“Like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner”….good one! The Tom Wolfe-ian wordsmith is D.J. LaChapelle, webmaster for TomCruiseIsNuts.com. The quote was given to Daily News “Lowdown” columnist Lloyd Grove: “What really inspired us was Tom’s appearance on the Today show. His body language, the way he got in Matt Lauer’s face — it was all pretty amazing. Watching one of America’s best actors coming unglued — like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner — there’s a kind of fascination.”

Face-Off

On Tuesday afternon I saw a DVD of Paul Schrader’s Exorcist prequel flick, which has been titled as Dominion: A Prequel to The Exorcist. Warner Bros. will release it on May 20, and it’s about friggin’ time.
Do I have to recount the whole Exorcist mishegoss over the last two or three years? Are there people who haven’t read about Morgan Creek’s James Robinson shelving the Schrader because he felt it wasn’t scary or pea-soupy enough, and then hiring Renny Harlin to shoot a slicker, aimed-at-the-youth-market version, blah blah?

Stellan Skarsgard (r.), star of Dominion: A Prequel to The Exorcist, and costar Billy Crawford (l.) in burning demonic possession mode.

The story of the Schrader version, which was shot between late ’02 and early ’03, coming back from the dead and finding release is in this week’s Entertainment Weekly , in a “News and Notes” article by Missy Schwartz.
What I have to say may not muss your hair and knock you out of your chair, but it’s the truth. Schrader’s version is the better film.
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By that I mean smarter and more grounded and being actually about something. It’s one of Schrader’s most thematically satisfying films, and there’s a caring and compassionate tone in the third act that feels unusual coming from the writer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Hardcore and American Gigolo.
Okay, it has a couple of lumpy elements (one or two CG shots that don’t quite cut it, a lead female performance by Clara Bellar that feels stiff and awkward), but nothing to throw you off the rails.
The Schrader isn’t as juiced as the Harlin and it doesn’t have Izabella Scorupco (who has, for me, a close-to-breathtaking shower scene in the latter), but the Schrader is so much fuller and richer and more rooted than the Harlin it’s not even funny. It’s an actual movie, as opposed to a thrill-ride reel.

And the star of both films, Stellan Skarsgard, delivers a tenderer, more expressive performance in the Schrader version. His acting actually left me feeling emotional allegiance and admiration for a Catholic priest character, which I frankly haven’t gotten from any theatre-viewed film since…well, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist .
When I see a priest in a movie, I usually think “pederast alert!” or “okay, here comes the obligatory guy-who-doesn’t-get-it” or something along these lines. Schrader’s film manages to punch through all this and come up with a real hero in Skarsgard’s Lankaster Merrin, a Dutch priest who will eventually grow old and turn into Max von Sydow and meet up with Linda Blair and die of a heart attack in her refrigerated bedroom.
I saw the Schrader after watching Harlin’s Exorcist The Beginning, which came out last August and hit the DVD shelves on 3.1.05. I never bothered to see the Harlin, and I probably wouldn’t have even rented it on DVD if it hadn’t been for the arrival of the Schrader.
I have to say that I half-liked the Harlin…at first. Because it’s so beautifully photographed (by the great Vittorio Storaro, who also shot the Schrader version) and because it has that expensive texture and accelerated rhythm and feeling of sublime polish that big-budget films always have because people are somehow comforted by them (as I was myself, to a limited extent).
But it gradually gets worse and worse (i.e., stupider, tackier, more desperate) and by the time it’s over it’s hard not to hate it.
The Harlin is a better cheap-high movie than the Schrader, granted, but in what kind of perverse universe do we applaud cheap highs?

If you go to the Schrader saying, “Okay, I want to see some really cool stuff I can talk about with my friends later on,” you may be disappointed. In fact, I was a tiny bit disappointed…at first. But it gets better and better, and by the time it’s in the home stretch it’s paying off on a fairly profound level.
There are loads of similarities between the two films, and a few key differences.
The Schrader takes place in 1947. The Harlin happens in 1949. Don’t ask why. Even Schrader, whom I spoke to this morning, says he doesn’t have a clue.
Both films are about how Merrin re-connects with his belief in God and the righteous scheme of things after losing faith in just about everything after enduring a horrible Sophie’s Choice-like incident during World War II.
A German officer (played by the same actor in both films) is threatening to kill a large group of Dutch villagers if someone doesn’t confess to killing of a German soldier. He orders Merrin, the local Catholic priest, to select the guilty party…only one person at first, and then, after Merrin initially refuses, ten.
Schrader’s film begins with this episode, and is much more psychologically intriguing (by the virtue of being better written) than it is in the Harlin film, which flashes back to this episode in piecemeal fashion.
The Harlin film is totally shameless in having the German officer shoot an innocent little girl in the head. The Schrader isn’t any less traumatic than Harlin’s version, but it doesn’t feel like it’s exploiting a terrible situation.

Establishing title card in the Harlin version…

..and in the Schrader film.

The main story line of both films is about Merrin facing fundamental evil during an archeological dig in Kenya, where an ancient cathedral is being excavated…along with some long-buried demonic forces.
This unholy emergence not only forces Merrin to eventually confront a living devil, but to rediscover his lost faith…mainly, obviously, because it’s the only weapon that will work.
The Schrader is much more layered and ambivalent in some ways about the way native Africans regard the emissaries of Christianity. Some characters feel that Christianity is a bringer of a kind of plague. There is one male character, embittered about losing his son, who picks up a framed painting of Jesus Christ at one point and smashes it on a desk and then throws it to the ground.
And yet the conclusion of Schrader’s film is one of the most spiritually centered I’ve ever seen. Skarsgard’s Merrin is standing tall and firm and fully resolved about who he is and what he needs to do as a priest in order to fight evil. Merrin is also a priest again at the end of Harlin’s film, but the undercurrent isn’t as strong.
There’s a female doctor in the Schrader film played by Pellar. The doctor in the Harlin version is played by Scorupco, perhaps not in a fully believable way (female doctors are rarely this attractive, in my experience) but she’s still a better actress that Pellar. And her slightly-older-fashion-model, eastern-European quality (she’s Polish-born) is highly stimulating.

The great Izabella Scorupco in Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning

Scorupco’s breasts are (or should be) objects of sincere religious worship. They require abasement and groveling on the church floor. They made me feel born again, or do I mean newly born? Harlin deserves full credit for getting her shower scene just right.
Gabriel Mann plays a young and ardent Catholic priest in the Schrader version, but he is replaced by a somewhat less passionate, altogether less reliable priest, played by James D’Arcy in the Harlin.
There’s a local native guy named Chuma (played by Andrew French in both) who is Merrin’s closest and frankest ally. He seems more of a typical secondary character in the Harlin film, and a more intriguing and layered fellow in the Schrader version.
The Harlin film has a young African boy of about nine or ten falling victim to demonic possession. The possession host in the Schrader is a 20-something character named Cheche, played by pop star Billy Crawford. Sickly and spindly at first, his demonic inhabiting doesn’t turn him into a Linda Blair-type monster but an androgynous-like Hindu God figure with his physical maladies gone and his personality warped by ego, ferocity and manipulation.

Painting of Satan as it appears on buried cathedral walls in Harlin’s version.

Billy Crawford in Satan mode in Schrader’s film.

This is far, far more interesting than the usual possessed by Beelzebub or the demon Pazuzu or Izusu crap in the Harlin version.
On the DVD I saw, the Schrader version looks like it was shot in 1.85 (i.e., standard Academy ratio) and the Harlin version is clearly framed in 2.35 to 1.
Schrader said that his version was actually shot in Univision, a system devised by Stroraro which has a wider aspect ratio than 1.85, and will be projected in theatres as Scope.
Schrader’s is more political than Harlin’s in the character of some British troops. They are portrayed as seriously belligerent pissers in his version but they barely figure in the Harlin film, except for the suicide of a certain officer character. (He shoots himself in the mouth in both films.)
Skarsgard seems to weigh a bit more in the Schrader version. He might be ten or fifteen pounds lighter in the Harlin film. His hair might be a touch blonder and he even seems a bit tanner.

Slightly fuller-faced Sarsgard as he appears in Schrader’s film…

..and as he appears in Harlin’s.

The pacing of the Schrader film has been slowed down. “I wanted to make it feel like an older film,” Schrader told me, “rather than follow the typical pace of another jacked-up, pumped-up horror film.”
Schrader was contractually obliged to keep his yap shut last year before the Harlin film opened, but the gloves are off now.
“I saw in the Harlin film every bad idea that I had fought off,” Schrader told me. “Every bad Jim Robinson idea that I rejected, re-surfaced in the Harlin film, so I think the issue of true authorship is pretty clear.”
Schrader’s film cost about $30 million; the Harlin cost another $50 million. The total domestic gross for the Harlin as of last November was about $42 million. I don’t know what it’s made worldwide and on DVD, but probably another $50 or $60 million, at least, and maybe a lot more.
Would the Schrader film have earned as much? I doubt it. It’s not a mass-audience film. But when it’s over, you know you’ve had some nutrition. The Harlin makes you feel like you’ve just wolfed down a Big Mac and some fries.

Dutch villager-killing German officer as he appears in Schrader’s film…

…and as he appears in Harlin’s version.

And of course, people like junk food. They know Big Macs are mostly chemicals and ground-up noses and ears and hooves and fatty sauces and most people don’t care. They just want the rush, and guys like James Robinson knows this.
By all means see the Schrader when it opens, but the more interesting thing to do is to watch these Exorcists prequels in tandem on DVD, like I did yesterday. Robinson and Warner Bros. should have put them both out simultaneously in theatres, a plan I suggested in this column on 8.11.04.
I quoted film critic and essayist David Thomson in that particular column. At one point he attempted a reading of why Schrader, who has never been and never will be a horror film kind of guy, took the deal to make the Exorcist prequel in the first place.
“There had to be an understanding on Paul’s point of view what a troubled route he was taking,” Thomson said. “He must have known what problems he was in, and I guess he took a gamble that they would argue it and change it a bit, and then let it go. I assumed he had made a bargain with himself that he could do [this film] to please himself and Morgan Creek at the same time.

Billy Crawford in third-act scene from Schrader’s Dominion.

“I don’t know why they hired him,” Thomson continued. “It must have been clear in the script there were not great torrents of vomit.” Thomson saw a version of Schrader’s cut early on, and said in the piece that it “didn’t really seem like a continuation of the Exorcist franchise, and to that extent one could foresee trouble. Schrader had made a film about spiritual isolation…a study in a crisis of faith.”
Except it’s not a troubling experience to watch. Okay, the first part is, a tiny bit, but you get past that soon enough, and then it gathers force and it ends like gangbusters.
Schrader’s film may not work for your 15 year-old son or nephew, but unlike 97% of the horror films cranked out these days, it has an actual undercurrent. It’s a film about a spiritual tug-of-war by a guy who has written and directed more films about spiritual (and often volatile) conflict than anyone else I can think of.
If you don’t believe me or you’re not sure, click on Schrader’s IMDB page and read his credits.

Design for Flying

We’ve all seen that Man of Steel get-up that Brandon Routh will be wearing in Bryan Singer’s currently-rolling Superman Returns (Warner Bros., 6.30.06). And Movie City News recently ran a photo created by some fanboy site with a more routinely designed outfit, which is obviously meant as a suggestion.
The message, which I sense is probably endorsed by a good number of those who are jazzed about the Superman mystique and are looking forward to the film, is that Singer not do to Superman what Joel Schumacher did to Batman with the ass closeups and those pointy nipples on the chest plate.
The Singer suit uses burgundy instead of traditional fire-engine red for the shorts, cape and boots, and has Routh wearing hot go-go dancer bikini briefs instead of the standard gym shorts that Chris Reeve used to tool around in.

The fanboy designer, whomever he or she is, will eventually learn to live with the burgundy, but he/she obviously doesn’t like that bikini shit. The alternate design is pure D.C. Comics and straight out of the 1930s (or 1950s, a la George Reeve). The fanboys can see what’s going down and…well, draw your own inferences.
Of course, the boat has sailed and whatever kind of Superman Routh is going to be (and whatever his suit may end up conveying), it’s a done deal and the fanboys will have to make their calls as they see ’em.
Singer gave the X-men movies a certain dimension, I think, by subtly portraying the sense of social apartness that mutants feel in terms that any socially aware gay guy could relate to. I’m not saying this was overt, but it was there.
Remember that hilarious Roger Avary riff that Quentin Tarantino acted in Sleep With Me about the subtext of Tom Cruise’s Maverick character in Top Gun? “Go the gay way, go the gay way…you can ride my tail,” etc.?
I used this to mess with Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson during a Crimson Tide junket interview about ten years ago. I told them, “Guys, you’re missing out on a whole marketing angle here. You should do an Advocate cover story and talk about the gay subtext in all your films, starting with the submarine in Crimson Tide.”

Monster Talk

“Your source wasn’t lying about Monster-in-Law being a hit waiting to happen.
“Unless the anti-Lopez sentiment keeps the crowds away, it should be a hit. I saw it this morning, and the audience went nuts for Jane Fonda’s wonderfully whacked-out performance as Viola Fields, a Barbara Walters type who loses her grip when she’s replaced on her talk show, ‘Personal Intimacy,’ by a ditzy hottie.
“The movie seemed to strike an especially strong chord with women who might have endured similar situations in their own lives.

“Still reeling from her abrupt fall from grace, Viola freaks when her son, a doctor (Michael Vartan, whose role is so perfunctory we never really even learn what his specialty is), proposes to Charlie (Lopez), a dogwalker/yoga instructor/aspiring designer, who also works as a temp in a doctor’s office.
“Viola throws the couple an engagement party and invites numerous celebrities and diplomats, just so she can introduce her future daughter-in-law with ‘this is Charlie — she’s a temp!’
“For those in the audience who have fantasized about seeing J.Lo humiliated, insulted and hassled, most of the rest of the film is going to be a delight. Wanda Sykes also got more than a few laughs as Viola’s put-upon assistant, who is caught in the crossfire between Viola and Charlie.
“Monster-in-Law is not a comedy classic, but it’s good fun and an excellent reminder of how sharp and funny Fonda can be.” — James Sanford.

The Big Stink

Deep down there’s something in us that enjoys the art of financial hoodwinking and flim-flamming… as long as it’s presented in a suitably fictional and charming package.
There’s an appealing example of this in The Sting when Paul Newman’s Henry Gondorff is talking about his days with the O’Shea mob in Chicago in the 1920s, when corruption was rife and “the feds took their end without a beef.”

(l. to r.) Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, former COO Jeff Skilling, sullied execs Andy Fastow and Lou Pai

And then Newman’s smirk grows into a shit-eating grin as he says to Robert Redford’s Johnny Hooker, “And it really stunk, kid.”
If you’re honest, you’ll admit your reaction when you first saw this scene was something along the lines of “yup…corruption can smell like nectar when there are no squealers and everyone’s equally dirty” or “there’s something to be said for graft and payoffs if they’re handled in a civilized manner.” Right? Especially if guys like Newman are in on it.
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In real life, of course, financial snookery isn’t quite as sexy.
Nine times out of ten the grifters are high-end corporate types with fleshy faces and boring haircuts and heavy political connections and an ability to put people to sleep with their inane remarks at stockholder’s meetings, or in their statements to the press.
And so it was with the Enron meltdown that began to break about four years ago, and spilled over into total scandal in early ’02.

Nothing remotely charming in this mess. The leading Enron bad guys, CEO Kenneth Lay and COO Jeff Skilling, were just odious. And yet Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia, 4.22 in New York and Houston, expanding on 4.29) manages to make their story a gripping thing.
It is, in fact, fully entertaining, and I never thought I’d say that about a documentary recounting the wrongdoings of a bunch of George Bush-supporting pirates.
“It’s like a heist film,” Gibney told me earlier this week. “When you think of it that way, it takes on a certain dimension.”
Over-valued and increasingly founded on imaginary concepts as it got closer and closer to the financial precipice, the Houston-based Enron, which got rolling in the `80s as as a gas-pipeline energy company but began to get into all kinds of stuff in the late `90s, was this country’s seventh-largest corporation before collapsing in 2001.
Lay, Skilling and other bigwigs walked away with over a billion dollars in their pockets, leaving lower-level investors and employees holding the bag, in some cases with their life savings wiped out.
Gibney has based his film on the 2003 bestseller of the same name, co-written by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. He began working on it just over a year ago and finished it last Thanksgiving,

(l. to r.) Skilling, Lay and former Enron executive Joseph Sutton.

Enron adds new reporting about stuff that has come out since ’03, including some indictments that have come down. The feds are putting Lay and Skilling on trial for fraud in January ’06. If they get a conviction, stiff sentences may result.
There is also TV coverage of Congressional hearings, several on-camera recollections from eyewitnesses and various folks who got burned. Lay and Skilling didn’t talk to Gibney but their statements are covered with TV news footage, C-SPAN clips and corporate videotapes originally meant for in-company viewing.
The basic message is that as things got more and more vision-driven in the mid to late ’90s, Enron became an absurdly overvalued company. Its stock was pumped up by deceptive maneuvering, and it borrowed heavily to make itself look good to the world, and eventually the fakery couldn’t sustain itself.
In ’91 Skilling introduced one of his cuter moves, which he got SEC approval on, called “mark to market” accounting. It was a scam by which Enron could project millions of dollars in potential profits from some newly launched endeavor or acquisition in their stockholders reports. If the venture wasn’t profitable, Enron was obliged to cover the losses with heavy borrowing.
A key component in all this, Gibney says, is that Enron wasn’t hassled all that much by federal oversight agencies, partly, he feels, because of a certain chumminess between Lay and George Bush, who accepted millions in Enron campaign contributions. Enron’s freedom to pretty do what it wanted to do seemed linked in a lot of people’s minds to an attitude on Bush’s part to go easy on “Kenny Boy” and his pals.

It turns out Enron was behind the big California energy crisis of 2000 and ’01. As footage of California brush fires are shown in the film, tapes are heard of Enron guys chortling about the success of their plan to artificially create the crisis. This was partly achieved by selective “maintenance” shut-downs of power plants, which allowed for hikes in electricity rates.
Former California governor Gray Davis, whom Enron tried to blame for the rolling blackouts that were happening back then, is shown trying to point the finger at Enron. Gray “suspected something [like this] was going on but he couldn’t prove it at the time,” says Gibney. “When 50% of the power plants were down for maintenance on a single day, you have to wonder what’s going on. That smelled fishy.”
Enron suggests that a May ’01 conference between Lay and eventual California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger gave the latter information that he used to make Gray look bad over his handling of the energy crisis.
The one note of compassion (or at least empathy) comes when the doc briefly focuses on Lou Pai, a Skilling associate who had a yen for strippers and strip clubs. It reminded me of Mort Sahl’s crack that revelations in the early ’80s of sexual impropriety by a certain Republican fat cat was “a cynical attempt to humanize the Reagan administration.”
The most chilling scene for me happens during a morale-boosting meeting among Enron employees right when the meltdown is happening, and some guy asks if he should invest all of his money, “all of my 401 K” in Enron, and he is told by a spokeswoman who happens to be standing at the mike, “Absolutely!” And then she laughs.
Bottom line: a lot of people were being paid a lot of money for working with Enron and being good team players, and as long as the checks were coming in none of them wanted to know anything. Nobody being paid good money ever does.
An Enron employee named Cliff Baxter killed himself in January ’02.

How much did Lay and Schilling walk away with? In the film Lay is quoted as saying he’s down to his last $20 million and something like $1 million in liquidity. Skilling reportedly paid $23 million to his attorney as a retainer fee.
Andrew Weissman is heading the prosecution of Lay and Skilling in the upcoming fraud trial. He was also the lead attorney in the government’s prosecution of fraud charges against the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, which cooked and then shredded the books for Enron during its big-calamity phase.
The Justice Department has been investigating the Enron debacle since January 2002. Why has it taken so long to put together a case against Lay and Schilling? “Because it’s very complicated,” says Gibney. “It’s going to be very tough to try because they’re going to have to prove intentional fraud. They may be found not guilty.”
President Bush “is, I think, happy to have the Department of Justice pursue this case as aggressively as possible. Now he can just say ‘I didn’t know’ and if they did something crooked, they have to pay the price.”
Gibney says “if I were king of the world, and it’s probably a good thing that I’m not, I’d like to see Ken Lay work as a grill man for McDonald’s and be forced to ride only public transportation for the rest of his life.”
Here’s a link to Bethany McLean’s 3.5.01 Fortune magazine piece, “Is Enron overpriced?”
If McLean’s piece has a money paragraph, it’s this: “‘Enron is an earnings-at-risk story,’ says Chris Wolfe, the equity market strategist at J.P. Morgan’s private bank, who despite his remark is an Enron fan. ‘If it doesn’t meet earnings, [the stock] could implode.'”
Fortune has put up a special webpage linking to various other aspects of its Enron reporting.

The thing that sticks with you at the end of Gibney’s film is the look in Lay and Skilling’s eyes as they try to sell the concept of Enron’s financial health.
I don’t know if these guys would have gotten off any easier if they had some of that Henry Gondorff charm, but I know audiences tend to respond to this on all sorts of levels.
If I had been an Enron stockholder five or six years ago in a buy-sell position, and all I had to go on was the way these guys presented themselves and the deep-down attitudes they conveyed, I would have unloaded like that. I feel sorry for the people who kept their Enron stock and lost everything, but that’s life in the big city.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room “is kind of a moral report card,” says Gibney. “There is a moral dimension to our economy that has to be reckoned with. It says, in a way, that the free market ultimately makes us slaves….utterly free but slaves at the same time.”
HDNet, the high-definition cable station owned by Enron producers Mark Cuban and Philip Garvin, will screen Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room concurrent with the 4.22 theatrical debut. It will play at 8 pm eastern (5 pm Pacific) and then at 11 pm eastern (8 pm Pacific).

Bill of Goods

The thing that made me want to buy Universal Home Video’s new 2-Disc Anniversary Edition of Apollo 13 was a promise on the jacket art that the IMAX version of this 1995 film is included on the second disc.
I saw a piece of the IMAX version on this Ron Howard film at a special invitational press screening a couple of years ago, and it made the images look sharper, fuller and bolder than those in the theatrical version, which was pretty good to start with.
The IMAX version looks better because each frame of the original has been digitally tweaked so as to make everything look richer and more vivid, in order to meet the blown-up standards demanded by the much larger IMAX screen.

Actual frame of IMAX film, indicating the appproximate 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio in which IMAX films are projected in theatres…

I wondered at first how this would work since the aspect ratio of an IMAX screen is kind of boxy (close to 1.33 to 1), and Apollo 13 was originally released in Scope (2.35 to 1). The solution, I learned at the press conference, is that Apollo 13 was actually shot in Super 35mm, which captures a 1.33 to 1 image but is then cropped in post-production to create a Scope aspect ratio. So there was plenty of extra top-and-bottom image space to fill the IMAX frame.
Pretty much all Scope films are shot in super 35, or so I’ve heard. This is how DVD pan-and-scan versions of Scope films are assembled — not by cropping off the sides of the Scope image but by using the original 1.33 to 1 super 35 image.
Anyway, knowing all this I was shocked when I played the IMAX version last night and discovered it’s not the IMAX version at all. What Universal Home Video has released on Disc 2 is a cropped IMAX image with an aspect ratio that looks roughly to me like 1.75 to 1.
(A critic on www.dvdtalk.com wrote that the IMAX DVD version uses a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio. He’s wrong. Check out the Warner Home Video DVD of Barry Lyndon — that’s 1.66 to 1.)
I’m not strenuously complaining about this. Image quality-wise the IMAX-on-DVD version of Apollo 13 looks quite superb. It has a knock-down, almost startling clarity and all kinds of ripe bountiful colors. It is so appealing and soothing to the eye that I stopped working last night in order to watch it.
But — but! — to tell DVD buyers they’ll be getting the IMAX version of this film when they buy the new DVD is a cheat. It’s the IMAX image quality without the actual shape of the image shown in IMAX theatres, and in my book to sell it as a “the IMAX Experience version” is at least a half-lie. To me it’s a flat-out fib.

…and the 1.75 to 1 aspect ratio of the “IMAX Experience” version as presented on the new Apollo 13 2-Disc DVD.

I enjoyed Apollo 13 when it came out ten years ago, but I hadn’t looked at it again since last night and it plays better than I remember. Well shot, professionally paced and believably acted, this is a fully involving, methodical recreation of a true-life event. I still love Dean Cundey’s photography and while the special effects look a bit dated by today’s standards, they’re still decent.
It’s always the mark of a good film when the third-act tension (i.e., will the possibly damaged heat shield hold during re-entry?) in the third-act works even when you know astronaut Jim Lovell (i.e., Hanks character) and the other two guys made it and there’s nothing to worry about.
I had forgotten how young Hanks used to look, and how thin he once was. Kevin Bacon looks so much younger also; ditto Bill Paxton. I know it sounds banal for an industry journalist to mention age and weight issues, but this is the first thing you notice when you watch this DVD. You say to yourself, “Wow, time really moves along.”

In Tom Wolfe’s scheme of things, reports a New York Times Magazine profile (11.31), social behavior is almost always determined by status consciousness — an instinct to preserve your place in the social pecking order. Pretty much all human endeavor “has to do with status,” says the 74 year-old author of “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (excerpted in Rolling Stone, in book stores November 9). “Or STATE-us, which is the way you say it if you want more status.” Our status awareness is so fundamental, Wolfe says, that “there may even be a specific place in the brain that creates it,” the article relates. “Status is neurological, in other words…people aren’t so much interested in scaling the social ladder as in clinging to their own, hard-earned rung.” For what it’s worth, I can say with some authority that Wolfe’s theory is observable in Los Angeles entertainment journalist circles.