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.

Have Link Will Travel

New York Times on Paul Thomas Anderson's secretive new movie The Master. It's about... something.
MNPP Charlize Theron and Alexander Skarsgård are dating? The Mayans were right about 2012 
Your Movie Buddy interviews The Hunter's storied leading man Willem Dafoe 
Draw Adrian Draw isn't happy about Anne Hathaway as Catwoman but is sketching her anyway
Michael Musto "who's your favorite Taylor?" fun question except there's only one appropriate answer. La Liz! Not that I don't appreciate Taylor Mac...

The Incredible Suit unexpectedly loves The Avengers ... even the Hulk part.
Awards Daily Sasha Stone loves HBO's Girls and Lena Dunham in particular
Stale Popcorn meet the Cannes class of 2012. Serious Thespians (lol) 
Flavorwire always finds interesting things. Did you know that crazy auteur Werner Herzog didn't realize that crazy auteur John Waters was gay for 30+ years. lol
Gold Derby who will Laura Dern (Enlightened) knock out of the Emmy Best Comedy Actress race this season? 

Today's Most Oscary Discussable:
Stranger Than Most looks at the oddest Best Picture snubs of all time. i.e. films that were nominated in the always Best Picture related fields (Dir+ Editing + Screenplay + Acting) and still missed out. Incidentally I love every single one of the "top five" that weren't actually top five (They Shoot Horses Don't They, Hud, Thelma & Louise, Bullets Over Broadway, and My Man Godfrey)  Like crazy 'would run away with them for lost sex-weekend' kind of love. That's how much!

Hud (1963), for example, is a movie I continuously feel guilty about not forcing upon people at every opportunity -- we should totes do it for "Hit Me" but I keep forgetting to put it in the schedule. It's just a freaking masterpiece. And it's weirdly underdiscussed given how many of Paul Newman's films endured.

3 Days Until Handsome Bludgeoning...

Oscar is an octogenarian so you know he's heard everything. He's been reviled, exalted, and called all sorts of things other than "Oscar" over the years. My favorite name-calling recently was from Daniel Day-Lewis. At the 80th Oscars in February 2008, he called our shiny man the "the handsomest bludgeon in town".

Remember that?

That's the closest I'll ever come to getting a knighthood so thank you. My deepest thanks to the members of the Academy for whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town. I'm looking at this gorgeous thing you've given me and I'm  thinking back to the first devilish whisper of an idea that came to him and everything since.

Mad Beautiful-Headed P.T.It seems to me that this sprang like a golden sapling out of the mad beautiful head of Paul Thomas Anderson.

I wish my son and my partner H W Plainveiw were up here with me, the mighty Dylan Frazier. So many people to thank. One amongst them would be Mrs Plainview down there, the enchantingly optimistic, openminded and beautiful rebecca miller.

I hope that all of those to whom I owe and to whom feel the deepest gratitude will forgive me if I say just simply 'Thank you, Paul.'

I've been thinking a lot about fathers and sons in the course of this. I'd like to accept this in the memory of my grandfather Michael Balkan, my father Cecil Day Lewis and my three find boys Gabriel Ronan and Kashel. Thank you very much indeed, thank you.

This is not Dylan Frazier. HW Plainview had to put on a few years first.

Only an actor as great as Daniel Day-Lewis could make you forget that they're actually elegant and erudite and endearing in person. When he's onscreen in There Will Be Blood, glowering and strategizing his heart pumping out only oily greed it's impossible to imagine that they're the same person.

When do you think we'll see a performance that massive winning Best Actor again? Don't say "the next Paul Thomas Anderson picture!" because then I'll have to remember that it's Phillip Seymour Hoffman who's starring in it. When do you think we'll start seeing production stills from The Master? Even with PSH leading I want. Gimme.

Beauty Break: New Heartthrobs According to VMan

VMan magazine offers up a black and white survey of future heartthrobs, the leading men of tomorrow today. All of the photos are shot by Hedi Slimane. These round-ups always amuse in retrospect because will we even know who they are in 10-20 years? (like when today's teenagers see those old Vanity Fair Hollywood covers wherein they tried to predict the new generation of Julia Roberts and Tom Cruises and half the faces have zero meaning).

This particular future stardom candidate above, Logan Lerman, declares himself a cinephile in the capsule icons and influences bios (you know the kind: it's the legit actors version of a centerfold's romantic preferences masturbation fodder quotes). Though they aren't pictured, Lerman has real balls. Consider this: the 19 year old actor (best known as Percy Jackson) is starring in Paul W.S. Anderson's Three Musketeers and has the stones to name Paul Thomas Anderson as the director he's dying to work with. W.S. must HATE that! Talk about biting the hand that just fed you. You know more than once poor Paul has had to explain that he's not that Paul and the person's face has inevitably dropped with disappointment.

Nobody else's bios has anything quite so off-mag image-conjuring but the photos are pretty. 

There are more young would-be stars after the jump if you're so inclined but I wanted to give Josh Pence (to your right) his due right away since he got so shafted in the whole Armie Hammer Debutante Ball (AKA The Social Network) last year. It was Pence's face that was digitally removed to make room for twinned Armie. Maybe he'll catch up to his physical twin, career-wise, if his work in The Dark Knight Rises as the Young Ra's Al Ghul gives Hollywood whatever it is that they're looking for? 

Click to read more ...

Philip Seymour Hoffman Continues To Get Great Tail

As long as I live I'll be haunting by the opening shots of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead in which 'sex angel' Marisa Tomei is on all fours getting nailed by ... Philip Seymour Hoffman? This is the part in the accompanying score where the lovely romantic music deflates to a comic halt, throwing ice water on the "mood"

What?

This image came flashing back to me with the announcement that delicious honey AMY ADAMS will play his wife in The Master, a film that's supposedly about Scientology (however veiled) from the genius Paul Thomas Anderson.

The cast for that movie is looking topnotch: Laura Dern, Lena Endre, Adams, Joaquin Phoenix (and *just announced* Breaking Dawn's Rami Malek as the son-in-law of Adams and Hoffman. No word yet on who is playing his teenage wife.) 

But even geniuses like P.T. Anderson make inexplicable decisions somehow, since Hoffman will be playing a "charismatic leader", the kind of man people flock to, sex up, idolize or obey for reasons that will maybe defy human logic. [See also: Synecdoche New York.] Hoffman can conjure "charisma" onscreen as well as any confident actor -- if not the sexual kind -- but the ladies he snags on celluloid... Yeesh.

A sampling of beauties that PSH has sexed up onscreen (sometimes literally but usually just implied):

• Annie Morgan
• Anna Paquin
• Michelle Williams
• Marisa Tomei
• Catherine Keener
• Samantha Morton
• Sarah Jessica Parker
• Minnie Driver

I'm sure I forgot someone. Their numbers grow every film!

Synecdoche New York was the worst offender as PSH's miserably depressed "Caden", with his boils and bloody stool, the kind of man who would have a hard time finding even one woman in real life, was able to bed Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, and Michelle Williams all in the space of one film!

Women are just hot for him, okay?! Deal with it.

It wasn't always this way with PSH. In the beginning of his career, none of the hotties that he wanted to sleep with onscreen wanted him back: in Boogie Nights he pursued Mark Wahlberg to no avail and in Happiness he really wanted Lara Flynn Boyle but ended up in bed with Camryn Mannheim instead.

But then...  Was it State and Main where he managed to bed Sarah Jessica Parker as a bitchy starlet that changed it? Was it those gargantuan displays of actor/character ego in The Talented Mr Ripley or Cold Mountain? Somewhere along the line great filmmakers decided he was a ladykiller!

I realize that complaining about the looks of a revered actor wins me no friends, but please trust that I wouldn't say a word if they would only cast his wives and girlfriends differently. I can only suspend disbelief so far. By this coupling logic I should have slept with Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and Uma Thurman by now, you know? JUST SAYIN'.

P.S. End of rant. I'm still excited for The Master, no matter what. P.T. Anderson is a wondrous gift to the movies.