WHITE DOG - #455

Samuel Fuller's 1982 racial shocker White Dog is one of those infamous movie that cinephiles always heard about but rarely had the opportunity to see. Buried before its stateside release for a variety of reasons, most of which involved a studio that misunderstood the film Fuller had given them, it had the distinction of being the last picture the patriotic Fuller shot on American soil, and given the toothsome commentary promised by White Dog's rather startling concept, it made most of us feel pretty secure that we were missing out on a lost classic. The man who shook up racial convention in Shock Corridor returning to such controversial subject matter had to be a must-see, right?

Well, yes and no.

Now that White Dog is available on DVD at last, it is faced with the daunting task of living up to its largely imagined reputation, and while it does so in terms of subject, we're still faced with a social parable that is shaky in its delivery. Sam Fuller was never a filmmaker known for his subtlety, and some of his choices in White Dog are rather hamfisted even for him. Though the reports that many of the Hollywood numbskulls that sank the movie misconstrued White Dog as being racist serve to tell us the kind of asinine thinking that killed the glorious 1970s (Fuller takes his own shots at Star Wars and its ilk in White Dog), I can see where studio execs might have been confused by what they'd been handed. At times, White Dog is as clumsy as an After School Special and as over-the-top as the most exploitative drive-in B-reeler; at other times, it's philosophically daring and politically progressive. Does the audience who wants to see dogs mauling people want a treatise on racism, and vice versa? The answer, if you know anything about exploitation pictures, is obviously to the affirmative, but let's not forget, we're talking about the asinine here.

Based on a story by Romaine Gary (one of Jean Seberg's husbands), and shooting from a script co-written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson (later the director of L.A. Confidential, among other things), White Dog tells the story of Julie (Kristy McNichol), a young actress who, while driving late at night in the Hollywood Hills, strikes a white german shepherd with her car. Unable to find its owner, she keeps the dog herself (though if she gives it a name, I didn't catch it). This turns out to be a lucky turn for her. When a rapist breaks into her home, the dog subdues the creep and holds him down until the cops come. This scene yields one of those hilariously bad moments that mar the picture. When the dog breaks through a second-story window to chase the attacker, I had flashbacks to that regularly circulated clip of Helen Hunt jumping out of a window after taking angel dust. [Helen Hunt YouTube Clip]

In fact, this dog-to-the-rescue scenario sets off a rather bizarre and largely unexplored subplot where, arguably, the dog becomes sexually fixated on Kristy McNichol. (Funny, I couldn't see her appeal when I was a kid and she was popular, but I do get what the dog sees in her now.) While, yes, his stealing her panties and sticking himself between her and her boyfriend (Jameson Parker, one of the Simons on "Simon & Simon") is fairly accurate dog behavior, given that the rest of White Dog encourages us to pay attention to who the dog looks at and how, and to be suspicious of what he is thinking, you can forgive me for assigning him some interspecies affection here.

Because, you see, what Julie is soon to discover is that her dog doesn't just mangle people who would do her harm, but he goes off for seemingly no reason at other times, as well. That boyfriend, who, having served his usefulness, is soon to disappear from the picture, tells Julie that her fluffy pal is an attack dog and needs to be put to sleep, but it's not until Julie takes the cur to Noah's Ark, an animal ranch where they train wild animals to behave themselves for the sake of movies, TV shows, and commercials, that she's told the full extent of his purpose. When the canine attacks an African American man working at the ranch, one of the Ark's owners, Carruthers (a rotund and hairy Burl Ives) sees it right away: this hound is a "white dog," a killer trained to fixate on black people.

Carruthers reiterates that the best thing to do is put the dog down, but his black partner, Keys (Paul Winfield, TV's "Julia" and King), disagrees. Keys sees an important challenge in the dog. An animal is not racist by nature, that is learned behavior. Some hateful human being trained this dog to be this way, carrying on an unctuous tradition that dates back to slave days. If Keys can break this dog of its bad habits, he can prove that racism can be broken. Old dogs can be taught new tricks, and racial hatred can be unlearned.

This is when White Dog starts to get good. Up until this point, the movie has played as a cross between a horror flick and one of those Tori Spelling movies on Lifetime where she doesn't realize her boyfriend is a killer. (For the record, the White Dog adaptation predates the Cujo movie by a year; Stephen King's book was released in 1981.) "Kristy McNichol is sleeping with a serial killer! How long before he turns on her?!" We've even seen him go out and attack a black man driving a cleaning truck, forcing him off the road and into a shop window (another scene staged as an awful cliché), information Julie is not privy to. Now do you see why I was wondering if the dog was going to kill the boyfriend?

There is quite a significant shift in White Dog upon Keys joining the narrative. It stops being a story about the girl and her animal and starts being about his crusade to change a way of thinking. Fuller saw the clash between man and animal as two powerful forces coming together to settle a grudge that spanned centuries. He staged it as a gladiator match, going so far as to instruct production designer Brian Eatwell (prior credits include multiple Nicolas Roeg movies) to design a domed cage for them to do battle. It's reason vs. violence, civilized behavior vs. primitive brutishness. Fuller is not afraid to let Keys preach it, either, and he gives the man several speeches about the importance of what is happening and the danger of flinching in the face of the task. When the three humans collude to cover up the dog's connection to his most recent killing, there is even a chance for Fuller to use Burl Ives' character to take a swipe at bureaucracy. The people who create the law and those who enforce it don't understand what is necessary to fix the problem. As he says it, all they know are "long words and long prison terms."

The crucial scene of this last murder is staged in a church, which continues the horror movie overtones that permeate White Dog. (Seeing the animal's snowy fur so regularly and so easily stained with red blood is also quite terrifying.) Putting this foul crime on hallowed ground could have been cheesy, but Fuller turns it into one of a couple of visually dazzling scenarios in the picture. Keys arriving at the site is shot so it looks like a leftover from To Kill a Mockingbird. The church reinforces the moral imperative of the situation, while the stained glass of St. Francis of Assisi underlines Keys' role in it. It's a perfect example of where Fuller's heavy style can actually make something work in ways no other director could get away with. Likewise, in an earlier scene, when Julie sees the dog unleashed for the first time while she is working on a movie set, the rear projection that frames her illustrates her disorientation in an impressively nauseous and surreal manner.

By the end of the movie, the jumbled first half is a distant memory and Fuller has largely redeemed himself. Julie has even met the man who trained the dog, and as it turns out--predictably, though not necessarily far-fetched--he is a kindly grandfather who arrives with a Whitman Sampler and two adorable granddaughters. This paves the way for the powerful ending, where Keys must give the dog his final test. There is a fear that the dog could lose his sanity in the deprogramming, and Keys wants to make sure he is tamed rather than turned into a killer of another kind. This is apparently Fuller's intention with the end of the film, to suggest that the dog has snapped by being dragged from one extreme to another, but I got even more out of it. Given Burl Ives' physical resemblance to the dog's original owner, Keys not only broke the dog of his hatred of black people, but so much so, that in the dog's eyes, he has now turned on the man who victimized him, the one who made him a monster. It's a more powerful conclusion than one would expect, no knee-jerk easy solution being provided to the rather significant problem.

White Dog is another Criterion with particularly good packaging. The multiple Eric Skillman drawings that grace the cover, booklet, and the disc itself are graphically pleasing, particularly the very simple palette of red, white, and black. I like the cover of the disc, with the dog's facial features on a white background, no defining outline.

The supplemental feature with interviews with producer Jon Davison, co-writer Curtis Hanson, and the director's widow, Christa Lang-Fuller, is also essential viewing. Not only does it shed light on this particular production, but it also serves as a vivid portrait of how movies can come together and how an indifferent or even hostile studio environment can destroy it. Additionally, it gives us a glimpse of Sam's later working years through people who knew him.

FOR ALL MANKIND - #54

"You know what the trouble is, Brucie? We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."

- Frank Sobotka, The Wire - The Complete Second Season

Though Criterion's brilliantly remastered reissue of the 1989 space race documentary For All Mankind isn't due in stores until July 14, it seems a fitting movie for a July 4th review. Though it's not actually all that like me to pause and reflect on my country's independence, not even on this day of all days, it's hard to avoid at this particular juncture in our history. With cries for a more fair democracy ringing out of Iran reminding us of our own origins, and with the U.S. itself seeming to take one step forward (a black President at last!) and stumbling a couple of steps back (gay marriage still struggling, the economy tanking), perhaps part of the problem is that guys like me don't take enough time to sit and think about how we got where we are and what it can say about where we're going.

Some conservative pundits are trying to roll the morality dice and claim it's a lack of values that has brought our downfall (we don't pray enough, we don't make enough babies, etc.). It strikes me as the same old song, the easy out. Look back over history, and the general populace has never been good enough for the morality police; to be facetious about it, the heart has always wanted what it wants, and it's always used the loins to get that stuff. To my mind, where perhaps these people have won, however, is in the underlying argument that, to their mind, part of what leads people astray is the fact that they think too much. Science, technology, advances in human achievement--this is all just stinkin' thinkin'. Better to not ponder, you just give yourself a headache. Which might be well and good if we took better care of our farmers, our autoworkers, our teachers, the people who go out and do what needs to be done every day, those hard-working folks that provide us with what is fundamental to our society. They are always the first to be devalued whenever someone tries to curb anything that goes against their personal "greater good," and this holds true whatever side of the aisle you stand on, whatever hole you punch in the voting booth.

This is why I lead with the quote from Frank Sobotka, the fictional union leader from The Wire, whose frustrations with the obstacles stacked against the working man compelled him to leave the straight and narrow path. It speaks to the frustration of many and the argument that for America to regain its footing as an economic leader, we have to start making stuff again, inventing stuff, leading the way. While this may seem a bit far afield of the space race, the truth is, our reasons for going to the moon are not that dissimilar, and our waning interest in finding new and undiscovered wonders is part and parcel with our waning drive to innovate and manufacture. Al Reinert chooses to open For All Mankind with the following excerpt from John F. Kennedy's 1962 speech in favor of space exploration.

[Link to video of full speech]

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills...." Is there anything that speaks to the American spirit more than that? It brings to mind Kennedy's poet laureate, Robert Frost, and perhaps his most famous poem, "The Road Not Taken", which is all about choosing to forge a new path, not going to the same old way, exploring all the unknowns that life has to offer. "I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

Space has not been called "the final frontier" for nothing. Once Manifest Destiny took us from one coast of this continent to the other, what else was left? We could go down in the depths of the ocean, or up to the heights of space. For all the bad that was done in the name of Manifest Destiny, we can't fault the spirit of it or deny that the American will to move forward achieved great things. So, when did we stop looking? When did we stop wanting to see?

To those who say, "But why go into space? What's there to find?" I reply "Why not? Everything!" Though the better and far more eloquent reply is this film. For All Mankind should change any skeptical mind about traveling the stars. I used to be one of those skeptics, one who thought our money was better spent elsewhere, and though Reinert's documentary is not the sole catalyst for bringing me back around--I, like every child born before the Challenger tragedy, at one point wanted to be an astronaut--it's still the best explanation I can give you.

Reinert cut For All Mankind together using footage shot entirely by NASA. They had cameras in the control room, on the launch pad, and in the rockets themselves. Movies shot by the astronauts in their space capsules are accompanied by the real audio between the ship and mission control, as well as some humorous musical accompaniment from the astronauts' individual tape players. Each crew member got their own personal cassette deck and one tape to go with it. How amazing to hear Buck Owens and Merle Haggard performing songs especially for the rocket jocks, complete with words of encouragement! That is how much we once cared about boldly going where no man has gone before. Science wasn't scary, it was exciting. Of course the cowboys were on board, those guys never wanted to sit still.

Better yet are the reminiscences from the astronauts that Reinert has collected. These are not put together in a narrative, "so it all went like this" kind of way, but instead, to give us the general impressions of space travel, to illuminate what it must be like. Thus, amazing shots of the Earth taken from incredible distances are accompanied by the men who took those shots talking about what it was like to stare out of a tiny window and see the whole of our planet nestled in the infinite blackness of the universe. Can you imagine? To witness such things as no one else had ever witnessed them, even on film--had these men not gone out and gotten this footage, we would have never seen our own world from that vantage point. We'd be no better for not having this record than had we continued to think the world was flat. Knowing matters.

In getting access to these archives, Reinert was granted unprecedented access to the space missions. For All Mankind isn't just a portrait of what was seen, it is also a portrait of what was done. Reinert is just as fascinated by the men who pulled off these feats as he is by the feats themselves, and so equal measure is given to what is happening back down in Houston and to how the space-faring astronauts spent their time. There is always something compelling about men getting together to pursue a common goal. If you think of movies like All the President's Men, which makes journalistic research exciting, or Zodiac, where the procedures of police investigation are more important than shoot-outs, a bunch of guys in a room talking and strategizing can be quite dramatic. Hell, Jay Roach's Recount made political lawyering and counting ballots feel like a race to stop a mad bomber, even with the audience already knowing how it would all turn out. Such is the case here, and Reinert looks for all the humanity, such as the crisis-fueled excitement over malfunctions or the things that keep the two crews connected, be it sharing personal news about a party or the world news. Hearing the sports scores can keep a fellow grounded even when he's in zero gravity.

Enhancing the visual poetry of stars and spinning planets, Brian Eno has provided Reinert with a dreamy ambient score, one of the composer's best works. It could have been easy to overdo it with the spacey stuff, or even lazy to go with something overly New Agey and all lasers and synths. Instead, Eno shows a passion for the material, and he works in an emotional range that stems from the thrill of discovery and the sensation of the travels. It's beautiful work [see/hear the clip below, though note it's takend from an older source than this new edition DVD]. In their new edition, newly mastered in high-def and available in standard and Blu-ray formats, Criterion has really brought For All Mankind into a whole new era. Eno's score sounds tremendous, and the film looks newly minted. The blue of our blue planet is incredible to see, the details of the clouds giving it texture and form, and the contrast against the deep black sky is startling. Also, the flotsam and jetsam of the outer atmosphere and the debris that tumbles off the rocket--every piece is crystal clear. You've never seen the craters of the moon--the first lunar landing takes up the last third of For All Mankind--in such spectacular relief. If you've only seen the rebroadcast news footage, the tiny television feed, you haven't seen it at all.

The new edition of For All Mankind has a documentary called "An Accidental Gift" that explores where the material came from and why NASA was so careful to capture it all. It wasn't as much for the posterity or the glory--though you can tell they knew, they felt, that it was important--as much as it was just to preserve the details for future study. It was meant to be no more than the documentation of the process, not a self-conscious historical record; nor was it Art. Thanks to Reinert, who dug through it all and made this film, it's now both. NASA kept all this stuff so one day they could look back and learn something; Al Reinert shaped it into cinema so we could, too.

And that's why we should go in space, why we should keep going, why it's worth the money. Because every time we do, we know something we didn't know before, even if it's to discover how much we really don't know. It keeps us humble and striving. Like one of the astronauts said to Reinert, just by going to this place we had never been, a place we were never meant to be in an environment that was not built for us, the curve of human evolution was bent forever.

So, next time someone asks you why we're exploring Mars, explain to them that it's because if we didn't, we would, as a species, flatline. We do it for the sake of all mankind.

"And this is one of those timeless moments. Something real, something urgent, something important is happening. The human race is fumbling toward the light through outer darkness; and there is a feeling here of movement, of genuine wonder. The sense of isolation dissipates."

- Harlan Ellison, writing on Voyager II
"Saturn, November 11th," reprinted in Stalking The Nightmare

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 06/09

IN THEATRES...

* Away We Go, the Sam Mendes-helmed comedy with John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph is mostly good, but the literary pretensions of authors Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida sometimes get in the way.

* Chéri, the lacklustre reteaming of Stephen Frears, Christopher Hampton, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

* Easy Virtue, Colin Firth rises high in this Noel Coward adaptation, but other problems get in the way of this simple pleasure.

* Food, Inc., an illuminating look at how food became big business and what's wrong with that development.

* The Hangover, a good, raunchy comedy made all the better by Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis.

* O' Horten, a quietly involving portrait of a changing life from Norwegian director Bent Hamer.

* Year One, Jack Black and Michael Cera starring in the worst movie of the year so far. Avoid at all costs.

Also, keep your eye out for more reviews of summer movies that are already in limited release. I should be posting my thoughts on the Oscar-winning Japanese film Departures, Moon, and Woody Allen's Whatever Works to DVDTalk.com this Thursday.

ON DVD...

* Au Bonheur des Dames, Julien Duvivier's 1930 silent adaptation of Emile Zola is visually stunning but a little weak in the end.

* Brief Encounter (1974), a BBC remake with Richard Burton and Sophia Loren that holds its own against the older David Lean version.

* Diary of a Suicide, a lost French film from the early 1970s that was better off not found. With Delphine Seyrig and Sami Frey.

* Eastbound & Down - The Complete First Season, the latest release from HBO's TV division is the perfect vehicle for comedian Danny McBride. Dirty, mean-spirited fun! Includes three episodes directed by David Gordon Green.

* Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth, an electrified portrait of the influential writer, a singular personality if ever there was one.

* Lonely are the Brave, a fantastic forgotten gem with Kirk Douglas as the last cowboy to stand against the modern world. With Gena Rowlands, Walter Matheau, and a script by Dalton Trumbo.

* Lookin' to Get Out: Extended Version, a little-known later work from Hal Ashby gets a new airing.

* Two more 1980s films from Alain Resnais, even more disappointing than the last two: Life is a Bed of Roses and I Want to Go Home, Resnais' flaccid collaboration with Jules Feiffer.

* Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, an incredible music documentary profiling an enigmatic performer.

* The Strange One, a 1950s drama penned by Calder Willingham and showing hazing at a military college. Features a stand-out performance by a young Ben Gazzara in his first film.

* The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, notable for being Paramount's first color picture, but a bit dull. With Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney, and Fred MacMurray; directed by Henry Hathaway.

* Une Femme Mariée, Godard's 1964 will-she-or-won't-she portrait of a married woman torn between husband and lover. Features a fantastic performance by Macha Méril.

I AM CURIOUS - BLUE - #181

A couple of years ago, I reviewed the re-release of Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back, the influential and iconic chronicle of his 1965 British tour. The new boxed set was called the 65 Tour Deluxe Edition and it featured a new film by director D.A. Pennebaker called Bob Dylan 65 Revisited. Essentially, Pennebaker did look back, digging into his archives and pulling out unseen footage from the same trip and making a new movie out of it. While exciting at the time I first watched it, this new documentary doesn't really measure up to its more famous older brother. Fine, sure, as a DVD extra, but given that I can't remember hardly anything about it, there is no way it stands alone as a companion or as a sequel or anything of the kind. Really, it's just scraps, and trying to determine whether or not they deserved to be scraps is a little too much like trying to get the egg back into its shell after the omelet has already been seasoned. Though I haven't watched it yet, I understand that the Maysles pulling a similar move with The Beales of Grey Gardens has yielded similar results. Whatever instincts led them the right way the first time should have been trusted.

Though Vilgot Sjöman put his two versions of I Am Curious together at the same time, turning one four-hour film into two films half that size, it's obvious that Yellow [review here] got all the best bits, and Blue the leftovers. Maybe I'd think differently if I had seen them in the other order, Blue would be the trailblazer and Yellow the mentally deficient little brother running to catch up, but I doubt it. I Am Curious - Blue doesn't just lack the surprise of Yellow, but the structure and the purpose, as well. These are the scraps.

Continuing to borrow from Godard's playbook, Sjöman opens I Am Curious - Blue with talking head interviews with women discussing their sex lives and what gives them pleasure, bringing to mind the relationship talk of Masculin féminin. These are part of the interviews that our heroine, Lena Nyman, began in Yellow, though now rather than just asking about class issues, she will talk about sex and religion, as well. Blue relies more heavily on these public studies, sending Lena on a road trip where she meets new lovers and new interview subjects. We learn a little more about her history--what bearded creep of a college professor did she screw? who did her mother screw and where did she go?--and we see her fall into the same intellectual traps she had supposedly already learned her lesson from. Yet, while Yellow had a point, Blue does not.

In fact, I'd say Blue almost goes out of its way not to make a point, but only if I were feeling more kind. The passion for genuine information, no matter how misguided or rhetorical, has been replaced by an off-putting smugness. Lena's sense of rightness borders on entitlement, and it is hard to swallow after her failed quest in Yellow. Haven't we watched a character arc already where her liberal naïveté comes down with a case of scabies? Well, Sjöman is attempting to turn back the clock, seemingly weaving around the scenes in his other movie, even taking us back to the casting of Lena and Börje. The latter never really adopts his character in Blue, he's always the actor, timid and lecherous, never the Crown Prince or the boyfriend. Like everything else, the metafictional elements, the movie behind the movie/within the movie, has over ripened. We've been here, and coming back to it teaches us nothing new. Neither do meeting the swinging couple who gave Lena her scabies or the constant references to the "Socialist Itch" make up for the fact that we end up in exactly the same place we ended up last time, but lacking the same emotional investment. What with Börje being a non character, and Lena's new relationships fleeting, and her epiphany of failure being so effective in Yellow, what here are we meant to glom on to? Especially when the more fun stuff, like playing with on-screen text, is all but absent.

I Am Curious - Blue actually stops dead more than once. A scene where Lena debates Christian morality goes on way too long and its ideas are pretty worn out for 2009. A tryst between Lena and creep-beard professor (Hands Hellberg) at the top of a phallic tower, its elevator car rising up and down in time with their pelvic thrusts, is vulgar in its obviousness, both for the comic editing and for the blunt satire of the old liberal being impotent. No surprise, then, that he resorts to violence later. Maybe had Sjöman given more time to the story of Lena's abandonment by her mother and the possible reunion, there would have been a better emotional counterpoint to stack against this disconnect from her "intellectual father." It would have also played nicely with Lena befriending the young single mother, Sonja Lindgren. Instead, it's a footnote that becomes an easy out with an ending that is too lazy to even be manipulative.

Rather than the color differentiation in the titles, Vilgot Sjöman could have played off of I Am Curious a little more, make the titles fit together. Like, given how this one was so much of the same, it could have been a duo of I Am Curious and But Not Surprised. Or, I am Curious and But Not Very Interesting. I Am Shamefully Predictable. I Am Too Shallow for Two Movies. I Have Already Found Out Everything I Will Ever Find.

I Am Curious but I Am Out of Ideas.

I AM CURIOUS - YELLOW - #180

The I Am Curious set has been sitting in the "next" position in my queue for a while, having come up in the sequential numbering of my personal viewing (in other words, the first 178 down with no gaps) after I covered My Life as a Dog fifteen months ago. It came to mind again after my review of In the Realm of the Senses, this movie's scandalous reputation seeming to make it a good match for Oshima's porno. I particularly considered it as a good choice after some of the mail I got regarding my opinions about Senses, partially because I expected I Am Curious to be another tempest in a teapot. My personal prudishness and my belief that it would be boring, that age would have rotted its teeth, were the main reasons I kept working around it, and maybe it was time to confront that head on.

So, I start here with the first in the set, I Am Curious - Yellow.

Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman's 1967 film is infamous for the protracted legal battle that its American distributor undertook in order to exhibit the picture, using I Am Curious - Yellow as his bludgeon to whack at U.S. obscenity laws. His crusade failed, then it succeeded on appeal, and then he pushed it too far and got close to a draw, but ultimately lost, and the result is that I Am Curious remained contraband. It's a film known more for its reputation than its content, and watching it now forty years on, the explicitness is incredibly tame (particularly compared to the smut of Oshima). The sex scenes comprise only a small part of the running time, and the details we see are far from gynecological. I Am Curious - Yellow isn't even about sex, it's about so much more, and the what sex there is serves a purpose. The long-dead controversy has done Sjöman's work quite a disservice.

I Am Curious - Yellow is a fun, adventurous film, the Swedish extension of the French new wave, a self-reflexive slice of agitprop that would rest comfortably on a shelf next to Godard's La Chinoise in the way it satirizes trendy young idealists while also giving tribute to their marvelously misguided ideals. The focus of Sjöman's movie is Lena, a girl of 22 playing herself between the blurred lines of fact and fiction. I am sure the question of how much of I Am Curious - Yellow was documentary added to its shock value. Sjöman appears as himself making the film, and though some of the early shots are obviously staged, they are quickly offset by clips of Lena taking to the streets and interviewing her fellow citizens about the class system in Sweden. When Sjöman unceremoniously slips from this to scenes of narrative fiction, the change is imperceptible. It's only later when the film crew returns that we have cause to question what we have been seeing, when we finally see the jealous director choreographing Lena's life and demanding she redo some of her lines.

Sjöman constructs his film by balancing it between various conflicting ideals, not just fact and fiction. There is the argument of class, the haves and the have-nots, the young and the old, conservative and liberal--there is even an implicit disparity between director and star. One scene has them questioning who is using the other more. Is it Sjöman for wanting Lena to star in his film and share his bed, or is it Lena for using her sexual wiles to get the lead? It's an interpersonal clash, and also one between art and commerce that brings to mind the similar portrayal of a young woman in a money-oriented world in Steven Soderbergh's latest, The Girlfriend Experience. This dynamic is also mirrored in the lover Lena eventually takes. Depending on what point of the story we are in, Börje Ahlstedt either works in men's wear retail, sells cars, or is the last crown prince of Sweden. A divergent scene shows he and Lena ushering his father out of the castle, putting an end to the monarchy. Leading up to this, they have public sex in front of the royal palace as a barely adult guard watches. The commentary is clear. Such disrespect!

This collection of background elements makes I Am Curious - Yellow as much a portrait of the changing face of Sweden as it is of Lena. The socialist nation was at a crossroads, the youth questioning the success of the ideology as they embraced the newfound freedom that would come to define the decade. Lena is the liberated 1960s woman, free with her body, demanding of her rights, and politically motivated. She is concerned with justice and nonviolence, equal pay for equal work, and global consciousness. She wants the U.S. out of Vietnam and urges her fellow Swedes to stop taking holidays in Spain until Franco is deposed. Her father (Peter Lindgren) went to fight against Franco, but chickened out and ran back home. Ashamed for him, Lena keeps a running tally of the days he has been AWOL in her bedroom under a portrait of the Spanish dictator, surrounded by images of concentration camps and U.S. atrocities in East Asia. It's under this morbid collage that she has sex with Börje, informing him that he's her 24th lover--though the first nineteen didn't count because they were no fun. So far, that is the only price she has had to pay for her convictions; it's easy to have such strident beliefs when faced with so little opposition.

Börje isn't the smartest match for Lena. He's dishonest and unfaithful, with conservative political leanings. He has no problem with class imbalance, nor does he feel women should make as much money as men. He's all sweetness when he wants something, but he's also forceful, almost brutal, when he wants it a certain way. In other words, he's the living embodiment of the real world, as opposed to Lena's hippy-dippy idealistic one. When she retreats to her own personal commune, where she eats tiny vegetarian meals and indulges in topless yoga, he comes crashing back into her life, shattering the peace, and ultimately making her forsake her beliefs. In one comically irreverent scene, Lena apologizes to Martin Luther King, Jr., who appears in footage Sjöman had filmed the year before, telling him she is sorry, but she is going to get violent all over Börje's cheating ass. This scene is sandwiched between multiple come-ons from men passing her on the road and Lena binging on cake. The girl is a mess.

She's also a pleasure to watch. Lena Nyman does more than play herself here, she manages a complete screen character that I couldn't help but root for despite her naïveté. It made me all the more sad when Börje's abuse pushes her to forsake the little life she's cultivated for herself, and even worse when she relies on his masculine posturing. The actor gets into a tussle with the director, even attempts to hijack his control of the movie--which is really grabbing control of Lena. At one point she had gotten away from both of them, but she's back up for grabs. Her father, her director, and her co-star are all disappointments to her, as modern life apparently was for many a young Swede coming of age back then. The social experiment wasn't all it was cracked up to be, the progression wasn't progressive enough, and too many people--particularly the older ones like her dad, but the younger generation, too--were content to carry on with the status quo. The reward for those who would ask for more? VD!

For all the points he is trying to make, for all the cinematic and philosophical balls Vilgot Sjöman is juggling in I Am Curious - Yellow, he never lets the film get bogged down. His technique is facile, moving between the verite and the more formalistic scenes with determination and control. He does occasionally make a clumsy cut from one element to the next, but his style and the soul of his piece remain potent, unlike say the unmannered clutter of Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Sjöman's playful experimentation with sound and words on the screen recall Godard's pranks, while his sense of confined drama recalls Ingmar Bergman--whom Sjöman quotes at the outset of the movie. Given that he directed Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie several years before I Am Curious, I think we can safely surmise that Sjöman picked up a few tricks from his countryman.

In the introduction Sjöman recorded for this disc, he explains how I Am Curious arose out of his discontent with the strictures of the Swedish studio system. He somehow convinced a producer to give him some film, some money, and the freedom to shoot whatever came to him. There was no supervision and no script. Eventually, his initial efforts proved not to be enough, and he had to return to the well for more film. Once he was done, however, he had enough footage to make two separate but compatible movies, extending the experiment further by taking Yellow in one direction, and then Blue in another (the colors being the same as on the Swedish flag). I am sorry I took so long to get around to checking out I Am Curious - Yellow, because I was definitely pleased with what I found waiting for me; whether its sibling will offer the same pleasures is a question that will have to wait just a little longer for its answer. [And here it is...the review of Blue.]

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE - #479

At the end of Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest's Corky St. Clair returns to New York from the Missouri burg where his dreams of a life in the Legitimate Theatre were dashed on the small-town rocks and opens up his own memorabilia store. Guest fills the shop with all kinds of ludicrous, non-existent movie tie-ins, including My Dinner with André action figures. The joke is, of course, that they should probably be "inaction" figures, because Louis Malle's 1981 movie is about as far from action as you can get, at least in the physical sense. There's plenty of mental action, but one doesn't really needs dolls to act that out. Maybe a better toy would be Wallace Shawn and André Gregory masks, and kids could fight over who gets to be the forceful André and dominate the conversation, sort of like getting to be the cop instead of the robber.

My Dinner with André is the brainchild of its two stars, actor/playwright Wallace Shawn and theatre director André Gregory. Of the pair, most moviegoers probably recognize the very recognizable Shawn from his roles in films like The Princess Bride and Clueless; he is currently playing Blair Waldorf's stepdad on Gossip Girl. The entire movie is an extended conversation between the two men, who wrote the screenplay and play versions of themselves. It's a heady movie, covering art, psychology, and philosophy via esoteric anecdotes, mostly coming from André, who shares some of his bizarre experiences from his worldwide search for authentic meaning and experience.

It's one of those left-field concepts that sounds boring but is so very much not boring it's almost shocking. I recall it being a picture that Siskel and Ebert championed back in the day, which is weird because I wasn't even ten when the film came out. Was I really paying attention to those guys back then? I guess so. I suppose it could be a trick of memory, the sort of illusory trap André might call into question in the film, that I could have just heard those famous TV critics talking about it much later. Then again, André would also probably encourage me to get rid of my TV altogether, in which case he would have cut off my cable to spite his own face.

It's weird considering a film like My Dinner with André in 2009, because the cultural landscape has changed so much since Louis Malle set up some cameras and filmed two New York intellectuals debating over a helping of quail. There is an intentional obscuring of the barrier between fiction and reality in this film, like a window that has been washed but the soap streaks are intentionally left on the glass. This is before shows like The Hills and its fake ilk, before reality was packaged and falsified and sold back to us as something genuine as an increasingly standard business practice. When I saw this movie in my late teens, for the first and only time until now, it didn't even occur to me to question whether it was real or not. I assumed it was a true conversation caught on the fly, not a scripted event made to look like it was really happening. I suppose that speaks to how far the film went over my head, that I spent at least twenty years thinking it was a documentary and not a piece of fiction. I suppose, though, that it's a better truth than believing anything that comes out of Heidi Montag's mouth. Even so, the caveats keep rolling; My Dinner with André would probably also reject the notion that any one illusion is quantifiably good in comparison to another.

The film does cover a range of topics, but they all eventually come back around to the concept of self and how one views the world. After a brief intro following Wallace Shawn through New York, listening to his thoughts as he explains the set-up of this dinner, we get into the thick of it relatively quickly. Yet, that set-up also gives us a fundamental understanding of the two character constructs we are working with. Shawn is a playwright concerned with his own failure and how he will make ends meet; André is a successful enough director that he was able to drop out of the business. Even so, there is a sense that he is no longer what he once was, that he is now a failure, as well, and rather than wishing to avoid him because of some social imbalance, Shawn seems scared that his companion might reflect his own insecurities back at him. His failures are Wallace Shawn's failures, too.

In a very abstract way, there is a case to be made for André representing God and Shawn humanity. André instigates the dinner, and he also begins the conversation with stories of how he learned to manipulate reality and control people through improvisational acting exercises. It is an anecdote that sets the stage both for the topics to follow and introduces the notion, false as it may be, that this is also improvisation. André's example is an event where actors were pushed to play themselves rather than invented characters, just as they are seemingly doing here. Life is performance, so performance is no different than life. Like the anti-Keyser Söze, André's trick here isn't making us believe he's not real when our experience tells us otherwise, but that he is, even when the strings are showing.

As the night wears on, though, André's tales take on an increasing weariness, a despair that all situations can be manipulated and people can't be pushed to act for themselves, as if the Supreme Being were sick of governing the minutia of our nowhere lives. Neither Malle nor the authors really set up any of this divine argument, and to be perfectly honest, it was a total afterthought on my part, but it does have a certain sense to it. André is trying to find a way to be an enlightened being, and he is searching for meaning wherever he can find it, placing great mystical importance on coincidence and his own perceptions of an interconnectedness. Be it art or activity or what have you, people need to come together and create moments of purity, reminding themselves that they are alive by creating illusions that paradoxically will force us to acknowledge that all life is a dream. If everyday experience is lacking in sustenance, then there must be something transformative to free our souls from the existential abyss that is modern living.

It's a self-indulgent argument, and it's hard not to look at André as a self-involved white man of privilege, a position I think the filmmakers are fully aware of. In a way, André is being set up to be knocked down, with Wallace Shawn given very few interjections--acting being reacting, Shawn doesn't sit idly, the amount of listening may make his the more difficult performance. Most of his thoughts are saved until his cathartic third-act speech (right on cue, right when it's needed*) in defense of day-to-day living, of the importance of surviving and the strength of the individual and the few real bonds one makes. This is enough, this is important, life is in the details. In a way, this, and the fact that My Dinner with André exists at all, supports Shawn's earlier argument that art should reflect life and the common experience; yet, it also supports André, who says that people know enough of their own lives and don't need to see their personal dramas played out for them on stage or screen, they need something else to transport them.

Which is just what My Dinner with André does for its running time. For nearly two hours you are likely to forget whatever else is around you, what bills aren't paid or that you need to put your laundry in the dryer, because you'll be wrapped up in this conversation. It may not be as important as André would have us believe, that this entertainment, no matter how intellectually stimulating, is merely a distraction from our own mortality, but each of the men does end up proving that art can be what he wants it to be without canceling out the other. Being both a reflection and a distortion, it can show us our personal reality while also showing us a different one; we see ourselves in what is separate from us. It may only be a magic trick, but it provides succor via entertainment, while also changing one's frame of reference and, therefore, one's perception. At one point, André asks if maybe the only art that will work anymore is the art that is geared toward an audience of one. Though this was still true in a darkened Cineplex, where each audience member sat alone with his or her thoughts and these two dinner guests, it's now even more valid in the age of DVD. And yet, that once very public private act of going to the movies was still communal in that a group of people engaged in it at the same time; are we now more disconnected as we enjoy more and more of life in the confines of our own homes? Does it make us better or less equipped to replicate the unheralded victory that sneaks its way into the voiceover at the end, when Wallace Shawn informs us that he goes home and tells his girlfriend all about his meal? He carries the torch for the conversation and passes it to someone else. I guess our new challenge is to get out of our easy chairs and do the same.

For those who want to go behind the curtain and learn more about how the reality informed the film and how Malle, Shawn, and Gregory built a piece of fiction out of actual lives, the lead feature on DVD 2 should satisfy your concerns. Filmmaker Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding) spends about half an hour each with Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, and the interviews explore who these men are and how they came together to create My Dinner with André. It digs into what parts of their own lives served as source material and how the two of them cobbled it all together, and then how they hooked up with Louis Malle and the ways the director shaped them into actors and their script into a movie. Baumbach is a good interviewer, sparking a dialogue that does service to the film and those who appreciate it.

The tables--and the camera--are turned in the other program, a 1982 episode of the BBC magazine show "Arena." Titled "My Dinner with Louis," it's a 52-minute portrait of Malle, based around an interview conducted by Wallace Shawn. The full scope of Malle's movie career is explored, complete with clips, in an attempt to divine the director's artistic impulse and the themes of his work. It's a great insight into the man who would read the script for My Dinner with André and think, "This is a movie I have to make."

Louis Malle

* Though, arguably, it's actually a second-act shift, this not being a by-the-book third act film. (I can hear Charlie Kaufman in my head, "Don't say ‘third act.'")



For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

THE SEVENTH SEAL - #11

"I live now in a world of phantoms, a prisoner of my own dreams."

Ingmar Bergman's 1957 Swedish production The Seventh Seal is the poster child for foreign films. It more than any other movie is what the average person thinks of when they think European cinema, and it's the first one other filmmakers go to when they want to make a parody of pretentious, depressing art house flicks. The most obvious and extended lampoon that comes to mind for me is the second Bill and Ted movie, though I think one of the more recent examples of someone using The Seventh Seal is Stephen Colbert's fake health segments, "Cheating Death," on The Colbert Report. The intro to those pieces shows Colbert playing a chess game with the Grim Reaper, which is the standard image, and by its ubiquity, you'd think that it was a far more substantial part of the movie. The actual chess game begins in the first two minutes of the picture, and it comes up twice more, yet is finished by the climax of the movie. I suppose this speaks to the power of the image that Bergman created that half a century later all you have to do is say "chess game with Death" and most people will immediately think of The Seventh Seal, whether they know that's what they are thinking of or not.

There are a number of things that are sad about the fact that a large segment of the population is scared of foreign films, but the misconceptions about what The Seventh Seal is supposed to represent is pretty high on the list. As a viewer, I wouldn't blame you for going into the movie thinking it is going to be pretentious and depressing, that the criticism inherent in the parodies is right; coming out of it, however, you'll probably be surprised by how far from the truth it all is. The Seventh Seal isn't a work so shallow that it can be deconstructed in a single perfume commercial, nor is it a film so self-involved as to make the mind feel pained or bloated, like you'll survive its 97 minutes but feel like you've been engorged. The surprising thing about The Seventh Seal is how light it really is. Yes, it deals with some important subjects--faith and doubt, mortality, religion, compassion--but it's never burdensome, never pushy. Rather, Bergman's script is so well constructed and his themes so expertly integrated into the overall narrative, the philosophizing never overtakes the story, and there is never a scene where the momentum of the action is lost amongst heady exposition. Nor is it an overly serious affair. Rather, The Seventh Seal is regularly funny, sometimes lusty, and often touching.

The Seventh Seal is set in medieval times, amidst plague and Christian crusades, both of which contribute to an overwhelming pallor of death that is permeating the land. Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), a knight and his squire, have just returned from ten years fighting the heathens in Africa. Their spirit is broken, their eyes opened by what they have seen. Jöns is more practical about it, life is what it is and one just carries on, but Antonius is in the midst of an existential crisis. His relationship with God is suffering from a sense of abandonment that is about to give way to not believing in a Supreme Being at all, and he is desiring of some proof that all of this fighting has not been in vain. So much so, that at the outset of the picture, when Death (Bengt Ekerot) comes to claim his immortal soul, Antonius stalls him with that famous chess game, saying he has something he needs to do before he can shuffle off this mortal coil. On the surface of it, that task appears to be returning home to his wife, but this is more Odysseus by way of Camus and that goal is really more of a red herring. It's more like returning to the source of his belief to see if it's still there.

Perhaps this is why he takes the acrobat family under his protection, he sees something in their unit that reminds him of why he wanted to side with the good and not the bad. In particular, he admires the forthright and caring nature of Mia (Bergman-regular Bibi Andersson), who cares both for her flighty husband, Jof (Nils Poppe), and their one-year-old baby. Mia is down to earth and practical, though practical in a common-sense way, still open to experience, and not as cynical as Jöns. You could even argue that the woman and the squire represent two sides of Antonius' conscience, one imploring him to remain open to life and the other suggesting he close up and wait it out. At the same time, Jöns also provides the example for personal redemption by saving the unnamed girl (Gunnel Lindblom) from the corpse-robbing rapist, Raval (Bertil Anderberg)--though Jöns' insistence that the girl serve him in return shows how badly mangled his sense of Christian charity has become now that he has rejected the church. Then again, there is also no more potent symbol than the attacker, in that Raval is the one who convinced Antonius and Jöns to join the Crusades a decade ago. The man who sent believers off to their death is now picking over their bodies.

Bergman provides many examples of how topsy-turvy the world is. The second scene of the movie, right after the knight meets and challenges death, is our introduction to the performance troupe that Mia and Jof are a part of, and their third partner, Skat (Erik Strandmark), emerges from their trailer wearing a Death mask. They are on their way to a religious festival. The monks running it have hired them to perform a play that will scare the audience into repenting, propaganda along the lines that the plague is punishment against sinners. The current prevailing message of the Church is that doom is the only possible reward anyone can hope for, and they will scare you into accepting or burn you at the stake (which we see, actually, when they fry a young "witch" (Maud Hansson) for not getting on board). Hordes of religious thugs are as pervasive as the disease they claim to fight, and this seems like the wrong kind of salvation to the returning warriors. Antonius and Jöns have become symbols for life themselves, the death bringers now challenging the end of all things and offering sanctuary to the tormented, whereas by taking the job at the festival, the entertainers, whose job it is to lighten people's loads, are now the ones piling on the gloom.

The plague state is akin to an apocalyptic nightmare, and so imagery in The Seventh Seal resembles the end of days. From the corpse that Antonius and Jöns find in the road--and whom the squire amusingly seeks directions from; his speech after the fact is one of his many funny chunks of dialogue--through the hooded monks who so resemble Death that after Antonius accidentally gives confession to a disguised Reaper you're never quite sure where he'll pop up again, to the knight's isolated castle, there is a sense that everything is being laid to waste. When Raval catches up with the caravan 2/3 in--the way characters enter and exit in The Seventh Seal are a tell-tale sign of its theatrical roots--on his last legs, having caught the plague himself, it suddenly seems that they are all merely staying one step ahead of the devastation the way Antonius is managing to stay one step ahead of Death. The world they have left has ceased to exist.

Bergman is aware of how thick he is laying it on, and there are a couple of self-reflexive moments where the author lets us know the potential for misunderstanding and parody is not lost to him. Some of the things the acrobats say about what audiences will sit through are like a wink forward to the critics who would say similar things about The Seventh Seal. The artist played by Gunnar Olsson, whom Jöns meets early in the picture, the painter who is creating a mural about death, even says that sometimes the common man needs to have a little depression foisted upon him so he will consider serious things, as if the director of Smiles of a Summer Night was worried he'd have to explain to a bewildered public where all the fun had gone. That same artist also admits that when the money runs out, he will paint the more sunny subjects that people pay for, a sly explanation of the trade-off pattern of tragedies and comedies that Bergman would make in the 1950s and '60s. One for me, one for them. Though, it's also a ratio existent in The Seventh Seal. It's a comic tragedy, or a tragic comedy. How else do you explain the subplot of the blacksmith (Ake Fridell) and his wife (Inga Gill), who runs off with Skat and then weasels her way back into her husband's good graces when caught? Jöns provides a running commentary on women, stoking the blacksmith's flames of anger the way Groucho might ignite the ire of one of the other Marx boys. And when Skat gets his, set upon by a gleeful Death, it's probably the funniest scene in the whole movie. No reason a guy can't go out laughing, is there?

These moments of laughter greatly offset Antonius' existential emptiness. He is a forebear of the 20th-century man seeking some kind of sense in a senseless world. He is not ready to admit that his beliefs are gone, so much so that his main gambit in the chess game, a combined knight-bishop attack, symbolically represents how he has always seen the world as being governed. At one point, he states his own fundamental problem, saying, "Faith is a heavy burden, you know? It's like loving someone out in the darkness who never comes no matter how loud you call." In the same conversation, shared with Mia, he refers to a betrothed that he lost, and if we read between the lines, he's referring to Jesus, once again indicating that his homeland mission is not all it seems. At the witch burning, the knight is juxtaposed with the accused, and he wants to know how she can retain her belief on the way to the pyre. She sees what is not there and trusts that it will carry her through, whereas he desires something tangible, something he can put his hands on. Overhearing all this, a ghastly looking monk asks him, "Do you never stop asking questions?" and when Antonius confirms that he does not, the monk lays him low with the futility of his plight: "You get no answers."

Placed against the unknowable, the simple pleasures of life with the acrobats, of playing with the baby and eating wild strawberries, is its own kind of paradise. The fact that they can have such tiny joys, or that the blacksmith can get so worked up about his wife's wanton ways, means that petty human drama is still important. That's the scintilla of hope, the last refuge in a meaningless wasteland, the thing one would hang onto in a post-apocalyptic world: the ability for man to continue. Even when others behave like beasts, be it the cruelty they inflict on Jof or Skat rutting with the blacksmith's wife, quite purposely scored by Mia and Jof singing a song about animal behavior, there is still the sustaining bond of mother and child. It's not for nothing that Mia and Jof in some translations are called Mary and Joseph, making their little Mikail the source of all tomorrows. (And, you know, you do kind of wonder how the lovely blonde ever got hooked up with the nerdy juggler. A virgin conception explains a lot.)

You can also see some remaining compassion in the girl that Jöns rescued. She silently watches everything, and she is the only one who is willing to help the disease-ridden Raval. Things reach their portentous apex around this time. In the forest, there is a point where everything goes quiet, where the world grows still. Bergman has used the natural landscape throughout The Seventh Seal, even opening up on a raging sea, and so the sudden lull is a little chilling. Plus, as voiceover at the start of the movie and a prayer at the end informs us that, in the Book of Revelation, when the Seventh Seal is opened, leading the way to final judgment, the world does go quiet this way. Though Bergman is never heavy-handed enough to have any of his characters openly acknowledge this connection, they do mark the moment, and it does seal their fate. This and some cryptic remarks by Death make Antonius realize that the game has gotten larger than him, that more is at stake, and so he must take action to rescue those in his charge. That, too, is an existential solution: salivation in man's action. He has retained some of the compassion that the nameless girl sought to hang on to, and so it is also she who prepares them to accept what cannot be avoided. She is the first to move toward Death, to lead the way to eternal peace, repeating Christ's final line, "It is finished."

At the end of the film, only the actors are left alive, and Jof, who is prone to mystical visions, spots the lost group up on a hill with Death, a chain gang in service to the bitter end, engaged in what he sees as a kind of dance, a new troupe destined to put on a show for the ages. Another self-reflexive moment, to be sure. With the movie now ended, Bergman's own troupe is, in its way, now enslaved to perform this play over and over thanks to the Hell of Celluloid. It's also the dance of life, the endless performance of being amongst the waking world that we are all engaged in.

The final scene reminds me, as well, that I would be remiss were I not to consider the performances, because really, the actors play an essential role in keeping The Seventh Seal from crumbling under the pressure of its own artistic aspirations. There is a convergence of styles here. Some of the comedy routines (as well as some of the music by Erik Nordgren) call to mind classic cinema traditions. The banter between Gunnar Björnstrand and Ake Fridell, the routines put on by Nils Poppe and Erik Strandmark--these polished performances appear so effortless, it is like watching the professional funnymen that moved from Vaudeville to Hollywood, like they've spent some time studying Abbot and Costello and the like. On the other hand, the more serious parts have a naturalism that is very much of the 1950s and the emergence of method acting and other less mannered styles. Max von Sydow is often called upon to play the creepy roles in horror movies, but his turn as Antonius Block has a thoughtful gravitas and a quiet nobility. When coupled with Bibi Andersson's earthy, unglamorous portrayal of Mia, Sydow also takes on calm and sweetness. Andersson is seductive without doing anything sexy. She is more sensual, a mother whose warm and open manner inspires a more primal desire. Given how gorgeous Andersson can be in movies that call for fancier dress, the "no make-up" look she wears in The Seventh Seal is almost more glamorous by how rare and beautiful it is. Antonius even tells Mia, after seeing her for the first time off stage, that she looks better without "all that paint" on her face.

The new two-disc edition of The Seventh Seal is the second that Criterion has released. It's been eleven years since that fist disc, and the decade of improved technology really shows. The new transfer is stunning, flawless, and whatever other superlative you care to toss at it. There are also a bunch of new extras--including the Bergman Island bonus DVD--with my favorite being the short tribute Woody Allen put together for Turner Classic Movies. In it, Allen discusses why he likes Bergman, making the distinction between the perceived artistry and the inherent entertainment value in Bergman's films. He speaks of The Seventh Seal as a suspense picture and a fairy tale.

It's too bad they couldn't also include Stephen Colbert's tribute to Bergman, made two years ago when the director passed away. I can't imagine Ingmar not smiling at the reverent irreverence of it.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Farewell Ingmar Bergman
www.colbertnation.com
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