Also this issue:

Shots in the Dark
Robin Williams is an obsessive photo clerk in One Hour Photo.
-Cindy Fuchs

Do the Freak-Out
In The Last Kiss, you’re never the wrong age for a midlife crisis.
-Sam Adams

New

Continuing

repertory film

August 29-September 4, 2002

screen picks

Screen Picks

Stalag 17 (Tue., Sept. 3, 7:30 p.m., free, Chestnut Hill Free Library, 8711 Germantown Ave., www.armcinema25.com/ tuesdaynights.html) The Chestnut Hill Film Group gets a jump on the competition, starting up its 2002-'03 series while their competitors are still getting sand in their bathing suits. Billy Wilder's sardonic 1953 comedy is set in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, with William Holden as the hard-bitten, mercenary inmate who eventually reveals a nobler side. Filmed immediately after the corrosively black Ace in the Hole, Stalag is cheerier despite its setting, but the movie's cocked-eyebrow humor -- drawn, no doubt from Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski's successful play -- doesn't always mesh with Wilder's gallows grin. Holden's is the movie's most complicated character, an amoral scrounger who takes bets against fellow prisoners' escape attempts. (After gunshots are heard, he grimly asks, "Anyone want to double the bet?") Wilder's relationship with co-writer Charles Brackett had collapsed -- 1950's Sunset Blvd. was their last hurrah -- and in the years before he found the right fit with I.A.L. Diamond, Wilder ran through collaborators at a prodigious rate, about one a picture. The masterful command of tone which characterized the earlier films was bound to suffer, and it did; Ace's cynicism is ultimately suffocating, and Stalag wobbles between scenes that work on their own but don't always mesh. Of course, it's only by the standards of Wilder's near-perfect best that Stalag 17 falls short, but that's the problem with greatness -- once you've tasted it, nothing else will do.

To Everything There is a Season Considering how attached people get to their favorite TV shows, it's amazing how badly they're treated. Rerun at odd hours to fill stray spots in the schedule, sold into syndication and hacked up to make room for more commercials -- and those are just the popular ones. It's worse with sitcoms, of course, since they're more easily repackaged, and since little usually changes in the universe of the show, programmers think nothing of airing an episode from the second season back-to-back with one from the seventh, even if the shift in tone can be more than a little jarring. Among other things, it robs you of a chance to see how a series developed, how the pieces fell into place.

So, all hail the DVD collection. There was nothing stopping studios from releasing complete seasons of TV shows on videocassette, of course, but something about those gigantic blocks of plastic seemed to mandate an unseemly sticker price. DVD has turned average viewers into rabid collectors, even against logic -- seriously, how many times are you going to watch Rush Hour 2? -- the most pleasant side effect of which is that you can ditch those carefully assembled stacks of carefully taped episodes and replace them with a neat box of plastic discs for a pretty reasonable fee.

The Simpsons has been on the air so long it's hard to remember how it started, even if you've been watching all along. (Me, I just got cable four years ago.) Watching The Complete Second Season ($49.98 DVD), you're immediately struck by the visual jump from the 13 episodes that preceded it (and the less said about the raggedy Tracey Ullman Show shorts the better). By and large, the show looks the same as it does 12 seasons later (though in the commentary provided for each episode, creator Matt Groening continually agonizes over the minor discrepancies yet to be corrected). More importantly, though the show has mostly shed the defensive sentimentality that dogged the first season, it still has enough of a basis in reality to be strangely moving at times -- when, in "Bart vs. Thanksgiving," Bart torches the feminist-themed centerpiece Lisa has spent days working on, it's hard not to be outraged on her behalf. By season's end, the show's writing staff was savvy enough to mock the very idea of resolution; after arguing over the moral of that episode's story, the family bursts into laughter and concludes, "Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happened." Later episodes would have a lot more "stuff" -- the commentators consistently marvel over the comparatively leisurely pace of these early episodes -- but it had to trade away some emotional depth to do it.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer's second season collection ($59.98 DVD) poses a similar conundrum. The season's second half is the series' emotional high point -- though the angst of Buffy's romance with occasionally soulless vamp Angel was mined for seasons to follow, it's hard to beat the sustained agony which accompanied Angel's return to his former beastly ways. (The two had a moment of bliss in there, but in Sunnydale, happy couples never last.) This year's hit-or-miss season has left even fans praying that next year will be the last, and wincing at creator Joss Whedon's comment that the show might not, in fact, end its run when Sarah Michelle Gellar's contract expires. (Whedon and co. have made hay out of many a TV contrivance, but with the show already foundering, the thought of Dawn the Vampire Slayer is too horrible to bear.) With the third season, the show made the jump from 16mm to 35mm and started knocking balls out of the park on a regular basis, but though Season Two has its missteps -- they ought to refund whatever portion of the purchase price goes towards "Inca Mummy Girl"and "Reptile Boy" -- it's also in some ways the most emotionally resonant. Like The Simpsons, Buffy got less raw in more than one sense, though it's still managed to pull the rug out from under its audience on a regular basis.

The Sopranos faced a different problem. With a more leisurely production schedule than network shows, the show had plenty of time to get its act together before the cameras rolled. But the show's second season over-expanded its focus, and what had been the most carefully arranged show on TV (which is not to say the best) started to feel hectic, overwritten. Surprisingly, the show rebounded with its third season. (The collection, with a trio of unfocused audio commentaries, goes for a kneecapping $99.98.) It's not just that the season contains the show's best stand-alone episode since the first season's "College," though it doesn't hurt. "Pine Barrens," directed by Steve Buscemi, brilliantly turns the show on its head -- tough guys Paulie (Tony Sirico) and Christopher (Michael Imperioli) find themselves lost in the snowy Barrens after a hit goes awry, shivering in an abandoned van and sucking ketchup packets for nourishment. (It's worth it just to see what Sirico's hair looks like uncombed.) The introduction of Tony Soprano's sister (Aida Turturro) ultimately played like a step backward -- Tony as regressive man-child rather than Tony as would-be responsible father. With his daughter dating the loose cannon son of his former boss, and his son starting to follow in his father's footsteps, Tony begins to lose his reasons for not maturing -- and with Joe Pantoliano's psychotic stepfather in the cast, Tony doesn't seem quite as bad a parent by comparison. In the way he ends his relationship with Annabella Sciorra's volatile character, you can see that the therapy is starting to pay off.