..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
..DVD Review
Domino
"I've always said that I'm sort of macho in terms of my personal life, in terms of like, to do dangerous things, in terms of rock climbing; I like to do things that make me scared. But the most scariest days of my life are the days that I'm filming, and they're scary because I'm scared of failure. I'm scared I'm not going to satisfy not just myself, but satisfy my film family, my larger family. I want people to like what I do, and I'm scared that I'm going to fail in doing that. So that's why every morning when I wake up, I'm always bolt upright 5 minutes before the alarm clock, whether I've had 1 hour's sleep, 2 hours' sleep or 10 hours' sleep-I don't get 10 hours' sleep, my max is about 5-I'm always bolt upright in fear, in fear of failure, in fear of not actually making my mark, in fear I haven't been able to execute what I wanted to do creatively as good as I could have done it. I think it's healthy to have that fear. I wake up with that same fear whether I'm doing a commercial or whether I'm doing a major movie, and I think my fear with Domino was that I kept pushing the boundaries in terms of what could be perceived as 'too rock 'n roll' and then being silly."
That Tony Scott can get this close to recognizing where his 2005 film came up short (and why he ought to be getting his blood pressure monitored on a regular basis) is just one of many instances that make the New Line Home Entertainment Platinum Series Widescreen release (N10136, $28) an outstanding DVD, well worth exploring and contemplating if you have any interest at all in the art of making movies or the dynamics of Hollywood. You don't have to like the film. In fact, Scott got somewhat carried away with his visual experiments and the film is rather difficult to like. No one beyond a handful of investors cares if the movie returned a profit. Domino is a failure because it doesn't entertain well, because its many deliberately unmatching elements never line up, and because ultimately, it doesn't escape Hollywood as much as it is pretending to.
Domino Harvey was the daughter of the actor, Lawrence Harvey, who passed away while she was still a child. Although sent to boarding schools around the world, her home was basically Los Angeles, and she even had a career as a runway model when she was a teenager before discovering her true calling as a California bounty hunter, running down bail jumpers. In a just world, Harold Robbins would rise from his grave to write this story, and it would make a heck of a TV series-a La Femme Nikita for the real world or an up-to-date Honey West. Scott read about Harvey and was the moviemaker, out of all of the moviemakers who probably read the same article, to secure the rights for making a film of her adventures. He explains on the DVD's supplement that the first screenwriters kept the narrative too realistic, too close to docudrama. Then he finally lit upon Richard Kelly - the director of Donnie Darko - who has never allowed reality to get in the way of anything. As Kelly sensibly explains to Harvey in a great 20-minute audio interview (a session he was taping for notes) included on the DVD, "Part of the whole process of making this movie is the blur between fact and fiction, and the fact being there are real people who are being characterized on the screen, and the 'fiction' being creating a fictional story about them. You're entering a mythology where you take someone like Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp, and you take them on a fictional adventure. At the same time, you try to be true to the origins of that character, and when you put them in that adventure, you kind of stay faithful to the spirit of who that person is."
What Kelly came up with, however, did not follow that plan very neatly. Introductory scenes are presented in flashback as a job the heroes have undertaken spins way out of control. Once the flashbacks are over, the plot alters its direction twice in a disjointed manner, first stopping in the desert as the heroine, played by Keira Knightley, and her companions come down from being poisoned with mescaline, and then concluding the primary crime story-about returning money stolen from mobsters instead of anything having to do with bail jumping-in a typical Hollywood blockbuster finale that depicts the destruction of a major Las Vegas landmark. Kelly, who shares the movie's commentary intercut with Scott, tries to justify his choices by suggesting that it is the heroine's mind who is spinning out of control, and in his defense, it was Scott that insisted on using the landmark instead of a less distinctive location, but that choice belies the film's premise-a realistic portrait of modern day bounty hunters-and is so absurd that viewers investing in the unglamorous verisimilitude of the first act are going to feel over charged. There are other, minor failures that the DVD supplements also magnify, notably the application of 'flow chart' visuals in the film to explain the complexities of the stolen money plot. Flow charts are what people who sit in boardrooms make when they want to view connections. Dominoes is a game about connections that people who live on the streets play. To have such a useful symbol so tantalizingly close and to not take advantage of it is both maddening and wasteful.
When film stylists in the past have advanced the cinematic grammar, it has been controversial, and there are always detractors who claim that the innovations were worthless, but there was also always a sense, when you were watching such passages, that the filmmaker was in total control, and was drawing you along and pressing exactly the buttons in you that he wanted to press. Sam Peckinpah's action scenes in The Wild Bunch are an easy example, but even Oliver Stone's manipulations in Any Given Sunday were spellbinding. What Scott has tried to do for the visual storytelling in Domino, however, step-processing the images to create jitters and blurs in the movements and colors, just doesn't work. It is alienating rather than involving. It doesn't guide you through the emotions of the narrative, it confuses you instead, flitting about as if nobody in the movie is important enough to savor. Scott really, really wanted to push the bar with Domino, and he speaks extensively about how various shots were achieved on the commentary-there is also a good 11-minute featurette about it; he even used old hand-cranked cameras-but he pushed the bar too high and couldn't jump over it. The suggestion that these tricks symbolize confusion in the heroine's soul doesn't justify their technical shortcomings. You're less involved with the characters and less interested in their actions because you spend too much time trying to figure out what is happening. There is no emotional focus, just frantic distraction. What is really going on with the film's look and style is a last desperate, die-hard effort to justify the utilization of film over digital video. In the commentary, Kelly even claims that there are subjects-such as a realistic drama set in the Seventies-where using video would be inappropriate because the 'look' doesn't match the 'look' such movies had in the Seventies. But he doesn't get it, and Scott doesn't get it. Digital video is replacing film because it can-or will soon-imitate anything film can do, more efficiently and cheaply. And all of this elaborate in-camera risk-taking and complex processing comes to naught, because viewers just assume that he is altering the images digitally in any case.
The letterboxing has an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The transfer is undoubtedly accurate. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound with EX-encoding is as fragmented as everything else and while it is reasonably detailed, it, too, lacks the kind of throughline that would make amplification appealing. There is a crisper, better-detailed DTS track with ES-encoding. The 128-minute program has optional English and Spanish subtitles.
The commentary by Scott and Kelly was recorded around the time of the film's theatrical release, before they were fully aware of how it would be received by viewers. Scott is not in denial the way some filmmakers are when doing commentaries for films that few, other than themselves, admire, but he is optimistic about what he has achieved, still excited about all of his experiments, and legitimately concerned about having done justice to the spirits of the characters.
In addition to the standard commentary, there is a fascinating second audio track, roughly keyed to the unfolding of the film, culled from Scott's recordings of his story meetings with Kelly and producer Zach Schiff-Abrams. Whether they are brainstorming over what sort of celebrity masks the robbers should be wearing or discussing when and how parts of the story should be explained, the conversations reveal how some of the puzzle parts of a movie get put together when a screenplay is prepared for shooting, and it also depicts Scott and Kelly in the act of making the choices that will ultimately compromise the film's capacity to entertain. Additionally, Tom Waits has a cameo role in the film and during that segment, he and Scott can be heard going over his approach to the part.
Two trailers are featured, as are 8 minutes of deleted scenes, the latter filling in unnecessary backstory and accompanied by an optional Scott commentary. Finally, to give the DVD a sense of completeness that is beyond the reach of the film, there is a good 20-minute profile of Harvey, who unexpectedly died a couple of months before the film premiered. Where the movie might have failed to lift her out of the annals of 'Hollywood Babylon,' the DVD resolutely succeeds, by fully demystifying the mythmaking process.
March 2, 2006DVD Roundup: This Week's DVD Releases
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