The Nines would be utterly incomprehensible if it weren’t for an anonymous extra on the new DVD. Among a plethora of ultimately unhelpful supplements is a short film that writer and director John August made a few years earlier called God. This short stars Melissa McCarthy (Gilmore Girls) as a young housewife who has a deep gossipy telephone relationship with God, who calls her frequently. Essentially the short blends a high school girl telephone lifestyle with a humanizing view of God freed of theological baggage.

McCarthy pops up again in The Nines, playing three characters, one of them the girl from God. The Nines itself is divided into three successive stories. The first tale concerns a hot young TV crime show actor named Gary (Ryan Reynolds) who has a public meltdown and is confined by his agent and a publicist to a house owned by a writer who is off making a TV pilot. McCarthy plays the publicist, and apparently her character is the same one from God. How this confluence works ultimately is ambiguous, but in any case, on a meta level she is also protecting her pal God from realizing that he is just playing a game by living someone else’s lifestyle. The other two stories concern Gavin (Reynolds again) who is a gay TV writer trying to mount a new show and whose exploits are followed by a reality TV crew. The third and final episode is the pilot that Gavin is working on, featuring in its cast the same actors who appear in the other two tales. There are also various overlaps and connections among the three stories.

When an innovative screenwriter comes along they are almost always compared to Tarantino or to Charles Kaufman. The specter of the Tarantino influence loomed with August’s first filmed script, Go, which played with chronology in the Tarantino manner, but which was probably misleading as to August’s real interests as a filmmaker (he soon ended up a collaborator of Tim Burton’s). August is less a Tarantino than a Richard Kelly. Left to his own devices, August naturally gravitates to obscurantist metaphysical tales on multiple levels.

Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, everything in The Nines comes in threes. Besides the three stories, there are three main characters symbolic perhaps of different Jungian archetypes. Reynolds, regardless of his identity, is always God, who imagines different worlds and casts himself in a key role to see what being a human being is like (that’s a guess). McCarthy falls into the role of aide-du-camp. In the first tale she is a handler, in the second the writer’s best friend (whom he betrays in order to get his show accepted by the network, though it isn’t), and in the third she plays the wife character in the pilot. The third character is a trickster-Anima archetype played by Hope Davis, a seductive neighbor in the first, a double-crossing TV exec in the second, and a hiker in the pilot. Her role, much as one can understand it, is to lure God back to his Olympian heights and abandon these fake worlds he has created.

As a puzzle film The Nines is modestly entertaining, but one watches it as one does Donnie Darko, with little hope that its mysteries will be revealed. McCarthy appears in a coda, which suggests that she was really the main character all along, but it remains unclear if the God worlds she has visited are dreams she has had or real parallel universes she has visited, or what. By watching all the extras on the DVD one can piece together an interpretation like the one above, although there is no definitive answer offered up.

The Nines came out on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 (retailing for $24.95) and is packed with extras. The disc comes with two audio commentary tracks, the first with August and Reynolds, the second, recorded later, with August, McCarthy, and the film’s editor, Douglas Crise. After his work in a variety of films, from The Amityville Horror to Smokin’ Aces, Reynolds (who also started out in sitcoms — Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place), looks to have the potential of becoming another Tom Hanks, adept in comedy, drama, action, anything. He is attractive yet changeable, charismatic and generous to co-stars (whom he makes look better). He needs only a break-out hit to put him at People-level public consciousness, but one suspects on the basis of his yak track that Reynolds is terribly shy and awkward in an unscripted world, though that didn’t stop the similarly afflicted Robert DeNiro. The second track is cozier, but in the end offers mostly technical and background information. We do learn that much of the first two stories are autobiographical and in part based on his work on two failed TV shows, D.C. and Alaska, though August doesn’t admit to hitting a female executive as the Gavin character does (the only woman associated with August’s two shows is E. Monique Floyd). We also learn that August has a penchant for upside down cars, and can see that he is fond of characters stretching out on the floor or ground.

There are also nine deleted or extended scenes, with an optional commentary by August and Crise. Mostly the come from the first segment, and one of them expands Gary’s character by showing him opportunistically getting a blow job from a delivery boy. The last deleted is an alternative ending, though it is similar to the standing ending.

In addition there is a script to storyboard comparison, a brief “making of” that reveals more facets of the film’s mysteries, a short photo gallery, and the God short. Finally, there is a whole raft of trailers: a Blu-Ray promo, Dragon Wars, Southland Tales, Revolver, Resident Evil: Extinction, Boogeyman 2, Gabriel, Slipstream, Across the Universe, Romance and Cigarettes, Zombie Strippers, Black Water, We Own the Night, and one for the first season of Damages on DVD.

On November 3rd, 1954, Toho Film in Japan released Gojiro, about a giant sea monster who lays waste to Tokyo. The film came out nine years after the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, and Gojiro was widely perceived as a metaphorical treatment of the nuclear horror. Gojiro was picked up for the American market, retitled Godzilla, was re-edited with new scenes featuring Raymond Burr, and became the author of a perplexingly popular series of films about Godzilla and numerous other monsters (most released in the 1960s and ’70s) and made with decreasing technical skill, yet nevertheless well-attended by little boys at that now-defunct weekly ritual, the Saturday matinee.

Cloverfield is a modern monster movie in which something strange, large, and unstoppable rises (presumably) from the sea and begins to tear apart lower Manhattan. But unlike Godzilla (and like Signs, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and The Blair Witch Project), the story is told from street level, with the participants knowing little more than the viewer, and with one of the characters recording events on a small video camera.

Cloverfield has all the elements one associates with monster movies, but it is old wine in new bottles. Random people are gathered. The monster arrives and they are whittled away person by person. An escape is interrupted by the need to go back and rescue someone. Two antagonists have a surprising tender moment after one saves the other’s life.

What becomes quickly apparent is that the shaky handheld single camera “found footage” approach doesn’t really work. It didn’t work in the movie version of Friday Night Lights and it doesn’t work here. The theory is that the mobile camera makes the events more “real” and personal, but in fact they become impersonal and distanced. If producer J. J. Abrams and his acolytes, director Greg Reeves and writer Drew Goddard, had made a traditional movie, with good music and close-ups and sharp photography, and a classic surface approach to the story, viewers would have been better drawn into the events. The introductory 20 minutes or so is concerned with setting up the characters, who act and sound like bland sitcom refugees, or October Road meeting Godzilla. They include Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), who has slept with Beth (Odette Yustman) (the act caught on self-shot tape), and who a month later is moving to Japan (an in joke?). The first act is set primarily at Rob’s going away party. His dim friend Hud Platt (T.J. Miller) is enlisted to film testimonials and the party itself, and he proves to be an incorrigible gossip, gleaning that Rob has slept with a hot girl at the party (while already having a girlfriend?). I assume that the petty concerns and jealousies and competitions among the party goers are meant to be highlighted as trivial in comparison to a natural disaster, which quickly happens, driving the kids onto the streets. There, occasional bravura long takes, such as one inside an electronic store, are as impressive as anything in Children of Men.

It’s been almost seven years since the attacks of 9/11. Cloverfield evokes memories of that time, especially with dust clouds roiling down the canyons of Manhattan as white-caked people flee or hide out in small shops. As with Godzilla, though, the connection of the monster to a previous disaster is tenuous. The film makes a thin gesture toward accounting for later actions of the characters based on their actions and dynamics at the party, but you can’t remember them all, and soon some are gone and you don’t know where. At root, all the films in this genre appeal to that occasional impatience we have with humanity that wants to see it squashed in wide swaths, what Susan Sontag called the imagination of disaster, the true emotional source of pop sci-films. Viewed in this light, there is something irresponsible about Cloverfield evoking a real disaster for dubious entertainment value, especially when the film distances the viewer, thanks to its visual technique, from the real lives and feelings of its characters.

When I go off-road, it’s always on designated trails. The group I go with takes garbage bags to help keep the trails clean, pick up trash when we see it, and take our own. BUT not everyone is as respectful. A couple years ago, a few friends and I went on a Halloween run to Brown’s Camp in TSF. The event was fantastic, there were a lot of people and fantastic rigs to look over. The trails were fun, and the events well-planned. Towards the end of the event during the raffle, a ranger rolled up informing us that he had just ticketed a handful of people who weren’t staying on designated trails, and threatening plant and animal habitat. This single act by a few threatened the event for the whole. The host club responded, big time. They said they would come and fix the damage. A ton of people on the spot were already scheduling times to come. Taking their personal time to come fix what others broke, without being paid and without being compensated. Ensuring the event for the future, and helping to keep TSF open to all. And recently, reading my issue of Four Wheeler Magazine (Jan ‘08), I read how Raven Off-Road Club was rewarded by BRGoodrich Tires for their work in keeping Crusher Trail in TSF open. And instead of putting the $$ in their club, they are putting it back into the trail! Raven Off-Road donates tons of man hours and their own money to keep the trail open for all of us. This prompted me to want to communicate with everyone that if we all do our part, we can keep our sport going for generations to come! So please, Tread lightly! www.treadlightly.org

As a project gets built, changes happen. It’s a fact. And as our XJ build progressed, I realized the Rubicon wheels and tires I had were just too small. Not only was the size an issue (it matters, I guess), but with the Bushwacker Fender Flairs, the wheel offset was off as well. So I went to see the professionals at Baxter Auto Parts.

I had an idea in mind as to what I wanted: a purpose-built off-road tire that would work well on the street. We ended up with the Mickey Thompson Baja MTZ Radial. They have full 6 ply tread with a 3 ply sidewall, which is more than strong enough for what the XJ will throw at them. They also have an aggressive side lug that makes them even better on rocks and when airing down. The tread design has a aggressive lug, with decent voids which should be great for self cleaning, and traction. They are a Radial tire, which should give us good mileage wear with the light XJ!

For the second week in a row, Entertainment Weekly has shown a fixation on Juno, the middlebrow Gilmore Girls knockoff, but at least this week it’s kept the noise to a dull roar. There are only seven references to the film (pages 11-12, a featurette on conservative message baby movies; page 16, in connection with Ellen Page’s next movie; page 22, a mention of its WGA nomination; pages 53 and 57, in two charts; page 70, a sidebar on the soundtrack, and a comment in the music chart). But that’s probably because an earlier, overriding obsession stepped forward: Conan O’Brien. Over the years, the magazine has displayed a certain helplessness before the talk show host’s supposed wit. In its Sound Bites column, which culls one liners on or about TV, it has usually offered over the years a Conan quote, regardless how bland or humorless. Late last year the magazine went something like eight weeks in a row quoting O’Brien in the column. Now he appears on the cover, flaunting a typically witless article “by” him inside, a strike diary. Are people really all that interested in Juno and Conan O’Brien? Or are certain elements at the paper following their own fandom or trying to promote these products because they are “good” for us? Or is it, as I suggested last week, that Entertainment Weekly is terrified of losing readers and is trolling for younger catch? I wish that the paper would get back to reporting actual arts news rather than skew its editorial content toward an imagined demographic before which it appears to be helplessly in thrall.

Someone needs to come along and really re-think horror.

The average person’s experience of the horror film is of a slow, tedious exercise in predictable shocks set within an ultimately incomprehensible context. Some may have thought that an infusion of J-horror premises, stories, and visual tricks were going to goose the American horror film, but this hasn’t proven to be the case. Rather, the ethereal philosophy of Asian horror fits poorly with the American penchant for the clear and explicit and its vaguely Christian pragmatism. The home grown Final Destination series has proven more effective, doing almost the same thing — killing a succession of anonymous teenagers — yet the killer is non-visible, just implacable death Himself, vexed at being deprived of His quarry as regularly scheduled and taking them anyway, but with a dash of wit, as His Rube Goldberg mechanisms take down simpleminded kids with maximum complication that is a form of artistry itself.

The Final Destination series and J-horror films are serial killer films without the serial killers. Instead of heavy breathing, masked, pituitary cases, the killers are ghost traces of children abused in life yet savvy enough to use modern electronica to assassinate the living in a premonitory context. Almost all the J-horror influenced movies are based on actual Asian horror films, which are usually incomprehensible. To make them less so, American filmmakers, who so far have proven to be as mediocre as their Japanese and Southeast Asian counterparts, have to labor mightily to make these stories make sense, while falling back on the style of straight-to-video movies as a sort of homogenizing ingredient.

One Missed Call is the latest and another perfect example of what’s wrong with J-horror adaptations. For one thing, there are technically no “missed calls” in the film. There are phone messages left, that are time coded a few days into the future and which record the recipient’s future death. But the recipients get the message sooner or later. Even more important, there is no way to “take” the call, since it goes directly into voicemail anyway, so how can it be missed? Second, the ability of a ghost to leave messages for the living in their own voice is not explained. The fact that one feels obliged to raise such an obvious question is emblematic of the nonsense we accept in so many of these J-horror knock-offs. They create worlds in which no rules apply.

One Missed Call is based on the movie Chakushin Ari (2003), directed by cult helmer Takashi Miike, and which was also a subsequent TV series. Like most J-horror films, it was based on a novel. One wonders how diluted the resultant US version is, especially in the aftermath of The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, Pulse, and various sequels thereof.

Shannyn Sossamon plays Beth Raymond. Beth’s college friends start dying off after receiving the telltale phone message, preceded by two days of hallucinations and resulting in little balls of hard candy dropping out of their dead mouths. With the aid of detective Jack Andrews (Ed Burns, who is required only to act glum until he is stabbed in the head during a rescue mission), whose sister is a part of the string of dead teens, Beth tracks back the deaths to a burned down hospital, where perished a woman who seemingly abused her two children. Beth also being an abuse victim, she forms a special sympathy for the surviving girl, who will not speak. Eventually, Beth and Jack end up in the burnt out hospital where Beth finds the corpse of the dead mother and apparently puts it to rest. At the last second, however, Jack learns (thanks to a camera hidden in a toy bear still in the possession of the surviving child) that it was the other child who did all the abuse in the family, and the mother was trying to end that abuse when she died. Beth has a final confrontation with the bad sister, and the mother’s ghost appears at the last second to settle accounts.

The people in this film are bland, one-note, and either stupid or unlikable. The photography in the long, slow, boring second half is so dark it is often difficult to understand what is happening. There is a pointless subplot with Ray Wise as a reality TV show host who explores “American miracles” that is presumably supposed to be funny, but as with every other scene or moment in the movie it has no consequences. Wouldn’t the rest of the media be really excited if a girl were killed live on camera during the “exorcism” of her cell phone? But the worst sin of the film is the pace, which is bound up with the structure. Instead of trying to scare the viewer, it teases her with only the possibility of being scared. For the love of all that is holy, how many more times must we see people popping up behind others and touching them, or mysterious non sequiturs materializing across streets and rooms, or disbelievers walking into death, or unresponsive authority figures, or the entering alone into a huge dark space while knowing something evil lurks within? With unimaginative films like this one clogging up the screens, horror will remain one missed genre.

Now that the dust has settled around Death Sentence (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 106 minutes, $29.95, 1.85:1, DD 1.5 English and Spanish, subtitles, two making ofs and 10 webisode making ofs; street date Tuesday 8 January, 2008), its similarity to The Brave One no longer feels relevant, and with the DVD now out, it’s possible to see the film more clearly. For one thing, it’s really a horror film, but an urban horror film like Psycho, one that addresses the horror of living in modern urban society. It’s still an unlikely project for Kevin Bacon, but seeing the film again, it seems much better; despite its familiar narrative elements, it is so visually strong that you could see why an actor would want to be a part of it, the way, for example, actors loved being in Leone films. When the film looks good, they look better.

Death Sentence stars Kevin Bacon as a man whose family suffers at the hands of a gang, and when the legal system can do nothing about it takes the law into his own hands, in the end becoming as much an animal as his prey. Bacon is hockey dad Nick Hume, who, on his way home one night, makes the mistake of stopping at at gas station in a “bad” part of town (how did they end up there? it doesn’t matter. What is important is that it is in visual contrast with the home movie world that opens the film, and that this gas station in a sense provides the visual cues for the rest of the film); within minutes, his son is dead, and he is severely injured by a group of wilding youths. In the aftermath of this event, Hume ends up taking the law into his own hands, tracking down the gang who participated in killing his son (and later his wife), while the law appears to take the side of the criminals rather than the victims. The film is based on a novel by Brian Garfield, the man who wrote the key vigilante text of the 1970s, the book Death Wish, to which this novel was something of a sequel. Death Sentence is directed by James Wan, whose biggest previous film was Saw, which probably prejudiced most critics against this film.

As mentioned, Death Sentence makes the obvious point that by engaging in his vengeance project Hume “becomes” like his enemies. Ian Mackenzie Jeffers’s credited script, however, offers no alternative to Hume’s audience-satisfying vigilante campaign. Society’s guardians offer no help, which was the problem with the original vigilante cycle of films beginning with Billy Jack. Death Sentence also has some Taxi Driver moments, Scorsese’s film being an art house vigilante test: Hume shoots a guy’s fingers off, is himself clipped in the neck at the end, and plops down on a couch post-bloodbath just like Travis. In a different coincidence, Death Sentence also echoes Bourne Ultimatum in having a car that is falling off a building used as a weapon.

Death Sentence is set up to provide a straightforward tale of vigilante justice with a patina of moralizing that is meant to divert the censors from the real purpose of the film. In reality, the males in the audience will feel a grim sense of satisfaction as Hume blows away the bad guys despite the fact that he ends up, as his final victim admits, looking just like them. In the experience, Death Sentence is much more tight in its narrative and solid in its visual technique and even less internally compromised in what it wants to say than you think it’s going to be, and it has some terrific action sequences, including a foot chase that ends up in an auto garage.

Fox Home Video offers Death Sentence in a fine wide screen transfer that matches the grittiness of the original, and comes with a handful of extras. Fox Movie Channel Presents: Making a Scene is a 10ish minute account of the key chase scene, which demanded some detailed camera operation. Fox Movie Channel Presents:Life After Film School, with Kevin Bacon is a 24-minute interview with the star by three film students. The deal seems to be that they can ask him anything they want (and of course gravitate to mundane queries) as long as they talk about Death Sentence for half the show. Nevertheless, Bacon is game and answers his questions with a sincerity that would make James Lipton proud. Next is 17-minutes worth of “webisode” makings of, that offer a mini-profile of director Wan, a charting of Hume’s “story arc,” the film’s cars, the villain, another about Wan, two about the garage car drop, one on the choreography, one on the chase scene, and finally an episode about the film’s dingy look. They can be played all at once individually. Finally, there are trailers for Hitman, Lake Placid 2, and The Comebacks.

If you read the box text of Already Dead (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 93 minutes, $24.95, 2.35:1, DD 1.5 English, French, Thai, and Spanish, subtitles, three deleted scenes; street date Tuesday 15 January, 2008) carelessly you might at first mix it up with Death Sentence, for in both a man’s family is desstroyed by a criminal, and he turns to private means of justice. But if Already Dead starts out a tiny bit like Death Sentence, it soon shows the influence of Saw, and even more so Hostel, with a bit of Star Chamber and Magnum Force thrown in, maybe a bit of The Game, all within the first 30 or so minutes, after which it settles into a straight-to-video version of Die Hard, garnished with a light reference to Assault on Precinct 13.

The film starts out feeling like a kidnapping movie, as a lone man with a big sports bag is directed from location to location by a disguised voice on a cell phone. But it turns out to be something different, as we learn from the inter-spliced back story. Tom Archer (Ron Eldard) and his wife arrive home one night from a function to discover the baby sitter attacked and their son dead. Archer remembers a tell-tale tattoo on the killer’s wrist. The police are unable to track down the killer. Now Tom, his family falling apart, has gathered all his money in order to pay for the services provided by a top secret group of ex-cops who do what the official police can’t: catch killers and provide a forum for the victims to do payback. Slight problem: when Tom confronts the man (Til Schweiger) tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, he doesn’t have the tattoo. Tom learned about the group from a psychiatrist (Christopher Plummer) recommended to him by his boss. The shrink is summoned when Tom is unwilling to proceed to kill the presumably innocent guy on offer. The way the ex-cops work it, it turns out, is to throw any old reprobate at the suffering victim, in order to enrich themselves over the person’s blind grief. In any case, Tom won’t kill the man in the chair, even under the influence of his shrink, and the rest of the film charts their efforts to escape the huge facility.

It’s an interesting premise under-explored at the cost of offering the faux excitement of the cat and mouse escape. The film feels very much like a straight-to-video effort, in its languorous pace, cost saving repetition of certain shots, poverty of cast, and use of one huge congenially empty location for the bulk of the story. It ends on a “cake and eat it” moment when the moral Tom declines to murder one of the shadowy group’s leaders, stating (in a cliche that actually led to the title), “I don’t need to kill you. You’re already dead.” But someone else does kill him, anyway, so the viewer gets both the moral purity of the hero and the satisfaction of knowing that a culprit is gone. The film does end, however, on an unexpected but satisfying coda. It’s well-acted by everyone.

The film comes in a fine wide screen transfer, with sound production better than it really needs. Supplements consist of three work-print-level deleted scenes, two of which are expanded versions of already existing scenes.

Just what exactly is it that Entertainment Weekly has invested in Diablo Cody? It’s not just that the publication has installed the faux-pole-dance-blogger-turned-screenwriter as its new last page columnist, the second of which appears this week in issue number 974. There is some larger obsession with the writer. For example, this same issue has no less than 13 references to Cody and / or Juno. That’s excessive even for an issue dedicated to Oscar predictions.

Cody is marbled all through the issue. There is a fan letter praising her on page 6. On page 11 Juno is praised for proffering the best new ornate expletive. Allison Janney is quoted on page 28 with her parenthetical credited listed as Juno instead of, say, The West Wing. There is a picture from Juno on page 36, and on page 37 a sincere hope expressed that it winds up nominated for best picture in this year’s Oscars. On page 43, Ellen Page is touted for best actress. On page 44, J. K. Simmons is recommended for a best supporting actor nod. Page 46 brings us praise of both Jennifer Garner and of Janney again. Nor is the film’s director left out (page 48), and of course, not its writer, leading off the original screenplay candidates on page 49. Juno also turns up in the “Critical Mass” chart on page 63 and then is singled out for explanatory language in the “Chart” box office list on page 69. Finally, Juno’s soundtrack is praised in the magazine’s music section (page 80).

Cody herself finally appears on the last page with her column, “Binge Thinking.” Taking as its theme female cultural figures who represent a certain amount of strength within weakness, the best that can be said of this incoherent, self-fixated ramble is that it is no less funny than its predecessor three weeks ago.

But why EW’s fixation on Cody? Unless there is a history of intricate behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing between the magazine and Cody’s apparently aggressive business manager Mason Novick, the benefit for EW is that they have a semi-high profile columnist who is under (barely) 30 and who will appeal, presumably, to much younger readers, say, those torn between Gossip Girls and the next Hannah Montana concert. EW is no doubt facing the same crisis that plagues nearly every other publication and newspaper in the land, that is, that their core readership is aging but they are failing to acquire new readers. I wonder if in years to come we will look back at this transitional period and laugh at how much the olders clung to their expensive, slow, instantly out-of-date, environmentally-unfriendly magazines and newspapers. In any case, citing Janney for Juno instead of West Wing is simply the quietest hint that EW wants henceforth to pretend that its readers are teens and twentysomethings and not the aged wrinklies who still read some of the books covered in its ever-shrinking book review section or who actually want to see the plays that would otherwise be covered in its non-existent theater department.

As Japan was to the American cinema of the late 1950s, Africa was in the early 1960s: a vast “other,” a site of sometimes scary, sometimes alluring rituals, a repository of liberal guilt proffering “understanding” in a violent world. Through Sayonara and Teahouse of the August Moon and House of Bamboo, cinema eventually made the transition to Hatari (1962)Zulu (1964) and The Last Safari (1967) and that great popular masterpiece, Dark of the Sun (1968). Arguably the premiere film within this trend is the near-silent The Naked Prey, now receiving a prestigious release on DVD via Criterion (The Criterion Collection disc No. 415, 96 minutes, $39.95, 2.35:1, mono, supplements include audio commentary, trailer, text feature on the music with music cues, and audio only feature of source material, with a 32-page insert with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer credits, essay by Michael Atkinson and interview with Cornel Wilde; street date Tuesday 15 January, 2008).

The Naked Prey was a particular favorite of American boys in the late 1960s, among whom it was something of a cult item. In fact, you can still see its influence today, in the strenuous primitivism of Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies. The Naked Prey veers toward art rather than action, really, as it tells a tale of man against nature. The nameless hero, played by the film’s director, Cornel Wilde, is a safari leader in mid-1800s Africa. Thanks to the foolhardiness of his client (safari clients are always foolhardy and reckless), the group is disrupted by a very angry tribe. Various judgments are visited upon the members of the safari, with Wilde’s being that he is given a head start whereupon a handful of warriors will hunt him down. The bulk of the film is given over to the relentless pursuit and the cat and mouse game of the hunt itself (influenced emotionally by the film The Most Dangerous Game, but officially by the story of one John Colter, who was hunted in similar fashion by the Blackfoot Indians around the same time), with the film comprising a visual essay on the indifference of nature and man’s fragile place within its food chain.

Cornel Wilde is an interesting case as an actor-turned-director, an act for which he has received no respect. A Jewish Hungarian immigrant, Wilde was an expert fencer (he was on the 1936 Olympic team but dropped out for unstated reasons), which proved to be his entry into acting, first as a fencing coordinator, then as an actor in actioners, and then, rather quickly and mysteriously, as an Oscar-nominated leading man in a film about Franz Liszt. Unfortunately, though Wilde was pretty in a Tyrone Power sort of way, he was somewhat inert, not unlike his true analog Victor Mature, and his descendant, Stallone. Perhaps aware of these limitations, Wilde gravitated to production and director, his company making one of the best film noirs, The Big Combo and Wilde himself directing eight features from 1955 to 1975 (he died in 1989). In this he resembles no less than Ida Lupino, an actress of intellectual ambitions who also had around eight credited and uncredited titles on her filmography. Both performers used their directorial work to explore ideas and social problems not found amid the mainstream pabulum. Both were intellectually ambitious in the manner of Hollywood actors who buck up against the implacable commerciality of the movie business. Despite impediments and critical indifference, they struggled on.

It is thus perhaps fitting that The Naked Prey was popular among kids, and became loosely categorized as a kids movie, especially possibly thanks to its National Geographic peep into a culture where dress is not required. One can imagine a young Stallone watching it in his early 20s and finding inspiration in the then 55-year-old Wilde stripping bare and running through the arid brush of the South African veldt. Was the young Stallone immune, however, to the film’s embedded political statements? An early sequence rivals The Rules of the Game for its wordless indictment of cruelty to animals, in this case elephants. What’s delicate about the blend of action and ideas that they are fully integrated into the substance of the narrative and, given the virtually wordless script, are purely visual.

The Naked Prey comes in a lovely, colorful widescreen transfer with mono sound. The supplemental material is modest but helpful. Besides the lengthy trailer, there is also a reading of an account of John Colter’s escape, read by Paul Giamatti (financing encouraged Wilde to transplant the Old West tale to Africa), and an account of all the music cues in the film, authentic African music played on African instruments by Africans, along with tribal music actually recorded by Wilde.

Since Criterion likes to release its directors in pairs, there is probably another Wilde film in the works, possibly Beach Red, which is already on DVD, or Sword of Lancelot, also on DVD and released by Universal, with whom Criterion has a relationship. But in the end, it’s hard to guess. As usual, the main supplement is an audio commentary track, this one by Criterion standby Stephen Prince, who has written books on Kurosawa and screen violence. Prince is surprisingly knowledgeable about a film that for others would have been difficult to research, but to which Prince brings what sounds like a lifetime’s knowledge (he’s even looked at the continuity script). With what sounds like a slight Southern accent, Prince brings too much of a “reading from a text” quality to his presentation, but the material is extremely well-organized: he is so immersed in the film that he knows when to take a detour into the career of Wilde or his co-star Ken Gampu (who later appeared in The Gods Must be Crazy). Prince only makes one error that I could detect, which is attributing the film Detour to Joseph H. Lewis rather than Edgar G. Ulmer (at around the 48-minute point), but otherwise it is a highly informative and much recommended yak track. The Naked Prey also comes with a 32-page insert with cast and crew information, 21 chapter titles, digital transfer info and credits, and an essay by Michael Atkinson and an interview with Cornel Wilde (both purposely unread by this reviewer). The Naked Prey retails for $39.95, and hits the street on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008.

There Will Be Blood is the best film of last year and also of this year, at least so far (it seems to have some kind of dual release schedule, but is officially a 2007 movie). It is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, adapted (loosely, everyone says), from a book by the novelist and radical activist Upton Sinclair (who once ran for California governor as a socialist). Anderson is now arguably the hottest director in Hollywood, while Sinclair continues to be confused with fellow novelist Sinclair Lewis. Anderson deserves his acclaim. Since 1996 he has issued five top notch movies, each an achievement of his uncompromising vision. In his dedication to his craft he resembles no one less than Kubrick (though most people like to compare him to Altman).

From its opening scenes, There Will Be Blood insists on going its own way, and the musical score itself, by Jonny Greenwood, puts one in mind of Kubrick’s The Shining. The first 15 minutes is virtually silent (possibly because the film begins when movies were silent), as Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) works a mine by himself despite a broken leg. We soon know that nothing, absolutely nothing, will prevent Plainview from getting what he wants. The film is divided into about four sections, which show Plainview’s shift to the oil business and his rise and rise, and ends on something of a declension, as if Citizen Kane, after all its exultation about its hero’s career, were to end on an elaborate scene in which the millionaire faces off for one long last battle with Big Jim Gettys.

Like Kubrick’s films, There Will Be Blood is both “political” and “artistic” at the same time. It makes no concessions to the viewer’s typical desire for someone to “identify” with. We view all the film’s people from the outside (which isn’t to say, however, that we lack understanding of their motivations). The film moves in grand narrative chunks that focus intensely on specific moments, and leave out a lot of dead weight. From the political end, There Will Be Blood does something interesting. It harks back to a time when religion was viewed as an impediment to business and political health. Here, its politics, like its approach to narrative and to audience participation, is utterly contrary to contemporary practice.

Most important of all, Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in virtually every scene, is riveting. You can’t take your eyes off him. He dominates the screen, without necessarily drowning the other actors. And then in a few minutes you forget that he is Daniel Day-Lewis and he is simply Daniel Plainview. It’s important to add that the film is not without wit, but even the humorous parts only point out the supreme brilliance of Day-Lewis’s performance, specifically the sequence in which nemesis Preacher Sunday has blackmailed him into a baptism.

There Will Be Blood also harks back to the themes found in Anderson’s early films. Both Hard Eight (1996) and Boogie Nights (1997) concerned themselves in general with a benevolent, wiser older man who takes on the role of guardian angel to a rambunctious younger man. Magnolia (1999) had some elements of this theme but buried within a larger panorama of parent-child conflicts. Punch-Drunk Love (2002) was an odd man out, a love story, perhaps inspired by Altman’s similarly quirky A Perfect Couple. After his outer excursions, Anderson returns to his major theme with different layerings and seasonings. The guardian angel is no longer so benevolent; the “son” is less wayward. The focus on Plainview’s character is intense. He is a man who can carry a grudge (hence the title). The whole last sequence is an answer to the humorous sequence of Plainview’s baptism. Few contemporary, commercial filmmakers would have thought out their films to this degree. But Kubrick did.