Yearly Archives: 2013

“Austenland”: A comedy that tosses all sense and sensibility out the window

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“Austenland” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. PG-13, 1;37, three stars out of four.

Diehard Jane Austen fans might see “Austenland” as something of an abomination. It takes the world of a Jane Austen novel — the clever dialogue, the elegant setting, the romantic plot turns — and turns it into something goofy and crass.

Lighten up, Darcy. The tone of writer-director Jerusha Hess’ comedy is appropriately ridiculous because the premise itself is so ridiculous. In the film (based on Shannon Hale’s novel), Austenland is sort of a theme park for lovelorn Jane fans. For a hefty fee, women get to play-act as a Jane Austen heroine, dressing in costumes, learning how to play whist in the drawing room, and, of course, getting wooed by the park’s stock of handsome male actors. It’s like Pride and Prejudice Fantasy Camp.

And it sounds like heaven to our Jane (Keri Russell), a bookish Yank who is such an Austen-phile that she has a Colin Firth Fathead watching over her bed. Unable to deal with 21st-century men, she cashes in her life savings for a trip to Austenland. Unfortunately, as Austenland’s matriarch ( Jane Seymour) explains, she only has enough money for the Copper Package. So while Platinum Package members get to wear the best dresses and sleep in the fanciest rooms, Jane’s accommodations are one step above “charwoman.”

Just like an Austen heroine, Jane finds herself choosing between two suitors. One is an actor (J.J. Feild), playing a Darcy-esque prig named Henry Nobley. The other is a groundskeeper at Austenland who is “out-of-game” (Bret McKenzie of “Flight of the Conchords”), who seems to offer the chance at a genuine, non-make-believe relationship. Will Jane choose reality, or the fantasy she’s chased all her life? Complicating matters is that Nobley is so convincing that one almost wonders if there’s a real spark of attraction underneath that waistcoat.

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“Austenland” starts off silly and gets increasingly sillier — Jennifer Coolidge is a riot as a crass rich American who becomes Jane’s confidant, and blurts out very un-Austen-like lines like “Shut yer hole” in the drawing room. When a hunky new suitor (Ricky Whittle) who can’t keep his shirt on appears, we’re sure we’ve wandered into the realm of pure farce, somewhere between a rom-com and a French & Saunders sketch.

But I liked it, especially the eagerness of Hess (who co-wrote “Napoleon Dynamite”) to mercilessly tweak the conventions of romantic comedy, making the laughs broader and goofier as the movie progresses. And yet, what really sells the film is Russell, who is so slyly charming, attuned both to the zany comic moments and its wistful romantic undertone. She’s a great actress who, aside from FX’s “The Americans,” has been really underused in recent years — maybe it’s time to put her in a real Jane Austen movie. One that doesn’t quote Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.”

“Crystal Fairy”: Strangers in a strange land

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“Crystal Fairy” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated, 1:38, three stars out of four.

In “This is the End,” Michael Cera drew big laughs for playing himself as a callous Hollywood bad boy, because the image of him snorting coke and banging hotties was so different from his usual sweet and gentle persona.

In “Crystal Fairy,” Cera plays a character who is in many ways as unsympathetic, only this time he does it for real. The result is a strong and bracing performance, balanced out beautifully by another very different strong performance by Gaby Hoffmann.

Cera plays Jamie, a drug tourist of sorts who lives in Chile on an endless, unspecified source of income. His life seems focused utterly on chasing that next high, almost monomaniacal in his pursuit. Under a “Hey, that’s cool,” veneer, he seems deeply uncomfortable with other people when he’s straight, a mix of arrogance and social awkwardness. It’s only when he’s high, it seems, that he can finally forget himself.

At a party, Jamie hears word of a rare cactus, the San Pedro, from which a potent form of mescaline can be made. He urges his friends to come with him on a road trip in the Chilean desert to find some and, in a moment of addled intimacy, invites a girl he just met at a party to come as well.

The next morning, Jamie and his three Chilean friends set out on their trip, only to find they have another passenger — the girl, who Jamie has completely forgotten he invited. She’s a neo-hippie named Crystal Fairy (Hoffmann), a free-spirited type who is comfortable in her skin as Jamie is ill at ease in his, unabashed about walking around naked in front of the others, insistent on sharing her deepest personal secrets. With the three Chileans as kind of an audience, Jamie and Crystal Fairy spar all the way into the desert.

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The offhanded, naturalistic approach Silva takes keeps you on edge — you’re never sure if something horrible or wonderful is waiting for these pilgrims in the desert. Both Jamie and Crystal Fairy are, in their own way, completely alone in this world. Jamie treats his journey with the self-absorption of a traveler on a business trip, while Crystal insists she’s deeply connected to every other living thing, oblivious to how precious and overbearing she comes off to others. If you’ve ever backpacked through Europe, you’ve sat next to both these types on a train.

I wish the three Chilean men (all played by Silva’s brothers) were more deeply drawn, and just when the film inches towards some kind of epiphany for Jamie and Crystal Fairy, Silva ends it, as if not wanting to compromise his loose approach with an actual climax. Still, “Crystal Fairy” is a funny and authentic look at two very distinct types of Americans abroad, who can’t escape themselves no matter how far they go.

Blu-ray review: “Wish You Were Here”

 

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A man stumbles, shirtless, bloody and shell-shocked, among garbage piles and wild dogs in a remote part of Cambodia.

How he got there, what it meant, and how he’ll with it are the central questions of the Australian thriller “Wish You Were Here.” Writer-director Kieran Darcy-Smith tells his tale in a deliberately fractured manner, jumping back and forth between moments during a vacation in Cambodia and the aftermath back home in Australia. The result is a film that is exactly the sum of its parts, no more and no less.

Dave (Joel Edgerton) begrudgingly agreed to go on that vacation with his wife (Felicity Price), her younger sister (Teresa Palmer) and the sister’s new boyfriend (Antony Starr). We catch brief, color-saturated glimpses of them dancing in the streets, taking drugs. But back home in Australia, everyone seems haunted and wary. Well, not everyone — the boyfriend didn’t come back.

What happened to him is revealed in dribs and drabs of information, as Darcy-Smith cuts back and forth between Australia and Cambodia, What anchors the film is Edgerton’s performance. So often called on to play masculine, even menacing figures in “The Great Gatsby” and “Animal Kingdom,” here he’s very convincing as a scared and possibly guilty man. It’s a canny performance, because Danny can only reveal emotionally to the audience at a given point in the movie only what the plot has revealed dramatically.

Finally, the film gives us our answer, but then shuffles off the stage rather quickly without dealing with the consequences. The result is a film that’s engrossing when you watch it but, like a vacation taken a long time ago, quickly dissipates in your memory.

The Blu-ray release, which captures both the fiery reds and oranges of Cambodia and the cool blues and grays of Australia, includes making-of featurettes and cast interviews.

 

 

Marcus Theatres gets into the indie/classic movie game

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Point Cinemas is gunning for Sundance.

I mean, it’s not quite that personal. But it seems pretty clear that Marcus Theatres, which owns both Point and Eastgate Cinemas in Madison, is looking at the success that Sundance and other arthouses have had in other markets, and are looking to replicate that success in their theaters. Which is an interesting move for the nation’s sixth-largest movie chain — can they bring that boutique feel to a building that has 16 screens?

Sundance and other theaters (particularly in the Landmark chain) have upped the ante for the moviegoing experience with more inviting exteriors, including lounges and alcoholic drinks that you can bring into the theater. So Point responded with the swanky new Take Five lounge, which looks nothing like a snack bar and everything like a hotel lounge, with a full bar.

Now Marcus (and Point) seems to be going after Sundance’s kind of programming with its Theatre Entertainment Network. Marcus has had such success with non-traditional types of programming (live theater, Rifftrax broadcasts, one-night-only screenings) that they’ve dedicated one screen at Point and Eastgate to this kind of fare, at least on weekdays. That also means limited runs of independent movies — the French-Canadian comedy “Starbuck” is playing once a day at Point and Eastgate through Thursday. And it means classic films — “Animal House” is also screening there through Thursday. They also have a series of comic short films, the “LOL Short Film Festival,” playing through Thursday.

Next week brings the indie drama “Between Us” and Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” for limited runs, while the horizon shows the Mads Mikkelsen drama “The Hunt” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” It’s kind of a grab bag (there’s also a Kirk Cameron special and a Paul McCartney & Wings concert in there somewhere), but Marcus can afford to experiment. In the days of 35mm film, it would have been unwieldy to have one-time-only showings of films, since it takes so long to change reels. In the age of digital, it’s just a matter of playing this file instead of that file. And with most of the movies costing $5 (special events are invariably more), it’s a good deal for audiences as well.

Whether audiences will respond is another matter — it seems strange that movies show at different times on different days, making it perhaps harder for viewers to plan to see one of the films. Sundance has had success at building a loyal following of older, pickier customers who will only see movies at Sundance — can Point do the same thing and also appeal to the masses? In any event, it’s a good thing that good movies will get a chance at theatrical distribution, and if Marcus thinks showing independent and classic movies is a sound business strategy, that’s great — one less screen showing “Getaway.” This is an interesting move worth watching.

Instant Gratification: “To the Wonder” and four other good movies to watch on Netflix Instant

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Pick of the week: “To The Wonder“: Terrence Malick’s latest film (which UW-Cinematheque premiered in Madison) is an ethereal and elliptical take on lost love and found faith that turned off some of Malick’s usual supporters. For me, it is a little overwrought in places, but the visuals and the rapturous tone swept me up.

Woody of the week: “The Purple Rose of Cairo”: A movie hero walks off the screen and into the life of a lonely housewife in Woody Allen’s wistful fantasy, whose last shot is the most devastating take on cinephilia I can remember.

Indie of the week: “The New Year“: Filmmaker Brett Haley brought his lovely slice-of-life indie to the Wisconsin Film Festival a couple of years ago, an insightful tale of recent college graduate slumming it at her family’s bowling alley, waiting for life to begin.

Sci-fi movie of the week: “The Core”: Heaven help me, I really enjoy this 2003 riff on ’50s sci-fi films, in which a team of scientists head down to the center of the earth to jumpstart the earth’s core. Ridiculous, but pretty fun, with a great cast (Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, and a hilarious Stanley Tucci) selling it far more than they needed to.

Comedy of the week: “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka”: I almost hate to recommmend this, since it begat “Scary Movie,” “A Haunted House” and all the other lame movie parodies from the Wayans clan. But Keenan Ivory Wayans loving spoof of blaxploitation movies is a genuine hoot.

Come join my post-show chat on “Stories We Tell” Tuesday at Sundance

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I feel a little guilty saying this, given the subject matter of the film, but the post-show chat I hosted after a screening of “Act of Killing” at Sundance Cinemas a couple of weeks ago was a lot of fun.

The movie itself, which delves into the psyche of government-sanctioned Indonesian mass murderers, is no fun. But it is brilliant and thought-provoking, and it made me so happy to see by far the largest turnout for a Sundance chat come out — we filled the Overflow Bar, and it was a great conversation, as people shared their reactions to the film, including a few people who lived in Indonesia.

But the next movie I’m doing a post-show discussion for, “Stories We Tell,” deals with somewhat lighter subject matter. The chat will take place after the 6:55 p.m. screening on Tuesday, Sept. 10 in the Overflow Bar, located on the first floor of the theater, right across from the box office. Everybody’s welcome.

Actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) turns the camera back on her own family in “Stories We Tell,” interviewing family members and friends to discover the story of her late mother, a story that brings with it some truly surprising revelations. It’s a film about the fractured state of a family’s history, how everyone holds their own perspective on past events, knitting fact, rumor and opinion together into a narrative that suits them best. I think it’s one of the best films of the year.

It’s a film that will give us lots to talk about. I hope you can join me!

 

What’s playing in Madison theaters: Sept. 6-12, 2013

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All week

“Riddick” (Point, Eastgate, Star Cinema) — Vin Diesel somehow keeps his sci-fi franchise going along with “Fast & Furious,” as his super-charged ex-convict deals with aliens and baddies on a hostile planet. Really hoping he manages to pull of “Find Me Guilty 2.”

“Stories We Tell” (Sundance) — My full review is here. Better late than never for Sarah Polley’s wonderful documentary, in which she turns the camera back on her own family to learn some surprising secrets involving her late mother. I’m doing a post-show chat after the 6:55 p.m. Tuesday show at Sundance Cinemas — they’ll be lots to talk about.

“Adore” (Sundance) — My full review is here. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright play middle-aged moms who decide to start affairs with each others’ college-age sons, and if that premise hasn’t already turned you off, perhaps the self-serious boredom of Anne Fontaine’s film will.

“Shuddh Desi Romance” (Star Cinema) — This Bollywood musical comedy looks at the shifting sands of romance.

Friday

“iron Man 3″ (6 p.m. and 9:15 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — I wrote some about the summer’s first blockbuster here, but this film gets right everything that “Iron Man 2” got wrong — it’s much funnier and more surprising, and not afraid to do something unexpected, like keep Robert Downey Jr. out of the suit and send him to Rose Hill, Tennessee for the second act. FREE!

“Eraserhead” (7 p.m. UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall) — I was not aware until this week that Jack Nance, who played avuncular types in several later David Lynch projects (he was “She’s dead — wrapped in plastic”), had the title role in Lynch’s 1978 debut, about an unnerving man unnerved by his encounters with the opposite sex. Cinematheque has a newly struck 35mm print to show off. FREE!

“The Room” (midnight, Union South Marquee Theatre) — Tommy Wiseau’s midnight-movie classic is a master class in bad acting, uncomfortable plotting, and random football tossing. FREE!

Saturday

“The United States of Football” (12:30 p.m., Point Cinemas) — Marcus Theatres is starting a new Theatre Entertainment Network that dedicates one screen at Point and Eastgate Cinemas to indie films, classics, live specials and other programming, all for $5. It kicks off with this documentary about the effect of head trauma in football from kids to professionals.

“iron Man 3” (6 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Friday listing.

“Le Doulos” (7 p.m., UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall) — Is Jean-Paul Belmondo the squealer? He keeps both the cops and his fellow criminals guessing in this stylish thriller from Jean-Pierre Melville. FREE!

“The Place Beyond the Pines” (9:15 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — The lives of a small-time thief (Ryan Gosling), a rookie cop (Bradley Cooper) and their sons intertwine in Derek Cianfrance’s ambitious drama. FREE!

“The Room” (midnight, Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Friday listing.

Sunday

“Contempt” (2 p.m., Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.) — A Cinematheque at the Chazen series of Cinemascope films kicks off with Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 classic about the moral corruption of modern cinema, as a writer is lured by a gauche American producer (Jack Palance) to work on a big-budget epic. FREE!

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“Iron Man 3” (3 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Friday listing. FREE!

Monday

“Animal House” (4;30 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — With the return of college comes the return of the ultimate college comedy, as the Delta bros drink, drink and be merry.

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Eastgate, 9:30 p.m. Point) — The annual series of comic short films returns.

“Starbuck” (7 p.m., Point and Eastgate Cinemas) — My full review is here. n this French-Canadian comedy (which will be remade this fall as “The Delivery Man” with Vince Vaughn), a fortysomething layabout discovers that he has fathered hundreds of children as a sperm donor, and decides to help his offspring out behind the scenes.

Tuesday

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15, 4:30 p.m. Eastgate, 9:30 p.m. Point) — See Monday listing.

“Animal House” (7 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

“Starbuck” (9:30 p.m. Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

Wednesday 

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15, 7 p.m. Eastgate, 7 p.m. Point) — See Monday listing

“Some Like It Hot” (1:25 p.m. and 6:45 p.m, Sundance) — Billy Wilder’s riotous comedy with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as cross-dressing musicians hiding out from the mob with Marilyn Monroe’s all-girl band is one of the great comedies of all time.

“Starbuck” (4:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

“Frances Ha” (7 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — My full review is here. Greta Gerwig absolutely sparkles in Noah Baumbach’s New Wave-inspired comedy about a New York dancer finally moving into adulthood. FREE!

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“Animal House” (9:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate Cinemas) — See Monday listing.

Thursday

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15, 7 p.m. Eastgate, 7 p.m. Point) — See Monday listing

“Starbuck” (4:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

“The Great Gatsby” (6:30 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — My full review is here. Baz Luhrmann’s attempt to jazz up the Jazz Age classic with hip-hop and 3D didn’t work, although Leonardo DiCaprio is perfectly at ease in the title role. FREE!

“Frances Ha” (9:30 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Wednesday listing.

“Animal House” (9:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate Cinemas) — See Monday listing.

“Adore”: This Australian film is a total MILF (Melodrama I’d Like to Forget)

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“Adore” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:49, two stars out of four.

There’s no question that “Adore” would be unbearably skeevy if the gender roles were reversed, and it was about two older men having affairs with each others’ college-age daughters. But Anne Fontaine’s drama is about two middle-aged women (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright) playing sexual criss-cross with each other’s hunky sons is still plenty icky.

And the problem is that “Adore,” based on a novella by the late Doris Lessing, is all about the premise, giving the charactes little room to maneuver outside its weird sexual arrangement. Worse, Fontaine and screenwriter Christopher Hampton dig into what this relationship actually is — is it morally twisted and a prelude to disaster, or a legitimate alternatve arrangement? For a film with dicey subject matter and somewhat explicit sex scenes, “Adore” is awfully polite when it comes to the emotions, substituting deadly seriousness for actual insight.

Roz (Wright) and Lil (Watts) are lifelong friends who live in an idyllic community on the coast of Australia, their families growing up side by side. When Lil’s husband dies, and Roz’s (Ben Mendelsohn) accepts a job at a Sydney university that will keep him away for most of the year, the women get bored. One night, without preamble, Lil’s son Ian (Xavier Samuel) makes a movie on Roz, and she barely puts up a fight. Roz’s son Tom (James Frecheville) witnesses this, and immediately goes over to bed Lil. And so it begins. “What have we done?” Roz asks the next morning. “Crossed a line,” Lil responds. Ya think?

Under the sun-dappled beauty of the Australian coast (brought to life in gorgeous 35mm Cinemascope), the foursome hang out, although the balance isn’t perfect. Ian is consumed with puppy love for Roz, while Lil and Ian’s relationship seems to be based on a more immediate sexual connection. Eventually, the boys’ romantic attentions start to wander, and they move on with their lives. But the attraction lingers.

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Watts and Wright are terrific actresses, and they work hard to imbue their characters with a mix of carnal lust and maternal guilt. But when the script doesn’t know how to explain their behavior, it leaves the actresses at sea as well. The presence of an unsuitable older suitor seems to suggest that Lil has few romantic options left in her life, but please. The idea that these women are past their prime and unable to find loving partners whose diapers they haven’t changed at one point is ludicrous, and borderline offensive to women over 40 in general.

It doesn’t help that Samuel and Frecheville (who was really good in “Animal Kingdom”) are such handsome blanks, giving Watts and Wright nothing to play off of except their tanned, toned bodies. Which might be enough for a tawdry beach novel, but enough for a drama starring two of our finest actresses.

“Stories We Tell”: Sarah Polley turns the camera on her own family

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“Stories We Tell” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas, and is also available to rent or buy on ITunes and other VOD services. PG-13, 1:49, four stars out of four. I’ll be doing a post-show chat at Sundance Cinemas after the 6:55 p.m. Tuesday show in the theater’s Overflow Bar.

From the beginning, Sarah Polley opens the hood of her documentary “Stories We Tell” and shows the machinery whirring inside. The film begins with her and her father entering a recording studio, and a montage of Polley and her crew setting up cameras and lighting for the film’s interview subjects.

It’s an introduction that’s tantamount to a magician’s “nothing-up-my-sleeve” insistence, because Polley has something far more interesting and unusual in mind that the typical nuts-and-bolts documentary. “Stories We Tell” is a powerful and very personal story from Polley, but she’s also constantly mindful that it’s a “story,” a mixture of facts and opinions shaped into a narrative, and as such isn’t entirely to be trusted.

And this is, in a very literal sense, Polley’s story. The film digs deep into the lives of her parents, Mick and Diane Polley, who met on the Toronto theatrical scene. Mick cut a dashing figure onstage, while Diane was beautiful and vivacious, the sort of woman who “make the record skip” when she walked into a room in more ways than one.

Diane was so dazzled by Mick’s onstage persona that she missed what an ordinary guy he really was. As Mick settled into kind of a middle-aged fog, Diane grew frustrated at middle-class Canadian life, and took an acting job in Montreal in 1978, leaving home for a couple of months. What happens next, the viewer should discover from the film, as Polley digs through layers after layers of reminiscences and rumors, interviewing her four siblings and friends of the family.

As the audience uncovers the revelations of the story — and there are some doozies, expertly revealed by Polley as she shifts from perspective from perspective — we’re also becoming aware of how each account differs. Some people have the facts a little off, others just view the same facts differently than others. One man, who seems to be just a supporting character in the drama, insists that his account and only  his is the truth, and all the others are just noise.

The closest the film has to an authority is Mick, who reads from his writing about the family history in plummy, theatrical tones throughout the film. But even he doesn’t have the full picture of his own family.

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The perspective that is largely missing, ironically, is Polley’s — although we see B-roll footage of her about to be interviewed, it never appears in the film. Instead, she seems to be getting at the truth of her life the way a submarine uses sonar, pinging off the other people in her life until she finds a spot that overlaps. This could be potentially an unbearable exercise in post-modern cleverness, but instead Polley makes it a fascinating process, and Polley (an actress turned acclaimed director of the dramas “Away From Her” and “Take This Waltz”) blends the different voices expertly until a bigger picture emerges.

The film also weaves in Super 8 home movie footage of Diane and the family, although it turns out that the way Polley is telling the story contains as many secrets as the story itself. Put it this way; critics who like their documentaries the way Joe Friday likes his witnesses — “Just the facts, ma’am” — are going to have a big problem with this movie.

For me, it’s a brilliant film that manages to be both one family’s shared history and all families’ shared histories. Would “Stories We Tell” have been as compelling if Polley didn’t add all the post-modern devices to it? On the level of pure storytelling, probably. But the way she tells the story takes it beyond “What happened?” and forces us to examine the too-tidy narratives of the stories we tell ourselves.

Blu-ray review: “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie”

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It could be the plot to some cheesy sci-fi movie that Mike and the ‘bots would make fun of on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” — two identical alternate universe, one where everything is happy and cheery, the other where we see those exact same events through a much darker and more sinister lens.

Those two universes, as it happens, are the two “making-of” featurettes that appear on the Shout! Factory DVD/Blu-ray release of “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie,” which just came out this week after a long, long wait from fans. Taken together, the extras provide an instructive lesson in dabbling with potent forces of evil — in this case, a major motion picture studio.

The movie came out in 1996, somewhat bridging the gap between the cult TV show’s Comedy Central and Sci-Fi Channel years. Universal Pictures thought they could turn the TV show into a cheap but profitable franchise for themselves, while the creators of the show thought that successful live “riffs” of the show before audiences proved that it could work in a group theater setting.

The first featurette, released at the time of the film’s release, shows a Satellite of Love crew happily working on the film. The second, made for this Blu-ray release, delves into the constant struggle that the MSTies had with Universal executives to make the film. Having signed onto the film, Universal insisted on having input into seemingly every decision, including approving or vetoing individual jokes (a Bootsy Collins reference was changed, bizarrely, to a Leona Helmsley reference) and test-screening rough drafts of the film to death. (It’s grimly ironic that the movie trailer touts that the MST3K crew “can make jokes without a censor” in the film, since the meddling from Universal was much more pervasive than anything the show had gotten from Comedy Central or Sci-Fi.)

Michael J. Nelson, Trace Beaulieu and Kevin Murphy, along with showrunner (and UW-Madison grad)  Jim Mallon, complain openly about the arduous process, and it’s clear that they regard the finished product as a compromised thing. “The joy of doing this was strained terribly through this odd, arbitrary process.” Mallon said.

That said, the movie itself comes off, as Murphy puts it, as a “better-than-average” episode of the TV show, with significantly better production values given to the host segments, which were shot on a much bigger studio space. The movie that the guys riff on, “This Island Earth,” is actually a pretty good scifi movie, and overall the image pops on Blu-ray in a way most episodes of the TV show just wouldn’t. The release also includes deleted scenes (axed by the studio, naturally) and you get a taste of the cover version of the MST3K theme song done for the movie by Dave Alvin.

In the end, I’ll bet the experience of making the movie was so painful for Mike and the gang that I doubt they’ll ever pop in a copy of the Blu-ray release. But for fans, its an essential part of the collection, and a surprisingly revealing look at the hazards of letting outsiders into your strange little world in the hopes of achieving mainstream success. Better to stay on your own Satellite of Love, unreachable by the mad scientists down below, doing it on your own terms.