X-MEN or SPIDER-MAN and I have to agree (neither of us have seen the two BLADE movies yet).

But DAREDEVIL was different. It was a fairly accurate adaptation of different stages of the Daredevil mythos; it especially captured the milieu of the early Bill Everett-Joe Orlando DAREDEVILs of smoky bars and rubbish-filled alleys where the dejected and degenerate people in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen ply their trades, people under the sway of various gang leaders. Also, for once, the in-jokes were clever and pointed, most of them figuring in people connected to the creation and continuation of Daredevil, such as Stan Lee — reading VARIETY — Frank Miller, and Kevin Smith.

Plus there is the Jennifer Garner factor. Could she make the transition to the big screen? I have to admit, one reason I was enthusiastic about seeing the film was because of her. She isn't conventionally pretty. She's more handsome in the well-honed, square-jawed California girl way. She would have made a great volleyball or soccer star if she hadn't gone into the movies. Unfortunately, she is everywhere called upon to play rather sad and determined characters, which deprives the audience of her marvelous smile, used to good effect for a defining moment in Spielberg's CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

DAREDEVIL is, of course, about Matthew Murdock (a character cursed with another one of Stan Lee's alliterative names). He is the son of a boxer (David Keith, who must someday make a movie with Keith David) who is mobbed up. One day, young Matthew is injured by some tanks of hazardous waste, and the product blinds the kid but also gives him heightened compensatory powers, especially a form of radar. When his dad is killed for not following through on a deal, Murdock vows to serve others in their need for vengeance and/or justice.

To that end he becomes a lawyer. His partner is Franklin Nelson (Jon Favreau, in the thankless comic relief partner role), and they practice in Hell's Kitchen. In short order, Murdock 1) meets a hot babe, Elektra Natchios (Garber) who is as good at martial arts as he is, and 2) becomes the foe of a hit-man-for-hire named Bullseye (Colin Farrell), because he is, 3) the target of the real Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan) of the city.

The film has been knocked as derivative. But that is its strength. The film has the grainy clotted look of Bill Everett's art. In a nice introduction to young Matt's new powers, the film evokes Cronenberg's SCANNERS, where psychics are driven mad by the mind noises of others. The fact that Murdock's father is a boxer harks back to films such as THE CHAMP and other films that Stan Lee must have see when he was a kid.

Like SPIDER-MAN, DAREDEVIL uses first person narration to walk the viewer through the story. Narration was not a convention of the early Marvels, but it is a convention of the "counterpoint" style narration you read in "graphic novel" comics. For some reason it works for me here in a way it didn't in SPIDER-MAN.

And a final fight (much better than the lame confrontation in SPIDER-MAN) takes place in a giant church organ that Bob Kane could have come up with (bats even fly out of it). Director Mark Steven Johnson (SIMON BIRCH) uses lots of reflections in this movie — mud puddles, glasses — to create movies within movies and to emphasize the mirroring of characters of each other.

The only annoying modern "citations" are the CSI tricks. And some of the film's aphorisms don't make a lot of sense to me. A priest tells Murdock, "A man without fear is a man without hope." What the hell does that mean, exactly? [Note: Wednesday, July 30: our esteemed editor Chris Ryall, who knows more about comic books than I ever will, points out that, while the line may not make any logical sense, it has a tributary sense, with writer-director Johnson paying homage to Frank Miller. Chris writes that, "I know the whole second-half of the film's story was basically Miller's "Elektra Saga" but this line too came from him. Miller's "Born Again" story from 1986 (my favorite comic story ever, incidentally) had a pretty famous (in its circle, anyway) line, 'A man without hope is a man without fear,' and this seems to be picked up from that."] And the Kingpin says, "Nobody's innocent." I see the point in the context of the movie, but really, are we suppose to find villains fonts of wisdom? Also, the CGI is not as finely honed as in other films. Running-up-the-building scenes just don't work. The characters look like Pac-Man discs chomping their way up a corridor. Another one of the film's weak points is Nelson. He is a buffoon (as I recall him being in the comic), but the humor here is too broad, and trivializes the movie. On the other hand, the first act of the movie, bookended by Murdock's emerging from and returning to a sensory deprivation chamber, is a great set piece.

Affleck is good as Murdock (the movie understands that the film is about Murdock the character, not Daredevil the superhero). The strange thing about him is that, in the beginning anyway, he kills people. His character grows and changes by ceasing to be a vigilante. DD's private life is a mess, and his scarred and weary body requires pills to get him through the night, like a pro athlete in the twilight of his career. Murdock is blind, and of course carries a cane, but the Kingpin also sports a cane, as if to suggest the dire similarity of their means, if not their ends.

Fox has put together a fantastic disc for DAREDEVIL that neither fans of the comic or the movie should be offended by. Things start off with a commentary track with director Mark Steven Johnson and producer Gary Foster. Foster admits that he is not all that much of a Daredevil geek, but Johnson is. He takes pains to indicate how he visually suggested differences between Matt Murdock's "lawyer" world, where he is powerless, and his Daredevil world, and also reminds us that he evokes the physical cost of being a superhero in a more realistic manner than most costumed hero movies.

In an infinifilm style text commentary track, scads of information about both the comic book and the movie are flashed on the bottom of the screen. This information provided is almost — I should say, is — always interesting. It's real geeky stuff at times — which is good, because it shows that the disc's creators really cared enough to do the research and convey it to the viewer. And of course, it is optional. You don't have to watch it and have the film "ruined" for you. Instead you can "settle" for a good transfer of the film. Also on the first disc is a DVD-ROM content which I wasn't able to look at.

Disc Two is of course all extras. The disc is partitioned into two parts, the first and larger part about the movie, the other about the source comic. .

It begins with an hour-long making of called "Beyond Hell's Kitchen: Making DAREDEVIL" which comes with what is called an enhanced viewing mode, which means that you can ask to have six subsidiary docs inserted into the film as you go along. You can also watch them separately. As making-ofs go, this is better than average.

Also on hand is Jennifer Garner's screen test, the actress going through some of the lines for about two and a half minutes. These things are not particularly educational, and this one looks awful, but they are always interesting. You wonder why Garner would even have to audition, although it is perhaps always good to make sure about these things.

I've been seeing fewer and fewer multi-angle features on the discs I get, but perhaps that's because they don't really do much and who is really going to "re-edit" the film as a pastime? Anyway, here you get to look at different angles on two scenes. "Featured Villain: Kingpin" is a nothing featurette on Michael Clarke Duncan.

The "DAREDEVIL: HBO First Look Special" is standard issue. "Moving Through Space: A Day with Tom Sullivan" is a short profile of the blind guy who consulted on the film. There's also a bundle of theatrical trailers and teasers for this and a few other Fox films. And it's nice to have the music videos for completeness sake, but they didn't do much for me.

There is an excellent anthology of stills. The storyboards alone present over 300 sketches, offered in comic book form, but without word balloons. There are also sketches for costumes, set design, and props.

Finally, there is a section on the second disc concerning the comic book itself. To that end, first off is "The Men Without Fear: Creating DAREDEVIL," a one hour documentary in which most of the artists and writers who have worked on Daredevil over the years, starting off with Stan Lee and including Kevin Smith. Each is informed, informative, funny, and dedicated to the character. It's simply one of the best docs on a comic book character I've seen. The disc ends with the six-minute Shadow World Tour, and I can't even remember what it is as I type this, and Modeling Sheets, which are one screen summaries of the film's five main characters.

All in all, this is a great package, and makes DAREDEVIL one of the discs to own.

Pretty Pictures, Empty Heads

TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 10 September, 2002
  
• 101 minutes
  
• R
  
• Directed by Michael Petroni
  
• Credited writer: Michael Petroni
  
• Cast: Guy Pearce (Dr. Sam Franks), Helena Bonham Carter (Ruby), Frank Gallacher (Maurie Lewis), Lindley Joyner (Young Sam Franks), Brooke Harman (Silvy Lewis
  
• Cinematography: Roger Lanser
  
• Editing: Bill Murphy
  
• Significant music: Dale Cornelius and Amotz Plessner
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $120, 000

Plot in one sentence: A psychiatrist returns to his home town for the funeral of his father, which evokes memories of a sad incident from his childhood.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Promo for DEAD LIKE ME, a new Showtime original series.
  

All of a sudden imaginary friends are bountiful in movies. Perhaps real life friends aren't cutting the mustard anymore, or, more likely, movie devisers find the inclusion of imaginary people expedient. SWIMMING POOL. It probably all goes back to the success of A BEAUTIFUL MIND, the ILIAD of imaginary playmate tales.

I don't think that by saying this I'm spoiling anything about TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US, the dreary film starring Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham-Carter about a repressed Australian psychiatrist who travels home to bury his father — after all, the disc's box does that already. It says, "It is an emotional journey that forces him to confront the memories of a long-ago summer that ended in tragedy — an incident that continues to torment him in his adult life. During the journey, he encounters Ruby (Carter), a beautiful, mysterious young woman with a secret past. Is Ruby real? Or is she a ghost — a manifestation — that Sam has created to allow him to say goodbye to a heartbreaking passage in his life?" Well, exactly. Curiously, Helena Bonham Carter was in FIGHT CLUB, so this makes her second imaginary friend movie, only this time she is the specter.

Pearce is introduced to us lecturing on Freud and Jung, not the way to endear the character to those who view psychoanalysts as slightly better dressed snake oil salesmen. Of course, he is a "troubled" shrink, "haunted" by an incident in his youth, which we come to learn in dribs and flashed-back drabs as he returns to his hometown of Genoa, Australia, to attend to the affairs of his recently deceased father. It seems that as a youth he had a crush on a local girl, but during their summer of bliss so long ago, something tragic happened (they did a lot of swimming and the girl had polio). In the strange time frame of the film, they like to read T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from which the film derives its title.

On the train out of Melbourne he sees a strange young woman. Later he sees her jump off a bridge. He rescues her and spends the rest of his adult portion of the film trying to help her revive her memory. These scenes alternate with progressive flashbacks, at least in the American version; the Australian original broke the film into two successive parts, first the childhood and then the adult portions. Both parts, sadly, are dull.

The main problems with this terribly static film is that it suffers from the age old device of first time writers and /or directors, which is to create a passive hero who simply wanders around and looks at things. I suppose one could do that sort of film well, and in fact certain European directors such as Antonioni have. First time director Michael Petroni seems to believe that by making Pearce's character a doctor that he has created an interesting and active protagonist, but in the experience that is not so. Pearce sighs, looks, wanders, and listens, his face frozen into a glum irritation. Also, the fact that he doesn't want to go back to his home town and deal with his father's death also makes him unattractive to the viewer.

A lot of Pearce's old movies are suddenly popping up on the screen, creating, as it were, a cinematic time machine in which old and young versions of the actor lead parallel lives. One wonders why actors make certain films. This project may have seemed attractive because it would only take a couple of weeks to shoot at most (Pearce is in only half the movie), and his portion would comprise a two character play. Unfortunately, though a film may only take two weeks to shoot, its legacy lasts forever regardless how much you tinker with the time machine.

Shaggy God Story

SOLARIS

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 19 November, 2002, in Germany
  
• 99 minutes
  
• PG-13
  
• Fox
  
• Directed by Steven Soderbergh
  
• Credited writer: Steven Soderbergh, from the novel by Stanislaw Lem
  
• Cast: George Clooney (Kelvin), Natascha McElhone (Rheya), Viola Davis (Gordon), Jeremy Davies (Snow), Ulrich Tukur (Gibarian)
  
• Credited cinematographer: "Peter Andrews" (Soderbergh)
  
• Editing: Mary Ann Bernard
  
• Significant music: Cliff Martinez
  
• Awards: Golden Satellite Awards, Best Sound, plus five various nominations
  
• Budget: $47 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $14.9 million dollars

Plot in one sentence: A psychiatrist is sent out to see what went wrong on the satellite circling the mysterious planet Solaris.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Audio commentary by Soderbergh and James Cameron
  
• HBO Special: Inside SOLARIS" (12:52)
  
• "SOLARIS: Behind the Planet" (17:40)
  
• Teaser (00:57) and trailer (1:15), MASTER AND COMMANDER, with a June 6 premiere date (1:21), and LE DIVORCE (
  
• Original screenplay
  

Another uptight and depressed psychiatrist mourning a loss appears in SOLARIS, Soderbergh's remake of the Tarkovsky film, although really it is a return to novel, although in actual fact it is a Soderberghian and Cameronian variation on the original.

James Cameron produced the film, and perhaps almost directed it, and his movies are usually about a guy who comes a great distance, either socially or literally, to air a woman and push to the next level of her evolution. Soderbergh, on the other hand, usually makes movies about a guy who returns to a situation he left a long time ago and messes it up even further. SOLARIS is a reversal of both premises. In this case it is a woman returning to save a man, and a woman returning to a situation she voluntarily abandoned, though in more drastic ways.

That Steven Soderbergh. You never know what he's going to do next. Unpredictability is the only predictable thing about his career.

He keeps critics and audiences on their toes. The viewer never knows what project or type of film the director is going to do next. Since 1989, Soderbergh has made a sexy drama, a coming of age tale, a surrealistic satire, a heist film, a record of a live performance piece, a docu-drama, a science fiction film, and three remakes, among other works. Some of these labels overlap, but the sheer variety of Soderbergh's films speaks to a restlessness in the director born of a desire to be a master of all movie forms.

And he hasn't been what can paradoxically be called a conventional indie filmmaker since at least 1998.

His career has followed the reverse trajectory of, say, Paul Schrader's. Schrader started out in the bosom of Hollywood, and then broke with it, willingly or not, after CAT PEOPLE. Since then, all of his films have been low budget so-called independent features. Yet given his sensibility, that's a place where Schrader seems to dwell most successfully as an artist. Soderbergh, on the other hand, began as an indie-Miramax-Sundance darling, but after a handful of modest, independently financed features, he has invaded the business of movie making with a vengeance, showing an aptitude for intricacies of that arcane, secretive world.

In his unpredictability and pursuit of diverse genres, however, Soderbergh is much like some of his former indie film colleagues. Richard Linklater has made a coming of age tale (DAZED AND CONFUSED), a western (THE NEWTON BOYS), a love story (BEFORE SUNRISE), two play adaptations (subUrbia, TAPE), and an animated feature (WAKING LIFE). Todd Haynes has done a comic short with dolls (SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY), a quirky adaptation of Jean Genet (POISON), a social protest film (SAFE), a glam-rock tribute (VELVET GOLDMINE), and a Sirkian family drama (FAR FROM HEAVEN). Next he is doing a biopic on Bob Dylan. Like Soderbergh, these directors also appear in films by others and are active producers and executive producers of films by respected colleagues.

Directors, it seems, yearn for variety. Both Martin Scorsese and John Carpenter have admitted pining for the studio days, when a director could make two or three films a year in a variety of genres and really learn his craft. Carpenter told one interviewer, "If I had three wishes, one of them would be, Send me back to the '40s and the studio system and let me direct movies. Because I would have been happiest there."

Perhaps the director Soderbergh most resembles at this point in his career is Jonathan Demme. Twenty years older, Demme began as a publicist before breaking into writing and directing. He may never have actually held a movie camera on his sets, but like Soderbergh he has done almost everything else that a movie demands when being made. He has both written and directed movies, and executive produced the work of others. He started out in the '60s equivalent of the indie world, working for Roger Corman, where he made exploitation films with a stylish bent. As a Hollywood director, Demme has worked in a variety of genres, include comedies, thrillers, docu-dramas, concert films, literary adaptations, and social protest films. And like Soderbergh, he has filmed a Spalding Gray performance piece.

But the important thing to note is that both Soderbergh and Demme are more or less traditional moviemakers. Though they started out as outsiders, their ambition was to work within the system. They can't be blamed for the labels attached to them. But each new generation or each emerging national cinema seems to require its own label, be it the nouvelle vague, the new German cinema, the movie brats, the Corman kids, or the independent film movement. Be that as it may, Soderbergh started out wanting to be a filmmaker from an early age.

In truth, Soderbergh is less the indie phenomenon of popular journalism profiles than one of the new breed of filmmakers who wants to do everything. Soderbergh's interest in multiple genres is simply another facet of his do-it-all mentality. He writes, directs, shoots, produces, and acts. In this he resembles directors as different as Carpenter and John Cassavetes. The greatest of all the do-it-all directors is, of course, Stanley Kubrick, who also DP-ed his own movies, and who took such an interest in all aspects of his films that he even supervised ad slicks and plotted release schedules. Like Kubrick, Soderbergh is both a control freak and a director comfortable with the spontaneity that explorative actors bring to a scene.

Now, with SOLARIS, Soderbergh takes a page from the Kubrick filmography.

In SOLARIS George Clooney plays Dr. Chris Kelvin (alluding to Baron William Kelvin, the Victorian scientist who developed the absolute temperature scale?). He's a psychiatrist suffering a tad bit of remorse himself and living in a stripped down and bare world that faintly suggests "the future" while also reflecting his inner emptiness. One night he is visited by a pair of ominous and official seeming guys who deliver a tape of a transmission received from the space station Prometheus, circling the vaguely located planet Solaris. The transmission is from Kelvin's friend Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur), who alludes to some difficulties on the satellite that only Kelvin can solve, and requests that Kelvin take a solo trip out to Solaris to help out.

Arriving on board the Prometheus, Kelvin learns that Gibarian is dead and the two surviving crew-members are in a state of paranoia. First there's Snow (Jeremy Davies), a coffee house hipster with a knowing manner and irritating gestures. Then there is Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis), who has locked herself in her room. On his first night there Kelvin falls asleep and begins to dream about his past: how he met his wife-to-be, Rheya (Natascha McElhone, who is frequently shown in straight-on close ups). Waking up suddenly, Kelvin finds Rheya — or something akin to her — in bed with him. This defies reason, as we soon learn that Rheya is a manic-depressive who committed suicide.

Rheya is really there. She is physical, not a ghost or an illusion. But she cannot remember how she got there, nor does she have any recent memories. The rest of the film concerns Kelvin's attempts to figure out what Rheya is, what happened on board the ship before he arrived, and what it all has to do with the blue, electrically charged planet below them.

John Simon once famously called Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY a shaggy God story, and that's what Soderbergh's SOLARIS is (and Tarkovsky's too, for that matter). A key dinner party conversation that Kelvin remembers seems to make explicit the God versus science theme of the film. God is mentioned in the novel, but only to be more or less dismissed as an inappropriate concept for understanding the universe and strange planets like Solaris.

Stanislaw Lem published Solaris in 1961 and Tarkovsky, frustrated and between projects, filmed it a decade later. It's Lem's best known novel in the west, but he is a prolific writer, with some 45 books to his credit, including memoirs, short story collections, and the think piece SUMMA TECHNOLIGICA (1964), a massive work of futurology in which Lem peered into the future and saw virtual reality, information breeding, and teleportation. Lem is in the Olaf Stapleton-school of science fiction. He is not interested in action and violence and hunks with guns rescuing bare-mid-riffed chicks in Frank Frazetta poses, but rather in ideas and changes in society and their implications for the future of society.

Like Michael Crichton's SPHERE, which was influenced by SOLARIS, Lem's book was in part an attempt to imagine the real difficulties of interplanetary contact. An alien intelligence is going to be so beyond our ken that we may have no idea what it is, what they are, and what they are doing. Lem leaves the purpose and meaning of the planet Solaris a mystery. In the book, Solaris is a globe with a living ocean, and there is a whole school of Solaris studies revolving around the planet, literally and figuratively. The idea of a planet that gets into your head was "in the air" around the time of Lem's novel time, and is seen also in Ib Melchior's movie JOURNEY TO THE 7TH PLANET.

Soderbergh's SOLARIS is a surprisingly close adaptation of Lem's novel, much closer really than Tarkovsky's. Except for a reduction in the chitchat about the nature of the planet, and a drastically changed ending that yet still captures the spirit of the original, the film is faithful to the book, even retaining many of the character's names. Still, Soderbergh has either titled the film toward the subject of relationships, or he has taken on this project because it is in line with the recurrent theme in his earlier films, which has to do with someone returning from the past to disrupt the lives of those he or she left behind. That's the premise of SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE and even figures in OCEAN'S 11. It is the whole of SOLARIS.

SOLARIS is a technically accomplished film but with a focus so narrow and a story so seemingly slight that it will probably bore most audiences. Thus it is not a film for everyone. And Jeremy Davies will go down in history as one of the most irritating characters in all of cinema, next to Jar Jar Binks (in his defense, however, there may well be a reason for his being annoying that only plot machinations can reveal). But for audiences with the patience to contemplate Clooney's convincing anguish, it confronts some fairly tough emotional states. Will he succumb to the siren call of this creature made of atomic matter who both is and isn't his wife?

The film still leaves some questions unanswered, however. For example, what do the "returners" (they are called visitors in the book) actually do? Why are they so threatening and disturbing to the human beings on board?

In its stripped-down manner, SOLARIS is a fascinating, at times even disturbing psychological study. On the one had Kelvin loves his wife. On the other, his view of himself as a failed husband has come to dominate his sense of self. Of his various identities — doctor, scientist, husband — his husband identity has come to dominate the others in his sorrow. As Charles Schwenk has shown in his book IDENTITY, LEARNING, AND DECISION MAKING IN CHANGING ORGANIZATIONS (Quorum Books), if one identity comes to dominate, then the self is impoverished, and clear thinking evaporates.

Kelvin's fixation on his wife is endorsed by the film without the filmmakers understanding the implications of that fixation. Soderbergh has said in interviews that Kelvin would rather die than live without his wife. That's a pretty disturbing view of life for any kind of film, science fiction or otherwise.

Fox has put together a discrete yet topnotch package for the film, which probably didn't "perform" as well as was hoped for. There's an audio commentary track by Soderbergh himself, which we have come to expect, but also producer Cameron. It's a great chat, one of the best I've heard. Soderbergh is definitely the alpha male here, sounding a lot smarter (but then, it is his film), but also less sarcastic than he has on previous yak tracks. Soderbergh is an informed viewer, whose favorite cinematic time period seems to be the '70s, and the films of Pakula. Both directors are overjoyed at what SS calls "the KLUTE shot," of Kelvin silhouetted against a window, which quotes a similar shot in KLUTE when a business executive has a private moment in his office. Soderbergh aspires to the "classicism" of '70s cinema, and in my view is mostly successful.

There's also an HBO special about the film which is slightly more informative then most films of this kind, followed by "SOLARIS: Behind the Planet" another making of, though looking like it was shot at the same time as the other one. However, both make shorts me wonder why in movie theaters we only see regular trailers and never any making-ofs? Is it a time factor? It seems like they might look pretty good on the big screen. And if they are, say, seven minutes, that is only a few minutes longer than a regular trailer. What is this strange demarcation that says that EPK stuff can only be on TV, and HBO or the Sci-Fi channel at that? Does seeing directors pointing or actors talking out of character destroy the illusion of movies? It seems to me that EPKs would work better in theaters, especially from a consumer's point of view, and trailers would be better confined to television, where I guess we don't mind seeing the same thing over and over again and only need to pay partial attention to something that is speeding by fairly fast. In any case, it's a strange class system the movies have going there.

After a few trailers, the disc ends with the original screenplay, or at least one of them. It's something like the 12th draft. There are a few versions available on-line, so I'm not sure where this one falls in order. In any case, I want to encourage all disc manufacturers to pick up this habit (they seem to have dropped the isolated score feature).

The Paranoid View

THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 13 December, 1973
  
• 104 minutes
  
• PG
  
• Directed by Mike Nichols
  
• Credited writer: Buck Henry, from the novel by Robert Merle
  
• Cast: George C. Scott (Dr. Jake Terrell), Trish Van Devere (Maggie Terrell), Paul Sorvino (Curtis Mahoney), Fritz Weaver (Harold DeMilo), Jon Korkes (David), Edward Herrmann (Mike), Leslie Charleson (Maryanne), John David Carson (Larry), Victoria Racimo (Lana), John Dehner (Wallingford), Severn Darden (Schwinn), Elizabeth Wilson (Mrs. Rome), Brooke Hayward (Woman at Club), Robert Lydiard (Fa the Dolphin (voice)
  
• Cinematography: William A. Fraker
  
• Editing: Sam O'Steen
  
• Significant music: Georges Delerue
  
• Production designer: Richard Sylbert
  
• Awards: Three nominations, including an Academy Award for Best Music, Original Dramatic Score
  
• Budget: $8.5 million dollars
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $2.5 million dollars

Plot in one sentence: Assassins hijack a science project about dolphins.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Interview with Buck Henry (12:19)
  
• Interview with Leslie Charleson (6:46)
  
• Interview with Edward Herrmann (13:06)
  
• Dolphin trivia gallery with 21 facts or quiz questions
  
• Dolphin bios (two screens)
  
• German theatrical trailer
  
• Four page insert with essay by Nathan Rabin, poster, and chapter list
  

One of my favorite directors is Alan J. Pakula. I met him briefly when he came to college once and talked about his film LOVE AND PAIN AND THE WHOLE DAMNED THING. I wanted to talk about KLUTE, his masterpiece of paranoia in which, as paranoia does in all Pakula's films, proves to be justified. After ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and THE PARALLAX VIEW, Pakula became the Balzac of paranoia films at a time when paranoia was becoming a national epidemic. His romances and historical epics were never as popular or as well constructed as his paranoid films, even the later ones such as ROLLOVER, CONSENTING ADULTS, and THE PELICAN BRIEF.

Pakula was a nice guy, somewhat under the thumb of his publicists and perhaps justifiably mocking of someone interpreting his own film to his face. He didn't seem like the guy who nearly single handedly founded a whole new genre, one that was so indicative of the '70s and '80s. The genre didn't inspire all that many competitors (Polanski, maybe, and the film EXECUTIVE ACTION comes to mind), and there weren't that many followers (Oliver Stone, maybe), so Pakula had the field practically to himself. He probably would have been the perfect director for THE DAY OF THE DOLPHINS.

Unfortunately, Mike Nichols directed it, from a screenplay credited to Buck Henry, itself derived from a thriller written by Robert Merle. In a video interview, Henry allows as how the film was a tactical move to free Nichols from a contract with the film's producer, Joseph E. Levine. Yet Polanski was also at one time attached to the film. This seems inconsistent with what Henry describes as the production's history, but perhaps there are more details in a Polanski bio somewhere.

But even Polanski would have been a better choice than Nichols. He would have relished the utter bleakness of the film's otherwise incoherent climax. As it is, Nichols is essentially a humorist, and all the wit in DD is unintentional: the unattractive hero, the overblown villains, the squeaky voices of the speaking dolphins themselves.

The film concerns one Dr. Jake Terrell (George C. Scott), who, with his wife Maggie — hate those names — played by Scott's real wife, Trish Van Devere, runs a research facility located somewhere on an island in a sunny clime where he is engaged in giving dolphins English lessons. Jake is a tough as nails man who won't even tell his funding organization what he is doing, and who, when a dolphin bites his wife, is more worried about the dolphin.

As the film opens, Jake is lecturing a ladies club for no apparent reason other than exposition about dolphins to the film's audience. When a question about military research comes up he brushes it aside harshly, indicated that he and the military have a collision course (which actually doesn't happen). When he returns to the island, the viewer meets the rest of his team, four college students that include the requisite blonde girl, ethnic girl, handsome guy, and "goofy" guy. They all worship Jake, despite the fact that he is a gruff, unpleasant, shortsighted alpha male that the audience is presumably meant to find attractive.

The paranoia of the plot takes off when the liaison for the board of directors (Fritz Weaver) forces Jake to submit to an interview with Mahoney (Paul Sorvino), a blackmailing agent of mysterious allegiance posing as a reporter. At first we are meant to think of him as the villain but the story is slightly more complicated than that. Instead, Mahoney helps expose the plot against Jake, in which a group of industrialists have conspired to kill the President by using a dolphin to place a bomb under the Prez's yacht. Jake's dolphins make perfect tools because they can take dictation.

Given that the film is 30 years old, the participants can be much more frank about it than they could or would be allowed at the time. Henry fully acknowledges that he never "licked" the book. And the screenplay as enacted on the screen, is a confusing jumble of conspiracies and unpleasant or under-realized characters. For one thing, wouldn't there be easier ways for these men to assassinate the President then the elaborate method of stealing a talking dolphin? At the end Jake must abandoned his dolphins because "they" are coming to take all his research. Only after the film is over do you wonder just who "they" are, given that the conspiracy failed. So who is coming? The surviving conspirators? The government? If so, why? To investigate the conspiracy? Or to steal the dolphins for military purposes?

DAY OF THE DOLPHINS is a clunky, junky movie with the absurdity of talking dolphins at its center, but beautiful photography and great music at is exterior. William Fraker did the images, and Georges Delerue did the music. They contribute further European tones to a film by a man who had already proven himself indebted to Continental filmmakers, including Antonioni (THE GRADUATE) and Fellini (CATCH-22), for his style. Numerous New Wave themes and concerns infiltrate DD's story and look, as Andrew Sarris pointed out at the time: education, a theme of Truffaut's, withdrawal from a corrupt society, found in Godard, and the deep blue sea as an implacable host to human endeavors (Godard's CONTEMPT, and also Passolini). The film also shows unintentional linkages with others films. Scott (looking like a cross between John Cassavetes and Roy Scheider, and making what must have been hobbling weight look "powerful") is the poorly enacted cliché of the driven scientist. It also has a plot device latter used in JURASSIC PARK and DEEP BLUE SEA, the investigator coming to inspect the experiment on behalf of the funders.

The film's European influences are not what offended contemporaneous reviewers, however. Pauline Kael gave one of her most scathing reviews to this movie, which she called "the most expensive Rin Tin Tin picture ever made." She charged the film with "corruption," and says that Henry and Nichols have "a lot to answer for." "This picture will probably upset more children tan any other movie since BAMBI," she complained. "It's an ugly-souled manipulative movie … If Mike Nichols and Buck Henry don't have anything better to make movies about than involving English-speaking dolphins in assassination attempts [sic], why don't they stop making movies?" Henry credits the review with breaking up his partnership with Nichols.

DD is artistically ambitious, but as Sarris points out, that gets in the way of its thriller component, and vice versa. Yet for being a not so good if somewhat interesting movie, the disc is packed.

Aside from a fine widescreen transfer, the disc offers the frank interview with Buck Henry as well as interviews with GENERAL HOSPITAL star Leslie Charleson, a minor character in the film, one of those great sleek, athletic-looking blonde super-minor characters you see in the corners of films and always wonder who and where they are now (and then), and with Edward Herrmann, miscast in the Walter Brennan role. There is a Dolphin trivia gallery with 21 facts or quiz questions about aspects of the film, and a bio of the film's Dolphins, which, by the way, must be some kind of joke. For some reason there is also the German theatrical trailer, as well as a fan our page insert with essay on the film by Nathan Rabin, who writes for THE ONION.

An Earlier, Funnier Woody Allen?

WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY?

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 2 November, 1966
  
• 80 minutes
  
• PG
  
• American International
  
• Directed by Woody Allen from Senkichi Taniguchi's film KEY OF KEYS (1964)
  
• Credited Writer: Woody Allen
  
• Cast: voices of Woody Allen, Frank Buxton, Louise Lasser, Len Maxwell
  
• Cinematography: Kazuo Yamada
  
• Editing: Richard Krown
  
• Significant music: The Lovin' Spoonful
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: A Japanese film is re-dubbed for comic potential.

Disc Stats:

Extras Disc One:

• Choice between original theatrical version of Allen's film, and an alternative version
  
• Alternative audio tracks for 21 scenes
  
• Woody Allen filmography
  

Woody Allen provided the most damning criticism of the work of Woody Allen. In the Fellini-esque STARDUST MEMORIES, the running gag is that the current, more serious work of the film's protagonist, a film director played by Allen, is constantly compared to "earlier, funnier" films. As it happens, intentionally or not, that was the then-current thought on Allen. But today the question would be, are those earlier films really all that funny?

No doubt films such as ANNIE HALL and MANHATTAN are of lasting value, funny regardless of their age, or yours. But on the basis of WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY?, Allen's first film as a director (more or less), the answer might have to be "no." Allen went on to make other "earlier, funny" films TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN and BANANAS, before kind of hitting it big with EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX … and then SLEEPER and LOVE AND DEATH. But then Allen's humor changed. He went from satirical wiseacre to melancholy loon, from the humor of slapstick and immediate paradox to the tragic sense of life.

You're bound to think it is an improvement when you compare old jokes to new. The jokes in the early films are premised on the undercutting add-on. "Not only is the universe dying, but try getting a caterer on Saturday night." That sort of thing. The humor in the later films is contingent on context, and emerges out of the nature of the characters and their clashing sensibilities, like a good sitcom. The problem with the earlier jokes is that they now seem flat — and wholly unfunny.

Nowhere is this more evident than in WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY? Obviously, this is an early effort. But on the other hand, Allen had been writing comedy since he was 15, and was 31 when he made this movie. The premise of the comedy is that Allen has taken a Japanese film of a few years earlier and dubbed in his own dialogue, written in his inimitable style. To me, none of these jokes seemed at all funny. During an early scene set in a dance club, one guy comments on a dancer to another guy by saying, "She was even better in The Sound of Music." Sorry, but I just don't think that's funny (and I don't think that humor is "subjective," otherwise no one would laugh at anything).

TIGER LILY is filled with this kind of humor, laid over a film that is obviously about something else, which is another problem with the film. The viewer's mind goes into overdrive, trying to follow both the disrupted plot of the original film (THE KEY OF KEYS), and the careless faux plot of Allen's version. In this regard, LILY is like an early version of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. I love MST3K, but I've heard people complain (stupidly, in my view) that they just want to see the movie without the intermediation of Mike and his crew. LILY poses a similar problem, but it's worse, because you don't get any of the original movie but it's visuals, just a steady diet of Allen's A-B jokes, with B being the deflationary comedown.

But has Allen really changed? Allen just had another short comedy piece about physics in THE NEW YORKER a week or so ago, and it evinced the same kind of inorganic joke-making, mechanical in its two-part schema. "And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly would certain restaurants still require a jacket." If you laughed at that, you will probably get a kick out of TIGER LILY.

The distribution history of WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY? is complicated. Originally released by AIP, some time in the '80s a company called Castle Hill Productions bought the film and proceeded to "improve it by redubbing some of the Allenish gags. One noted by the IMDB is that when one character chases a car he says "Hey! You've got my vibrator!" in the Allen version but "Hey! That's a rented car!" in the new one. The Image disc, which sports a fine transfer, offers what appears to be both versions of the film, Allen's original and the re-redubbed version, with the alterations also accessible via a separate menu.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Michael Mann: "Now, there's an anecdote about this scene you've just seen on the airplane, which is kind of the cinema of necessity. This picture was made on a very limited budget. I think the whole picture cost little more than on $11 million dollars. So in trying to economize two things had to happen. One is we had to fly from our Chicago locations down to our Florida locations, and secondly I had this scene that had to be shot in an airplane. And the way this is typically done is there is a cut apart fuselage on a stage some place, and there are some green screens and blue screens out the window, and because they are a process shot it never looks very real to me. Secondly, we were not able to get permission to, in fact, shoot on any airplanes, and so we did something in 1986, which you could do then but obviously can't do now. And that is, we booked the entire crew into a United flight from Chicago down to, I think, Orlando. It's a four-hour flight and I made sure that the departure was out at four and lasted until eight so we would have a good sunset. And I booked the whole a crew into coach and everybody took all the magazines and camera apart, everybody kinda put them in their carry on baggage and once we were in the air once we all had tickets we just reconstituted ourselves into a film company. And since there was about a hundred of us, we started shooting and basically shot those scenes in amongst the cabin of regular folks traveling to Orlando, Florida from Chicago. This whole film crew assembled lights and camera and stuff and we just went ahead and shot the scenes. A couple of the stewardess got upset and the pilot got upset and they came back." —MANHUNTER director Michael Mann on the cinema of necessity.

NEXT TIME: FOXES, DEEP SPACE NINE, and more!

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