The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - Criterion Audio Commentary

Filmmaker Commentary Tracks and their Usefulness

They say listen to people who are doing what you want to do. So I’m surprised that it is in fashion to disrespect the opportunity provided by the better DVD commentaries. I don’t buy a DVD generally unless there is a commentary. They can be long, but at least like radio or a podcast you can listen while doing other things. Here are a few samples. Control – distinguishing between the actor’s “journey as a human being” as opposed to honoring the character and function of the story. David Fincher commentary on various films Ridley Scott – commentary from Thelma and Louise is very worth hearing Beyond these, I’d recommend Aranovski’s commentary for Requiem for a Dream which gets into the why of some shot choices. For example, it would not have occurred to me that in a restaurant dialogue scene the person with more depth and background behind him/her has the “authority” in the scene. Nicholas Meyer (Wrath of Khan) gives good commentary on his disks, Frank Darabont’s commentaries on Shawshank, Green Mile and The Mist are very informative, any movie on which Walter Murch was editor or sound he might have a separate commentary for his own discipline, The Conversation, for example, which breaks things down more than the director commentary. Writer/actor Emma Thompson has her own commentary on Sense and Sensibility which is more worthwhile than the director’s track for Sense and Sensibility. If you only have time to hear one commentary on Citizen Kane, choose the Roger Ebert version which is very informative and especially useful to film students. Roger Deacons the cinematographer from Fargo gets to provide its only commentary track, but he lets you know how the shots came about and his process with the meticulous Coen brothers as well as the truth about the “true story” card at the beginning. Some directors do embrace commentary tracks for the sake of posterity and use the time efficiently, while others admittedly seem to recline and wax nostalgic with actors and may not have screened the film in years or planned an approach to the track nor had anything to get off the chest. Haskell Wexler Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Audio Commentary is very detailed, best listened to if you are already familiar with Mike Nichols’ first feature but the descriptions by Wexler are detailed enough that you can imagine the set-ups and situations explained.

mini-review: The Beaver

This is the first of my reviews pulling down DVDs from my own collection. I hesitate to include this one because I notice a disproportionate number of blog posts about Mel Gibson. Strange. I'll hold off any reviews on his other flicks until after I have been through a few others here. Pardon the hiss of sound on this one. The shot-gun mic I was using is not up to snuff. Waste of money. But at least this gets across my glib, flip remarks about The Beaver.

terrible scrapped intro for Six Million Dollar Man

Looking at the Season 1 discs, the second TV movie had this intro with what sounds more like a "jingle" than a theme. Even though I agree with the sentiment that "he's the man" I can see that this never would have become as enduring as the intro The Six Million Dollar Man ended up with. Still, interesting to see. The song is in the last 20 seconds of this 60 second temporary intro:

Adopt a DVD

I look at my DVD collection and I first think of the missing teeth. One disc is missing from a 2-disc John carpenter case which had The Thing (I already have a better copy of that) and Prince of Darkness which I intended to watch and ended up looking for on Youtube when I gave up looking for the disc. I loaned Fido - a Canadian zombie movie with Carrie Anne Moss and Billy Connely - to a producer named Anthony who hasn't responeded to a message or a prod or a reasonable question in. . .well, in February 2011 it will be 2 years. I'm not re-buying it unless it is with money voluntarily given by Anthony or mugged from him. (Of special note: the most important quality of a producer is honesty. He's welcome to lie to everyone else, but he must deal with me only with integrity. And since is doesn't HAVE TO kiss up to me or honor a simple thing like returning a borrowed DVD, and he has failed to do that, his window for proving he is honorable is closing fast. I forgot to open my Something MORE About Mary box, and so I don't know off hand if I still have my special features disc. Jay, the friend who introdced me to would-be-producer Anthony still has one of my discs, Orgazmo by Trey parker. But that's not theft or neglect. It was found and I decided to pointedly leave it until it has been watched. But maybe movies can't be forced on people.

The next thing I notice when I step back from the DVDs is the cheer volume. If I equate these with mental clutter I think maybe I should remove them carefully like moduals of memory from HAL 9000. Is it really necessary for me to use all of these as a touchstone to transport back to the 80's or 90's or the Zeros? There was a time when it all felt necessary, or part of learning my craft as a budding screenwriter and director. Am I ever going to need to watch Ace Ventura again? Well, maybe. I start making a pile of movies I might never watch again. Maybe I got them as part of a deal.

Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 may be the worst movie I own. I can't get rid of it because it's on the same disc as the other two. That also means that if I watch it on my laptop it won't fill the screen so I won't get full picture quality of the crap.

On the other end of the spectrum is David Cronenberg's Fast Company, which also has two of his shorts Crimes of the Future and Stereo. I have listened to the commentary and seen these movies dutifully and nothing has found purchase in my brain let alone my spirit. Stereo has a nice mind-reading premise and there is a shot I plan to reference in my own mind reading film but the tone is far more arty than anything I would want to make. Both shorts feel like there was an assigned running time and everything was shot long and edited long to fill that out. If an image is laid bare it doesn't gain meaning, as far as I'm concerned. it just seems ponderous. Fast Company is a serviceable bit of "Canadian film" in the usual sense. It doesn't look like a Cronenberg film. It may be a personal expression of his, as he says, because he does like race cars. But it would have been nice if one of the cars was a giant bug. All things considered it is better than his other car movie, Crash which I don't have (not to be confused with Paul Haggis' Oscar-winning and self-important yet forgetable multi-story LA TV movie of the week, which I do have in the most expensive version). Cronenberg's crash was notable for having a car chase that manages to be slow and boring, as well as sex that is kind of boring, and I was never stoned enough to appreciate it apparently.

I have 2010 The Year We Make Contact, and yes I have watched it this year. But I don't have 2001: A Space Odyssy. The last time I saw the Kubrick film was January 2001 whwn I borrowed a friend's VHS tape of it and watched it alone in the dark at home and actually kind of liked it. I did this because I had heard MGM had no plans to re-release it which seems a shame. I don't feel any impulse to see it again though. If I do, I'll borrow a DVD and just listen to the cast commentary.

I have the Canadian movie Defendor (sic) about a mentally challenged superhero. I like it, but I also know it is unlikely I will watch it again. Maybe it's just a matter of age. It's harder for me to forget movies even though other vital issues fall by the wayside. I have Doctor Detroit, a mugging fest about a guy posing as a pimp, which is a lesser pimp movie than Night Shift but I think more entertaining than Risky Business (which I don't have but recently borrowed from the library).

Closets full of DVDs anyway appear to present a statement: this person appears to have too much time on his hands.

90 minutes to two hours or more per DVD case, then commentaries and docs and anso some TV series. I have every episode of Wonder Woman, and I remember the circumstances under which I was able to get through most of those as they hit the stores. But for possible legal reasons I won't go into that here. It would undermine the field that I work in. Even though I was on nights at the time. I have every Young Indiana Jones episode, and I know I haven't made it through all of that and yet I like Indy. There are some great documentaries about real history, very educational, but since I had no choice but to have those as part of a very expensive package I have been stubborn about not watching them. I would have preferred some behind the scenes or commentaries or interviews or inclusion even as a special feature George Hall's bookend sequences as OLD Indiana Jones with an eye patch. Maybe those were tossed aside when Lucas realized Indiana Jones at Age 70 would look pretty much exactly like Harrison Ford - numerically old but nimble and fit. I have every Mork and Mindy available on DVD, though they don't seem to have yet released the Merth episodes which I have had to look up on a certain website. I wouldn't mind forcing myself to sit through the animated series either, but maybe I would just have it, watch one episode and just never get around to enduring it.

I have a lot of VHS to unload while it can still be unloaded. VHS was my generation, the eighties an early nineties, how I saw most of the great film and a lot of the crap - the good and bad crap. I have at least set aside a box of those for the day I have the gusto to haul it to a store than might buy it or to a library that might find the tapes a good home for donations. Maybe the latter will be the case for a lot of these. Even my Star Wars and Raiders movies on VHS are little more than paper weights. It isn't like they can be handed down like a family heirloom. Any kids of my own I might have or my neice and nephews won't be interested in the historical significance of VHS any more than Super 8. I'm old enough that when I was single digits until age 12 or so I would go to North Bay's public library and borrow a Super 8mm projector or a 16mm projector and sometimes a screen and a bunch of film reels and play those for family and neighbors. Then I was borrowing the record LP size cartridge movie discs that predated laser discs. Those tended to skip a bit but they were pretty cool anyway.

I have a hard time throwing anything out. I want to think it will benefit humanity in some way. It's like the generous way someone offers you the last rancid slice of pizza before it goes into the garbage.

Maybe a library or The Liason of Independant Filmmakers of Toronto or some other organization can put out a call for DVDs that people want to get rid of that they are simply storing but that should go to people who are actually interested in watching movies rather than using them as coasters. Tyler Durden, in a movie I'm not giving away, says, "The things you own end up owning you." Very true. I mean I question the impulse to give anything away, since that is what suicidal people do as an early warning sign and it's not like I've made great leaps in the personal life or career lately. But clutter is clutter.

I have moments of posessive tension when people take too long to watch a movie and give it back, maybe partly because of matters mentioned above. But in a sense the leap of faith in loaning out movies is something I've done since I was a kid or showing movies. That's my way of connecting and communicating. THIS means something to me. See if you like it. Of course a person can wonder why officially escapist movies mean something to me, but those people dont impress me. A well told story is a ritual, and even the silliest contains elements people can connect to. Or impose themselves on and interpret in their own private and maybe opposite way.

Anyway, still making lists to separate the wheat from the chaff.

(And yes, I just googled that line to see how to spell "chaff." )

zoetrope.com

I'm starting my day early for no reason. Usual bowl of chilled monkey brains just so it won't go bad, watching my girlfriend levitate from the other side of the table. She hits her head on the ceiling a lot since I filled her with helium. Otherwise a typical day.

I may check my e-mails and the usual message boards, even though they say "ignore the fruits of your actions." By that rule it makes no sense to see if anyone replies to a post. It would save a lot of time.

Here's a quote that is rattling around in my head lately, like a song that just won't go away so you have to look for it on Youtube or your own collection and hear it until you are cured:

"I've been in high school eight years; I'm no dummy."
- Curtis Armstrong advising John Cusack in Better Off Dead

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088794/

I think it's the ever-present realization that being "smart about movies" isn't such a badge of honor and that when you close in on a decade of discussions (even killing time on someone else' clock as is the case with many of us most of the time) it's not that a seasoned veteran of b.s. can say to a newbie, "Listen here, in my day. . ."

There have been steps forward in the vocation, but if I was one of those annoying people with a five year plan and a one year plan chirping "fail to plan, plan to fail" I might be more in touch with whatever unconscious depression might be going on. Or I might be exactly where I need to be. They say the measure of sanity is the proximity of reality to the dream.

What could I be doing instead of debating whether a given movie may be over-rated or under-rated? I mean, I'd be sacrificing the pay-off of possibly convincing some anonymous teen to knuckle down and see more movies. What could I be doing instead of watching movies? To my left is a $3500 Cannon HX A1 which can shoot some pretty decent HD; it has a nice t-shirt over it so it won't get all dusty. On the floor is the instruction manual torn apart for photocopies. I've read some of it. What a time to realize my instruction-phobia is back in full bloom. I've had meetings and meetings and generated a backlog of scripts. . .

I wonder how many screenplays I can read and review - under whatever accounts or IDs - and have it improve my taste and facility within the form of the screenplay. It's great to stumble across a link to a resource or somebody else's short film and be inspired once in a while or take a shortcut in my political education or current events by looking at articles and clips that someone else labored to collect. I'll get drawn into a debate on zoetrope once in a while, and it's interesting to come away with a vivid projection of someone's character or pathology. Not something to debate or even state outright, of course, because any self-respecting sociopath would take offence at the accusation. I have been called arrogant, but it's hard to make that stick when I'm pretty open about my stupidity.

I know from my job that there are some very functional sociopaths walking around.

Starting to dabble in radio drama again. I wrote a one-act play for the stage in 2001 after I had been on my job for a few months. It had a public reading, went well, and then after 9/11 there was to be a reading of the next draft and somehow I got the date wrong and missed it. I've been re-writing it on the same themes with each workplace. Once in a while a vital layer is added and the story enriched bu higher stakes. A life experience can be an end to itself; a job experience had better add to the writing.

I keep thinking if I really apply myself I can finish watching all the Extended Lord of the Rings DVDs by this weekend, and hear the commentaries. Imagine THAT feeling like a chore to procrastinate about.

Man, when I had nothing, when I had no job or when I thought my job was temporary I would spend days in a library cubby hole doing my storyboards and correcting my scripts. There is a point where everything that drifts into your transom is not there as a sprig of wisdom that has to be absorbed or explored in your life as an artist. Most opinions are the waste material of having consumed movies or TV or gossip rags or having spent all day playing video games (like cigarettes, this last example is one of the few bad habits I haven't picked up yet, much to the disappointment of friends and nephews).

If anyone else does read this, the one thing I can say in my defense is that the chilled monkey brains and inflate-a-date are jokes. If I actually get some cardio at the gym today for a change, I might view this whole thing differently. I might be ready to actually accomplish something today.

New Year Crap-Clear

So I'm sorting through the gym bag that usually keeps vital work-related materials I take to the workplace, pills, work shirt, body spray and random free newspapers I have read on the subway with articles I hadn't finished importing into my brain. Garbage in, garbage out.

I can understand keeping an issue that boasts one of my letters to the editor. Those may not be thrown out except by accident. Whether I should keep them or not. But since it is perfectly acceptable and thoughtful to leave a Metro or Eye Weekly on the subway seat, I have chosen to stuff the most worthless material in my gym bag. So as I throw these papers out it's a review of the year's news that isn't quite news.

Jerry Lewis went to Australia and when asked if he liked playing cricket he said, "That's a faggot game" and did some physical comedy miming use of a cricket bat. So there's an article about GLAAD slapping him on the sturdy wrist and asking him for an apology. Like millions of Rat Pack fans will abandon Jerry for using the "new F-word." It amazes me how lobby groups seem to be in the business of telling people to lie to them. I don't have to pathologize Jerry for being out of touch with the latest edition of Newspeak. But you can understand if he has lingering resentment for the 2002 TV movie Martin and Lewis that was made about him where a guy from Will and Grace - Sean Hayes - played him. I remember saying to a friend after seeing a clip, "I didn't know Jerry Lewis was gay."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318908/

That gives an idea the kind of time and thought wastage results from reading a newspaper.
Did I have to know about that? When Issiah Washington was fired from Grey's Anatomy for calling T.R. Knight the same derogatory term for homosexual, my first instinct was that this is an over-reaction and extremely political (read: cowardly). T.R. crying on Ellen's couch didn't help boost his preferred image as the stoic leading man he was destined to be. Somehow since those articles we have more recent useless information that his role has been reduced on the show since Mr. Washington went to the Bionic Woman (much to the glee of snarky, fey critics). I'll be honest, I thought the Bionic Woman pilot episode was okay and I like Katee Sackoff as a satirical antagonist. A can't comment on Gay's Anatomy, because I've never seen an episode.

Still the new Bionic Woman pales by comparison to the original Bionic Woman and The Six Million Dollar Man which have been mired in a legal dispute between Universal and I forget what company. I try to google it and the term "Million dollar" is pretty common and "Bionic Woman" tends to bring up reference to the new-fangled version.

I seem to be finding a lot of blurbs about the apparent comeback of Tom Cruise after having supposedly killed his career. Imagine Tom Cruise in the early days of Top Gun and Rainman, with Barbara Walters bringing in a psychic to tell him this: "You will be very popular for many years until what kills your career is that you are so happy that you jump on Oprah's couch - but of course that's not enough to REALLY kill your career; you also criticise Brooke Shields."
What else hurt him? Of course Sumner Redstone making a point of saying that his behaviour hurt the box office of Mission: Impossible III. I see in another trash blurb that they have since reconciled and had lunch, but only after Tom had to become head of MGA/UA. Old Redstone seemed to be administering the death blow, and he was motivated because his lovely wife had a head full of this disposable tabloid crap. The guy manages to survive as a top Box office draw with a name like Cruise and what almost sinks him is an old man's wife reading the kind of crap I'm now finally throwing out.

What I can't have the pleasure of physically trashing is the sort of "news" feed you get signing into certain websites for e-mail. How do they choose these columnists? It has never been more true that somebody got a job by giving a blow. Do I really want to see an idiot's list of the "forgettable movies of the year" or a rant against Mel Gibson and the gossip about his marriage? Just another distraction. I have to reign myself in or I'll spend all of my time e-mailing incompetant cyber-columnists. Those that actually have a talk-back e-mail provided. Even then, likely it only bolsters the impression that people are reading the shite.

I won't mention a local Toronto film community that has a pressence on the web and sends out shameless viral marketing. I like the people involved but I've had to withdraw from involvement or the loop of promotions. It's too much. You get double and tripple versions of the same link and it takes up space in your Facebook feed even if you sellect "less from" this friend. And again I've had to confront this mentality and I've been told point blank that their columnists deliberately take extreme and controversial positions - many of which are inarticulate and non-persuasive - to get people fired up and attract feedback. I just thought why make myself crazy. Throw it all out. Ignore, ignore.

Now I'll have to look at my mostly blank Day-timer from last year, with its pages used as a notebook for some random ideas and snippets of dialogue. Maybe I'll actually have more time to plan things to do this year if I'm not wasting a little bit at a time paying attention to the sickening void of pop culture.

I should add another note for the sake of the few knee-jerks who might happen upon this blog and take offence at my issues with GLAAD and groups like them: I'm all for gay marriage and gay adoption and all of those many bench marks of progress that won't have an impact on what I want or have to do in my own life. But we live in a climate where we don't know each other and few intelligent people dare say anything that isn't affirmative. I'm not surprised to see a full-page article about the return of Andrew "Dice" Clay to comedy. People may very well need to listen to something that is expressing a very valid feeling of discomfort. I don't think discomfort should be lumped in with fear and certainly not hated to the point where someone's disinterest or a market's disinterest in something is branded "non-inclusive." I think it's great that the net version of Star Trek has introduced Captain Kirk's gay nephew, but I'm not rushing to find out how that is illustrated. Live long and prosper, as long as I don't have to pretend T.R. Knight is cool. Roddenberry was bucking the system to deal with race and staff the Enterprise with a multi-racial crew, but these days to buck the system is to be politically incorrect and outrage lobby groups.

All of this cluttering my head as I haul fresh new garbage out the door.