Extra, Extra!

Watching the extras on the very appealing Blu-ray edition of the award-winning film The Wrestler (a four-star film, in my opinion), I found one of them not so good, two of them excellent. This set me thinking about the whole business of ancillary material on Blu-ray. I told everyone what I thought about BD Live last month (it stinks); here I talk about the rest of it.

I have no idea whether or not anyone watches the extras that come with most films on disc. I’ve heard from friends, and seen in print, that many viewers could care less about anything but the feature. They watch that, then put the disc away on a shelf, back in the mail, or drop it off at the rental outlet. Many have said they’d rather have lower prices and fewer extras. In lieu of a survey, perhaps some readers will write in with their opinions on this subject. An odd side of the controversy seems to be that extras are used to sell and promote a title, so that even customers who don’t watch them are a little miffed if they don’t get them! Is this sane?

What makes a good extra? On The Wrestler Blu-ray, first up was a production featurette. While not as back-slappingly inane as most, it was still redundant if you’ve already watched the feature. For my money, these things should be outlawed, and everyone forced to go to picture-in-picture commentaries. To me, that’s the best way to learn tidbits about the making of the film: while the film (or any other program) is actually onscreen. A superb example is Sin City, covered in this month’s video reviews. Universal’s U-Control sometimes goes a step further by allowing the viewer to choose one of several different topics of picture-in-picture program. But standard production featurettes are usually no more than talking heads saying what a great time they had making the movie, interspersed with film clips, sometimes pertinent, sometimes not.

Regular commentaries without picture-in-picture are often good, but just as often bad. My rule here would be to hire a critic or film historian to make them. You’d think -- Hollywood thinks, anyway -- that a film’s director and/or stars could make a great commentary. However, this is seldom true; their egos are too big, and they’re seldom objective. They tend to wander, and their comments are seldom specific to what’s going on at that moment in the film -- something happens onscreen, you want to yell to whoever’s making the commentary track, Hey what’s that all about? To see how this should be done, all you have to do is listen to F.X. Feeney’s historically oriented commentary on the recently released Quo Vadis?. As with picture-in-picture, the film itself is unfolding, so you can see what the critic is talking about.

Another extra on The Wrestler, "Wrestlers’ Round Table," is a good one that raises questions about whether pro wresting is staged or fake. We see the wrestlers coming to agreements beforehand about what they’re going to do in the ring . . . sort of. The roundtable discussion answers any questions we might have had on this subject, and also tells us how well the film portrays the real lives of aging wrestlers. I find such extras, which explore or explain topics dealt with differently or only briefly touched on in the main feature, to be valuable enhancements of my enjoyment and understanding of the films.

Other good examples of this are a short feature about toymakers included on the new Disney Platinum release of Pinocchio, and one on CinemaScope that’s included in the BD edition of The Robe. You might think the stars of The Robe were Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, but the real star was the new widescreen film process -- thousands went to see The Robe because it was the first of its kind. So 20th Century Fox has thoughtfully included The CinemaScope Story, a documentary about the widescreen anamorphic wonder: who invented it, how was it produced, what it did for the film industry.

There are other extras that can be good or bad. Interviews with or documentaries about a particular star can be useful. Deleted scenes are a mixed bag. Most often they were deleted for good reasons, and are little more than filler. Once in a while, however, they prove important -- especially when they disclose an alternate ending, as in the recent release of Being There. Games are a waste of time on Blu-ray. They can’t compare to one of the regular gaming systems, and are, without exception, lame. Never do another one, Hollywood. Ever.

Digital copies? I find such discs in every other Blu-ray or DVD release I review these days, but do people really use them? Do you really want to watch a film on your small-screen computer or iPhone? Do you even have the time? Enough hard-drive space? I have many friends who watch DVDs and Blu-rays, and not one has ever used a digital copy. Is it something we need, or something producers are telling us we need -- and charging us for?

The bottom line is that an extra ought to increase one’s understanding or enjoyment of the feature being presented. If it doesn’t do either, it’s a waste of time and doesn’t belong on the disc. It’s something you can see on cable or the Internet, and probably won’t want to watch again.

Perhaps that’s why a lot of people don’t watch extras at all: most are wastes of our time, and we’re all busy. If extras more reliably met one of the two criteria stated, then I think we’d see more people watching them and being willing to pay for them. That’s my two cents. What do you think?

. . . Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com

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