Extras, Extras! On DVD

At the moment all of my TV and movie watching is via DVD or even--yes, I've still got a VCR--tape.  During the school year when Margaret likes to relax with no more than an hour in the evening, we watch episodes of a TV series on DVD.  We catch up on the latest release year of a series we like, but much of the time we've never seen the series before, so we start at the beginning.

That's why we watched an episode of the first season of Leverage, from 2008, last night.  And later, before winging it back to Netflix, I watched it again with the commentary.  It reminded me what I like best about DVD commentaries, the subject of a short piece I published in a local paper some 9 years ago, when they were sort of new.

This particular episode was a late season story directed by Jonathan Frakes, who cast three actors from Star Trek's 24th century.  Frakes was by then an experienced TV as well as feature film director, and the persona he may have developed at Trek conventions--quick, funny--is a delight on the commentary.

 Also commenting were a couple of producers and the episode's writer.  They did what is increasingly rare on commentary--they commented on the background to the episode itself, and how it developed within the series.  They talked about influences--Hitchcock and Rockford Files moments, Judgement at Nuremberg as a model for shooting the courtroom scenes.  They talked about the pros and cons of establishing shots, about when to move the camera and when to let it dwell. They talked about the genesis of the story (they had a courtroom set left over from Boston Legal) and that it started with the ending, and worked back. It was great.  It's what I value in commentaries: a combination of a painless film/drama class and some modest gossip.

However I've learned to my chagrin that this is increasingly rare.  I sat through a series of commentaries to a series we like, Bones. Though some commentaries were fun if not overly informative (those with the show's two stars who are also producers and one is a director) there were examples of almost everything that's wrong with commentaries: a group of people who have no idea of what to say or why they are there and wind up talking about utter irrelevancies, or producers etc. who note that every single actor with a line is a great, great actor, and a really great person.

 Meanwhile, where a key episode fits in the arc of the series, the story's genesis or what was learned, goes uncommented upon.  There's the rare gem (a case of the actor whose character was supposed to die but the producers changed their mind and kept her as a regular--something that started Julianne Margulis' career on ER.)  But you have to slog through a lot and somehow stay awake to get there.

Sometimes it's enough that the commenting voices are good company, and it's like hanging out with them for awhile. But you have to be able to understand them--sometimes a problem with fast-talking Brits, especially when they aren't talking about what's on the screen. There are a few commentaries that have little to do with the show that are entertaining anyway, like some of Tom Baker's for Doctor Who. (His often-parodied but easily understood RSC diction is a blessing as well.)  

As for movie commentaries, I've noted at least two other examples of directors who say "this is my favorite scene in the whole movie" a half dozen times--something I mentioned in my earlier piece.  I see fewer new movies these days, and I still enjoy retrospective commentaries on reissues of older films, at least when the people have something to say beyond--I forgot that!  Look how young we were!

What I wrote about deleted scenes still pertains.  Since then I've seen at least one movie I like--called Pirate Radio--which deleted so many scenes that there's another movie there.  Several of the deleted scenes are among my favorites-- better and more memorable than what's in the release version.

More than anything, it may look like I really know how to waste my time.  There's some rueful truth in that.  Still, if I spend the time watching this stuff at all, and I like it, the bonuses become an important part of the experience.

Anyway, here's my first published thoughts on the matter from 2005, prompted by a local columnist who found commentaries and bonus scenes annoying:

I love the bonus features on DVD. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t watch them. But sometimes they are the main reason I rent or buy a DVD movie, apart from the image quality, especially if I’ve already got it on tape.

 Bonus features typically include short documentaries related to the film, a commentary track for the movie itself, and scenes that weren’t in the theatrical release version, either reintegrated into the film or by themselves. They are all hit or miss, of course, but they often add new layers to the experience of the movie.

 The documentaries I often like best are retrospective interviews with directors and actors years after release, when they can put their efforts in perspective, and they can say things that maybe they couldn’t before. But I also like to know how movies are made. I enjoy learning about the process.

 Commentary tracks can be maddening, especially when the voices don’t bother talking about what you’re watching, and what you’d like to know. The worst I’m come across recently is “Spiderman II.” The director is cueing the star (Tobey McGuire) to talk solemnly about how he learns his lines while I’d like to know why they kept that scene with the neighbor bringing Peter Parker a piece of pie is the movie.

 It’s also nearly impossible to follow both the commentary and the movie, even when you select for subtitles (which I usually do). But much of the time, the commentary is enlightening (between descriptions of how effects shots were done, George Lucas describes a surprisingly serious intent for the Star Wars cycle: “how a democracy becomes a dictatorship, and a good person becomes a bad person”) or it’s just entertaining (counting the number of times that director Roland Emerich says “this is my favorite scene” during “The Day After Tomorrow.”)

 Sometimes the commentaries are even better than that. The dialogue between writer/director Nancy Meyers and actor Jack Nicholson on the DVD of “Something’s Gotta Give” is hilarious, and a master class in film acting as well. So not only is this movie worth repeating, so is the commentary.

 If DVDs have done nothing else, they proven how stupid movie studios can be in editing scenes out of movies just to make them shorter. They leave gaping holes in the story and make the actors look dumb, just so they can have more showings to confuse more people. But without the need to sell more tickets on opening weekend at the multiplex, DVDs can restore the scenes that at least give the movie a chance to make sense. That’s a more a restoration than a bonus.

 That works best when they actually put the scenes back where they belong in the movie (and the commentary track can tip you off to this). Sometimes when they offer them as “deleted scenes,” you wonder what they were thinking when they cut it. I remember several of the deleted scenes from the second Harry Potter movie better than I do a lot of the scenes that are in it. They tended to be mood pieces, like Harry and his owl sitting on a hill high above the landscape, but the movie needed some quiet moments, some beauty that evokes magic.

It's 1960 on AMC's Mad Men. Or is it?

Mad Men

I'd seen ads for the AMC series Mad Men, but missed the first few, so I gave up trying to follow it. Too bad, because we enjoyed their previous original series, Remember WENN (about a fictional early-- Pittsburgh radio station; in fact, Pittsburgh had one of the first radio stations and a couple of the first TV stations in the country.) That was back in the days before AMC started running commercials, which is when I stopped watching its movies.

Ironically of course, Mad Men is about advertising. Now we're watching the first season on the commercial-free DVDs. All I knew about it was that it was set in 1960, and prided itself on fanatical attention to period detail, right down to not having a child play with an etch-a-sketch, because the episode was set just months before that toy was introduced.

Well, we've seen a half dozen episodes, and we like it: the writing and acting, and much of the period stuff. Although from our perspective now it doesn't seem possible that people could smoke so much, but, well, we probably did. (Not me in 1960 exactly--I was 14-- but later in the 60s.)

But I have found some period details that are wrong. I remember most of the clothes and furnishings, but I couldn't really tell you when they changed (except hats for men--they would disappear in January 1961, with JFK, and astoundingly, never appear again as standard attire .) But some of the music seems off. It's possible that they were dancing to Chubby Checker's version of The Twist in the spring of 1960, although it didn't really become a big hit until August, after the Democratic convention that nominated JFK. The timing in the show is a little ambiguous. But it's close. Still, some songs on the sound track seemed premature.

What isn't close however, is a reference to the term, "the medium is the message." That was from Marshall McLuhan, and it wouldn't become part of the national argot for five whole years. (To be fair, McLuhan did publish the phrase in a journal in 1960. But it didn't become widely known until after his book Understanding Media was published in 1964--really not until 1965 and 66.)

But nice try, Mad Men.

Bonus Track!

This little piece was a rejoinder to a column in the local Eureka Reporter, and was published there as a Guest Column. I'd just give you the url except it has an annoying typo that this version doesn't. Discerning readers in this space won't be surprised by the opinions, but I couldn't let a chance go by to say Something Nice about one of the few new things in the world I actually like.

Unlike Wendy Butler, I love the bonus features on DVD. If I didn't, I just wouldn't watch them. Sometimes they are even the main reason I rent or buy a DVD movie, apart from the image quality, especially if I've already got it on tape.

Bonus features typically include short documentaries related to the film, a commentary track for the movie itself, and scenes that weren't in the theatrical release version, either reintegrated into the film, or by themselves. They are all hit or miss, of course, but they often add new layers to the experience of the movie.

The documentaries I often like best are retrospective interviews with directors and actors years after release, when they can put their efforts in perspective, and they can say things that maybe they couldn't before. But I also like to know how movies are made. I enjoy learning about the process.

Commentary tracks can be maddening, especially when the voices don't bother talking about what you're watching, and what you'd like to know. The worst I'm come across recently is "Spiderman II." The director (Sam Raimi) is cueing the star (Tobey Maguire) to talk solemnly about how he learns his lines while I'd like to know why they kept that scene with the neighbor bringing Peter Parker a piece of pie is the movie. It's also nearly impossible to follow both commentary and movie, even when you select for subtitles (which I usually do). But fortunately there's scene selection, pause, review---and fast-forward.

But much of the time, the commentary is enlightening (between descriptions of how effects shots were done, George Lucas describes a surprisingly serious intent for the Star Wars cycle: "how a democracy becomes a dictatorship, and a good person becomes a bad person") or it's just entertaining (counting the number of times that director Roland Emmerich says "this is one of my favorite scenes" during "The Day After Tomorrow.")

Sometimes the commentaries are even better than that. The dialogue between writer/director Nancy Meyers and actor Jack Nicholson on the DVD of "Something's Gotta Give" is hilarious, and a master class in film acting as well. So not only is this movie worth repeating, so is the commentary.

If DVDs have done nothing else, they proven how stupid movie studios can be in editing scenes out of movies just to make them shorter. They leave gaping holes in the story and make the actors look dumb, just so they can have more showings to confuse more people. But without the need to sell more tickets on opening weekend at the multiplex, DVDs can restore the scenes that at least give the movie a chance to make sense. That's more of a restoration than a bonus.

The bonus scenes work best when they actually put them back where they belong in the movie (and the commentary track can tip you off to this). Sometimes when they're offered as "deleted scenes," you wonder what the filmmakers were thinking when they deleted them. I remember several of the deleted scenes from the second Harry Potter movie better than I do a lot of the scenes that are in it. They tended to be mood pieces, like Harry and his owl sitting on a hill high above the landscape, but the movie needed some quiet moments, some beauty that evokes magic.

Selecting imaginative and high quality bonus features, delivering smart and honest commentaries, are becoming part of the DVD. package. I look forward to more.


Oddly or not, while nursing the cold I thought I'd avoided for this year, I watched a lot of DVD over the weekend, including bonuses. I even played some of the Harry Potter games (scored two goals in Quidditch, too, even in my weakened condition.) After hearing Star Trek's Dan Curry call the 1938 Erroll Flynn Adventures of Robin Hood the best adventure movie of all time, I thought I'd see it again with that in mind. It came with a film scholar's commentary, pretty informative, and a bonus disk, not too impressive except for a terrific long feature on the history of Technicolor (seems the name came from MIT, where the inventor went to school).

What I missed in the commentary but what I saw in the film was historical context: the Depression and already ravaged Europe of 1937-8. The scenes of Robin showing Maid Marion the plight of the poor was reminicent of similiar scenes in Sullivan's Travels and My Man Godfrey. Also, the scholar mentioned that in the earliest Robin Hood legends he was a trickster, and a figure in the May festival. What he failed to note was that in this film, Robin forcing the nobles to exchange clothing with the poor reproduced the Lord of Misrule reversals of those festivals. It was neat to see that the final sword battle between Flynn and Sherlock Holmes was as exciting as I remembered it as a kid, watching it on TV, probably in black and white.

Filmed Grace

We seem to see a lot of movies during these late December into January weeks. Not a lot compared to what I used to see (at one point in my life, about 10 a week) but compared to the rest of the year. It's partly due to Margaret's vacation from school, so our viewing time at night gets extended from the usual one hour, and partly because we had movie cards for the local cinema, and the films have to be seen within the calendar year ending on December 31.

It's also partly due to the fact that I no longer feel bound to see lots of movies when they first come out, for real or imagined professional reasons, as I once did. I also don't like as many movies, possibly because they aren't as good. As for the better foreign and independent films, I don't often find their subjects (young love, tortured relationships) as worth dwelling on as I might have in the past. You know, been there, done that, don't remind me.

But I can still be persuaded by a big bag of popcorn, so we started at the Minor Theatre by seeing "Sideways," probably the most relentlessly anti-Hollywood-film ever made. It's the story of very unattractive people (except for one, Virginia Madsen, who I had a feeling was a talented actor even in her youthful bloom when all she had to do--- and all she was allowed to do-- was to be stunningly beautiful). They wear very unattractive clothes, go to unattractive places (as well as attractive places photographed to look unattractive) and do unattractive things.

It's an intelligent film, a pretty well told story, and of course, with very "real" characters, which I guess was the point. So yes, the anxious, jilted teacher desperate for his break as a writer, and the washed-up actor who still takes an actor's point of view on life, are pretty dead-on, and in the case of the writer, quite uncomfortably so. But not only don't I want to see a movie so relentlessly ugly, I would really hate to live those ugly lives in that ugly world. None of them have the slightest sense of style. They are aesthetically underprivileged. Surrounded and imbued by such slovenliness, they can't help but be miserable. And I can't help but be miserable watching them. The fact that this is very recognizable and realistic is exactly zero compensation. Between "Sideways" and, say, "Shall We Dance" (the Fred Astaire version), there has to be some ground to live on.

We then did several nights of DVDs, which I selected from a depressing and depleted field at the video store. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that we hadn't seen them. But they turned out to have several common threads running through at least two. "Cold Mountain" (Nicole Kidman, Jude Law, Renee Zellweger who won best supporting actress Oscar, directed by Anthony Minghella) and "Malena" (from 2000, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, of "Cinema Paradiso" fame) concerned women waiting for their men at war in dangerous communities. "Cold Mountain" and "Beyond Borders" (Angelina Jolie) involved women in love with men they hardly knew, and whose single conjugation produced a child that survived one of the dead parents.

They were all quite good, if also quite long, and with too much graphic violence for Margaret. The directing was excellent, and the cinematography and music were exceptional for all three. I came away with greater admiration for the actors I knew of, and for the Italian actors I hadn't seen before in "Malena" (which at times seemed like an Italian version of a Truffaut film.) Angelina Jolie is another actor known primarily for her beauty who always seemed to me to have some substance (and the same could be said of Jude Law, actually), and she was not only quite good in "Beyond Borders," but it was a fine commitment at this point in her career to do a feature film which showcased the worldwide human tragedies-the starvation, devastating illness, homelessness and violence---caused by warring. Then to see the Civil War devastation in "Cold Mountain," and see how little has changed except the scope. Nicole Kidman also strikes me as a brave actor with special skills and versatility who perhaps doesn't get as much credit for that as does, say, Renee Z.

I've said this before, perhaps in this blog, but I am a huge fan of DVDs. Not only is the picture and sound so much better for me, but I love the commentaries, the interviews and documentaries. "Cold Mountain" included a concert of music and readings. So much so that while Margaret went off to use her last film on the movie card, I stayed home to watch DVDs of movies I was screening for a couple of projects I'm working on. Alone, I watch the movie with the audio commentary and subtitles. I don't get everything of anything that way, but enough of something. I was asked by the New York Times for ideas on how to cover the upcoming Episode III of the Star Wars saga, so I watched the DVDs of I and II (which both were somewhat different from the theatrical releases.) “The Phantom Menace” DVD has a remarkable documentary on the making of that film: not the usual after-the-fact summary that looks like an extended trailer, but film shot as the movie was being made. In some ways it’s better than the movie it is about. My favorite line in the whole DVD package was from George Lucas. He was listening to someone explain that if they used one process it would cost “only” about a million dollars more than another process. George shook his head sagely and in a quiet voice he said, “A million saved is a million earned.” I often say that myself.

One of these films (for a different project) didn't have commentaries, but watching the 1950s George Pal version of "War of the Worlds" was pretty remarkable anyway, because I watched it on my laptop and listened through earphones. I saw that movie when it first came out, and several times since, but I heard more this time than ever, if only the carefully layered background chatter.

But the unquestioned hit of the vacation watching so far has to be not a movie, not a DVD movie, not a DVD movie about a DVD movie, but a television series on DVD: Northern Exposure.

It’s hard to believe but Northern Exposure had its first run at the same time as Twin Peaks, and Star Trek The Next Generation (NE and Next Gen were both nominated for Emmys as best dramatic series the same year). Seeing the first season on DVD reminded me of how my Jungian education more or less began with Northern Exposure and Next Gen. And that Northern Exposure was the first TV series to take Native contemporary life seriously (as seriously as any other kind of life, that is), at a time I was first exploring it.

It was also on at the time that Margaret and I met. So we got the DVDs of the eight first season episodes (it started as a midseason replacement.) The DVDs themselves are unadorned; just a few deleted scenes besides the episodes, but the episodes (great color and sound, and of course no commercials) are enough. If this wasn’t the greatest TV series ever, it has to be in the top 5, absolutely the top 10. We just started watching season 2, with more interesting deleted scenes, too. But there are only 7 more episodes on these DVDs. There were more than 100 over 5 years, so we’re hoping the DVD elves are hard at work.

On New Year's Eve we watched Mickey Lemle's documentary on Ram Das, "Fierce Grace." It was both a sobering and inspiring way to mark the end of one more year, since it deals not only with the life of a leader of My Generation, but how this spiritual leader had to learn to cope with the effects of a stroke. And there was wily old Huston "Mr. Comparative Religion" Smith, as respectable as they come these days, talking about his LSD trips. And Wavy Gravy, being wavy. And all those sixties and seventies kids, dancing around in circles and looking ecstatic, likely with a little help from their friendly drugs. And then all those 21st century people---old ones, young ones, very young ones---dancing around in circles to various sweet versions of Hare Krishna music, looking ecstatic. But now they've earned it. It's clearly beautiful now, so maybe we can let ourselves recognize: maybe it really was beautiful then, too, after all.