Notes from the Trenches

I moderated this last week the first multiple-film discussion of the newly-conceived (with the Denver Public Library’s film committee) “Cinema Club” where three or more films are “assigned” for an end-of-month clip show, analysis, and chat about the films by themselves and in sequence. Topic for the first series was “Modern Love” with the films Edward Scissorhands, Punch-Drunk Love, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Drove down with an old pal-o-mine who presented me a photocopy of the box of a product endorsed by Smokey Robinson (of Miracles fame): red beans and rice frozen dinner – and it’s a lot scarier than you’d imagine with a tagline, “The Soul is in the Bowl” that strikes my ears as really, really menacing. Soylent Beans is people. Between the mesmeric blue eyes and the questionable content of celebrity-endorsed food stuffs (what’s with the American Gothic vibe of Newman’s Own anyway?), I felt several moments of real temptation before its awful frozen majesty.

Here's something to think about: most woeful or unfortunate celebrity endorsements or, even better, real or fictional celebrity and merchandise tie-ins you'd like to see. Mad Magazine? Eat yer heart out.

The discussion went well though, scheduled in the middle of a weekday, attendance was sparse. Of note: a woman came in late, delivered a scary, rambling diatribe in which I think she was ultimately blaming the makers of Entrapment for “perpetrating a crime” on her in a tenement in Jackson, MI a decade or so ago, because she had been asked by someone to write a film review of it. She left after a while, but not before making a few arcane gestures with her hands, sighing heavily, and indicating that she’d only seen one of the three films up for dissection. Mental illness is a scary thing – especially when it’s front row, left, and about five feet away from my throat.

Same sort of program being proposed for a local coffee shop - it's the kind of thing that could become a kind of thing, if you know what I mean.

Also moderated a quickie discussion-following-screening of All About Eve - one of the most overrated screenplays in history, I think, but possessed of another invaluable turn by the inimitable George Sanders. Someone should talk about the curse of the film as two of the folks, Sanders and “second Eve” Phoebe, Barbara Bates, killed themselves.

Went to blissfully closed screenings for Neil Young: Heart of Gold, Night Watch, and the new Robert Towne flick Ask the Dust. I’m on record for the first, will hold my counsel for the last (though the review has been logged to prevent corruption should I interview the man), and as for the Russian vampire flick?

It’s well and truly dreadful. On the bright side, though, looks like I might have a scheduling conflict this week that prevents me from seeing the Tim Allen Shaggy Dog flick.

Avoided watching any of the Winter Olympics with the same dedication that I will apply to avoiding the Oscar telecast next month – and caught a look at Terry Zwigoff’s newest: Art School Confidential. I’m going to try to see it again before I write on it which is not, after all, necessarily an endorsement.

Hoping to do a blog-only review of Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia this week – maybe sometime just before Bill’s last Class of 1984 contest. Speaking of frame-grabs, here’s mine:

Class of 1984: THE FINAL ROUND (UPDATED)

Here's the last Class of 1984 giveaway. To reiterate: we've got 5 copies of Anchor Bay's upcoming Special Edition of Mark L. Lester's exploitation classic to unload, courtesy of Total Assault. This is the fifth and final mini-contest (one per copy) I will hold here at the blog.

If you've never seen Class of 1984, it's basically a remake of The Blackboard Jungle with the flamboyant gangbangers of The Warriors replacing the original's Wild One-style delinquents. One of the last Canadian tax-shelter pics, it features rare live footage of Toronto punk band Teenage Head, an early performance by Michael J. Fox, and an ending that will have you asking how something so wrong can feel so right. Due out on February 21st, the DVD features commentary from Lester, a retrospective documentary, and beautifully remastered picture and sound. We'll have a full review at the mother site in the coming weeks.

To win the fifth copy, correctly identify the movie to which the below frame-grab belongs. (Since this a frame-grab and not a production still, be sure to take note of things like aspect ratio.) As we're only allowed to give these discs away to North American residents, I must ask that our international readers refrain from placing any guesses. Sorry.

I promised the last one would be tough, and I think I came through.

Meantime, my two-for-one review of Ryan's Daughter and Dune is finally up (try to curb your enthusiasm), and Travis has taken a look at the Brokeback Mountain of its day, Making Love.

Hot Off the Presses (2/23)
Walter does a little jig over Jonathan Demme's Neil Young: Heart of Gold.

As promised, another screencap from the as-yet-unguessed film in question:

Notes from the Trenches

It’s hard to know how to feel about the Eight Below screening what with the lady behind us who talked to the dogs throughout while exclaiming to her companion a few times that she couldn’t bear much more of the suspense this completely unsuspenseful film was dishing out – and the two old ladies in front of us who, before the film started, turned around to ask me my opinion, as a film critic, of The New World before proceeding to not listen to a word I said for about two minutes. Her main problem was that she couldn’t follow the narrative of the film and wished that she was fresher from school so that she might be more familiar with the history – when I said that that would almost certainly make her dislike the film even more for being a-linear and anti-narrative, she said that she wished that she was fresher from school so that she might be more familiar with the history. Needless to say, halfway through this Paul Walker masterpiece, the hankies were out and the declaration of “what a brave and emotional film” punctuated her evening and confirmed her sense of well being.

Did anyone mention in the nationals that the snow cat the heroes drive to rescue their hounds at the end of the film is named “Mare Biscotti” – “Sea Biscuit”?

It’s enough to make you sick: for me, it was just enough to plan on skipping the Running Scared screening next week. Another evening show for that one, I’d just as soon wait until it hits the dollar theaters and see it there on matinee. The relative silence and solitude would be well worth the two dollar admission price. Besides, the projectionist at my local discount cinema is better at his job than most of the folks running the machines at these screenings. At the least he manages not to consistently use the wrong lenses on his projectors.

Jeremiah Kipp conducts an interesting interview with freshly-fired Salon.com critic Charles Taylor here – with most of the revelations unsurprising, but worth repeating in any case and certainly still infuriating. I particularly like Taylor’s retort to the popular (and inscrutable) complaint that reviews should be assigned to people who are most likely to enjoy the film (he says something along the lines of “they do that already, they’re called ‘publicists’”). Is the conversation watering down? Not a whisper of a doubt about it.

That doesn’t mean, however, that when folks are presented with a film in a convivial community environment, that they don’t really get into the spirit of intellectual discourse. Speaking before and after Possessed, Leon, The Professional and Run Lola Run recently, with All About Eve (or Humoresque) and a classroom on Edward Scissorhands, Punch-Drunk Love, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind coming up this week – I’m constantly rejuvenated and edified by my interactions with folks bringing the full weight of their experience and prejudices to bear on a piece of subjective cinema. I love pinioning the spiritual progression of Tykwer’s Hitchcock and Kieslowski shrine; the mad ‘90s of Gary Oldman’s career, and the visual hijacking of a film by two of Hitch’s favorite cinematographers: Joseph Valentine and Robert Burks. What’s lost in most discussions of Possessed is its singular, nightmarish camera work. That and the fact that Crawford spent half of the film without makeup: diva that.

Will try to catch that Russian vampire flick this week as well as that Christmas movie that got nominated for the Best Foreign Picture Oscar while, on the DVD write-up queue, I see two television series (“Arrested Development” and “Alien Nation”) and a trio of Bette Davis melodramas. Weren’t they all?

Question of the moment: what books would you like to see adapted that have not or, more controversially, maybe can't be adapted to the screen. Mine for the latter would be William Goldman's Control - and for the former the Coppola-owned Kerouac: On the Road.

Reading Joe Eszterhas’ insane Bill Clinton faux-moir American Rhapsody and listening to the new Beth Orton and Roseanne Cash CDs – here’s the screen capture:

Class of 1984: Round Four

Here's the latest Class of 1984 giveaway. To reiterate: we've got 5 copies of Anchor Bay's upcoming Special Edition of Mark L. Lester's exploitation classic to unload, courtesy of Total Assault. This is the fourth of five mini-contests (one per copy) I will hold here at the blog.

If you've never seen Class of 1984, it's basically a remake of The Blackboard Jungle with the flamboyant gangbangers of The Warriors replacing the original's Wild One-style delinquents. One of the last Canadian tax-shelter pics, it features rare live footage of Toronto punk band Teenage Head, an early performance by Michael J. Fox, and an ending that will have you asking how something so wrong can feel so right. Due out on February 21st, the DVD features commentary from Lester, a retrospective documentary, and beautifully remastered picture and sound. We'll have a full review at the mother site in the coming weeks.

To win the fourth copy, correctly identify the movie to which the below frame-grab belongs. (Since this a frame-grab and not a production still, be sure to take note of things like aspect ratio.) As we're only allowed to give these discs away to North American residents, I must ask that our international readers refrain from placing any guesses. Sorry.

I think this week's pretty easy, but maybe not if you haven't seen the film in a while. I promise next week's (i.e. the last one) will be a showstopper.

Not much else to report. Walter's review of Freedomland is up early; Valentine's Day came and went without Anna Paquin showing up at my doorstep; and in a fit of procrastination I marathon'd the entire first season of "Grey's Anatomy". Why, oh why, is that show so popular? It reminds me a lot of "Gilmore Girls", actually, in that it's clueless as to just how shallow and frankly evil its characters are.

Hot Off the Presses (2/16)
It's Walter vs. the Snow Dogs: Eight Below.

Notes from the Trenches

Revving up the screening schedule this last week has left me revving it back down this coming week with the bad following the worse and, besides, better things to do in the form of the young Boulder Film Festival, running for three days about thirty-minutes up the road this coming weekend, and featuring a few fine guests and films. Spent most of this week (and weekend) watching screeners from the fest and wondering if I’m going to get to interview Maria Bello while she’s in town. Seems like whenever I say anything, it’s jinxed, so there you have it – but I want to mention that among the many injustices in the Oscar nominations, Bello and Viggo Mortensen being shut out of the performance categories loom large as perhaps the most egregious. Another exciting interview being lined up that I don’t want to mention yet, but I will say that it’s with a personal hero of mine when I was just an embryonic critic-to-be instead of this big ugly man-critic in full-aggressive flower that you see before you.

The “Dueling Divas” series at the Denver Public Library moves forward at a healthy clip last week with a well-attended screening of the Bette Davis three-hankie weepie Dark Victory. It hasn’t aged well. With three Bette flicks to review for the muthasite (including this one), I’ll keep my own counsel – but I will say that Bogie is badly miscast as an Irish stable-hand and Ronald Reagan is perfectly cast as a rich lush with champagne bubbles in his head. This week: Possessed, the second Joan Crawford flick by that name, and one of her best performances. They were all good. Well, at least until she hooked up with Roger Corman.

Really disgusted by this article about Netflix and their policy of “throttling” their best customers by slowing the pace of their rentals. I hope this thing becomes a class action. As of now, though, consider me an ex-customer. I’m sure they could give a shit, but there’s too much of this stuff in our culture now, isn’t there, of lack of accountability and surplus of deception. “Truthiness”, right? Well, this is the first chance I get to do something about it and so, I’m taking it.

With the death of Peter Benchley – bears asking if anyone’s actually read Jaws? Y’know, the one where there’s an adulterous affair between Chief Brody’s wife and the Richard Dreyfuss shark expert? Those looking for examples of the books being much, much worse than the movies based on them: look no farther than the films of Alfred Hitchcock and, of course, Jaws. Other prime examples? Controversial ones?

Here’s this week’s screen capture. May need to take a page out of Bill’s playbook somehow is it turns out, too, to be too easy. This is the first of seven in the fourth cycle and it is a screen capture, so issues such as aspect ratio matter. Thanks, Jack, for the link to the LAN player. It's small, easy, and works like a dream.

Hot off the Presses (Feb 14)

Happy Valentine's day, folks. Saw Eight Below last night and had the pleasure of listening to some woman sitting behind me, dangerously involved in the picture, urging the dog heroes on with not-so-whispered, tearful entreaties of "Be careful, honey, c'mon, C'MON" and entreaties to a pup playing dead of "Be there, Maya, c'mon, baby, BE THERE" as Paul Walker zombie-walks to its side to administer what I was sure was going to be the kiss of life. Alas, the dog wakes up by itself. This is the kind of audience "interference" that studios hope will corrupt a critic's experience of a film favorably - but there are two truths about this tactic: the first is that there is nothing I can say that will make the kind of people who see this film not love it; and the second is that this kind of dimwitted audience intrusion almost invariably makes good critics crankier and less likely to give the film a kind review. I console myself with the flick's poster: the funniest thing I've seen in some time. Walker reproduced with exactly the same expression as his canine co-stars is almost worth the movie.

A question though, thrown out there out of flabbergasting ignorance before I write the review proper: is there a temperature so cold that beyond which breath no longer mists? I'm serious. This film has made me measurably stupider.

Class of 1984: Round Three

Here's the latest Class of 1984 giveaway. To reiterate: we've got 5 copies of Anchor Bay's upcoming Special Edition of Mark L. Lester's exploitation classic to unload, courtesy of Total Assault. This is the third of five mini-contests (one per copy) I will hold here at the blog.

If you've never seen Class of 1984, it's basically a remake of The Blackboard Jungle with the flamboyant gangbangers of The Warriors replacing the original's Wild One-style delinquents. One of the last Canadian tax-shelter pics, it features rare live footage of Toronto punk band Teenage Head, an early performance by Michael J. Fox, and an ending that will have you asking how something so wrong can feel so right. Due out on February 21st, the DVD features commentary from Lester, a retrospective documentary, and beautifully remastered picture and sound. We'll have a full review at the mother site in the coming weeks.

To win the third copy, correctly identify the movie to which the below frame-grab belongs. (Since this a frame-grab and not a production still, be sure to take note of things like aspect ratio.) As we're only allowed to give these discs away to North American residents, I must ask that our international readers refrain from placing any guesses. Sorry.

Little tougher this week? Mayhaps.

As you may have surmised from my Carnac-like speculation that Warners wouldn't be revisiting Superman on DVD unless it was in the context of an Alien Quadrilogy-style box set, I was given some inkling a few months back that such a project was being brainstormed but wasn't aware that it--along with definitive reissues of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and the NC-17 version of Eyes Wide Shut (sadly, re-releases of Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket are not currently on tap)--had been officially announced at a Warner Home Video event last week. Oops; I stopped reading the various DVD news sites once FFC started getting besieged with press releases straight from the studios themselves, but occasionally a juicy tidbit--like this crocodile-choking, 14-disc box set of the four original Superman feature films plus Bryan Singer's upcoming Superman Returns--flies clear of our radar. I'm really excited about those Kubricks.

Be sure to take a gander at Walter's two-for-one review of Bram Stoker's Dracula & Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Many nails are hit squarely on the head therein.

Hot Off the Presses (2/9)
Ask and ye shall receive: Walter reviews Final Destination 3.

Update (2/10)
As my clues have apparently been of little help, here's a second framegrab from the film in question; this is probably a dead giveaway. Also, new on the mothersite, Travis looks at Simone Bitton's documentary Wall.

Notes from the Trenches

Broke my self-imposed fast this last week by attending a late-Thursday screening of the just dreadfully inept and pathetic When a Stranger Calls; the kind of lint trap that is so listless and dreary that it begs a lot of existential questions – most of them during the screening. It’s not bad enough to be instructive, even (like A Sound of Thunder and Bloodrayne (which I caught in the dollars and which, I have to say, is the best Uwe Boll film hands down: just like staph is the best –locaccus), but rather just bad enough to make you feel tired and dispirited. The audience was extraordinarily well-behaved – testament to how effective a narcotic is When a Stranger Calls, perhaps – and I noted with interest that not a one of them was the least bit engaged, nor startled, by the mindless cymbal-clashes of this calculated formula twitcher. The original Carol Kane flick was terrible, of course, but at least it had the eternally underestimated and misused Carol Kane.

Tuesday found me at the Denver Public Library introducing and discussing Michael Curtiz’s proto-melodrama Mildred Pierce. Lost in most discussions of Joan Crawford’s career is this essential truth that she was a top box-office draw for decades, not for being a bitch, but for being magnetic, beautiful, and a gifted actor. Her turn in Mildred Pierce, for instance, is indicated by a great deal of subtlety and quiet; a scene where she witnesses her monstrous daughter objectified by a bunch of sailors in a night club is devastating and mostly because Crawford has allowed us insight into how her character has been wounded (and perhaps Crawford herself) by the same kind of destructive male gaze. When best pal Ida (Eve Arden) comments on a lascivious glance with “Sheesh, leave me something, I’ll catch cold!” – some of the cultural brutality of the picture floats clean into focus. With over 160 films under his belt, I find myself admiring Curtiz’s work on this one more than other, more revered, pictures on which he functioned mainly as a kind of place-marker. What I’m saying is that it’s better than Casablanca.

Because the film is longish, there wasn’t much time for discussion afterwards, limited as we are by the library’s closing time. A shame, and something to think about when programming series. This week saw, too, the launch of the library’s “Cinema Club” with a screening of Edward Scissorhands.

This coming week: Dark Victory at the DPL, Run Lola Run at Lone Tree, and Leon: The Professional at Douglas County, plus the second film in the “Cinema Club” three-film-then-discussion series, P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love.

Watched a fabbo giallo on DVD for review called Strip Nude for your Killer: an exploitation flick that combines elements of Peeping Tom with Blow-Up with some weird Italian soft-porn flick, reminding that the fringe is often where you find the strongest statements about the things that matter. Taken with Mildred Pierce and, to an extent, the mendacity of When a Stranger Calls 2006, the theme of the day seems to be social awareness. In a year where Crash and Brokeback Mountain are in a neck-to-neck (man-on-man?) race to win the industry’s most-coveted self-congratulation – my question is what are the best films about social issues?

Let me start the debate with Romero’s landmark Civil Rights piece: Night of the Living Dead.

The last screen capture of this cycle presents Jack S. with the chance to win if none of the other four previous winners can tie it at the finish line. They've all been easy as I wrestle with a good capture program and no time lately - tougher next time, I promise:

Meanwhile, tons of new material at the mothersite with Alex's excellent Sundance coverage continuing, side-by-side with a nice Top Ten Internet Flicks piece while the crew works on Iviews Issue 7. Also, Travis takes on Alex Cox's Repo Man.

For Lee and Jack S. to decide the winner of capture-contest #3:

Hot off the Presses (2.7)

Here's the new Harrison Ford, Firewall, with whether or not I'll make the Final Destination 3 screening before this weekend still up in the air. Alex's Sundance coverage continues with Into Great Silence plus I do the honors on Burton's Big Fish on DVD again.

Hot off the Presses (2.8)

Scheduling conflict is going to shut me out of a screening of Steve Martin's long-awaited (by someone, I'm sure) Pink Panther update, I'm afraid, (and still don't know if I can juggle/rush to get a screening of Final Destination 3 under my belt this week) but here's Alex reporting on Tanuj Chopra's Punching at the Sun from Sundance, and me going on about Heidi Klum's "Project Runway Season One". Want to mention that Alex's review of A Darkness Swallowed is an example of why a lot of us are fans of his in the first place: humane and humble, and a reminder of how to do it right.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Note the cheeky, "Whistler's Mother"-esque shadow R. G. Armstrong casts on the wall to his left.

I confess that I used that frame-grab from 1973's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in the latest Class of 1984 giveaway to facilitate a segue into this post. I've wanted to vent a little since getting Warner's new box set of Sam Peckinpah's "Legendary Westerns" (Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) for my birthday.

Like Back to the Future or Miller's Crossing or Blue Velvet or Se7en, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is one of those movies that caused an ineffable tremor in my makeup, leaving a fissure distinguishing who I was before I saw it from who I was thereafter. Yet I never went out of my way to recommend it to anyone: it's too flawed, too idiosyncratic--it's frankly boring at times. In the end, though, I don't know if I was protecting it from people or people from it.

In a dry-run of what Warner did to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America a decade later, the long-out-of-circulation 106-minute theatrical cut of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid strips the film of its non-linearity and drops portions of Bob Dylan's song score, including the soundtrack hit "Knocking on Heaven's Door." The version I grew up with, dubbed the "1988 Turner Preview," runs 122 minutes and restores, most crucially, a framing device in which Garrett (James Coburn) is ambushed and killed over a land dispute (land implicitly purchased with the money Garrett received for killing the Kid (Kris Kristofferson)), putting an ironic--or literal, but fatalistic/nihilistic all the same--spin on his suicidal gesture of firing at a mirror immediately after gunning Billy down. "Knocking on Heaven's Door" also makes a return (albeit in instrumental form), backing the similarly-reinstated riverside bloodletting of Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) as his soon-to-be widow (genre staple Katy Jurado) looks on. (It is impossible to imagine the film without this scene.) Editor-turned-director Roger Spottiswoode oversaw this laconic cut, going by his memory of Bloody Sam's original assembly, and the sum of its parts reaches Days of Heaven levels of transcendence. Indeed, Billy the Kid had become a kind of countercultural icon, and many presumed that Peckinpah saw himself as Billy and Pat Garrett as an avatar for Hollywood producers--the liberal free-spirit trying to squirm out of the two-faced Man's grip and, pointedly, failing. But there's no joy in Billy's borrowed time; unlike Terrence Malick (but rather like Chow Yun-Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), meditation leads Peckinpah not to the bliss of enlightenment, but to endless sorrow. This is a movie about reckonings.

The Two-Disc Special Edition DVD of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid features both the 1988 Turner Preview and a new 115-minute Frankenstein cobbled together by Peckinpah acolytes, apparently reconstructing the director's vision as conveyed through copious editing-room notes. I'm skeptical--not of the existence of these notes, but that Peckinpah would've ultimately preferred this cut to the Spottiswoode alternative. Shots have been reordered to hamfisted effect in the past/"present" prologue and the opening credits now fall at the end of this virtuoso sequence where they once checkered it, effectively imposing an intermission on the film ten minutes in. Dylan's vocals resurface in "Knocking on Heaven's Door," stealing a little thunder from Pickens and Jurado. Maybe you always prefer the one you see first, but considering Peckinpah's gradual metamorphosis (devolution?) into a member of the avant-garde, a lot of these changes strike me as imperialistic, especially the egregious "tightening" of a few notoriously languid set-pieces.

What are your favourite/least favourite Director's Cuts, Extended Editions, etc.?

Hot Off the Presses (2/3)
Walter chimes in with a zero-star review of the latest superfluous remake, When a Stranger Calls; actually, I thought there was nowhere to go but up with that one, but apparently not. Travis, meanwhile, comes to terms with the Ghost of Movies Past in his review of 1977's Thunder and Lightning.

Class of 1984: Round Two

Here's the latest Class of 1984 giveaway. To reiterate: we've got 5 copies of Anchor Bay's upcoming Special Edition of Mark L. Lester's exploitation classic to unload, courtesy of Total Assault. This is the second of five mini-contests (one per copy) I will hold here at the blog.

If you've never seen Class of 1984, it's basically a remake of The Blackboard Jungle with the flamboyant gangbangers of The Warriors replacing the original's Wild One-style delinquents. One of the last Canadian tax-shelter pics, it features rare live footage of Toronto punk band Teenage Head, an early performance by Michael J. Fox, and an ending that will have you asking how something so wrong can feel so right. Due out on February 21st, the DVD features commentary from Lester, a retrospective documentary, and beautifully remastered picture and sound. We'll have a full review at the mother site in the coming weeks.

To win the second copy, correctly identify the movie to which the below frame-grab belongs. (Since this a frame-grab and not a production still, be sure to take note of things like aspect ratio.) As we're only allowed to give these discs away to North American residents, I must ask that our international readers refrain from placing any guesses. Sorry.

Saw Ryan's Daughter for the first time today and I think I'm going to expand my review of Dune to include this other "David L." folly. Both movies swat flies with Buicks and of course Lynch is quite the fan of Lean, but more than anything I think they're mutually due for a renaissance, these singular acts of hubris. No review I'd read of Ryan's Daughter prepared me for a primordial Straw Dogs (trim the roadshow fat off it and that's essentially what you're left with), and Robert Mitchum isn't miscast so much as ironically cast, like Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West. The DVD restoration is, I might add, stunning--too bad no theatrical re-release is planned.

Here's Walter's long-awaited review of Caché. Alex's Sundance coverage continues with Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That!. (Beastie Boys fans beware.) And speaking of Lynch, check out the new Special Edition of Dead Poets Society for an unlikely appreciation of sound designer Alan Splet courtesy of Lynch and Peter Weir. Actually, it's an inexplicable release all-around, with Weir providing his first DVD commentary for what is arguably the only one of his films that doesn't deserve it.