In 1995, reporter Robert Cringely conducted a hour-long interview with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for a TV special on nerds making good, essentially. Most of the chat wasn’t aired, of course, and for many years it was presumed lost, until a producer discovered a VHS copy in his garage.

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, then, is exactly what its forthright title suggests — the presentation of this sit-down interview in full, with the shaded knowledge of all of Apple’s innovation and market domination yet to come. At the time of the Q&A, Jobs, having been exiled from the company he founded, was running niche computer company NeXT. So there’s some talk about that, but, thankfully, lots of meaty, candid reflection on his various successes and failures.

The chat starts out with some grade-A anecdotes from Jobs about calling up Hewlett Packard co-founder Jim Hewlett on the phone (in the days before unlisted numbers) when he was 12 years old, to lob questions at him about computer parts and the like. (It led to a summer internship.) He also recounts hacking AT&T’s long distance program and building a so-called “blue box” to mimic its tones, at which point he and friend Steve Wozniak even phoned the Pope! (After progressing through several levels of papal bureaucracy, they cracked up laughing and hung up before Pope John Paul II got on the line.) The lesson, says Jobs, was that it was possible — just through intelligence and hard work — to harness a huge company’s infrastructure and make it work for you.

Jobs also talks about viewing computer science as a liberal art, and when it comes to discussing and dissecting Apple’s failures, he pulls no punches, noting that when there is a market success, big companies wrongheadedly try to institutionalize process. “Apple did not have the caliber of people that was necessary to seize this idea in many ways,” he says. “There was a core team that did, but a larger team that had come mostly from Hewlett Packard didn’t have a clue.”

Jobs also gets in what many might perceive as digs or jabs at Bill Gates and Microsoft (“They have absolutely no taste. I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way — they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product”), but he does so in such a casual manner, vacuumed free of animosity, that even his biggest punches (“I’m not saddened by their success… I’m just saddened that they just make really third-rate products”) come off more as sincere sociocultural critiques than embittered rantings.

What’s most notable about Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, which is engaging throughout, is its subject’s commingled intelligence and passion. When he talks about humankind “building tools that can amplify our skills,” it makes one smile in realization at just how long the seeming impossibilities that some of Apple’s products would go on to achieve had likely danced around inside Jobs’ head.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview comes to DVD presented in a 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with an English language Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio track, and optional Spanish subtitles. Obviously, given the nature of the source material from which this DVD is mastered, the picture clarity isn’t in line with the sort of pristine standards to which hardcore digital aficionados are accustomed, but that’s not the chief selling point of this title, given that it’s a static, straight-on interview.

The DVD’s bonus features, however, provide a nice bit of added value. First up, there’s an audio commentary track with producer-director Paul Sen and writer-presenter Robert Cringely, in which the pair discuss the program for which the Jobs interview was originally recorded, along with much more. There’s also a separate audio interview with Cringely, conducted by producer John Cau, and, best of all, a 60-minute interview with Andy Hertzfeld, the original Macintosh programmer at Apple. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase it via Half, click here. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

The Best Screenplay award winner at the Sundance Film Festival, Safety Not Guaranteed is an entertaining and endearing little seriocomic bauble that, while having a smidge of fun tweaking genre conventions and expectations, also richly mines for laughs the pained regret and fumbling desires of its characters in much the same manner as Alexander Payne. A movie of exquisite silver linings — which locates the humor in the swallowed ache of emotionally stunted men without ever selling out the legitimacy of their feelings — director Colin Trevorrow‘s debut offering heralds a solid new talent on the indie film scene.



Needing a story, Seattle magazine writer Jeff (Jake Johnson, of New Girl) pitches his boss (Mary Lynn Rajskub) on tracking down the person responsible for a strange classified ad seeking someone to go back in time with the author, reading in part, “Must bring your own weapons, safety not guaranteed — I have only done this once before.” Given the go-ahead, Jeff snatches up two interns — Darius (Aubrey Plaza), a disillusioned live-at-home college grad, and the timid Arnau (Karan Soni, above center), a studious biology major trying to diversify his resume — and sets out for the tiny seaside community of Ocean View, where the ad has a listed post office box number.

There, they discover Kenneth Calloway (Mark Duplass), an eccentric and paranoid grocery store clerk who’s convinced he’s solved the riddle of time travel. The real impetus behind Jeff’s desire to hit the road turns out not to be the story on Kenneth, but instead an old… well, adolescent sexual conquest, Liz (Jenica Bergere). With Jeff spending his time pursuing her, the specifics of getting the actual journalistic scoop fall mostly to Darius, who slowly gains Kenneth’s trust. In the process, she finds herself becoming decidedly intrigued with his nerdy survivalist ways, and the fact that, Kenneth’s weirdness notwithstanding, people really do seem to be following him.

As penned by Derek Connolly and directed by fellow New York University graduate Trevorrow, Safety Not Guaranteed is a beguiling combination of melancholic character notes and pin-prick comedy (Darius is told she’s “not a quality hire” by a restaurant manager after a painfully blunt interview). There’s a breezy, lightweight quality to a lot of the movie’s banter, but it never seems false or out-of-step with the characterizations, which are actually quite nicely sketched, and deepen emotionally with time. As Darius and Kenneth kind of trip and fumble toward something approaching romantic bloom, and the movie flits about the edges of the grander sci-fi fantasy its conceit suggests, Jeff’s blossoming disillusionment and unhappiness is rendered in contrast to Darius’ emotional thawing.

Duplass, kind of jittery and guarded, nicely captures both the hurt and hope in Kenneth (who will only say that his mission involves “mistakes, regret and love”), and Johnson delivers a winning turn as a man-child who finally if improbably seems to discover the tools that might enable him to grow up. If not for all its other considerable pleasures, Safety Not Guaranteed is also, at the very least, a winning feature showcase for Plaza, an ensemble player on Parks and Recreation whose sardonic wit is here, for perhaps the first time, leavened with grace notes of vulnerability and longing. It’s the look of someone who wants more, and is realizing that she’s capable of it, and it’s a look that suits both the character of Darius and Plaza herself.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Safety Not Guaranteed comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track. Kickstarting its bonus features is a quite nice 15-minute making-of featurette in which Trevorrow talks about how he wanted to make a movie that wasn’t about time travel per se but rather “the emotional needs that time travel satisfies,” as well as how screenwriter Connolly is in many ways an amalgamation of the four lead characters of Darius, Kenneth, Arnau and Jeff. Other fun bits include reminiscences about blind trust in the Seattle crew base and their design for the Kenneth’s time travel device, as well as how folks pitched in to finish shooting a slow-speed car chase when one of their vehicles broke down on the allotted day. All in all, it’s a great overview of not only the film itself, but also the all-for-one-and-one-for-all spirit of independent filmmaking.

Other supplemental extras include a two-and-a-half-minute tidbit with the author, John Silveira, of the original ad upon which the movie is based. Needless to say, it’s better to leave this unviewed until one has seen the feature, but even then it’s a fluffy and inessential extra that doesn’t shed much satisfying light on the story’s roots. There’s also a 90-second Easter egg, located on the bonus slate menu, in which cast members ruminate on what they might do if given the chance to travel through time. Rounding things out is a slate of previews, inclusive of looks at Looper, Robot & Frank, Playing for Keeps and more. Something on the movie’s Sundance premiere might have been nice, but this is a solid home video treatment of one of 2012’s most whimsical and pleasurable debuts. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B (Disc)