Extras:

• Audio commentary track with director Clooney and the D.P., Newton Thomas Sigel
  
• Making of featurette (22:37) in seven chapters
  
• Eleven deleted scenes: "Chuck and the Bellboy," "Day of the Dead Parade," "Chuck Kills Renda," "Confronting the Pizza Eater," "Flexner's Head Explodes," "Penny Suicide Attempt," "Chuck and the Maid," "Dinner with Old Tuvia," "Paranoid Chuck," "Chuck Walks Behind the Set," and "Cousin It," with optional director and DP commentary and play all option (22:45), non-anamorphic
  
• Sam Rockwell screen tests (7:06) in three chapters
  
• "Chuck Barris: The 'Real' Story" (6:13)
  
• Production stills (24 screens)
  
• Five GONG SHOW acts deleted from the final film (4:42)
  
• Trailer for KILL BILL, and a Miramax promo
  
• One page insert with chapter list (not contained in review screeners)
  

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND was the second film last year to feature Dick Clark.

In MIND, Clark is a talking head recollecting the life and career of Chuck Barris, the Mozart of television game shows. But you may recall that Clark also appears in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE as a spectral presence whom Michael Moore is pursing for a sound bite. I daresay that we got the "real" Clark in Moore's film. Outside of the safe environment of "softball" questions and carefully lit sound stages, people like Clark are not nice. You can see it in their eyes, in the very corners of their eyes. There is a reptilian coldness, a mean appraising wariness that is at variance with their efforts at being warm and agreeable. They are the eyes you see in Michael Keaton and indeed most old-time style comics when they are "relaxed." This is why such people excel at TV; those hard eyes are hidden in plain sight from the viewer. On the big screen those slits are revealed in all their serpentine coldness.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND was the second film last year to feature the recruitment of a CIA agent as a major plot device. You will recall that one of Colin Farrell's 12 films from 2002 was THE RECRUIT, in which he is scooped up from college by Al Pacino to takes courses at "the farm," where prospective agents are trained. In MIND, Sam Rockwell's Barris is singled out by George Clooney's (real? Mythical?) CIA agent Jim Byrd as ideal Company material (both Barris and the viewer wonder why). Barris and Farrell's James Clayton spend time at a barren, wintry private school where they learn to kill, lie, and cheat for their government. The only difference is that there are no lanky chicks at Barris's spy school (only a few fellow students named Oswald and Ruby), which must have been very disappointing to the self-confessed pussy hound.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND was the second film from last year written by Charlie Kaufman. He also wrote the Oscar-nominated ADAPTATION, a meditation on how the animal kingdom sustains itself through replication and how human beings sustain themselves through stories. And it's about how journalists transgress social codes and Hollywood transmutes existing material for its narrow "commercial" requirements. MIND, on the other hand, is a tale of illusion versus reality, of mind over matter, of a modern-day Ed Wood who never let mediocrity get in his way (actually just another Ed Wood, now that I think about it, since Barris and Wood were near contemporaries). For Kaufman, it's always the girl that grounds the guy, in both senses of the word: she either gives him stability and a reason to live, or knocks him to the floor, from which he can't get up. Generally, Kaufman excels at cold-hearted bitches like Catherine Keener's shrew in MALKOVICH; seeing a warm, giving woman whom Kaufman doesn't malkovize, such as Barris's wife Penny, is atypical.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND was the second film last year to feature new favorite Maggie Gyllenhaal in something written by Kaufman (she was also in ADAPTATION). Gyllenhaal also appeared in the quasi-independent feature SECRETARY, in which her character found freedom and bliss in a good solid spanking. Gyllenhaal has only a modest, minor role in MIND, and in fact she may be more of a character-actor type than leading actress or star at this stage of her career. I don't think that it is cruel to compare her to Julia Roberts (after all, it's the sort of comparison that casting directors make hundreds of times a day). Roberts, who plays a femme fatale in MIND, is odd-looking, too, but has an ineffable charisma. Director George Clooney understands these things and uses Roberts' star status to do most of her acting for her, since the character is a mysterious, glamorous, unattainable woman in the first place.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND was the second film in recent memory featuring a free-spirited character named Penny. In ALMOST FAMOUS, it was Penny Lane, a music-loving groupie who ultimately was treated poorly by the musicians she worshipped. Here it is another Penny (Drew Barrymore), a free-spirited hippie who is ultimately mistreated by the TV game show host she worships. I haven't read the book so I don't know if Penny is real or a composite of several Barrisian wives created by Kaufman, but Penny is an admirable figure, delightfully played by Drew Barrymore.

After a long career in television, where he started as a page at NBC, Chuck Barris had some kind of crisis or nervous breakdown in the late '70s, emerging from obscurity again with the memoir CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, in which he recounts how he got ideas for such shows as THE DATING GAME, THE NEWLYWED GAME, and THE GONG SHOW (in addition to these he did four or more other shows). As a producer he was the epitome of the vulgarity that television is prone to and an easy target for Cassandra's decrying the demise of western civilization. Nevertheless, television didn't change. It simply got new blood. And some generations later, prime time has shows such as TEMPTATION ISLAND, BLIND DATE, and ELIMIDATE. Like everyone else on television, it is unimaginable without him.

However, at the same time, Barris claims in his book that he had a parallel career as a freelance paid assassin for the CIA, using his chaperone duties for game show winners as a cover to eliminate enemies of the state. No one believes this, of course, but the movie doesn't question the story's veracity, or theorize that Barris's alternative career is a fantasy born of mental crisis and fueled by James Bond movies. Instead, MIND takes Barris at his word and explores the implications of such a career. Clooney and Kaufman do so wittily and even movingly at times, and with a cinematic technique that blends artifice and documentary. It's one of the best films from last year, and I resent the fact that few people went to see it. It must be very disappointing to filmmakers to work hard and creatively on an odd but perfectly realized project only to have it dismissed by critics and ignored by viewers when visually undistinguished pabulum like AMERICAN WEDDING makes millions of dollars. Well, that's why there is DVD, to rescue such movies and give them longer shelf life.

The other thing that DVDs do is allow the filmmakers to explain themselves and in their audio commentary track with director Clooney and the cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, do a fine job of it. You can see why Clooney and the '70s-mad Soderbergh get along so well. Clooney quotes and cites all the right movies: CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, THE PARALLAX VIEW. He's not just mentioning them because they served as good reference guides to the things he needed to do in this film. He really likes them, with Soderbergian passion. He also cites 2001, Bob Fosse, and a few other movies indicating that Clooney is as much a film geek as a Joe Dante or QT. Clooney and his cameraman have a brief disagreement over whether Ann-Margaret is the ice scatter whom Nicholson and Garfunkel watch at the start of CARNAL KNOWLEDGE's second act, but it is easy to see how you could get confused about that. As Clooney rightly points out, it is not Ann-Margaret they are watching in that scene. But at the end of the movie there is a brief flash of her in ice scatting garb on the ice, a brief flash of a feminine ideal. On another note, both of them should know that the so-called "unknown comic" is no longer unknown. He even has a Web site about himself and his name is Michael Landsberg. If they look in the credits of their own movie on the IMDB they will see him listed in the cast. Their perpetuation of that mythology must be part of the whole "taking Barris seriously" M.O.

Next up is a 20-minute "making of" featurette (in seven chapters) that is much better than most in its pallid genre. Clooney goes into detail about his directorial strategy, and you learn a bunch of interesting things, such as that Bryan Singer was originally slated to be director. Clooney also describes and visually illustrates how the film's clever effects were all done in camera

There are also eleven deleted or alternative scenes. I like them all, except for the alternative scenes, which are better in the movie. In one, James Urbaniak (who looks a lot like Rutger Hauer, who is also in the movie) gets his head blowed up, and that scene has some wit, but I am not a fan of split screens and one of the alternative scenes is a split screen endeavor. The scenes come with optional director and DP commentary and a "play all" option. In addition there are five GONG SHOW acts that were also deleted from the final film.

There are also three tapes of Sam Rockwell's screen tests, and they are so good they could practically have been in the movie. In one of them he does the splits, which seems screen-test duty above and beyond the call.

There is also a short piece about the Barris, called "Chuck Barris: The 'Real' Story," which seems to incorporate documentary interview footage dropped from the final film. It's doesn't "solve" the mystery of whether Barris really was a assassin, but it's funny to see Jaye P. Morgan talk so frankly about Barris.

The supplements round off with 24 color production stills, a trailer for KILL BILL, a Miramax promo reel, and a one-page insert with chapter list (not contained in review screeners, so I am actually just assuming that it will be there).

Twice Upon a Time in Mexico

EL MARIACHI

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 15 September, 1992, at the Toronto Film Festival
  
• 81 minutes
  
• R
  
• Columbia
  
• Directed by Robert Rodriguiz
  
• Credited writer: Robert Rodriguiz
  
• Cast: Carlos Gallardo (El Mariachi), Consuelo Gómez (Domino), Jaime de Hoyos (Bigotón), Peter Marquardt (Mauricio: Moco), Reinol Martinez (Azul)
  
• Cinematography: Robert Rodriguez
  
• Editing: Robert Rodriguez
  
• Significant music: Nestor Fajardo, Eric Guthrie, Chris Knudson, Cecilio Rodríguez, Álvaro Rodríguez, Juan Suarez, Marc Trujillo
  
• Awards: Deauville Film Festival, Audience Award, Robert Rodriguez; Independent Spirit Awards, Best First Feature; Sundance Film Festival, Audience Award; plus three nominations
• Budget: $7 thousand/$220, 000
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $2 million

Plot in one sentence: In a Mexican border town, a musician is confused with a vengeance-consumed killer.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Commentary track by RR
  
• "The Robert Rodriguez Ten Minute Film School" (14:38)
  
• BEDHEAD, black and white short film by RR (9:08)
  
• ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO sneak peak "making of" material (4:28)
  
• Filmographies for five cast and crew members (about two screens each)
  
• Trailers for EL MARIACHI, DESPERADO, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, THE MASK OF ZORRO, and LOVE AND A BULLET
  

DESPERADO: SPECIAL EDITION

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 25 August, 1995
  
• 106 minutes
  
• R
  
• Columbia
  
• Directed by Robert Rodriquez
  
• Credited writer: Robert Rodriquez
  
• Cast: Antonio Banderas (El Mariachi), Salma Hayek (Carolina), Joaquim de Almeida (Bucho), Cheech Marin (Short bartender), Steve Buscemi (Buscemi), Quentin Tarantino (Pick-up Guy), Danny Trejo (Navajas)
  
• Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro
  
• Editing: Robert Rodriguez
  
• Significant music: Los Lobos
  
• Awards: two nominations, including an MTV Best Kiss award
  
• Budget: $7 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $25.6 million

Plot in one sentence: A musician is seeking revenge on the mobsters who killed his girlfriend.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Commentary track by RR
  
• "Ten More Minutes" (10:25)
  
• ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO sneak peak making of material (4:28)
  
• Filmographies for five cast and crew members (about two screens each)
  
• Somewhere on the disc is a free trial of Screenblast video-editing software, though I couldn't find it
  
• Trailers for DESPERADO, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, and LOVE AND A BULLET
  

What happened to the great indie filmmakers of the '90s? They had the kind of prestige accorded to the stars who banded together to form United Artists (Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford), or the hot '70s guys who seemed to burst out all at once, directors such as Coppola, Friedkin, Ashby, Pakula, all of them modern seeming directors who brought a new classicism, so to speak, to movies but whose roots really stretched back to the '50s. In the '90s it was Tarantino, Rodriguez, Anders, and Rockwell. They could get the budgets they wanted. They could use their name as the imprimatur to get other films they liked released. They got to work with great actors whom in some cases they resurrected from the dead. They became indie/fest/magazine/talk show favorites. What happened?

They pissed it all away by doing FOUR ROOMS together. What a career-slayer that film was! Afterwards, Tarantino retreated to his mansion to watch old movies, Anders made a bomb or two and an episode of SEX AND THE CITY, Rockwell made a couple of movies no one saw, and Rodriguez started making kiddie films, publicly eschewing the violence that had made his reputation.

These people have been making movies now for a decade. They have "bodies of work." But their reputations are in fragments. How could one simple movie, an anthology film with stories about the events in four rooms in an hotel on New Year's Eve, linked by a bellhop who should have been played by Steve Buscemi but turns out to be Tim Roth, derail the seemingly unstoppable trajectory of these filmmakers?

I would guess that, for one thing, for once the filmmakers were unrestrained in budget and imagination. Thus, each of their 20-minute fragments managed to bring out the worst excesses of its director. Anders made a dumb feminist allegory. Rockwell made a predictable hostage story (did you remember that? I had to look it up). Rodriguez told a story about annoying kids, the harbinger of all that was to follow. Tarantino ripped off an old TWILIGHT ZONE episode, doing nothing to deflect criticism that he was a cinematic magpie lifting images and scenes from movies he liked and undermining his reputation as an original. None of FOUR ROOMS's stories served the filmmakers and indeed tarnished their reputations. They are still reeling from the experience, trying to pick up the pieces, and FOUR ROOMS is something of a sick joke among students of '90s films. I wouldn't be surprised if the quartet all absolutely hated each other these days.

Rodriquez is just about the only one of the four who remained visibly active. While QT was burrowing deeper into the oeuvre of William Witney, Rodriguez was turning out a horror film (THE FACULTY), a QT-scribed action film (FROM DUSK TILL DAWN), and the dreadful SPY KIDS series, while planning the next El Mariachi movie, all from his aerie in Austin, Texas, called Troublemaker Studios. He was probably more "successful" because he was working in crowd-pleasing films in genres from whose foundations he never strayed from.

You have to go back to EL MARIACHI and RESERVOIR DOGS to recapture what all the excitement was about. EL MARIACHI is a lively, complex, and sinister tale of blood and revenge that belies its alleged $7, 000 dollar budget (it may have only cost RR seven grand to shoot the footage, but it demanded several more thousands to market and make prints, among other things). Still, EL MARIACHI is an impressive first effort — but that's about all it is. It's an amazing feat that RR was able to pull it all together, but the film still betrays the clunky editing and willed exuberance you see in amateur films.

DESPERADO, on the other hand, is an assured, highly watchable and indeed addictive movie. From its opening shot (Buscemi sliding through the door of a decrepit cantina, as so many other characters will do throughout the film) DESPERADO exerts absolute confidence over the tools and tricks of filmmaking.

But you could go crazy trying to nail down the links between EL MARIACHI, DESPERADO, and, now, MEXICO. EL MARIACHI has a relatively simple plot about a musician (Carlos Gallardo) with a guitar box who is confused with a gangster on a mission named Azul (Reinol Martinez), who also wears black and carries a guitar case (only his is filled with weapons).

DESPERADO, on the other hand, seems to be both a remake and re-telling of the first film, a continuation of it while at the same time improving it. In DESPERADO, El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) enters a small town to seek revenge on the people who … did something or other. DESPERADO has a much more lively villain, great subsidiary characters such as Danny Trejo, and it has Salma Hayek (I'll get into ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO later [MEXICO will be up Friday morning, September 12—ye olde Ed.]).

EL MARIACHI and DESPERADO now appear on DVD in conjunction with the long-delayed release of their sequel, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot new here. Both films have been on DVD before, and in fact were released a few years ago as part of a double set.

DESPERADO also enjoyed release as a SuperBit disc. This transfer isn't as sharp as the SuperBit, of course, but is by all accounts better than the dual-disc set and has a better soundtrack. The supplements on EL MARIACHI are the same as those that appear on the film's original laser disc way back when, and the materials on the DESPERADO disc are inherited from its earlier incarnations, with the exception of a "making of" style preview of MEXICO, duplicated on both discs.

Were these directors worth all the attention? Well, they are starting to make "comebacks" of a sort. Tarantino's KILL BILL has the movie world twittering. And Rodriguez is releasing his much-anticipated ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO.

On page 58 of his book REBEL WITHOUT A CREW, Rodriquez refers to EL MARIACHI as a "throwaway movie" that he intended to sell to the Mexican film market but on which he nonetheless worked hard. Instead the film became his gateway to a unique career as a movie director, almost always generating his own projects. Just as the best of the UA filmmakers and almost all the '70s directors survived their highs and lows to just keep on working no matter what, doubtlessly only death will quell the careers of the FOUR ROOMS brigade and their indie colleagues at the time. If DESPERADO remains Rodriguez's best film, that is no small praise about a film made in an industry that, as RR must now know, is difficult and unforgiving.

Inner Space

THE CORE

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 25 March, 2003
  
• 135 minutes
  
• PG-13
  
• Paramount
  
• Directed by Jon Amiel
  
• Credited writers: Cooper Layne and John Rogers
  
• Cast: Aaron Eckhart (Dr. Joshua Keyes), Hilary Swank (Major Rebecca Childs), Stanley Tucci (Dr. Conrad Zimsky), Delroy Lindo (Dr. Ed Brazzelton), Tchééky Karyo (Dr. Serge Leveque), Richard Jenkins (General Thomas Purcell), Alfre Woodard (Talma Stickley), DJ Qualls (Taz Finch), Bruce Greenwood (Commander Robert Iverson
  
• Cinematography: John Lindley and Phil Meheux (Italian sequences)
  
• Editing: Terry Rawlings
  
• Significant music: Christopher Young
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: $85 thousand
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $35 million

Plot in one sentence: A team of scientists must travel to the center of the planet and jump start the earth's core.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Commentary by director Jon Amiel
  
• "To the Core and Back" making of (10:52)
  
• "Deconstruction of the Visual Effects": Previsualization (4:31), Travalgar Square (3:16), Rome (3:32), The Golden Gate Bridge (4:26), The Geode (3:03)
  
• Ten deleted scenes: Keyes gives the kids his credit card; testing the ray gun; claustrophobia; preparing to save the world montage; Keyes and Rat; the fire suits work; the team isn't ready; Zimsky grabbing a smoke 1; fixing the monitors; Zimsky grabbing a smoke 2 (14:11), with optional director's commentary
  
• Trailers for TIMELINE, LARA CROFT 2, and the INDIANA JONES DVD package
  
• One sheet insert with chapter list
  

In the year 2000 Canadian filmmaker made a short at the behest of the Toronto Film Festival, called THE HEART OF THE WORLD, it was a mock silent film in which a female "state scientist" learns that the very heart of the world is sick, on the verge of a heart attack. Despite being torn between two brothers, the woman sacrifices herself and escapes to the center of the earth, where she replaces the world's heart with her own.

Maddin's point, in this gloriously fast-paced and wacky movie, seems to be that by sacrificing herself, the scientist has kept alive the world and — movies. Movies like THE CORE?

Is the world really worth saving? That is the question not raised in THE CORE. After centuries of torture, cruelty, religious wars, political corruption, wanton destruction of the environment, and unkindness to animals, maybe we should lose the franchise, and let the inner core of the earth spin out of control until the earth is consumed by gamma rays or whatever it is out there on the verge of burning us up.

But no, a team of scientists must band together and actually save this wretched planet from itself. The team consists of two astronauts and four scientists and their mission is to "dive" to the center of the world and blow up a bomb or two before the electromagnetic fields and various space rays burn up more than the Golden Gate Bridge and Rome. Naturally, some of the team members don't get along, and each one needs to learn a valuable lesson about their humanity — sci-fi as encounter group.

Putting aside the familiarity of the plot and the scientific mumbo jumbo, these adventures in a real middle earth can be fun. That's due to the collection of fine actors contracted to enact this nonsense, who bring dignity, wit, and a level of realism that the movie fights to deny. In fact, reality caught up with the movie, as is well known, when a real space shuttle tragedy exceeded the happy accident in the movie itself and caused delay in the film's release from November to early 2003. That's been happening a lot lately. To the filmmakers' credit, they stuck with their shuttle sequence and left it in the movie.

At the very least, THE CORE is a lot more exciting than the similar THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE, one of those dry British science fiction films in which nothing happens but talk. And within the confines of their characters the actors manage to make their reactions to the ridiculous plausible. The special effects are pretty good, the FANTASTIC VOYAGE succession of impediments is entertaining, and it's always nice to see institutions explode. As Susan Sontag noted, science fiction is really about the "imagination of disaster," and exists partly to quench our thirst for chaos and mass destruction.

THE CORE enjoys a very good transfer with good sound, and has a host of modest but informative supplements. First off is the commentary by director Jon Amiel (THE SINGING DETECTIVE, COPYCAT, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE). He's one of those guys from British theater, so he is well-spoken and offers a detailed account of the film's production, but you never get the impression that THE CORE was much more than an interesting technical puzzle or job of work.

The making-of material is also informative, and since the special effects ended up being pretty good you can see how happy everyone is and they are all eager to crow about how they did this stuff. The primary doc is "To the Core and Back," which is about 10 minutes long, but there are five other bits of it broken up into specific topics, as per common practice these days.

There is a surprisingly high amount of deleted scenes, and as usual, I think they should have been retained. Generally, scenes are deleted to speed things up and to shorten a film, but that is a purely commercial decision based on showings per day in theaters and has nothing to do with the organic rhythm of the film itself. In any case, the deleted scenes show you much more about the characters' personalities and introduce or resolve two or three subplots. The deleted scenes amount to about 15 additional minutes of screen time, and come with the usual mournful and justificatory optional director's commentary.

Finally, there are trailers for TIMELINE, LARA CROFT 2, and the INDIANA JONES DVD package, which we have been seeing on Paramount discs for some time now.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Jon Amiel: "This entire sequence was shot in a mock-up shuttle that was accurate to the last blinking light. It had previously been used in SPACE COWBOYS. As I'm sure you'll be aware, this movie was completed before the Columbia shuttle disaster, and it gave us a lot of pause, particularly since we felt closely involved with the crew of Columbia, and with the NASA astronauts, in general. They contributed an enormous amount to the research in this movie and were with us on the set. We finally felt that this sequence stood, not only as a testament to the heroism and resourcefulness of those people, but also as a reminder of what an operational knife-edge these guys operate under. We tend to take what they do very much for granted these days. You're gonna see just how dangerous, just how fragile, just how difficult a plane this is to fly, in the sequence that's about to come." —Director Jon Amiel on the controversial Shuttle sequence in THE CORE.

NEXT TIME:HALLOWEEN, DAY OF THE DEAD, CONFIDENCE, John Sayles, SLEEPING BEAUTY, and more!

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