The Screengrab : timothy dalton

Thursday Poll for November 27, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, we continued our Bond-fest with the eternal question, “who was the best 007?” But much like the Vesper martinis that Daniel Craig’s Bond enjoys so much, this quiz came with a twist- Sean Connery wasn’t one of the candidates, a choice we made with the goal of keeping the poll competitive. However, you had other plans, with Craig (if nothing else, the first Bond since Connery who could convincingly kick some serious villain ass) bringing home a cool 56% of the vote. Trailing him by a wide margin was the #2 choice, Roger Moore, with 19%, followed by Pierce Brosnan with 13%. As usual, the unloved Messrs. Lazenby and Dalton brought up the rear with a mere 6% apiece. And while we received a number of write-in votes for unofficial Bonds ranging from Corey Burton to Operation Kid Brother’s Neil Connery, I was a little disappointed that nobody chose my favorite fake Bond, the diminutive Weng Weng in For Your Height Only.

This week, we move from high-octane action to high-caffeine spectacle by spotlighting the one and only Baz Luhrmann, whose latest film, Australia, was released yesterday. Whether his films leave you dumb with wonderment or simply dumbfounded, it’s hard to find a movie lover who doesn’t have an opinion on the guy. So, what’s your favorite Luhrmann film?

What is your favorite Baz Luhrmann film? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is opening. Have a spectacular spectacular Thanksgiving, and we’ll see you next week!

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

13. OCTOPUSSY (1983)

Okay, to be honest, I’m the only one at Screengrab who voted for Octopussy as one of the best James Bond films of all time. But even though it’s been a long time since I saw it, I’m pretty sure I can safely stand by my vote. First of all...it’s frickin’ called OCTOPUSSY! Newspapers and TV stations across the United States (in the Age of Reagan, no less!) had to advertise what sounds like the dirtiest, freakiest porn flick of all time...how great is that? And to think many of those same newspapers and TV stations balked at revealing the full title of Zack and Miri...I only regret the MoviePhone Guy wasn’t around back then to say, “You’ve selected...Octopussy!” My friends and I would have called twenty times a day! Uh...but I digress. So anyway, aside from that bitchen title, the film also featured a pretty cool, well-paced story featuring an elephant chase, knife-throwing circus performers, a sweet fight on the wings of an airborne jet and a weird lady cult of acrobatic assassins. True, Roger Moore was really showing his age (and would retire after his next Bond adventure, the dreadful View To A Kill), and sure, the movie is goofy as hell...but, for me at least, goofy more often than not equals fine entertainment value.

12. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)

The apotheosis of Roger Moore; as you might expect, the secret was to build a hell of a show around the smirking old thing and give him something to react to. After the comparatively low-tech Man with the Golden Gun and the ugly-looking Live and Let Die, the producers decided to kick out the jams a little, and Ken Adam, the legendary production designer who'd worked on most of the Bond films of the 1960s and '70s, was encouraged to just go nuts. In addition to the sets, the movie boasts perhaps the most succulent and wittiest of the Bond babes -- Barbara Bach, a.k.a. Mrs. Ringo -- as well as a villain for the ages in Richard Kiel's hard-to-finish-off Jaws, and even a theme song (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and performed by Carly Simon) that you can still hear on the radio without throwing up in your mouth hardly at all.

11. LICENSE TO KILL (1989)

Timothy Dalton never got much love as James Bond, and with good reason: his interpretation of 007 was humorless and constipated, and one of his two at-bats in the role was 1987’s snoozer The Living Daylights, one of the dullest Bond films in the entire series. And while License to Kill played more like a feature-length Miami Vice episode than a spy caper, it was nevertheless a pretty good action movie. The villain (Robert Davi’s evil drug lord Sanchez -- based, at least according to Wikipedia, on real-life supervillain Pablo Escobar) gets his goons to feed ageless, indestructible CIA agent Felix Leiter to a shark (after raping and killing the poor bastard’s wife on their wedding night...a plot twist WAY too dark for any Bond film to carry), after which Dalton’s character goes rogue, resigning from M16 to get himself some payback. Once it gets past the gruesome downer of a set-up, however, the film introduces Carey Lowell as drug courier and CIA informant Pam Bouvier, one of the smartest, most charismatic “Bond girls” of all time, then continues to improves with a compelling cat-and-mouse battle of wits between Sanchez and Bond, featuring a peculiar Wayne Newton cameo (as a shady televangelist!) and climaxing with the best tanker truck chase this side of The Road Warrior.

10. LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

Granted, this is something of a nostalgic choice. As I mentioned in the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs list a couple of weeks ago, Live and Let Die was the first Bond movie I ever saw, and it took many years for me to get over the idea that Roger Moore was the 007. I'm aware that almost anything positive I say about the movie can also be held against it. For example, I could give it credit for having the most racially diverse cast in the series, but then I'd have to admit that some of the characters do not represent the most, er, enlightened portrayal of African-Americans on film. My theory is this: after the failure of George Lazenby, the producers weren't taking any chances in launching their new Bond, so they raided American cinema for all the trendiest action movie trimmings. The story pits Bond against a voodoo-dabbling heroin magnate and his Harlem drug ring, a convenient excuse to plunder the then-hot blaxploitation pictures for wild afros, gaudy cars and the latest in jive talk. When the action shifts to the American South, the movie just as shamelessly embraces the gators, speedboats and cottonmouth drawls of hixploitation. It almost turns into Smokey and the Bandit for awhile, with the arrival of peckerwood Sheriff Pepper. I can understand how the purists would object to all this, but I've always gotten a kick out of the voodoo vibe, Yaphet Kotto as the exploding villain Kananga, luscious Jane Seymour as the fortune teller Solitaire and Roger Moore running across a bunch of crocodiles.

9. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

For all its continued bankability, the Bond series was in a creative rut after four decades. Given the self-parody of the late Moore adventures, the lean Dalton years, and the diminishing returns of the Brosnan movies, how could the producers of the Bond films rejuvenate their cash cow? Why, with a reboot, of course! And what better way to do so than to double back and adapt Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel in the process? A new take on the series would require a new leading man, and Daniel Craig was just the man for the job -- younger, leaner, and meaner, here was a guy with bigger things to worry about than how his martinis were made. Casino Royale makes it clear from the outset that this is a whole new ballgame, when we first see Craig’s Bond undertaking the missions that earned him his license to kill -- filmed in stark black and white, no less. And through Craig’s steely blue eyes, we experience a fresh take on the usual Bond story -- no nifty gadgets, no villains bent on world domination, and no convoluted methods of torture (in a decidedly lo-fi touch, the captured Bond gets whacked in the tenders with a knotted rope). Of course, the action scenes are still pretty kickass, especially an early parkour-style foot chase. But what really makes Casino Royale special is Craig’s relationship with Vesper Lynd, played by the luscious Eva Green. Vesper is Bond’s equal in many ways, and the closest the character has come to finding his match since Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And this makes her eventual betrayal all the more effective -- not simply because of how much it messes our hero up, but also the lengths to which he must go to steel himself against the pain in the future. Essentially, Casino Royale finds James Bond becoming the 007 we all know, and when he finally states his name at the end of the film, we have no trouble believing him.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oh, James Bond, why do we love you so? Batmen and teenage wizards and swashbuckling archaeologists may come and go, but film after film, decade after decade, 007 never dies.

Maybe it’s because the character has no real end or beginning: despite the so-called origin story “reboot” of Daniel Craig’s 2006 Casino Royale, Bond is timeless. Though technically the agent was born sometime between 1918 and 1924 (to Andrew and Monique Delacroix Bond...thank you, Wikipedia!) and went on his first official mission circa 1954 (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang creator Ian Fleming’s literary Royale), Bond movies are always happening right now, reflecting the tastes and mores of their time, from the swingin’ sexist hedonism of the 1960s to the gritty post-Bourne “realism” of the Craig administration.

Bond, after all, is more of a concept than a character, a periodic excuse for hacks and auteurs, Oscar winners and supermodels, giants and dwarves, skiers, skaters, scuba divers, Wayne Newton, Madonna and everyone in between to make big, stylish, international action flicks, swill cocktails and blow stuff up real good, like the Olympics and the Cannes Film Festival crossed with a monster truck rally and New Year's Eve at the Playboy mansion...and who the hell can say no to that?

And so, in honor of the upcoming Quantum of Solace, the supervillains of the top-secret organization SCREENGRAB gathered in their hidden mountaintop fortress to compile a plan for world domination and, while they were at it, the following list of THE BEST & WORST JAMES BOND FILMS OF ALL TIME!!!!!

THE WORST:

10. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

Okay, so I’m in the minority on this one (since Daniel Craig’s superspy debut also appears on our “Best” list)...and it’s not just that I think blonde and Bond don’t mix (because really...who cares?). But, c’mon...after an admittedly righteous parkour chase through Madagascar, the movie spends A LOT of time stuck in the titular casino. Gambling scenes in Bond movies usually last about five minutes, because we all know who’s gonna win...only THIS time, the poker tournament goes on and on and on...and unlike, say, the battle of wits in the similarly high stakes card game in The Sting, Bond here finally wins his tournament by flashing a straight flush. A straight flush! Dude, anybody can win with a straight flush! Winning with a pair of twos...now THAT would have been superspy impressive! So anyhow, with the snoozy foregone conclusion of the trendy Hold ‘Em showdown out of the way, director Martin Campbell lightens the mood with a scene of Craig getting repeatedly smacked in the nuts (possibly to make Pierce Brosnan feel less bad about getting booted from the franchise), and then, the big finale is...a fantastically exciting hovercraft chase? ...a massive secret agent melee aboard a flaming death zeppelin? Nope...the big finale is Bond watching his girlfriend drown. Whee!!! Sorry guys...action, drama and Craig’s scowly killjoy puss may have worked in Munich, but in the 007-verse? Not so much.

9. TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) & THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Pierce Brosnan made four films as Bond. The first, Goldeneye (1995), came out six years after the previous one, and was gratefully accepted by those who had given the series up for dead but couldn't bear the thought of living without it; Brosnan's swan song, the 2003 Die Another Day, is probably the liveliest of his short reign. Tomorrow and World came between them and are what passes for the meat in a thin sandwich. Both were directed by talented but slumming directors (Roger Spottiswoode and Michael Apted, respectively), and both are laden down with sad excuses for romantic foils (Teri Hatcher and Denise Richards) and disappointing villains (Jonathan Pryce as a power-mad media mogul and Robert Carlyle as a notorious terrorist who turns out to be merely the cat's-paw to the true villain, played by Sophie Marceau). Both movies belong -- to the degree that anyone would want them -- to Brosnan's female co-stars, Marceau and Michelle Yeoh. Brought in to supply a teensy taste of the action acrobatics of Hong Kong movies, Yeoh gets to kick up a little dust and show Brosnan up in a few scenes, though it's disappointing that she ends up being turned into a damsel in distress, calling to James for help. The spectacular Marceau is luckier; she starts out wittily pretending to be an imperiled little thing and then gets to blossom in a scene that reveals her to be a sick chick who could throw a scare into Rosa Kleb.

8. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

With his suave, urbane presence, Pierce Brosnan was ideally suited to the role of James Bond, so much so that he was originally offered the role after Moore retired, only to turn it down due to his commitment to Remington Steele. It was Brosnan’s bad luck that by the time he assumed the role, the creative well was beginning to run dry. Never was this more apparent than in his fourth and final 007 vehicle, Die Another Day. Brosnan was just fine, but the movie around him -- yeesh. To begin with, much was made of the presence of recent Oscar-winner Halle Berry as the “good” Bond girl Jinx, but her performance was so bad (witty banter just doesn’t work when it’s over-enunciated, Rudy Ray Moore-style) that the studio-generated hype about a spinoff movie quickly became laughable. And who could forget those villains, eh? You know -- the, uh, English guy who was actually a Korean who got plastic surgery, and the dude with the diamonds in his face. Not exactly Oddjob or Rosa Klebb, that’s for sure. Then there’s the villain’s ice lair (which one reviewer called “Ronald McDonald’s Fortress of Solitude”), and a chase scene involving an invisible car, an idea that’s too silly even in the context of a James Bond movie. The final nails in the coffin are the double contribution of Madonna, who not only contributed the travesty of a title song -- perhaps the series’ worst to date -- but also appeared in a cameo as a British (this was her British phase, remember) fencing instructor, in which she proceeded to suck all the energy out of the room simply by showing up. But don’t cry for Brosnan -- all the money he made from playing 007 has allowed him to appear in films in which his looks and charisma have been put to much more interesting use. Put it another way -- if sitting through Die Another Day was the price we had to pay to get The Matador, it was worth it.

7. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)

The title character -- Scaramanga, the master assassin with the island hideaway, the pet dwarf manservant (Herve Villechaize), and the superfluous nipple -- is played by Christopher Lee, who clearly enjoyed one of his first prominent roles where he didn't have to bite his co-stars on the neck. Lee is the only thing this one has going for it, though; it's a dull son of a bitch. This was Moore's second time out as 007, and he seems to have responded to the discovery that he hadn't been fired after his work in the first one by switching to autopilot. The Bond girls here are Britt Ekland, a once-promising starlet on her way to a career as tabloid and tell-all memoir fodder based on her relationships with Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart, and Maud Adams, who would return to the franchise nine years later to play the title role in Octopussy. (If you'd given the performance that she gives here, you'd want a do-over, too.) And, oh, joy, Clifton James is back as Sheriff J. W. Pepper, an act of hubris on the moviemakers' part that rivals George Lucas' refusal to flush Jar Jar Binks. Even John Barry fell down on the job; he would later say that the score here was "the one I hate the most," though at least the producers declined the title song offered to them by Alice Cooper, thus giving Alice one more thing he has in common with Johnny Cash. For topicality, there's an energy crisis theme, and no movie better illustrates a dwindling of reserves of energy than this one.

6. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

As soon as A View to a Kill hit the street, it was clear that something had to give. So the producers eighty-sixed Roger Moore and attempted a newer, more serious approach to the character. The man chosen to embody that new approach, Timothy Dalton, has been trying to live down the results ever since, but Dalton is a good actor with a handsome shell and a dashing presence, and it's not the worst thing you can say about someone in his position here that he let his contempt for the material show. (After twelve years of Roger Moore, it was kind of reassuring to see someone who had it in him to feel contempt for any material at all.) The producers also scaled back on the harem girls, the feeling being that the age of AIDS demanded a Bond who was at least serially monogamous. The problem is that the villains -- the hedonistic Jeroen Krabbe and the rampaging Joe Don Baker -- now seemed to be the only people having any fun. Then movie may perhaps be most notable for a sequence that plays very strangely today, the one in which Bond, in Afghanistan, lends a helping hand to the heroic, scrappy forces of the Mujahideen.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

That Guy!: John Rhys-Davies

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Genre films are something of a trap for actors and actresses. One memorable role in a movie franchise beloved by one flavor of geek or another, and they're pretty much set for life -- as long as sequels keep getting made, they'll keep getting steady work, and the sun will set on their acting careers about five weeks after they die. On the other hand, as long as they're best known for genre parts, those are the parts they're likely to keep getting ad infinitum; there's a reason it's called the genre ghetto. Unfortunately, actors who take up residence there are awfully reluctant to leave because the paychecks are good, but they soon find out it's not easy even when they decide to move to a ritzier neighborhood. More than a few actors of some talent and range have found themselves, after cashing in off of a big genre-character role, being judged for the rest of their careers not on how well they can act, but how well they can still fit into their old costumes. Such an actor is the big, hearty Welshman John Rhys Davies: a man of impressive range and flawless credentials playing the classics on stage, his portrayal of a handful of unforgettable characters in sci-fi and fantasy films has somewhat derailed his career while at the same time ensuring that he'll always have work. He's gone from being the poor man's Brian Blessed to being one of the innumerable people who pays for his house by spending half the year in New Zealand filming syndicated sci-fi television shows.

It wasn't always this way for John Rhys-Davies. He started out in theater (as did his childhood friend and sometime co-star, Patrick Stewart -- an actor who is in a similarly precarious predicament, career-wise) and has an extensive background in Shakesperian productions of great acclaim. But aside from the movie roles listed below that launched him to wide, if not deep, fame, he likewise co-starred in the 1990s cult sci-fi show Sliders, forever assuring him a seat of honor at a science fiction convention near you, and likewise cutting him off from getting the kind of parts that would demonstrate the kind of range he had early in his career. Even when Rhys-Davies plays, as he has, Gamel Nasser, a Spanish conquistador, or the King of Troy, he's forever going to be thought of by his most devoted fans as Prof. Max Arturo or one of his other genre roles. Then again, it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for the guy, given that in 2004, he pissed all over his reputation by publicly endorsing the crackpot demographic beliefs of Mark Steyn and other right-wing demagogues, worrying himself over the allegedly insufficient breeding habits of white people and sweating over the nonsensical and pointless belief that Muslims will be 50% of the population by 2015. It's ironic that a man who has many times played the part of Arabs or Muslims -- including in one of his most famous roles -- shows such knee-jerk horror of the real thing; but for all that, he's still a gifted actor who deserves a few more chances to stretch his feet outside the genre ghetto.

Where to see John Rhys-Davies at his best:

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

For over twenty years, John Rhys-Davies' most recognizable role to geeks and squares alike was Sallah, the Egyptian archaeologist who served as advisor, assistant, friend, and grand vizier to Indiana Jones. He had some of the most memorable scenes in the first two movies, including one where he warns our hero that there are worse consequences to bad dates than just blowing fifty bucks on dinner and a movie. For reasons it would be ungentlemanly to discuss, the character will likely not be appearing in the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but it's still one of his warmest, most charismatic roles he's ever played.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

Timothy Dalton's first role as 007 was a tricky one: in the era of perestroika, it didn't seem quite right to portray the Russians as the unrepentant monsters they had been in previous James Bond films. But it was so darn hard to let go of such juicy villains! Thus it fell to our Welsh wonder to portray Leonid Pushkin, the mysterious Russian general who may or my not have been as bad as he seems. It's that rare thing, a character in a James Bond film with a charcterization with more than one dimension, and Rhys-Davies obviously has a lot of fun with it, and even gets a meaty Bond-movie kill line.

LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001)

Oh, yeah, that thing. Yes, John Rhys-Davies got the role of his career when, after auditioning for much more minor roles in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" epic, he snagged the part of Gimli the Dwarf. It was one of the more underwritten parts in the film, in fact, consisting mostly of short jokes after an intial burst of hotheadedness, but Rhys-Davies makes the most of it, and his charisma with Orlando Bloom is undeniable. (It's a bit amusing that Rhys-Davies, who is a solid six-footer who's taller than most of the members of the cast, was selected to play a four-foot-tall character, but at least he had a sense of humor about it.)

Dave Stevens (1955-2008)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The illustrator and comic book artist Dave Stevens died earlier this week at the age of 52 after a long struggle with leukemia. Stevens was best known as the creator of the Rocketeer, an adventure character that first appeared in various titles published by Pacific, a short-lived independent comics company in the early 1980s. (After Pacific went out of business, he jumped to other now-defunct "independent" comics publishers--Eclipse, Comico--before winding up at Dark Horse.) Set in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, the comics centered on Cliff Secord, a scrappy young stunt pilot who battles Nazis and performs other acts of derring-do after stumbling across a portable jet pack that turns him into a two-fisted flying fool. The comics inspired a 1991 movie, directed by Joe Johnston, that worked hard to capture the look of Stevens's comics, and with a cast that included Bill Campbell in the lead, Jennifer Connelly as his girl Betty, and Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton (in a role modeled on Errol Flynn), and Terry O'Quinn, of Lost, as Howard Hughes.

The movie was okay, but Stevens had essentially already made his own Rocketeer movie; he just did it on paper. He didn't turn out many pages of Cliff Secord's adventures, because he put so much painstaking work into them that there were long, long lulls between the appearance of each new short chapter, an effect that was amplified by the fact that his publishing companies kept dying on him. It was worth the effort he put into them. (The film critic Charles Taylor described them as "little pieces of kitsch heaven.") Stevens was really crazy about the pop culture of a certain place and time, and part of what set his work apart was that he was driven to lavish his loving eye and craftsmanship on some very tacky, and even sleazy, love objects. Secord was a carny hanger-on making a buck any way he could, and his beloved Betty was explicitly modeled on the pin-up icon Bettie Page, whose image Stevens did a hell of a lot to resurrect and immortalize. (He also rediscovered, and befriended, the actual Ms. Page, who probably never expected to outlive him.) The "Rocketeer" comics also incorporated a lot of period Hollywood lore, as well as nods to such iconic ephemera as the masked image of the Saturday-matinee hero Commander Cody, Rondo Hatton, and the Doc Savage sidekick Monk Mayfair. Stevens earned his right to slap all this stuff together by giving it a unifying visual dazzle and afectionate spirit. His masterwork is probably one of the best marriages of movies and comics ever brought off.

Oprah's Favorite Things Include Watching Road House

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

We're not so into this trend of giant DVD box sets; they tend to be padded with lots of half-baked featurettes, useless production stills, and other things you'd never pay money for if they weren't all packaged together in a pretty box with a movie you really like. But United Artists just took it to the next level with its 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection — a massive 110-disc set that features ninety films from seven decades. Oprah just named it one of her Favorite Things, which means it will sell like hotcakes. $870 hotcakes to be exact. But let's look at exactly which ninety movies are featured, shall we?

First off, the box set starts with the '40s, leaving out the opportunity to include earlier United Artist benchmarks like Broken Blossoms (1919), The Gold Rush (1925) and Stagecoach (1939).

The '40s/'50s selection, including Marty, Night of the Hunter and Some Like It Hot, is fairly solid — although Rebecca and The African Queen are among the missing.

The '60s brings a bunch of Bond films and some second-tier Billy Wilder. Good picks: The Apartment, In the Heat of the Night, Satyricon, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Midnight Cowboy. Questionable: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Battle of Britain, I Could Go On Singing. Notable omission: The Graduate.

The '70s has some interesting stuff: Rocky, Annie Hall, The Last Waltz, Carrie, Manhattan, Last Tango in Paris and Lenny would make for a quality weekend of film-watching. But The Pink Panther Strikes Again? Equus? And how much James Bond do we really need? Missing in action: Network and Being There.

By the '80s, things are getting a bit random. Enjoy a triple feature of Heaven's Gate, WarGames and Child's Play! Or alternately, Baby Boom, Raging Bull and Road House! Top it off with the most unnecessary Bond film of them all, the Timothy Dalton vehicle The Living Daylights. No big omissions here, unless you want to count I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Finally we reach the '90s-'00s, a short selection featuring Bowling for Columbine, the little-seen Pieces of April, The Birdcage, Hotel Rwanda, Leaving Las Vegas, and five others. What, no Showgirls?

Overall, the set feels like a stranger's DVD collection: a few classics, a few childhood favorites, a few questionable selections they probably got for $5 at the drugstore. But it doesn't feel like the collection of a movie buff, nor does it have any particular coherence beyond the name of the studio. If an alien landed on Earth and asked me how to quickly amass an American film collection, I might advise him to get this box set. However, if you live on this planet, you can probably find a better use for your $900. Like, for example, buying forty-five copies of Network. — Gwynne Watkins