goes beyond the film itself, since through video we have
come to, essentially, the preservation of film history. But
is, for instance, The Last Starfighter really all that his-
torically significant in the pioneering of digital effects as its
liner notes proclaim, as does an included documentary? Do I
really care, I ask myself, hoping by the asking I can pump up
some enthusiasm for the subject? Nope, not really and truly.
But then again, sometimes I do. I would have loved any
commentary from Stanley Kubrick about his aesthetic sensi-
bility and how he applied it to film. (As noted above, I watched
the documentary on The Shining before I checked out the
quality of the movie’s transfer, and normally a
scenes documentary I could care less about.) I would even
liked to have known how some of the Steadicam shots in that
film were made, and whether the evil smile Jack Nicholson
gives the camera as he throws dishes at it was on purpose. I
would like to know how some of the shots in Wolfen were
made – and how they got an obviously terrified Albert Finney
to go up on the Williamsburg Bridge’s topmost spans. Ditto for
a director’s cut of Wolfen and some commentary about how
he, Michael Wadleigh (Woodstock), used sound to tie the the-
matic elements of the film together.*
Or what he originally had in mind before the picture was
taken away from him. I wouldn’t even have minded hearing
from John Frankenheimer about the spectacular last car
chase in Ronin: DeNiro looks terrified and he appears to be
doing much of the driving. How did they manage the mechan-
ics of driving two high-speed cars the wrong way on a Paris
freeway (and through a tunnel that looks suspiciously like the
one where Princess Diana met death)? And I’m always inter-
ested in seeing the sexy stuff they cut out, e.g., the 65 seconds
of Eyes Wide Shut, which Kubrick fudged on to avert an NC-
17 rating in America, but which will be shown as shot (private
parts and all) elsewhere in the world. Postscript: Wouldn’t it be
an event, if not one likely in this or any other realm, to have a
commentary about his work from Terence Malick?
Maybe I’m just wondering aloud if I am the only movie col-
lector who could do without the sometimes intimidating array
of bonuses that come increasingly on DVD, even for movies
that are quite ordinary. Too much of what passes for “special”
features on DVD is drivel and only partially treated sludge, cre-
ating an illusion of importance and “permanence” for movies
that are quite ephemeral in the sense of having lasting value,
even if such features are therapy for the egos of the
moviemakers, and aromatherapy, in the more odious sense,
for the rest of us.
Worth a Look:
(Relatively) Recent Arrivals
Gallipoli. Peter Weir, director. 1981. 5.1 discrete
surround. 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Enhanced for 16.9.
111 minutes. Paramount.
As it proved with its DVD issue of Days of Heaven, Para-
mount is no slouch when it comes a startlingly good video
transfer. And of late it seems that Paramount has put itself
*This movie is still available on laserdisc and is a showcase, even in matrixed form, for the use of surround sound.
solidly back in the camp of those who “enhance” their
transfers for widescreen viewing on a 16.9 sized
screen. (It started out with “enhanced” releases, then
abandoned the practice, now “enhancement” is back on their
recent releases, including, most notably The Ten Command -
ments.) I believe than fans of this early Peter Weir movie (fea-
turing a
this release. The movie is exquisitely beautiful in this transfer.
Weir knows how to use the widescreen, and this disc could
well be a demonstration for the virtues of preserving a film’s
original aspect ratio.
reminds me of the early California gold miners, hurts this film,
reducing it to a buddy movie when that is only the super-
structure around which Weir has built a picture of the Aussie
and his sensibility, then as now.
What Dreams May Come. Vincent Ward, director. l998.
5.1
Vincent Ward has made two fascinating films. One is called
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, the other is Map of the
Human Heart.
The Navigator is a wondrous strange little film, about
some medieval villagers, on a kind of crusade (looking for
a cross) who stumble across time and into contemporary
New Zealand. It is a film full of odd and quite gripping
moments, none finer, to my way of thinking, than their con-
frontation with a freeway, which they must cross if they are
to succeed in their venture. Map of the Human Heart,
which is available on a laserdisc you must not buy, is a film
that works best and only in its wide aspect ratio. If you see
the pan/scan version, you won’t have the vaguest notion
why us
tive storytelling. (Even the versions shown on satellite’s art
movie venues, usually home to widescreen issues, are
pan/scan.) I don’t know how to explain what happens. But
somehow the heart has gotten cut out of the film.
What Dreams could have been every bit as good as the
two earlier films if only Ward could have had a Tom Hanks
or some
pompous, smug, condescending Robin Williams, who, I’d
guess, isn’t into the material at all. Lacking that kind of High
Romantic’s sensibility, he would be bound to a kind of con-
fusion about the character he is playing. We have to believe
in a man who loves his wife to the point that he would give
up all hope of Heaven to find and to rot beside her in Hell.
So Williams slaps on a goofy, sweet grin, the one that has
carried him through so many other mushy roles, and tries to
look sincere. He’s as out of place in this fantasy as I’d be at
a militiaman’s convention. And it wrecks the picture. We
can’t believe in him, so we don’t believe in it. By a mile, it
was the worst performance by a major male star last year
(and he still had Patch Adams ahead of him).
Williams dies, in more ways than one, early on in the
picture and goes to a Heaven that seems to consist of his
wife’s paintings, evidently meant to be her idea of heaven,
though it is not quite clear why it should be his. This gives
the special effects “artists” – and in this movie they are that