Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

Lilo & Stitch (2002)

In the wake of all of the extras I saw last week, I had to watch the film again, and it continues to hold up. It stars Tia Carrere as the voice of Nani, and she turns up in…

Rising Sun (1993)

The launch of a new format provides some subtle clues to what the film companies regard as their major potential sellers. 20th Century Fox launched widescreen VHS with Die Hard, Alien and the original Star Wars trilogy, and this film, which turned up on DVD three years after the format launch, is one of Fox’s first back catalogue releases on Blu-ray. Clearly, there must be some kind of audience out there waiting to snap it up in high definition. This isn’t a cult audience eagerly awaiting the arrival of Donnie Darko (2001); this isn’t an audience that’s set up websites to discuss the fascinating topic of precisely how many minutes of screen time take place in cars driving between buildings during both night and day so Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes can fill us in on the plot and provide what passes for character development in the Michael Crichton universe (this isn’t a diss; I like Michael Crichton’s work a lot). Rising Sun must have been a solid, consistent seller on DVD over the last 8 years for it to reach the head of the high definition queue. Yet as a movie, it’s only solid rather than spectacular, a chance for Philip Kaufman to assure executives made nervous by the NC-17-rated Henry & June (1990) that he’s still a commercial filmmaker. It’s one he made for them, rather than for himself.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) *

So where does that leave Guillermo Del Toro’s highly touted and eagerly awaited (especially by me) sequel to 2004’s original? Del Toro has received extensive critical approval for the films he’s made in Spanish - Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - whereas his films in English have for the most part been more financially successful but subject to a fair number of sniffy reviews. Even though, for someone like myself who’s seen all of them, they have mostly been constructed from terribly similar personal obsessions - clockwork, insects, surrealism, and so on - and in a weird kind of way have fed off each other and enabled each individual project to come to fruition. Hellboy II only started to seem like a bankable idea again (Hollywood watchers will note that this sequel has been produced - maybe uniquely - by an entirely different corporation) after the critical praise dealt out to Pan’s Labyrinth, and the original Hellboy only fell into place after Blade II (2002) was a major hit. Del Toro has made the sequel more him and less Mignola, when what made the original work so well were all the quirky Mignola-style character notes that were especially emphasised in the Extended Cut of the original. So the sequel looks fabulous, every dollar of the budget is on the screen, and yet it’s nowhere near as interesting. It has a straightforward narrative, more old school Dr Who-style running around in tunnels, and an action beat (read: fight scene) every 10 minutes. The emotional heft of the story has been lost, which in the wake of the strong impact of Pan’s Labyrinth, is especially disappointing. All we can hope is that Del Toro will rediscover his mojo with The Hobbit films, and there won’t be quite so much running around in tunnels, except perhaps under the Misty Mountains. And in Smaug’s cave (I think Smaug lives in a cave, right?). Oh.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Maybe Del Toro should take a leaf out of the Coens’ book, and never make a film for them, meaning the studios, although there was Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004), and they’re better than you think, cause, y’know, it’s the Coen brothers. I’m still learning to like the Lebowski, but I’m getting there. It is really unusual for a major studio release, though, and you can see why this film has become a cult and Rising Sun hasn’t.

I haven’t found time in my busy schedule to watch anything like a proper movie this week, even though Hellboy 2 has now made it into cinemas. Hurrah! Instead, this post’s title should be sufficient to warm the heart of any longtime DVD purchaser, and was prompted by my recent acquisition of the Walt Disney film, Lilo & Stitch: 2-Disc Special Edition, the edition that almost never was. This week’s title in bold is the title of the documentary on Disc 2.

The Story Room: The Making of Lilo & Stitch (2005)

While it might seem in many ways a minor entry in the Walt Disney canon, recent developments in the world of animation have assigned it another place of importance: it was the Disney studio’s last major 2D animated hit when in 2002 it outperformed the much more expensive (and by no means terrible) Treasure Planet (2002) at the American box office. And this 2nd disc of the DVD release includes an indepth 2 hour exploration (which can be expanded to about 3 1/2 hours with a bunch of supplemental featurettes) of how two first-time writer/directors (though both Disney veterans in other areas), Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, pulled it off.

This release followed in the tradition of the exemplary 2-Disc Special Edition release of Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), where, regardless of the qualities or not of the finished product, a comprehensive 2 hour documentary (amongst many other features) told in impressive detail how and why it had been brought to the screen.

It was at this stage that the Disney villain of the piece, then-CEO Michael Eisner, enters the picture. Propped up by a bunch of unreliable marketing reports (”parents didn’t like changing the discs” - so don’t buy the SE, buy the standard edition, you dopes - duh!), irritating corporate bottom-line-ism and his own personal prejudices, Eisner decided that 2-Disc Special Editions which paid respect to a large number of the artists who created these films were to be shitcanned and replaced with bog-standard, feature-light DVDs packed not very full with crappy DVD games for kids and Gareth Gates music videos for no one.

This wouldn’t have been much of a problem except that at this time Disney had embarked on a series of dedicated 2-Disc Platinum Edition releases packed to the gills with the kind of indepth documentary materials, commentary tracks, DTS soundtracks and the like, the majority of which was clearly aimed at adult DVD collectors like me, and not the kids that Eisner thought should be the Special Edition’s intended market; this is precisely the kind of arrogant, blundering wrongheadedness that was ultimately to cost Eisner his job.

The immediate effect of this was that The Lion King (1994) still came out as a 2-Disc Special Edition, but was curiously denuded of a lot of the kind of exemplary background material that had characterised previous releases in the series. Instead there were any number of plugs for The Lion King Broadway musical and featurettes about how great Walt Disney World was, and wasn’t it about time you paid a visit? And The Lion King had been Disney’s biggest recent hit! It deserved much better treatment than this.

One of the other casualties was the 2-Disc Special Edition of Lilo & Stitch, which at the time of writing has still not been released in the US. Eisner has now gone, Pixar has taken over Disney, and it is yet to be seen whether or not the much ballyhooed commitment the Pixar team have publicly made that they would support a 2D animated feature if they felt it was the right way to tell the story will come true. Let’s hope so.

Lilo & Stitch was the little film that could, it was the last film of the much derided Thomas Schumacher era (appointed Animation CEO in the wake of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s controversial departure, though disappointing returns from Treasure Planet led to Schumacher’s departure as well) to connect with a popular audience, proof that a good story, well-developed characters and great jokes could still win through in 2D at a time when the domination of 3D animation had started to become one obvious future. But, for just one example, as the films of Hayao Miyazaki showed, especially Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), not the only one.

No cinema visits this week. Hellboy 2 still not released. Boo.

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Time in film can be interestingly elastic. The events of The Da Vinci Code take place in the course of a single 24 hour period, possibly due to Dan Brown’s lack of experience as a novelist or perhaps his desire to adhere to the Aristotelian unities. Or something like that. On the face of it, 24 hours seems like a ludicrously short period of time for the might of the Catholic Church to be brought metaphorically to its knees by the shocking, unspoilered here revelations of the film’s narrative, or for Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) to uncover them.

This time compression happens out of necessity. For example, how long does it take Jake Gittes to go from photographing Burt Young’s adulterous wife to being told to “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Two weeks? A month? In fact, and I’m not going to check as I know the film enough, it’s a lot less than a week. It seems like a longer period of time as a result of the film’s languid pacing.

On the commentary track for Les Rivières Pourpres (2000), Vincent Cassel points out just how superhuman the two cop characters played by himself and Jean Reno are to have uncovered the complicated, long-running conspiracy that faces them in just a few days. Cassel quite rightly points out that in reality uncovering this kind of conspiracy would take months of boring and monotonous research, if it could even be uncovered at all.

Yet we accept this as a convention of thriller-going and would feel rather cheated if, like the cops in Hot Fuzz (2007), crimes were solved by paperwork rather than by the kicking in of doors, or the punching of faces, or the shooting of guns.

Brick (2005)

In a related vein, Joseph Gordon-Levitt ties up another hideously complicated noir plot in under a week, although he has skipped most of his classes in order to do so, since Brick is set not in the metaphorical state of mind of Chinatown, but in the San Clemente High School which writer-director Rian Johnson attended. Loaded with MacGuffins, femme fatales and stylised dialogue, this is the kind of indie gem made for spare change that the Sundance Festival and seasoned moviegoers live for. A reminder that what you really need in the movie business is a unique point of view distinct from everything else in the marketplace rather than the same old same old recycled yet again. Even though this film noir is old as the hills in plot terms and narrative devices, its location in high school sets it apart and makes it shine.

Just one cinema release, marked with a *. Roll on, Hellboy 2, I’ll be able to see it on DVD from America sooner than it appears in UK cinemas.

Out of Time (2003)

There’s a second (or maybe it’s the third) tier of American film directors who can be relied upon to helm solid character pieces or decent genre work, the kind of films that are too good not to release in theatres, but a long way from being straight to DVD fodder. Discovering these directors is a little more tricky than being, say, a Tim Burton film, since the nature and scale of their productions means the promotional budget gets scaled down appropriately (worst case scenario: there is no marketing budget). Carl Franklin is one of those directors, and Out of Time is eminently solid genre fare with one absolute standout fight sequence that starts in a hotel room that really caught my attention (as it will catch yours, should you catch this film). Carl Franklin is not going to let you down if you want to see a real movie like they used to make them. And he’s not alone.

The Prestige (2006)

I want to see this again. Immediately. Even after it told me I was going to be sideswiped going in (the film is about magic and magicians after all), it still caught me out with the kind of twist that only seems obvious in retrospect. Almost casually thrown away between the two batbusters, this is Christopher Nolan reminding everyone that he’s the same director who made Memento (2000), and his mastery of non-linear storytelling that retains its clarity remains intact.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) *

Hmm, yes, it was a bit of a let-down after the build-up, and it was more like a good TV episode than something that demanded to be told as a movie. Duchovny and especially Gillian Anderson remain very watchable, but Chris Carter et al really don’t seem to have quite worked out the climax of the A-plot and seemed at times rather more interested in the subplots of the narrative than the main event. The one thing the original X-Files movie had which this one doesn’t was size and ambition. And the final Easter egg for the fans in the credits may tell you that the filmmakers know this as well.

Planet Terror (2007)

Well, it took a year but I’ve finally had my Grindhouse (2007) experience (sort of). Although we know why Rodriguez and Tarantino did this (actually to deliver on the promise of grindhouse trailers instead of shortchanging the audience in true exploitation style), I remain ambivalent about the end results. There’s something very misguided about spending an awful lot of money to reproduce (sort of) the effects that were achieved back in the 1970s with chump change and a lot of audience goodwill (and sometimes not even that - some grindhouse films are so ineffably awful that even Tarantino can’t bring himself to champion them - maybe). The most celebrated moment in Planet Terror is the missing reel jump in which all sorts of mayhem happens. Oh, and Machete: there were times I was thinking I’d much rather have watched that movie.

Death Proof (2007)

There’s an awful lot of talk, then a really good stunt, then there’s an awful lot of talk, and a really good chase. And someone somewhere should start an online petition to remind Tarantino that he really isn’t a very good actor, and his cameos should be smaller rather than larger. Anyone for the 6th film from Quentin Tarantino? Me, I’m waiting for his 8 and a half.