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Gift Guide 3:
Books, Music, & DVDs
Desert Island, Defiant Barflies — The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker: 79 years of classic gags. By Brian Miller
From MOMA to Moaning — With 30 Porn-Star Portraits, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders sheds new light on the world's oldest obsession. By Tim Appelo
Scarecrow With Brains — Seattle video institution Scarecrow finally delivers a book as idiosyncratic and opinionated as it is. By Brian Miller
Only the Best — When only the best will do, give greatest hits. By Keith Harris
A Chorus Line — Books about pop music work best when they mix it up.By Michaelangelo Matos
Tokyo Calling — If you can't trek to Japan to load up on comics art and DVD anime, here's a shortcut. By Roger Downey
DVD Boxes — From Felicity and The OC to John Cassavetes' greatest, um, hits, plus Elf for the kids.
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The Ultimate Matrix Collection
For once, the title is fairly accurate in this Wachowski overload box set— it surely is the "ultimate" such collection, because there surely won't be any more Matrix spin-offs outside the video-game arena. The brothers saw to that; after their groundbreaking 1999 original, the trilogy took a swan dive into a shallow Dixie cup, dashing the expectations of network administrators, IT professionals, and recovering D&D addicts worldwide. Just when they'd been given new hope, like Neo, all that glorious system architecture of part one collapsed into a familiar mishmash of shoot-'em-ups and Christlike self-sacrifice. Everything new was old again.
But this 10-disc set comes to praise the Wachowskis, not to bury them. And short of refunding our money for Reloaded and Revolutions, it does about all any Matrix fan could ask of the franchise. You get all three films with dual commentaries on each; 35 hours of extras and production minutiae not contained on earlier DVDs; and the neat Animatrix compilation of nine shorts written by the brothers and executed by various animation masters—which almost eases the disappointment of parts two and three.
As always, Larry and Andy are conspicuously absent from their creations (apart from an inane introductory essay to the accompanying booklet). To their credit, however, they've originated a feature that should be standard on all DVD releases—a negative commentary track (!), here from critics, to offset the standard rah-rah-ism of ordinary studio extras. Thus we have Variety's Todd McCarthy, film scholar David Thomson, and John Powers (from SW sister publication L.A. Weekly) at the roundtable, discussing what went wrong after everything started out so right.
One reason, Powers notes, is that so many TV commercials (and other films) have ripped off the original's special effects to the extent that they almost seem banal five years later. Then there's the shaky philosophical regress of how the future came to be so fucked up—through humanity's neglect or stupidity, presumably. The Matrix "fits the teenage mind perfectly," says Powers. "Grievance without responsibility," Thomson chimes in. Neo, the innocent über-teen hacker, is simply born into an already broken world in order to redeem it. Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad.
But it's not entirely a rag-fest. The three critics have plenty of nice things to say about the franchise—and in more direct terms than the second commentary with Cornel West and another academic. And darned if the entire damn DVD set doesn't inspire at least one profound philosophical question: When will the Wachowskis get around to making another movie? BRIAN MILLER
John Cassavetes: Five Films
As The Nation'sStuart Klawans notes in one of the 16 wonderfully illuminating essays accompanying this gorgeously designed box, it's utterly ironic that Cassavetes films should be treated to the museum-quality feats of restoration Criterion is famous for. What the mad Greek is famous for is howling defiance of Hollywood perfectionism. He is the least visual director in history; his sets were lit like handball courts, and if the actors crashing around therein fell repeatedly out of focus, or blocked the star's face in a crucial soliloquy, or collided with the cameraman and fucking killed him dead as a Chinese bookie, he would insist on letting the camera roll on the sacred event, actors plunging to the molten core at the center of their characters, "waiting with great faith and apprehension," as Cassavetes says, "for this miracle to take place."
In fact, the miracles do look better with the Criterion treatment: Every scary pore of actor John Marley's pockmarked face is as crisp as the Voyager pictures of the coruscating craters of Jupiter's moons. More important, these eight discs and 68 pages of scholarship clarify one of the most bewilderingly obscure auteurs who ever lived. You get a five-film fist in the face of the studios: the 1959 improvisational riff on sex and race, Shadows; the Oscar-magnet 1968 masterpiece about marriage, Faces; 1974's A Woman Under the Influence, the greatest mad scene in movie history; both the 1976 and 1978 versions of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and the weirdly stagy 1977 Opening Night. Plus, there are two major bio-documentaries; hours of interviews with Cassavetes' wife and greatest actor, Gena Rowlands, and the also great Lynn Carlin, Seymour Cassel, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Sean Penn, Jon Voight, and John Sayles; and every single thing the most rabid fan could want (except Husbands, which probably should've replaced Opening Night). Even Criterion has seldom, if ever, gone this all-out for a director. It's not a box set, it's a film school.
Five Films demolishes the myth that Cassavetes' movies were mostly improvised—almost all dialogue was scripted, and what the cast was doing for 52 takes per 10-minute scene was daredevil exploration of the words' possibilities. The characters' emotional resonance was all that mattered. Plot, rhythm, mise-en-scène—the whole bag of movie tricks was put out with the trash. Cassavetes invented plenty of new tricks, helpfully explicated here: slapping Carlin's face and ordering her not to cry, to get the required silent, stifled shriek in Faces, or impersonating a dead chicken on the dinner table to shake Rowlands and Voight. A startling amount of time-capsule truth about '60s and '70s American domestic life comes through thereby, but it's all about the moment—and he was obsessed with making every single moment a Moment of Truth.
