by DVDJ Mediapar Bruce Apar (dvdj@dvda.org )

There was a nonsense rhyme my slightly older brother used to cant to me when we were kids:

“Big and Little had a race, all around the pillow case, Big fell down and broke his face, and Little won the race.”

DVDJ Mediapar, in his finite wisdom, calls this emerging class of digital originals Hollywoodn’t.

 Have you ever noticed, for example, how many features and TV shows are located in Southern California? Not just photographed there, but whose characters and storylines are endemic to that selfsame province.

 
Ya think viewers in the rest of the country, let alone the world, have an insatiable curiosity about life in SoCal? Didn’t think you thought so. It’s financially pragmatic for production to stay close to home, not to mention it would take more legwork and brainpower than necessary, or easily accessible, to produce entertainment about “foreign” cultures such as, say, Montana or Miami. And on the too-rare occasions when alien lifestyles are dramatized, outside the 900XX zip codes, often as not they are depicted in a quaint, condescending context. “Picket Fences,” anyone?

Then along come so-called “small movies” (did someone say condescending?) like Capote, Crash, Hustle & Flow, Good Night & Good Luck, The Squid & the Whale and, qualifying as small to a smaller degree, Brokeback Mountain. If not small in terms of production values or star power, its subject matter is not exactly mainstream; more “down by the ol’ mill stream, where I first met you,” if you catch my meaning, if you get my drift.

Nearly needless to say, Brokeback, which takes place in Wyoming (somewhere between Canada and South America, I believe), did not spring from the mind of a standard-issue scriptwriter who pitches concepts high (obvious) and inside (all access to the greenlighters).

The film fickle Oscar left standing at the altar of Best Picturedom is extrapolated – as Universal’s discumentary “From Script to Screen” nicely illustrates – from a gorgeously spun 1997 short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and naturalist Annie Proulx that appeared in The New Yorker. 

 What really was ultra cool, though -- and a towering testament to the possibilities inherent in DVD -- is that on the same day I received Brokeback Mountain from Netflix I also received, courtesy of Jeff Stabenau and David Anthony at New York's Giant Interactive digital production house, a veritable historic DVD release -- every page of every one of the 4000-plus issues of The New Yorker weekly magazine since it debuted in 1925 -- one-half million pages on eight discs. We'll review that  monumental, award-worthy achievement separately, but the coincidence in timing allowed me to access the original short story and print it out.

 A nice flourish on all the bonus features of the Brokeback DVD – which we reviewed via Netflix – is their languid pacing, which parallels the deliberate narrative of the film as directed by Ang Lee, the painterly stylist of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility. 

 Otherwise, the extras are typical, intersplicing head-and-shoulder shots of the principal actors with scenes that complement their comments. Forgetting about the picture quality of high-definition discs, they are arriving just in time to offer a more dynamic viewer experience beyond the feature film itself; with all-too-rare exceptions, DVD extras have become so formulaic, and fungible, the majority are hard pressed to retain the interest even of film enthusiasts.

 Bennett Miller, the earnest and brooding director of “Capote” (reviewed via Netflix, as Sony Pictures doesn’t indulge the press with screeners), opens one of the discumentaries with this soliloquy: “Someone recently asked, ‘Why did you choose such a sedate style?’

 “My answer was: It’s not sedate at all. It’s very controlled and composed and the shots go long and the camera doesn’t move a lot. But the effect is not sedating, the effect is sensitizing. The effect is enlivening. The effect, I think, puts you on your toes and brings you to the edge of your seat. You become so sensitive to what’s happening on the subtlest level. And the entire style is really designed just to heighten your awareness to what is happening.”

The production designer, on the other hand, offers a more pragmatic and less affected explanation: the spare budget by and large dictated the spare style. Oh. Never mind, Bennett. You didn’t see the memo explaining that how a viewer perceives a film, yours or anyone else’s, can’t be altered by a tortured explanation from the director. Sorry for the reality check.

If young Mr. Miller comes off at times as a tad defensive, and precious, it’s hard to suppress the notion that’s simply his default persona, take it or leave it. Other directorial eminences choose to avoid analysis of their work on DVD at all costs. The new DVD of Woody Allen’s sexual thriller set in England, Match Point, a welcome return to top form, offers not one extra. The eccentric artist is famously allergic to recording commentary tracks.

Mr. Miller, while handsomer, is Allenesque in both his slight carriage and drily morose manner. Yet he couldn’t be more unWoodylike in his penchant for gabbing garrulously over his work, as evidenced by his two “Capote” commentary tracks, one with cinematographer Adam Kimmel, the other with Oscar-winning lead Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s as if it’s not enough that he made the movie, with all the recognition that attended it and him, but he also has to explain for us the significance of it all. 

Parts of that tendency produce interesting insights into the filmmaking process, while others reveal flaws in technique. During a scene where one of the “In Cold Blood” killers is seen being escorted into the courthouse up a long stairway, Mr. Miller cites the prisoner’s limp and how the film’s style dictated his not bothering to explain such backstory details, but merely to show them. Yadda yadda yadda.

Well, the surprise was on me, because until he enlightened this viewer, I didn’t catch any hitch in the actor’s gait. In fact, the camera’s dwelling an extra beat on his boots mystified me.  

Another idiosyncratic filmmaker’s commentary can be found on The Squid & the Whale (reviewed through Netflix, because it’s also a Sony picture). Writer/director Noah Baumbach explains he did not want to do the conventional commentary over the film’s running time, so instead it can be heard accompanying production stills from the film.

It already was known, at least by those interested in such cinephilia, that Mr. Baumbach based his characters on his own fractured family. It focuses on parents, both New York literati, with a self-absorbed, fatuous father whose reputation as a book critic is eclipsed, to his utter chagrin, by the spouse.  Not that it matters all that much, but the real-life father is Jonathan Baumbach, who wrote for The Partisan Review, and the mom is Village Voice critic Georgia Brown.

Call me intrusive or petty or whatever, but I admittedly was surprised and frustrated when Baumbach fils failed in his commentary to make any mention of his parents as the inspiration for the roman a clef on celluloid. Perhaps even odder, but consistently in character, is that he also avoids identifying the “friends” who are the parents of remarkable young actor Owen Kline -- who pulls off a complex role with impressive aplomb and empathy -- as versatile actor Kevin Kline and ex-actress Phoebe Cates. What’s the big secret. The kid’s name is what gave it away for me, plus Kevin Kline’s name appears in the end credits. Never thought I’d be carping about someone NOT name dropping, but in the context of a DVD commentary, let’s face it, folks: that’s the kind of insider, behind-the-scenes juice you want to squeeze out of the disc supplements.  

Then again, does anybody out there actually listen to and watch this stuff besides me?