He was better in EVERYONE'S ALL-AMERICAN and COME SEE THE PARADISE, but I'd so turned off the spigots on Quaid by the time these films were released ('88 and '90, respectively) that I mentally brushed them aside.

The first sign Quaid had started to turn things around came with his Doc Holliday performance in Lawrence Kasdan's WYATT EARP ('94). In his AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM, David Thomson calls it "the best Holliday in pictures -- a physical and attitudinal transformation - and enough to turn Kevin Costner to stone (if he hadn't been there already)."

For me, Quaid's new phase started three years ago with his over-the-hill quarterback role in Oliver Stone's ANY GIVEN SUNDAY. Then came his oily attorney-on-the-take part in Steven Soderbergh's TRAFFIC. He wasn't phenomenal, but it was a nice score in a near-great film.

Then came Quaid's watershed role in THE ROOKIE. I floated a notion last summer that he deserves a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his work as late-blooming hurler Jimmy Morris, and this seems to have since gathered a slight headwind. And I know some people who feel he gives another top-level performance as Julianne Moore's closeted gay husband in Todd Haynes' FAR FROM HEAVEN.

In sum, he's looking good for an Oscar nomination today because he's not only survived the ups and downs but come into himself (the Academy loves the idea of growing past your stumblings and finding second winds), and perhaps also because of a slight lingering sympathy factor from Ryan having taken up with Russell Crowe a couple of years ago.

If I were Quaid's publicist I would try and keep it quiet about his next film, DAY AFTER TOMORROW, a futuristic thriller being directed by Roland Emmerich. Every actor takes an occasional paycheck role, but you want to be careful about associations with the director of THE PATRIOT and GODZILLA. Especially with the dreaded Jake Gyllenhaal as a costar.

Signs

For the first time in many years I've actually got a mask to wear to Halloween parties. I bought it earlier this year from the same Venice, Italy, outfit that provided all those grotesque masks for the orgy scene in Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT. The important thing with any get-up is that you should look exotic and/or becoming, and I think I've accomplished this.

I should add that my Halloween attire has absolutely nothing to do with the point of this little riff, which is that for the first time since the mid to late '70s I'm starting to feel vaguely hopeful about horror films. It seems (emphasis on that word) as if a wave of subtlety is working its way in -- a show-less, cut the gore, excite-the-imagination attitude by way of M. Night Shyamalan.

John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN aside, I've never been much of a fan of sexual serial-killer films, and now this genre seems to finally be in retreat, especially in the wake of all the parodies which leaves the practitioners (i.e., the new would-be Sam Raimi's and Steve Miner's) with nowhere to go.

I started to consider this a few weeks ago when AUTO FOCUS director Paul Schrader told me that the success of the less-is-more approach in Shyamalan's SIGNS was making it easier for him to argue with the producers of his EXORCSIST prequel (i.e., Morgan Creek) to adopt a similar tack or tone.

I think Gore Verbinski's THE RING keeps to this aesthetic, for the most part. Then a guy wrote me the other day about DARK WATER, the latest film by Hideo Nakata, who directed the 1998 Japanese feature RINGU that THE RING is a remake of. The guy described DARK WATER, which uses Nakata's trademark "slow-building creepiness," as "one of the scariest things I've ever experienced.

In short, forget all forthcoming Jason and Freddy movies and Raimi tributes like Eli Roth's CABIN FEVER, and look to the future of horror (for now), which isn't about cheap jerks and grisly body parts lying in a steamy pile in the woods as much as arousing those ethereal little fear goblins sleeping deep inside our chest cavities, just waiting to be prodded.

Keep sending in those suggestions! With every new column I'll either be re-running my suggestions from yesterday (in short bursts) along with recent reader requests. I'm backlogged with replies after Wednesday's column, but for now... The Alamo ('60, d: John Wayne -- restored version, when and if it happens); The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, d: Michael Curtiz, Errol Flynn, et. al.); Around the World in 80 Days (not taken from 35mm elements, but original 70mm, 30 frame-per-second, Todd-AO roadshow version); Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue ('70, w/ Robards, Stevens); Peter Glenville's Becket ('64 w/ O'Toole, Burton). and Treasure of the Sierra Madre ('48 -- only on laser disc so far). Recent Reader Suggestions: Joseph Losey's Boom! ('68 -- only on VHS, but desperately needs to be letterboxed); Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse ('58 -- ditto); Arthur Penn's Mickey One ('65); Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life ('59); Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls ('67); and Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls ('70) -- Alonso Duralde, ADVOCATE editor. Tunes of Glory ('60), as requested by reader Sean Richardson. "Criterion put out Tuneson laser dsic, while on DVD they've released several other titles by Ronald Neame, like The Horse's Mouth ('58) and Hopscotch ('80). But Tunes, a movie that's brilliant in every way and way, way better than The Horse's Mouth, is pretty much out of print in every format, although it occasionally pops up on Bravo. "If any film needs a solid DVD treatment, it's Double Indemnity ('45)," says reader Mark Van Hook. "I know it was released already (by Universal, I think) but the print was crap, and I'm pretty sure it's since gone out of print. It's simply one of the two or three finest films noir ever. Oh, and any list of most-wanted DVD's needs to include Bringing Up Baby ('38)." Author's Note: I was told Wednesday morning that Anchor Bay has had a widescreen DVD of Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner ('72) out for some time, although I've never seen it on shelves.

Bad Henry

Some brief words of praise for Eugene Jarecki and Alex Gibney's THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER, which opened earlier this month in New York and has been expanding across the country since. It'll be at Los Angeles' Nuart theatre until October 31, and then play at San Francisco's Castro starting November 1st. It'll hit at least another eighteen cities between now and the end of the year.

I hope it'll bring in more people in than the presumed core audience of die-hard, middle-aged lefties who were young during Kissinger's heyday, and who still carry in their heads lethal recollections about his having served the aims and neuroses of Richard Nixon. TRIALS is a smart, highly persuasive, above-average documentary. It deserves to be seen by anyone with the slightest suspicion that world politics should be infused with at least a shred of humanistic conscience, since it leaves you convinced that foreign policy without morality can be a truly heinous thing.

Failing that, it should intrigue anyone willing to consider some very tough charges leveled at Kissinger for having engineered some flagrantly evil foreign-policy moves during the Nixon and Ford administrations.

This 80-minute, BBC-funded doc was inspired by a two-part HARPERS article by Christopher Hitchens, which he then turned into a book called THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER. As presented here, Hitchens' views -- which are backed up in some respects by respected journalist Seymour Hersh and British journalist William Shawcross, the author of a book about America's war in Cambodia called SIDESHOW -- appear to be valid and well-sourced.

The doc gives credence to Hitchens' view that Kissinger, who served as President Nixon's top foreign-affairs strategist and facilitator in the early- to mid-'70s, and then stayed on with Gerald Ford's administration for a while after this, is a war criminal and should be tried as such. That is, if you apply to Kissinger's actions the standards by which Nazi war criminals were prosecuted in the late '40s, which could also apply to Chile's Augusto Pinochet and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic when and if they ever face their legal accusers.

Boiled down, the beefs against Kissinger are that he (a) helped Nixon sabotage the peace talks between the Johnson administration and the North Vietnamese in late '68, and facilitated the deliberate prolonging of the Vietnam War for totally cynical reasons over the next four to five years, resulting in the needless deaths of tens of thousands, (b) not only winked at but lent support to the 1973 Chilean military coup against president Salvador Allende, resulting in not only his murder but thousands of others who were "disappeared" by the military forces loyal by Pinochet, Allende's successor, and (c) tacitly approved a campaign of mass slaughter in December 1975 in East Timor by Indonesian government troops, who were fighting insurgents at the time.

I haven't read Hitchens' Kissinger book or the Harper's articles, but the facts are put forth by Jarecki and Gibney concisely and, it would appear, comprehensively.

In his NEW YORKER review last month, David Denby wrote that he wished only that Jarecki and Gibney "had gone beyond the usual mosaic style of film journalism, the brisk summary in which short interview and newsreel fragments are joined together with voice-over narration. This method...is no doubt the best way to convey a great deal of information quickly. But is the method equal to the gravity and complexity of the subject?"

I asked Jarecki over the phone if he wanted to respond to this and other matters. He began by agreeing with Denby. "I share his regret that the full picture is hard to get across to people," he said. "Denby took this subject as seriously as I would hope anyone would. I don't know that any film could be equal to Kissinger's White House years, which saw the authoring of some very grave actions that resulted in millions of lost lives. I don't know that any film could equal this.

"On the other hand, films [of this sort] usually run about 90 minutes, during which time you have to do your best to serve education and narrow it down. You have to walk in a certain degree of lockstep, knowing the preponderance of toothpaste commercials. The BBC [which aired the doc last March] gave us some reprieve from that, but the American market is another matter."

In other words, if you see THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER and want to know more, buy some books on the subject. There are plenty out there, including Kissinger's own accounts. But you can't go wrong with Jarecki and Gibney's film for starters. Plus it's tight and short and easy on the backside.

Too Late Blues

I'm not inclined to celebrate anyone's misfortune under any circumstance. But I couldn't help but chuckle at an idea that came to me on Wednesday, i.e. -- inviting friends over for a big EYE SEE YOU, goof-on-Sylvester-Stallone DVD party. You know...one of those participatory, talk-back-to-the-screen, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW deals. Hit the "play" button, drink beer, and make cheap, unfeeling cracks about Sly, co-stars Tom Berenger and Kris Kristofferson, director Jim Gillespie, et. al.

But I lost interest after hearing two things later that day: One, that Columbia TriStar Home Video won't be releasing this reportedly stinky serial-killer flick until the very last day of the year. And two, that it recently played theatrically in various Midwest markets (Dallas, Oklahoma City, etc.). In other words, the people who may well appreciate the awful splendor film of this film the most -- i.e., jaded Los Angeles or New York cynics like myself -- are going to be among the last to see it. Is that thoughtful of Universal? Is it considerate?

I can feel the sand draining out of the hourglass as I write this. Nothing about this film has turned out right.

OKLAHOMA GAZETTE entertainment writer Preston Jones wrote yesterday to confirm that EYE SEE YOU "was indeed [recently] booked for two weeks at Heritage Plaza 5 Cinema here in Oklahoma City. No one from our paper reviewed it, and to the best of my knowledge, no one from the DAILY OKLAHOMAN (the major city paper) reviewed it either. So in essence, it came and went and no one really noticed."

On the other hand, this letter from Brian Orndorf of Minneapolis -- one of the many thousands who've already seen it -- contends there's another Stallone entry around the corner that's even more difficult to sit through.

"I bought a DVD copy of D-TOX (i.e., the original title of EYE SEE YOU) last summer off Ebay," he wrote yesterday. "Having suffered through so many delays, I was curious to see what was so bad about this film that Universal deemed unfit for release. The surprise is that for the opening 25 minutes, the film plays fast and tight with its serial-killer storyline. Stallone is pretty good in his cop role, and he has a nice early domestic scene with co-star Dina Meyer.

"But once Stallone's character is shipped off to the remote detox center about 30 minutes in, the film goes right into the toilet. This is where the studio interference comes rumbling in, with characters disappearing and reappearing without explanation, loose motivations, and a climax that gives 'stretching' a new meaning. At least it's better than AVENGING ANGELO, the other Stallone flick currently sitting on the shelf."

Thief Grief

"I can't tell you how disappointed I am to hear about Paramount Home Video's under-representation (is that the right way to put it?) of TO CATCH A THIEF on DVD. I know that it's generally considered one of Hitch's lesser works, but that's rubbish. This is one of the greatest light entertainments ever, one of Hitchcock's most gorgeously shot films, and the very definition of a movie-star movie.

"Any film with Grace Kelly looking this good has to be given the absolute finest video treatment possible, and to hear that I'm being asked to ponder her shimmering beauty under less-than-tip-top circumstances is unforgivable. I'm probably going to buy the damn disc anyway, just because I've wanted the film in my DVD collection for so long. But knowing that I'm buying a below-par transfer is heartbreaking." -- Mark Van Hook, Elon University, North Carolina

Wells to Van Hook: Look at the upside. Sometime in the future Paramount Home Video may decide to re-master it properly (using original 8-perf VistaVision elements) and then they'll put the new DVD on the market and sell it all over again, and probably make more money. You, on the other hand, will have the privilege of shelling out another $15 or $20 or more so you can have two THIEFs in your collection -- one good, one not-so-good -- which will serve as proof of your passion and make you a more fully-rounded aficionado.

Save Orny!

"I was just in LA for the first time a few weeks ago, and I saw Orny Adams perform at the Laugh Factory. We were there to see Dane Cook, as was most or the audience, but I thought Adams was one of the best standups I've seen in ages.

He was playing to a pretty small crowd, and while he was getting heckled by some woman who didn't like the way he picked on sharks (don't ask), he's a clear comedic descendant of the late, great Bill Hicks. Arrogant? I have no doubt. Many smart people are.

"I haven't seen COMEDIAN yet, but you have me scared that the filmmakers might have sacrificed the career of a talented up-and-comer in order to worship at the altar of Jerry, and that would be a shame. Adams deserves better." -- David Medsker

Wells to Medsker: Good to hear this. I don't want Adams to go down; I was just conveying how he comes off in the film in contrast to Jerry Seinfeld.

Role Playing

Mike Malone was first to identify Wednesday's cast. They appeared together in Robert Altman's COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN ('82).

Today's cast: Luis Guzman, Penelope Ann Miller (whatever happened to her?), Ingrid Rogers, John Leguizamo, Viggo Mortensen, Jorge Porcel, Sean Penn, Adrian Pasdar and a lead actor known for a combustible, if occasionally florid, acting style.

What's That Line?

Kyle Buchanan, hailing from the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, was first to identify Wednesday's dialogue. It's from a cut scene in ABOUT SCHMIDT, directed by Alxander Payne from a script that he co-wrote with Jim Taylor. Jack Nicholson is the "older guy" in the scene. "The fraternity scenes are among the funniest in the movie," says Buchanan, "but I've heard a lot of them didn't make it into the final cut." In fact, none of them did.

A double-header today. First, a younger man is visiting an older man in his home. The older man is sitting in his den, watching a football game....

Older Man: Come in, [name]. Sit down, make yourself comfortable. It's almost over -- you follow football?
Younger Man: Nope, not for a while I haven't.
Older Man: I enjoy watching football in the afternoon. One of the things I enjoy about this country. Baseball, too. I've loved baseball ever since [a certain nefarious event that would give everything away].

They both chuckle. A brief pause, and then...

Older Man: I heard you had some trouble. Stupid -- people behaving like that with guns. Important thing is, that you're all right. Good health -- the most important thing in the world. More than success, more than money, more than power.

Younger man stands up, shuts the door; moves their chairs closer as older man turns up the TV.

Younger Man: I came here because there's gonna be more blood shed. I want you to know about it before it happens so that there's no danger of starting another war.
Older Man: Nobody wants another war.
Younger Man: [Man's name] came to my home and he asked my permission to get rid of [some business competitors]. When I refused, he tried to have me killed. He was stupid, I was lucky. I'll visit him soon. The important thing is that nothing interferes with our plans for the future. Yours and mine.

Older man shakes his head in agreement.

Older Man: Nothing is more important. [pause] You're a wise and considerate young man.
Younger Man: And you're a great man, Mr. [name]. There's much I can learn from you.

Name the film, the year of release, the director, the screenwriter(s), and the actors in the scene. Important extra question: Caveat: No one will qualify unless they can identify the kind of sandwich offered to the younger man by the older man's wife when he first enters the before entering the den. She says to him, "Would you like a [fill in the blank] sandwich?"

Secondly, a powerful politician is arguing with his wife over his supposed lack of devotion to her. They're discussing a friend of his, who she feels is largely to blame for her husband's lack of attentions.

Wife: Your friend? You mean you went to the whorehouses together? It was he who lured you away from the duties you owe to me.
Politician: Madame, in matters of debauchery it was I who lured him. And I didn't need anyone to lure me away from the duties I owe you. I made you four children very conscientiously. Thank the Lord my duty is done!
Wife: I pray heaven he stays away from you. You may appreciate the joys of family life again.

The sounds of their children playing raucously nearby can be heard. The wife is working on weaving a large tapestry.

Politician: The joys of family life are limited, Madame. To be perfectly frank, you bore me! You and you everlasting backbiting! And for God's sake how long does it take to weave a tapestry? It's mediocre beyond belief.
Wife: One performs according to one's gifts!

Name the film, the year of release, the director, the screenwriter(s), and the actors in the scene.