Disc Till Dawn

Catching up with some recent DVD releases.

by Sam Adams

LOST EMPIRE: Laura Dern and Justin Theroux in David Lynch's latest head-scratcher, which narrowly missed opening in Philadelphia. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Even for a devout big-screen booster, there are weeks when it's difficult to justify leaving the house. Cabin fever notwithstanding, it's hard to imagine Rob Zombie's Halloween remake will be worth the gas money, let alone the price of a ticket. With a long weekend ahead and the fall flood of prestige pictures still weeks away, it's an awfully good time to play catch-up.

Among the recent crop of new-release DVDs, the standout has to be David Lynch's bewildering, bewitching Inland Empire. For a split second back in April, it looked as if the Ritz would have the stones to open Lynch's three-hour head-scratcher, but its scheduled opening fell just after the Landmark takeover, and its theatrical hopes went the way of the dodo. Seeing as Lynch shot the entire movie with a low-resolution DV camera, home video might seem the ideal place for it, although I miss the hallucinatory smudge its images acquired when blown up to larger than life-size. This is one case where better-looking is not necessarily better.

Originally conceived as a series of disconnected scenes, Empire is the most elusive and least coherent of Lynch's features, although the latter isn't intended as a term of abuse. Even more than Mulholland Dr. , the movie strives to keep viewers in the dark, ping-ponging between plots, continents, levels of reality, you name it. Laura Dern plays both a Hollywood actress and a Southern housewife, although whether one is meant to be playing the other or they're both aspects of one woman is open to (endless) debate. The movie seems to coalesce around the idea of feminine performance, the roles men (literally and figuratively) cast them in and the roles they take on of their own accord. Near the movie's beginning, Dern's actress is visited by a cat-eyed visitor with a thick Slavic accent (Grace Zabriske, all but licking her lips) who tells her she has "everything you need to play this part." And so she does.

Warmly embracing the digital format, Lynch has filled his two-disc package to the brim. There's a 75-minute addendum called "Things That Happened," making-of footage, an interview set in what looks like Twin Peaks' red room, and even a 20-minute lesson on cooking quinoa (with broccoli and beef stock, mmm).

On the commentary for LOL, mumblecore mainstay Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) says he purposefully shot the film with a midrange camera to give it a look rooted in a specific time period. But considering that he and Lynch used the exact same camera (the Sony PD150), there's not much excuse for LOL's visual blahs. Swanberg's portrait of mid-twentysomething guys who are more attached to their computers than their girlfriends (or too porn-addled to even look for one) has observational weight, but Swanberg doesn't develop his superficial anomie into any greater insight. The movie gets its surfaces right, but it's all surface. The disc, the first from fledgling Benten Films, includes multiple commentaries, short films and a host of other goodies.

At the other end of the video spectrum, Abbas Kiarostami's Five: Dedicated to Ozu blurs the line between feature film, documentary and video art. In a series of five long, immobile takes, Kiarostami develops seemingly random actions into oblique mini-narratives, or perhaps he stimulates our storytelling impulses and lets us do the rest. A bisected piece of driftwood transmits a sense of poignant longing as the splintered halves float close to each other and then slide slowly away; the crisscross movement of humans along a boardwalk is comically echoed in the strut of waddling ducks. The final take is the most elaborate, a pre-dawn shot of a watery marsh that falls in and out of darkness, lit by a cloud-covered moon and flashes of lightning. The periods of intense blackness make it impossible to tell if Kiarostami has stuck to his single-take rule, and it's clear that he's manipulated the soundtrack, but not knowing only adds to the pleasure.

Fans of Ingmar Bergman and Louis Malle already have their reasons to love Criterion's budget-priced Eclipse imprint, but for my money, their most exciting release to date is Samuel Fuller: The First Films, memorializing the master of what Jean-Luc Godard called "cinema-fist." By the standards of Shock Corridor or The Naked Kiss, Fuller's first three features are mild stuff; there's not a bald-headed, shoe-wielding prostitute in the bunch. But the revisionist Western I Shot Jesse James prefigures the whole-hog revamp of Forty Guns, and Vincent Price's high-toned swindler in The Baron of Arizona might be the 19th-century equivalent of Richard Widmark in Pickup on South Street. Both show Fuller struggling to focus on his strengths: Jesse's portrait of assassin, Robert Ford (John Ireland) is dragged down by a thudding romance, and Baron is saddled with a foot-dragging frame story. But they have their moments of glory as well. In Jesse, Ford buys a drink for a wandering saloon singer, only to find that his most popular ballad is the story of the "dirty little coward" who shot his friend in the back. Mythologized in front of his eyes, Ford is powerless to combat his own image, lost in the darkness that eventually swallows him whole.

Also in the Eclipse set is Fuller's The Steel Helmet, which transplanted Fuller's experience as a WWII correspondent into the theater of the Korean War, which had begun only months before. At times, it's an awkward cross between a genre war picture and a full-on Fuller yarn, but it has moments of sublime power, as when one soldier strikes up "Auld Lang Syne" on a portable organ only to find out it's the same tune as the Korean national anthem.

Criterion doesn't have too many down periods, but they've been on something of a roll in recent months: a box set devoted to Hiroshi Teshigahara, including the erotic horror of Woman in the Dunes, Andrei Tarkovsky's sublime Ivan's Childhood and so forth. Two that have given me particular pleasure are Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole and David Mamet's House of Games. Ace has been impossibly unavailable for ages, and their two-disc set does it proud, including a bonus Wilder documentary and interviews with Kirk Douglas and Spike Lee. Like Fuller, Wilder was a former journalist, but where Fuller's Park Row was an affectionate portrait of newspapermen at work, Ace is arguably the most cynical ever made, a corrosive satire with battery acid for blood. Douglas plays a hotshot reporter exiled to the New Mexico sticks, whose chance at a comeback arrives in the form of a stranded spelunker. Always angling for a better story, he colludes with the hapless victim's none-too-loving wife to keep the poor schlub stuck underground. Although less macabre than Sunset Blvd. , Ace is Wilder's ugliest film, as savage as it is sharp-witted. It's the black-comic equivalent of a cold shower: not always pleasant, but it clears your head.

House of Games is nearly as nasty. Mamet's first movie cast his then-wife Lindsay Crouse as a cold-blooded psychiatrist who falls in with a sharp-tongued con artist (Joe Mantegna), first fascinated and then seduced by the world of trickery. Crouse's performance is singularly odd — her eyes never seem to meet Mantegna's, focusing somewhere off in the middle distance — but it's of a piece with the movie's look, all hard edges and sharp lights. In dive bars and back rooms, Mamet's dialogue ricochets off the walls, studded with machine-gun patter and gloriously obscure colloquialisms. Anchored by the best poker scene this side of Some Came Running, it's a vernacularist's delight.

Keeping on top of Warner Bros.' expansive box sets is practically a full-time job, but it's worth cashing in a few sick days to linger over the Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4. Smooshing 10 films onto five discs, it turns up only a pair of acknowledged classics: André de Toth's hard-boiled Crime Wave and Nicholas Ray's superlative They Live by Night, but Ray's limpid lovers-on-the-run tale (later remade as Thieves Like Us) is glorious enough to warrant the time off all on its own. Likewise, the second volume of Classic Musicals From the Dream Factory has more discoveries-in-waiting than straight-up gems; Vincente Minnelli's marvelous The Pirate with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly is as good as it gets. Of special note among the box set's seven films is That Midnight Kiss, a quasi-biopic starring Mario Lanza as, well, Mario Lanza.

Another unexpected gem is Warner's Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938. Collecting five years of the Fleischer brothers' black-and-white cartoons, it's a treat from start to finish (not that it's a good idea to watch that way; you can only watch the snickering sailor punch some bad guy to atoms so many times in a row). The four-disc set is lovingly embellished with commentaries and featurettes, a real treat for amateur animation scholars.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)