Daily Archives: July 20, 2006

Saw III Trailer Set, Tobin Bell Speaks Out

Ephemera, Interviews

For those that care about such things, the trailer for Saw III,
which opens October 27, debuted at Comic-Con in San Diego today,
showing an unfortunate gentleman chained up and pierced through his
hands, feet and mouth, most likely not to celebrate his birthday. The clip will drop in theaters on August 4, in front of Lions Gate’s spelunking horror flick The Descent, and not a moment too soon according to the film’s star.

“I’m
looking forward to fans seeing this one, and learning more about Jigsaw
and his role as a mentor,” says Tobin Bell (left), who anchors  the Saw franchise as cancer-riddled, murderous mastermind John Kramer, better known as
Jigsaw. “He’s a civil engineer, a mechanical and architectural
engineer, and he comes from a scientific background,” says Bell of his
character. “He’s a philosopher. He’s interested in Gerte Hofstede, he’s
interested in Gandhi, he’s interested in Jesus, he’s interested in Shakespeare and the poets, and Hermann Hesse. He has a multiplicity of interests
and they dovetail into whatever his project is.” Great! So Saw III is a ruminative disquisition into the nature of reality and the study of the arts, then, right? Well, not quite…

“We’re talking about a scary movie here,”
notes Bell, “so it doesn’t have to be a philosophical tome. But I do
think it’s worthwhile to understand what things motivate and drive
Jigsaw.” Helping on that end is original writer Leigh Whannell, also
back for his third tour of duty with the franchise. “There’s no
question his continued presence” is a help, notes Bell. “Leigh has a
very consistent voice when it comes to the mechanics of how the Saw films work, and that’s a very reassuring thing to have because people like
when things connect and recur. They want to be surprised but they
always like it when there’s some continuity too.”

This is America, Charlie Brown

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Do you love the late Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts?
Do you also have a hankering for American history, or the desire to
teach your kids about the full breadth of the same? Then the two-disc This is America, Charlie Brown
is for you — a robust and entertaining filing from the
spoonful-of-sugar-to-make-the-medicine-go-down line of reasoning that
plays equally well to kids and nostalgic young adults entering
first-time parent terrain.

Elementary instruction through colorful animation is nothing new, but the whole Peanuts
gang pops up here as guides through various important events in the
history of our country. Consisting of eight 24-minute episodes, This is America, Charlie Brown
looks all the way back to the Mayflower voyage and the birth of the
constitution, but also hearteningly enters more generalized territory
in offering forth a lively look back at American music throughout the
years. From composers John Philip Sousa and Stephen Foster to the rise
of ragtime and jazz, and the inimitable explosion of blues, a wide
variety of musical genres are touched upon, and it’s nice to see Pig
Pen rock out on bass guitar.

The groundwork of America’s industrial explosion is laid in “The
Building of the Transcontinental Railroad,” while “The Smithsonian and
the Presidency” finds Charlie Brown and company visiting the titular
Washington D.C. museum and learning about Abraham Lincoln and Theodore
and Franklin Roosevelt, taking make-believe journeys that whisk them
back to crucial events from the various eras under discussion. Among
the other episodes are one examining outer space and the NASA Space
Station, as well as the launch of the Wright brothers’ first primitive
airplane in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Probably best, though, is “The
Great Inventors,” which results when Sally gives a school report (a
frequently used leaping-off point for the series) that touches upon
Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. It’s great for
kids to learn, in such a short, compacted sitting, about a wide-ranging
buffet of information that practically affects their everyday lives.

A cardboard slipcase stores the two slimline snapcases that house This is America, Charlie Brown’s
two discs. Each episode is presented in 1.33:1 full screen with a Dolby
digital English stereo track. While no supplemental extras grace the
release, in a weird way I was almost appreciative of that, as part of
the appeal of the Peanuts has, to me, always seemed to lie in
its comparative restraint — the fact that there wasn’t an all-out
commercial blitz attached to the series, even as those little Snoopy dolls and
lunchboxes became ubiquitous in bedrooms and classrooms across the country. B (Show) C+ (Disc)