View From The Couch

HOOSIERS (1986). Long considered one of the best sports movies ever made by those in the know (i.e. wags at Sports Illustrated and ESPN and basketball fans across the country), Hoosiers works the underdog formula so expertly that it’s no surprise the film still has the ability to uplift audiences nearly 20 years later. Much of its appeal comes courtesy of Gene Hackman, whose work here – a canny mix of aw-shucks bluster and below-the-surface slyness – was a warm-up for the career-best performance he would deliver two years later in Mississippi Burning. Hackman stars as Norman Dale, a basketball coach who arrives in the small town of Hickory, Indiana, in 1951 to take the reins on a high school basketball team (the Hickory Huskers) whose beloved coach has just passed away between seasons. Still nursing emotional wounds from a secretive past, Dale finds himself facing townspeople who don’t approve of his coaching methods, though he does acquire some allies in a plainspoken teacher (Barbara Hershey), the town’s basketball-savvy drunk (Dennis Hooper) and, eventually, the players themselves. Both Hopper and the late, great composer Jerry Goldsmith (who passed away last year) earned Oscar nominations for their worthy contributions. Extras on the two-disc DVD include audio commentary by director David Anspaugh and writer Angelo Pizzo, a look at the real-life team (the Milan Indians) that inspired the film, and 30 minutes of deleted scenes that answer several lingering questions from the theatrical cut (such as why the team roster suddenly jumps from seven to eight players at one point in the movie).

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MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991). Calling Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho a great film would clearly be stretching it, but calling it a great exercise in film experimentation would be right on the money. Van Sant, still flush from the critical success of 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, made what’s in essence a homosexual road movie that espouses the family values of a Disney feature and the pop art sensibilities of a Warhol piece – with a liberal dose of Shakespeare thrown in for good measure. River Phoenix, in a bold performance that earned him Best Actor honors from the National Society of Film Critics, is cast as Mike Waters, a Portland street hustler who deals with stressful situations by tumbling into a narcoleptic state. His only true friend is Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), who abandoned his privileged life as the son of Portland’s mayor to hang out on the streets with other boy toys. Deeply in love with Scott, Mike counts on his pal to help him find his mother, embarking on a journey that will take them to Idaho and then Italy. Van Sant packs his movie with all manner of unusual narrative devices and offbeat visual flourishes, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the end result is a mishmash of things that work (the animated gay porn magazine covers) and things that don’t (the Henry IV homage that dominates the middle of the movie). Yet for all of Van Sant’s idiosyncrasies, the picture’s most memorable component is the aching performance by Phoenix, who would suffer a drug-induced death almost exactly two years after this movie’s debut. Extras in the two-disc Criterion set include a 64-page booklet packed with essays and interviews, an audio interview with Van Sant conducted by director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), deleted scenes, a making-of documentary, and a recent conversation between producer Laurie Parker and River’s sister, Rain Phoenix.

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NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984) / PORCO ROSSO (1992) / THE CAT RETURNS (2002). The name Hayao Miyazaki isn’t exactly a household name in the US – heck, it’s not even a movie house name. Yet his stock has steadily been on the rise over the past few years, first when his engaging efforts My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke were championed by several critics (most notably Roger Ebert) and then when his magnificent Spirited Away earned the 2002 Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Taking a break from whoring out its own franchises for straight-to-DVD sequels, Disney has graciously been using its home entertainment arm to release lesser known Miyazaki titles, dubbing them into English with name actors and then affording them a proper promotional buildup. The latest batch is far from the top-flight efforts we’re used to seeing from Miyazaki or his fabled Studio Ghibli, but they’re all reasonably entertaining — and infinitely superior to such Yankee dreck as Shark Tale and Brother Bear. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is the epic of the group — an environmental tale (with ideas better realized in the later Princess Mononoke) about a princess (voiced by White Oleander‘s Alison Lohman) who tries to prevent warring neighbors from stirring up the fearsome jungle insects that could decimate her village within minutes. Porco Rosso is a rambunctious comedy about the misadventures of an aerial hero (Michael Keaton) under a curse that has transformed his facial features into those of a pig. And The Cat Returns, for which Miyazaki only served as an executive producer, is the closest in, uh, spirit to Spirited Away, with a young girl (The Princess Diaries‘ Anne Hathaway) magically finding herself trapped in a fantasy land (in this case, one inhabited by anthropomorphic felines) fraught with mystery and danger. Each movie comes in a two-disc set; extras include complete storyboards and theatrical trailers.

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