A screwball-style, Hollywood-tweaking romantic comedy starring William H. Macy and Meg Ryan, version 2.0, The Deal is a movie that overcomes one of the most terribly obvious PhotoShopped covers of recent memory, as well as a back cover that misspells the name of one of its main characters. In addition to affording screen capture enthusiasts more opportunities to gawk at Macy’s bare ass, the film gives its talented multi-hyphenate a fun chance to play roguish and oblivious. Put it on the front end of a double bill with a Chinese takeout buffet and David Mamet’s State and Main, also starring Macy, and you have yourself a pleasant little evening.

Adapted by Macy and director Steven Schachter from Peter Lefcourt’s book of the same name, The Deal opens with despondent, washed-up Hollywood producer Charlie Berns (Macy) trying to off himself, only to be interrupted by his nephew Lionel (Jason Ritter), an idealistic screenwriter who’s penned a script about former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Seizing on the touted desires of Bobby Mason (LL Cool J, standing in for, oh, Vin Diesel, let’s say), a meatheaded action star and recent convert to Judiasm, to delve into more Jewish-centric material, Berns gets it in his head to take Lionel’s earnest, wholly uncommercial script and turn it into a wildly reimagined, thunderously stupid “freedom fighter” biopic. Wheeling and dealing, planting bogus stories of a bidding war in the trades, Charlie gets a hit-hungry studio desperate to get onboard a Mason picture to snap up the screenplay, and he then shrewdly taps Mason’s manager for rewrite duties. Along the way, Charlie becomes enamored with Deidre Hearn (Ryan), the slightly stuffy, self-serious development executive assigned to fast track the project.

Beginning with the second act, The Deal pivots to South Africa (where it was actually entirely filmed), chronicling the making of Berns and Hearn’s movie, where all sorts of various emergencies flare up, from a temperamental director to a nervous star. With cost-conscious studio execs already circling, Mason gets kidnapped by Muslim extremists. Things look bleak, but an emboldened Deidre finally comes around to Charlie’s damn-the-consequences style, and convinces him to take part in an on-the-fly refashioning of the movie as a legitimate arthouse endeavor.

The Deal‘s dialogue has a nice, ’30s-style patter to it, whether in incidental, passing fancy (“Good job, Hun,” says Charlie, walking past a costumed marauder on the studio lot) or the many scenes in which Charlie tries (and eventually succeeds in) getting into Deidre’s power-suit pants. Not everything works. In fact, the whole kidnapped-movie-star bit was much more effectively played out in last summer’s Tropic Thunder; here it’s just a throwaway gag — albeit a big, plot-shifting one — and then we’re off and running in another direction, never to actually see Mason’s character again. If that sort of abrupt, tacks-underneath-the-tires narrative switcheroo — where you think you’re headed one way, narratively speaking, only to be suddenly thrust in another direction — seems a bit like the storytelling equivalent of sand in the eyes during a playground fight, in the end it doesn’t much matter. Wry and dirty-minded, Macy absolutely steamrolls scenes, and if there’s a big tonal misstep midway through that unnecessarily tries to bring shading to his character — a maudlin sequence where Charlie finds out about the marriage of his adult daughter — most of the movie is content to just let Macy hoodwink folks, like a shrugging, devil-may-care loafer. That’s a plenty good deal, it turns out.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case with a deep-set, single circular nesting notch, The Deal comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Apart from the theatrical trailer for the movie, the only other bonus feature is a 17-minute making-of featurette. It’s chock full of interviews from all the major players, both on screen and off, but Macy holds forth with many of the best ruminations, positing that Hollywood is for the most part a microcosm of society, and also that a writer watching a movie get made from his book is a bit like watching someone make love to one’s wife. “What are they supposed to say,” Macy jokes. “‘Good job?'” There’s also a digital download copy of the film included on the disc, for rip-and-play portability. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Written by Tom Malloy (who also co-stars in the film), The Alphabet Killer is a decently gripping psychological thriller loosely based on the still-unsolved “double initial” murders that shocked the citizens of Rochester, New York in the early 1970s. The details of the true story? From 1970 to 1973, three girls in and around Rochester were brutally raped and strangled, their bodies dumped in neighboring villages that bore the same first initial as their names. All three victims’ — young girls, aged 10 to 12 — first and last names also had matching initials. Despite the questioning of more than 800 suspects and the combined police resources of several communities, the case remains unsolved to this day.



In the film, Eliza Dushku stars Megan Paige, a police investigator whose commitment to the job borders on obsession. Megan and her partner, Lt. Ken Shine (Cary Elwes), are assigned to investigate the murder of a young girl named Carla Castillo, whose body is found in the nearby town of Churchville. Despite Megan’s considerable efforts, her inability to catch the killer leads to a nervous breakdown, eventually causing her to lose her fiancée, her career in law enforcement career, and her grip on reality.

Two years later, Megan is back at the police department, albeit in a demoted position. With the help of a mental illness support group headed by Richard Ledge (Timothy Hutton), Megan is slowly getting her life back on track. But when two more young girls are murdered with the same “alphabet” modus operandi, Megan becomes convinced the same serial killer has resurfaced. Battling hallucinations of the dead girls — as well as distrust from her colleagues — Megan dives back into the case, determined to bring the culprit to justice. With few leads and fewer concrete suspects, can she catch the “Alphabet Killer” before another victim is found?

There are hints of Flesh and Bone to this thriller, believe it or not, as well as some unreliable narrator/Insomnia-type shiftiness that Malloy craftily works in. (In this regard, the movie earns its stripes as part of a perfectly nutty Dushku double-dip, alongside the recent Nobel Son.) Director Rob Schmidt, who previously worked with Dushku on the thriller Wrong Turn, shoots the affair in a fairly straightforward fashion, but also has a nice sense of when to slow-play things to string along the tension. Dushku, who’s set to return to the small screen next month in the upcoming Fox series Dollhouse, does a fairly decent job overall, but also leans on a few mannered, TV acting tics that help keep her performance from being more of a naturalistic, rooted thing. If there’s a codifying strength here, other than the creepy fact that this is a speculative thriller, rooted in fact, it’s the movie’s superb supporting cast — the aforementioned bit players, plus Tom Noonan, recent Oscar nominee Melissa Leo, Larry Hankin, Bill Moseley, Jack McGee and Michael Ironside. They help give the film a sense of depth, and genuineness, that eludes a lot of straight-to-video crime dramas.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with matching art, The Alphabet Killer is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Two audio commentaries highlight the DVD’s special features. The first is with producer Isen Robbins and director Schmidt (Crime + Punishment in Suburbia, the “Masters of Horror” series hour-long flick Right to Die), the latter of whom talks some about his cameo in the film as a cop who discovers a body in a rock quarry. Also, somewhat uncomfortably and hilariously, Schmidt picks the exact moment of Dushku’s brief topless scene to say “It felt like the right time for her to play a woman.” The audio commentary track with writer-producer-actor Malloy is thankfully much more interesting and engaging. In breathless fashion, Malloy drops mad anecdotes and mundane details alike (Elwes wearing his BlueTooth in a scene), as well as pointing out his mother’s filing secretary cameo. In more substantive monologues, he expounds upon the themes of “man versus self” (or woman, really) in the movie; he also drops an amusing sideways crack on Ralph Fiennes when he touts co-star Noonan’s work in Manhunter.

Finally, wrapping up the slate of bonus material is a three-minute, time-coded, alternate version of the movie’s opening scene — an investigatory traipse through the woods by Dushku and Elwes — and a completely pointless six-minute featurette that strings together a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage under music. Some of the latter material looks interesting on the surface, but without some context or linking interviews, however, this tells us nothing of substance about the movie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)