Antonioni's L'ECLISSE (The Criterion Collection, No. 278, 1962, two discs, $39.95, Tuesday, March 15) is commonly viewed as the final entry in a trilogy about alienation and man's inability to communicate. But isn't it really the first film of a different trilogy? A trilogy about modern men for the most part detached from humanity and comfortable in the new, anti-human environment while all others around them are driven mad? That's the real theme of L'ECLISSE, and the theme is carried over into RED DESERT, which makes the madness of those who cannot adapt to reality, and BLOW UP, another portrait of a man thoroughly integrated into his inhuman society, but here befuddled by the alternative to reality offer by the hippie and protest movement.

L'ECLISSE, like most of Antonioni's films from the 1950s, is a love story, but from a modernist perspective, i.e., nothing much happens, and the romance peters out into inertial. Vittoria (Monica Vitti) breaks up one dawn morning with her current boyfriend, and later that day drifts into a flirtation with her mother's broker, Piero (Alain Delon). Vittoria is attracted but something holds her back. Is it a fear that she will address the same issues that ruined her relationship with Riccardo? Or is it that Piero represents something inhuman that she can't get behind? Is her alienation based on the fact that society is leaving her behind and that Piero represents the "new man," fully adapted to the new harsh world, like Richard Harris in RED DESERT? The film leaves these questions intriguingly unanswered as it creates a "symphony of a city" in this, Antonioni's "Rome film" to match the Milan of LA NOTTA and the Sicily of L'AVENTURA. It's visually beautiful, to me the most beautiful of all Antonioni's films, and obsessed with both physical objects, which Vittoria touches constantly as if to ground herself, and the urban landscape, which seems almost always very artificial and humanly inhospitable.

Antonioni came to film via a circuitous route. While most filmmakers come from theater or TV, Antonioni started out as a film critic, and then a documentarian. On his way to co-founding neo-realism, he managed to observe and explore the fate of love in the post-war world. But unlike the films of, say, De Sica, his films are uncompromising, making no concessions to perceived public taste or expectations (not unlike, curiously, the films of Bergman). Antonioni said of his "road" film IL GRIDO that he "took the bicycle out of neorealism." His films have a formal beauty (that is also in a sense an architectural critique of modern society) that is much not in the spirit of the rough street view of the world for which neorealism is known.

In a sense, style, the very thing that auteur critics search for and which identifies a director, gets in the way of a film. I think that most average viewers prefer blandness, or TV style movies. Style gets in the way of the story for them. Just as you don't want too much visual experimentation in your pornography, most mainstream viewers don't want the camera to get in the way of the love story or action tale in front of them. Yet the whole point for Antonioni is to use the visual frame to tell the bulk of the story, wordlessly, using objects and the environment as a metaphor to comment on the action, the way Raymond Chandler or John D. MacDonald's jokes and metaphors are moral comments.

Now 93 as of right this second, Antonioni, in poor health, has lapsed into the incommunicability he explored so vibrantly in his 60's films. Yet he is still making movies (he has a segment in the forthcoming EROS), perhaps because as a primarily visual filmmaker he doesn't need the words now lost to him to speak his piece or share his current observations on society.

L'ECLISSE is one of my top 10 favorite movies (at times I think that it is my favorite movie) and the Criterion Collection's two-disc version is a treat. Disc One bears the black and white film in a luscious restored widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) with modest DD 1.0 audio (in Italian with optional English subtitles). Richard Peña, of the Lincoln Center film society, does the commentary track and it is informative as far as it goes, but because I am so obsessed with the film I found it didn't quite go far enough in explicating the role of Piero as a modern example of the New InHuman.

Disc Two has a documentary and a new video interview (both in Italian with English subtitles), MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI: THE EYE THAT CHANGED CINEMA, made for Italian television and which charts his career via various interview snippets, and ELEMENTS OF LANDSCAPE, which has new interviews with two Antonioni colleagues, Italian film critic Adriano Apra and Carlo di Carlo, who explicate Antonioni's film with great sympathy. The dual disc digipak comes with a 32-page booklet that includes essays by the always insightful Jonathan Rosenbaum and Gilberto Perez (though I didn't read these for fear of being influenced), and two excerpts from Antonioni's writings, plus stills, cast and credits, transfer info, and chapter titles. The animated musical menu offers 19-chapter scene selection.

THE INCREDIBLES (Buena Vista, 2004, two discs, $29.95, Tuesday, March 15) is the apotheosis, the most popular manifestation, of a theme burbling in comic book culture since the 1980s, a sort of demystification of superherodom. The first example of this, pointed out by many others, is Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's WATCHMEN (due soon for re-publication in the DC Absolute series ). There may be earlier attempts but I can't think of them. In Moore's writing, the superheroes are chunky, graying, and late in life mere parodies of themselves, as we all become in our dotage. Like Frank Miller's big-gutted Batman, their flaws belie the image of the superhero that they have cultivated, a metaphor in its way of all pop culture and its self-motivated icons.

THE INCREDIBLES carries this notion into the comic realm, with Mr. Incredible, a.k.a. Bob Parr, in a superhero witness protection program after the moral equivalent of a Keene Act makes superheroes unsustainable by society. Other elements of WATCHMEN creep in, such as an island hideaway and a super villain killing off "suits" but the similarities are really only tangential. The story is actually about an affirmation of a certain kind of faith — in super hero activity as truly viable, in the family, in one's own instincts.

Brad Bird's script is very clever. He has a knack for inserting references almost anonymously only to have them pay off later in the film (follow the capes theme). He also knows the general trajectory of cartoon hero stories, which is the full abeyance of the hero by the villain through much of the middle of the story. Obviously, a huge team of collaborators helped Bird realize this film at Pixar, but there is little doubt that Bird is the motivating force.

Like most other computer animated films of late, and the most popular kids books such as the Harry Potter series, THE INCREDIBLES can be enjoyed by adults as well as kids. This film, however, despite its comic book mien, is surprisingly bereft of the usual cultural references. It doesn't try to impress you with multitudinous Robin Williams riffs on scatted and perhaps irrelevant media personages, but with its own touching, well-structured story.

If you listen to only one audio commentary track to a movie you like this year let it be Brad Bird and Jon Walker's for THE INCREDIBLES (one of two tracks for the film on the first disc). The second one is fine, too, gathering many of the animators together to chat. But on the first track Bird proves to be a bright guy with firm and well-articulated ideas about how movies should work; it's among the best tracks I've heard in a while (see the quote below).

THE INCREDIBLES comes in a beautiful widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) that, as Bird explains in a special introduction, comes from the digital source files (BV also offers a full-screen version). The sound is DD 5.1 Surround EX audio (with Spanish and French tracks and English, French, and Spanish subtitles). Extras on this disc also include Disney trailers, and the THX Optimizer tool, which Bird recommends that viewers use. Also, both yak tracks are conveniently subtitled in numerous languages.

Disc Two is packed. There are eight "making-of" featurettes," plus "Jack-Jack Attack," a new cartoon derived from the film, along with the Pixar short "Boundin'" with optional commentary by director Bud Luckey, "Who is Bud Luckey?" featurette, and the "Mr. Incredible & Pals" cartoon with optional commentary by Frozone and Mr. Incredible. Also on hand is "Incredi-Blunders," bloopers and outtakes, several deleted scenes, plus an alternate opening, the jokey top secret NSA files on all the heroes, and "Vowellet" an essay by NPR voice Sarah Vowell, who plays Violet. There is also an eight-page insert that includes a fine little flow chart of the contents of both discs. The animated musical menu comes with 32-chapter scene selection.

Coincidentally, released almost at the same time is THE SPECIALS (Anchor Bay, 2000, $19.98, Tuesday, February 22), an earlier attempt to do the "superheroes as ordinary folk" trick.

Craig Mazin directs THE SPECIALS, but the film is really the brainchild of James Gunn, the writer and enactor of one of the Specials. It mostly takes place in the Specials world headquarters (an old house in what looks like Monrovia, California). Seeing shows like THE OFFICE or CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM must be bitterly frustrating for Gunn, who viewed THE SPECIALS as a faux documentary and clashed with Mazin about that (they are friends again, according to Gunn on his yak track).

The joke of this film is that the Specials never do anything. We never see them fight villains. Instead, we see their internecine fights, mainly between Thomas Hayden Church's Strobe and Rob Lowe's Weevil, who is sleeping with Strobe's wife, Paget Brewster, or Ms. Indestructible. Maybe the film doesn't come across now as funny as it did or could have, but the concatenation of characters is cleverly worked out and they are all individuated in amusing ways. (The film also stars Jamie Kennedy and a thighbooted Judy Greer as the Goth Deadly Girl.)

This Anchor Bay special edition kicks off with one of the funniest, dishiest audio tracks ever. Gunn and co-star Brewster yak over the movie and trash everything from Jessica Alba to the way Lowe tries to make his eyes look bigger on screen (I will leave that for you to discover). It's hilarious, and Hollywood is so self-protective now that it's a shock to hear people speaking frankly about conflicts with co-workers, table gossip, and the business in general.

There is also a second commentary track also with Gunn, joined by Mazin, producer mark Altman, and the visual effects guy, Mojo. Also on hand are some deleted scenes, the trailer, a stills gallery, and the full toy commercial and wedding footage that figures in the film itself. The transfer of the widescreen film (1.77:1, enhanced) is excellent.

In about the 100th remake of a 1960s film (or a Michael Caine movie), ALFIE (Paramount, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, March 15) has, like HIGH FIDELITY the book, been transposed to America, where this Alfie is a chauffeur, which gives him lots of access to high class women. This version, by Charles Shyer, is reasonably faithful to the first version, but minimizes the abortion angle, which was the raison d'etre of the previous movie, and the play whence it came.

The film aspires to the deft touch of the first and is makes you kind of yearnful for the sexual hijinks of the 1960s, which in the end it is morally against, but feels kind of out of date here. You wonder why they made the movie, which first makes Alfie seem like a lucky guy, and then turns on him, like a bad date. I'd like to see a film that argues against fidelity or monogamy, that makes a case that first, there is nothing wrong with sex with as many people as you can manage, and second, that perhaps it is humanizing to have so much intimate contact with so many different people. That would be a movie. You know, one that reflects how people really conduct their lives.

For a much-anticipated movie that didn't do so well at the box office, Paramount (which of course, planned this disc before the movie even came out) presents a pack ALFIE platter. The film comes in a nice widescreen (1.78:1, enhanced) with mostly effective Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (for the barroom scenes). The disc also offers no less than two audio commentaries, the first with Charles Shyer and editor Padriac McKinley (which helpfully highlights some aspects of the film denuded by the cutting of various scenes), the second with Shyer and co-writer Elaine Pope. There's also an hour's worth of "making of" featurettes, plus "Gedde Wantanabe Dance Footage," which is an outtake feature with optional Shyer and Pope commentary, 11 minutes worth of deleted scenes with optional Shyer and McKinley commentary, plus script, storyboard, and production galleries, and the theatrical trailer, along with additional Paramount trailers. If you liked the movie better than me, this is a smorgasbord.

Another mono-monikered character from the '60s is the retard CHARLY (MGM, 1968, $14.95, Tuesday, March 15), who, in this film based on the novel expanded from the short story "Flowers for Algernon," undergoes a procedure that increases his IQ.

The film was popular at the time of its release, but it made numerous changes from the original story, concessions, I guess, to pop taste. For example, I don't remember Charly (Cliff Robertson) having an affair with his supervisor (Claire Bloom). Nor do I recall Charly's co-workers at the bakery taunting him, as they do here. In a clever twist, Charly himself, now a genius, applies his mind to the problem of the procedure's automatic reversal, which I also don't recall from the story. Here there is a poignant parting between Charly and his supervisor; in the story he goes back to his own ways and has no memory of which being a brainiac, accidentally going to a night school class taught by her and embarrassing everybody. In the end, the story is more tear inducing than the movie, which is odd; you'd think that the power of cinema brought to bear on this fragile narrative would make it even more powerful. CHARLY could stand to be remade, under its original title and with more faithfulness to the source.

MGM offers up a nice widescreen transfer of the film (which does show its age) with a full frame version on the B-side. There are no extras beyond various language and subtitle selections.

The inexplicable fascination, seemingly ungrounded, with STARSKY AND HUTCH: THE COMPLETE THIRD SEASON (Sony Pictures, 1977, five discs, $49.95, Tuesday, March 15) continues. The four-season show reached its peak in its second season but then success bred something akin to fear of success. Spelling - Goldberg essentially changed the format out from under the show, taking away from it what the viewers actually liked. What was once a gritty buddy cop show with a cool theme song became a parody of itself. The Mike Post theme song was replaced with something unmemorable; the duo of Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and Hutch (David Soul) went from street savvy ur-Vic Mackeys to Abbott and Costello.

Part of the problem must have been that Glaser had vocalized a disinclination to return to the show for a third season. He was almost succeeded by a female partner for Hutch, but at the last minute Glaser went ahead with the series, with only remnants of the female partner appearing throughout the early part of the season. Both stars must have felt the conceit and boredom that comes with a hit which led to a desire to leave, to direct individual episodes, and to recklessness of behavior off the screen (Soul had a skiing accident during season 3).

The stars' disenchantment must have been based also on the show's creators not knowing what to do with it, or with the writers just being lazy. The characters' red Gran Torino is destroyed, then returns; Huggy Bear runs a club, and then he doesn't. This continual sloppiness is really evident if you watch a bunch of episodes closely together. But the worst aspect of season three is the diminution of the two lead cops into buffoons. This tone commences with the first two eps, a two-parter in which they go undercover on "Playboy Island" to find out why some rich guy in ill-health is kept under wraps. It is a story of such inconsequence and tedium as to evade memory. The whole season is like that. The first story is immediately followed by one with Karen Valentine as a crazy jealous stalker a la PLAY MISTY FOR ME. Other eps have Starsky falling for a mob boss's daughter and Hutch for a Russian ballerina. In general the violence and car chases are minimized and the "drama" (gayness and drugs pop up) and goofiness magnified.

Five discs. No extras.

As I've mentioned before one of my childhood memories is of how much I loved the Hardy Boys serial on the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB show, THE MYSTERY OF THE APPLEGATE TREASURE (based, I believe, on the first Hardy Boys book, THE TOWER TREASURE), the first of two Hardy Boys adaptations in the mid-1950s. As a little kid I loved the whole opening credit sequence, with its pirates and doubloons, and in the show itself the wind swept suburban neighborhood with its turreted houses and water towers.

This youthful fantasia does not hold up to THE HARDY BOYS NANCY DREW MYSTERIES: SEASON ONE (Sony Pictures, 1977, five discs, $49.95, Tuesday, March 22), a really lousy show geared to teenie boppers fixated on Shaun Cassidy.

These are not your boyhood Hardy Boys. They are surfing, rocking dudes in helmet hair and big teeth. And they are appallingly bad actors trying to make execrable dialogue sound light and funny. I also couldn't take Parker Stevenson seriously as Frank Hardy once I noticed how much he looks like Chevy Chase. The brainchild of Glen Larson (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA), one of the three big TV product providers of the era along with Stephen Cannell and Spelling -Goldberg, and a man who often also composed the theme songs to his series, this show alternated weekly a Hardys story with a Nancy Drew mystery.

Not only did the Nancy Drew half of the series have better constructed and more clever mysteries, it also had the virtue of Pamela Sue Martin. Before Katie Holmes, Martin was the cutest girl in the world, the cutest girl who ever was and who would ever be. Her face is endlessly fascinating, a cross between a duck and a fluffy bunny. I could look at it for hours. Well, seven hours, to be precise, the length of time it takes to view her half of the season. There are also the usual morbid pleasures to be had from an old show from the 1970s, such as seeing Ricky Nelson in a Hardy Boys episode in which he plays a rock star about to fly a booby trapped airplane.

Somebody at Universal must have been colorblind and the only thing he could see was yellow. That is the only explanation for the yellow color scheme of the continually overlit sets of the typical Universal series. DREW and HARDY BOYS is no exception. These are terribly lit and shot shows, even when the great Russell Metty steps in to shoot an episode or two. The Hardy side of this box is negligible. The Drew side may be worth a rest for those who are nostalgic for the kids shows the late 1970s.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From the first audio commentary track on THE INCREDIBLES: "The filmmakers I most admire recognize the value of teasing moments and milking moments. Think about a good storyteller who tells good stories in a bar, they don't blast through a story. They stop and savor moments. And they know which moments they can milk. And all of my favorite filmmakers have the confidence to slow down. Versus, I won't name names, but a lot of successful hacks, who by having rapid-fire editing all the way through never have to d eal with the issue of is anybody paying attention, because they keep throwing stuff at you. And to me, there's an edge of desperation about that. The kind of filmmaking I most admire takes a moment to savor things, because there are also many things that a movie can offer." —Director Brad Bird on his aesthetic, Disc One, 00:57:09.

Letters

From Theron Neel:

"I grew up in the '70s, and COLUMBO was one of my "must see" shows. MCMILLAN AND WIFE was cool, too, because — hey — Susan St. James was a stone '70s fox, man. But Peter Falk made COLUMBO great. A little known fact about Columbo is that the character of Det. Columbo was based on Lt. William Kinderman, Lee J. Cobb's character from THE EXORCIST. If you watch the movie with this in mind, it's amazing how obvious it is. Kinderman is a bit more "Jewish" (no offense meant) than Columbo but, otherwise, they're the same character. It was so blatant that it apparently ruffled the feathers of several people involved in THE EXORCIST."

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

NEXT TIME: SIN CITY, more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!

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