Burning Questions: The Best of Bonus Features

Hey everybody. Michael C here to rifle through your video collections like a guy at a garage sale.

All of us probably have enough material residing in the bonus features of our DVD collections to fill a respectable film studies course for a semester or two.

The first time I was introduced to a bonus feature was a double VHS box set of Scream with a second cassette featuring a Wes Craven commentary. Since then, like most cinephiles, I’ve spent countless hours wading through commentaries, behind the scenes featurettes, deleted scenes, and other supplemental material, much of it interesting, some of it entertaining, a good chunk of it filler.

Since so many of us have amassed movies collections over the years to rival the Library of Congress, it stands to reasons there should be some gems buried in there. So it is with genuine curiosity that I put this question to the floor: Which Bluray/DVD extra features do you treasure for their own sake, apart from the films to which they are attached?

The bonus feature I most often return to is Magnolia Diary: the documentary chronicling the creation of PT Anderson’s ’99 opus of dysfunctional parents, children and frogs.

Behind the scenes cinematic chronicles are a sub-genre of documentaries that have produced masterpieces such as Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse and Burden of Dreams. Magnolia Diary doesn’t quite belong in that distinguished company but I would easily rank it the equal of Lost in La Mancha, the doc recording the painful death of Terry Gilliam’s long-in-the-works Don Quixote movie.

What sets it apart from the thousands of other making of docs is the stunning amount of access, going so far as to wander through the orchestra during the recording of the score. There are numerous moments where we eavesdrop on the most sensitive moments in the process, as when Anderson runs lines with Melinda Dillon and Philip Baker Hall for their dramatic confrontation.

It plays like a documentary companion to Making Movies, Sidney Lumet’s essential book on the filmmaking process. It's packed with goodies like Julianne Moore explaining how she pitched her performance to the operatic tone of the script, or the director and Philip Seymour Hoffman having a friendly argument about just how much actorly "business" he adds to the simplest of actions. There is much ado about transforming the climactic plague of frogs from a screenwriter's flight of fancy to a filmable reality.

So that is my favorite bonus feature. What’s yours? Is there a commentary you return to often? Let's hear about it in the comments.

You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm or read his blog Serious Film.

Take Three: John C. Reilly

Craig here with this week's Take Three. Today: John C. Reilly

Take One: Terri (2011) 
The last couple of years have brought Reilly a trio of great dramedic roles. He showed real range in a slight but noteworthy career shift from his usual broader comedies to Cyrus, Carnage and Terri. The third film which is about the lonely life of an overweight high school outcast (Jacob Wysocki) was a particularly great role for Reilly. He was unassuming, believable and much more curiously sombre than in most of the roles we've seen him play to date. (He also played Tilda Swinton’s husband in We Need to Talk about Kevin last year, though his role was largely, though I'd argue unfairly, labelled as miscasting.) Playing Assistant Principal Fitzgerald here Reilly gets to balance that oddball characteristic of his – the one where he does that shouty-then-calm bafflement – with more introspective modes of expression. His first meeting with Terri, who is called to his office for wearing PJs to school, is a beautifully played example of Reilly’s ability to quickly establish a strong, unconventional personality, and then let an audience work out and appreciate what that character is all about. He’s pally one minute and almost comically aggressive the next – especially with the ‘problem’ students. He’s probably the only adult figure in these kids’ world who resembles an authority figure but who can serve it to them on a level they might understand. Watching Reilly in Terri you see just how perfectly he understands certain ‘types’ (here the hardened know-it-all with a hidden nice side) and how that understanding allows him to blend the comic and tragic aspects of his characters in a fresh manner.

Two more Reilly takes after the jump

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Still Top Gun? 25 Years With "Maverick"

Michael C here to commemorate an auspicious occasion. This week marks the 25th anniversary of Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986). Having managed to navigate this last quarter century having never seen Scott’s slick recruiting poster of a movie, I though it might be interesting to evaluate it with fresh eyes. Up until now my only experience with Top Gun was as an enormously frustrating Nintendo game from the late 80’s.

So I was eager to finally catch up with it. This is a film, after all, that Avatar only just bumped off the all time 100 highest grossers (adjusted for inflation). Surely there was some core entertainment value that held up underneath all the dated Berlin songs and catch phrases.

So I watched it.

Ummm….

Okay, let’s start with the stuff that holds up.  The aerial dog-fighting scenes remain beautifully executed. If anything, with their clarity of action and still-convincing effects they may actually play better in the current age of cartoony CGI and hyperactive film cutting.

And for the record Tom Cruise performance remains as slickly effective as ever. I noticed no evidence that his current cultural infamy intrudes on Maverick. He basically has two poses – smug smirk and jaw-clenched intensity, each in sunglasses on and off varieties – and Cruise executes both about as well as humanly possible.  

Two Poses: Smug Smirk and Jaw-Clenched Intensity

As for the rest of the film, let’s just say it was tough to get involved in. 

Here is an incomplete list of the subsequent pop culture landmarks that intruded on my viewing of Top Gun:

Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988)
Top Gun really suffers when compared with the legacy of its ultra-violent action contemporaries. All these films have been ripped off ad infinitum but Top Gun offers nothing like that the Gibson-Glover chemistry or Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber that holds up despite the familiarity.

Rain Man (1988)
Cruise’s personal life doesn’t detract from the movie but that doesn’t mean Cruise’s other roles don’t haunt Maverick at every moment. I could name any of a dozen talented, yet arrogant wild cards with Daddy issues, but I singled out Rain Man because Levinson’s film has the wherewithal to peg Cruise's character as an insufferable prick in need of redemption from frame one, whereas Top Gun seems to think he’s a charmer.

Speaking of which…

Frank TJ Mackey approves of Maverick's mastery of the muffin

Magnolia (1999)
I couldn’t shake the impression that Cruise's Pete Mitchell had just completed a Frank Mackey seminar. Seriously, he is one of the most unlikable protagonists I’ve encountered outside a Neil LaBute film. Kelly McGillis's character seems to drop 50 IQ points in the process of falling for him. I kept siding with Kilmer’s Iceman and his entirely reasonable requests that Cruise stop showboating before he kills everybody.

Quentin Tarantino
So, yeah, I was never able to forget QT’s notorious monlogue on Top Gun’s gay subtext and it pretty well destroyed the volleyball scene which was ridiculous to start with. If anything it built it up too much for me. Homoerotic, sure, but I was expecting a cross between 300 and a number from Showgirls.

Team America World Police (2004)
You would think Hot Shots would be the one to distract but Parker and Stone were the ones who conclusively eviscerated the action clichés present in every moment of Top Gun. Try to get through Tom’s serious speech about his father’s past without thinking of Team America’s CATS monologue.

And as long as we’re on the subject…

Every Action Movie Ever
From the end of act two crisis of confidence to the evil black-helmeted pilots who flew in from the nearest Bond movie they really do leave no action trope unturned. If you had a drinking game where you took a shot every time someone yelled at Maverick for being too damned awesome you'd be blotto by the thirty minute mark.

Reader Spotlight: Ziyad

In this Reader Appreciation series we're getting to know the Film Experience community, one person at a time ;) Today's interviewee is Ziyad who was born in Barcelona and is currently in Tel Aviv. He's truly international.

So let's jump right in.

Nathaniel: Do you remember your first filmgoing experience?
ZIYAD: Beauty and the Beast, I was 5 years old, the whole family (my parents and 2 brothers) went to a late showing, I fell asleep after 5 minutes and I woke up after in the ending credits, I got so pissed they didn't wake me so I forced my parents to take me again the next day.

Dedication. I love it. When did you start reading?
Around September 2004, I was checking if Javier Bardem had a chance at getting nominated for The Sea Inside, I loved the "actressexuality", bookmarked it instantaneously and since then visited on a daily basis. My favorite part: Film Bitch Awards -- I owe you copyrights for doing my own with your extra categories as well, EVERY YEAR, the difference is that I do it for myself and have no place to share it.

3 favorite actresses. Go.

Julianne Moore, she is my goddess, my face glows by just seeing her, in anything;  Meryl Streep... "She could play Batman and be the right choice"; And a tie between Carmen Maura, Hiam Abbass, Susan Sarandon, Bette Davis, and Kate Winslet. SORRY! Right now Emma Stone is everything to me. Every time I watch Easy A I fall a little bit more in love with her.

Um this is less of a "tie" than an ensemble film!

I'm horrible at following orders.

Take one Oscar away from something and give it to something else.
I'm going to have to do two. I take Angelina Jolie's Oscar for Girl, Interrupted and give it to Julianne Moore for Magnolia (god, it HURTS physically that she wasn't even nominated). I think I could take every Oscar and give it to Julianne Moore.

All the Oscars Belong To Her.

The second one, is actually a movie... I would take A Beautiful Mind's and give it to Amelie. Best Movie Ever.

What's one movie you're super ashamed to say you haven't seen and why is it taking you so long?

The Godfather Trilogy. I'm just lazy.

Previous Reader Spotlights:
Andrew, Yonatan, Keir, Kyle, Jamie, Vinci, Victor, Bill, Hayden, Dominique, Murtada, Cory, Walter, Paolo, Leehee and BBats