Some Came Running

Schrader/DeNiro/Scorsese/Farber/Patterson

One of the many nice things about the new Blu-ray disc of the restoration of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is that the supplements restore to us  the very first audio commentary on the film, featuring the film's screenwriter Paul Schrader as well as its director. Recorded in 1986 for the Criterion Collection laser disc of the film, it's a commentary in the Criterion style—serious, frank, in-depth, not the sort of self-congratulatory "I love this shot" stuff that audio commentaries became associated with in the height of the DVD boom. In any event, when Criterion's license on the film went out, Sony began overseeing the DVD editions, and the exemplary laser disc commentary went by the wayside; somebody at Sony was on the ball enough to acquire the material from Criterion and include it here. It's still a bracing listen. From the hindsight of ten years past, and having endured any number of personal and artistic crucibles since the making of Taxi Driver, Schrader and Scorsese are in reflective frames of mind, fully cognizant of the fact that Taxi Driver was in a sense an extraordinary occurrence. Scorsese: "It was a beautiful script. There’s only two scripts that I’ve gotten that were completely there, that we hardly had to do any work on…Taxi Driver was the first one, later on it was King of Comedy by Paul Zimmerman[...] Bob and myself felt as if it had been written for us in a funny way." Schrader: "[It was v]ery much a serendipity. Three people coming together at a certain point in their lives all needing to say the same thing. You know, occasionally in art you get lucky, and you’re in the right place at the right time with the right people."

It is particularly interesting to listen to them talk about what they were feeling, about what they were doing, in conjunction with exploring what a couple of first-rate critics, Manny Farber and his partner Patricia Patterson, saw them doing in the film. The Farber/Patterson essay, "The Power And The Gory," was first published in the May/June 1976 issue of Film Comment. (Taxi Driver premiered in February of that year.) It can now be read in the Library of America's indispensible volume, Farber on Film. An extremely detailed and vivid piece of prose, it alternates so vehemently between admiration for the film and grave offense at it that it can almost be considered as a piece of Writing Against Itself. The arguments against the film are not, as it happens, as easy to dismiss outright as Pauline Kael's hideously smug and classist "What am I doing here watching these two dumb f--ks?" whinge on Raging Bull. Farber and Patterson characterize as "diversionary" the "pounding, illustrative music that grinds you," and "the spike words which stud the [...] soundtrack."'Pussy' and 'fuck' have never been harvested so often; the black race is mauled by verbal inventions spoken with elaborate pizzazz styling[...]" The picture winds up Farber and Patterson to the extent that it turns them into "plausibles," to use Alfred Hitchcock's coinage for his least favorite kind of movie viewer, and they make a list of "plot impossibles." They inveigh against the use of the DeNiro: "the intense DeNiro is sold as a misfit psychotic, and, at the same time, a charismatic star who centers every shot[...]" To some, that paradox might seem key to the film's glory, but Farber and Patterson are clearly quite irritated by this. They cannot, however, disguise their delight at the bravura filmmaking: "The amount of twisting questions that are thrown at the spectator highlights its director's boldness in intricate visuals." Still, one senses that Farber and Patterson can't enjoy their enjoyment. They deeply distrust the film. A key to reading the essay: they frequently use variations on the verb "sell," and when they do, that's a signal that they're gonna bitch about something. They even take the filmmakers to task on the marketing of the picture: "The movie's ad campaign (the poster of DeNiro as a looming presence, the interviews with crew members almost before the final mixing, the terrible schlock novel now sold in every supermarket which takes [Arthur] Bremer's diary and Schrader's script to an unbelievably trashy depth) is revelatory of what the filmmakers feel it takes to move, score, and hold your territory in a competitive U.S.A. society."

This contrasts quite a bit to Schrader's pronouncement (I'm paraphrasing here) that the Taxi Driver script leapt out of him like an animal, or Scorsese's various proclamations concerning his own identification with Travis Bickle's sense of isolation and anger. On the commentary track cited above, Scorsese's remark about feeling the script had been written for him and DeNiro comes after he recounts a clash with studio execs over matching shots in the lunch-with-Betsy scene, recollecting in tranquility that it was a "serious" clash and leaving it to the listener's imagination just how serious it was, given the personal volatility that was much more a part of the Scorsese forefront than it was in 1986, or than it is today. 

Almost forty minutes into the film, there's the shot of Travis on a pay phone after his disastrous porn-theater date with Betsy, hunching over a little, trying to make out what's gone wrong. The camera slowly tracks to the right, and into a view of an empty hallway leading to the front door of the building. Here's Scorsese talking about the shot on the commentary, as he looks at it: "We’re holding on him, and he’s just getting refused and rejected and rejected, then the camera starts to move, to the hall. As if it’s about to reveal something. And it doesn’t. The idea is meant that the revelation comes much later, when he explodes. I think this is one of the last things we shot, one of the last days of shooting…and then he enters the frame and leaves. And when I thought of that shot…it presented to me how the style of the picture would be…where the moves would be…the camera moves would seem…uh, if I could really put it in words I wouldn’t have had to put it on film." At this point Scorsese pauses and seems to gather himself. "The idea is that…theres a sense again of anxiety, a sense of uneasiness, of the camera tracking to an empty hall. Is that his soul?...Is that…the emptiness he’s feeling in his heart? Or are we about to reveal something, is there about to be an explosion, is something terrible about to happen in the hall? It was the idea of keeping the audience off balance all the time, and that was the piece…all the other shots came from that concept that’s in that shot right now. It just turned out to be one of the last shots we took, but it was the first shot I thought of."

One is reminded of Vladimir Nabokov's essay "On A Book Entitled Lolita," and the passage wherein he evokes "Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying 'waterproof,'" and then pronounces, "These are the nerves of the novel." Many an English lit major no doubt said "Really? Charlotte saying 'waterproof'?" and then paged back through the book to find the passage and see if it resonated any differently as a result. It's worth noting that the shot thus doted on by Scorsese isn't even mentioned in the Farber/Patterson essay. 

I don't know if Scorsese or Schrader ever went on record with their reaction to the Farber/Patterson essay, but the two were/are admirers of Farber, and I recall one of them describing a visit the two made to Farber's studio, where they took in his wonderful paintings, as a "pilgrimage." Also, I wonder what Farber would have made of Scorsese's recent Shine A Light, which to my mind is, among other things, very much a film about what it takes to move, score, and hold one's territory in a competitive worldwide market.

Audrey Hitchcock

How To Steal A Million, William Wyler, 1966

Freed by Minnelli

The Long, Long Trailer, 1953 (with Desi Arnaz)

The Cobweb, 1955 (with Eve McVeagh, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall)

Theorem

Last night I saw The Adjustment Bureau, which, until the point it cracks like an egg and goes all sappy, was a kind of silly but at least somewhat entertaining piece of metaphysical burlesque (although I have no doubt its makers intended it as something rather more serious). Anyway, in the middle of the picture Terence Stamp shows up in the role of a rather formidable uber-functionary of the film's titular organization. And although in the film his character IS given a name, still I thought: "This picture's actually even better if you decide to interpret Stamp's character as a literal continuation of the unnamed fellow he played in Pasolini's Teorema back in the '60s, that decade that ruined everything." I daresay that if director George Nolfi had been a true man of vision, he might have interpolated actual scenes from Teorema into his own film, the way Steven Soderbergh threw in shots of young Stamp from Loach's Poor Cow to contrast with the older and less pleasant WIlson in The Limey. But no. Here my own imagination had to do the work, and I gotta tell you, it made The Adjustment Bureau that much more fun. Try it yourself (only, of course, if you're conversant with the Pasolini; a friend I mentioned this to after the screening looked at me as if I'd lost my mind before sheepishly admitting that he'd never seen the seminal Pier Paolo film) and let me know if you get similar results.

So where exactly IS Catherine Breillat in "Last Tango in Paris," anyway?

Such was the question that I was determined to finally answer when I got the recent Blu-ray disc release of Bertolucci's still-argument-provoking 1972 film, in which the future director of A ma soeur! and Barbe Bleue, to name but two of my favorites of hers, is credited as appearing in the role of "Mouchette," while sister Marie-Hélene plays "Muriel." And I believe I found the two, in the scene in which Maria Schneider's Jeanne is trying on her wedding dress and discussing the relation of love to "pop marriage" and advertising with her schmuck cinephile/cineaste fiancé Tom (poor Jean-Pierre Léaud) and very nearly giving away her secret affair with the aging American Paul (Marlon Brando). To be honest, I can't be quite sure here which one is Catherine and which is Marie-Hélene; while the characters are named in the credits, they're not referred to by those names in the film proper (unless I missed something). Marie Hélene is only all of thirteen months older than Catherine, so it's hard to tell the difference. (It's kind of funny to consider their scant age difference and incredibly strong resemblance in contrast to the admittedly autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical portrayals of the sisters in the Breillat films I cite above, and the marked dissimilarities between the two girls in each of those films; just another study for the "perception IS reality" book, I guess.) Anyway, the two act very sweet and hippy dippy as they attend to Jeanne like ladies in waiting; it's a moment of comic and lyrical respite before everything starts coming crashing down and the film reaches its peculiar conclusion, which itself prompts a number of questions: is Jeanne in fact in "the wrong?" Will Paul be happier without the chewing gum? And so on.

Still such a weird, multi-layered film, really a mess in certain ways, because it tries to do so much; it's a study of the iconography of Hollywood stardom and what happens when you metaphorically destroy the system upon which it's built (and if you think that's over-reading the film, you need to pay closer attention to the description of Paul the cleaning woman tells Paul she gave to the authorities), a study of the soul-rot that can be an inherent feature of a certain species of cinephilia (something Bertolucci never quite got out of his system, and a topic to which I can imagine the sometime anti-cinephile Richard Brody warming to), AND an attempt to apply a new frankness to sexuality than had prior been attempted in conventional narrative film. It is this last feature that Breillat most obviously picked up at least part of her own artistic cue from, and from film to film you can see her succeeding where Bertolucci failed, and failing in ways he never even dreamed of. And that's even before we start getting into the attendant gender and sexual politics of the whole deal.

I have to say since I'm here that I'm not crazy about the MGM/UA  Blu-ray—it strikes me as a bit on the noisy side—and still have very fond memories of Criterion's laser disc, which I recollect as having been mastered from superior materials. Not that there's much of anything I can do about that. 

Some notes on the brief and not particularly furious transit of Tommy Noonan

This post is another contribution to the "For the Love of Film (Noir)" Blogathon hosted by the Self Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films, who will explain it all and steer you to other, and far more sterling, contributions. To make a donation to the cause, hit the nifty "donate here" icon below. 

"Tommy Noonan" is not a name one regularly, or perhaps I ought to say "normally," associates with film noir. Indeed, the name "Tommy Noonan" to which I am specifically referring is one that is not much regularly associated with anything these days; drop it and even someone who considers him or herself a cinephile or cinecrophile may well say, "You mean that creepy-looking, freakishly tall actor I see around the East Village all the time?"

And, no. The Noonan to whom I refer achieved his greatest mainstream fame as the bespectacled milquetoast heir-to-a-fortune Gus, Jr., betrothed to Marilyn Monroe's Miss Lorelei Lee in Howard Hawks' 1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. A year later he took a slight detour from schlubville to portray a wisecracking showbiz sidekick of Judy Garland's in Cukor's A Star Is Born, but it would be around slightly more graphic variants of the nerd/bombshell contrast that he would craft, such as it were, the finale of his acting career, before dying of a brain tumor in 1968.

As it happened, the bland vacancy of Noonan's facial features in Blondes was a product of both prop placement (the glasses) and deft acting. The half-brother of John Ireland, Noonan wasn't a bad-looking guy, and among his first Hollywood acting roles were film noir turns as knowing slicksters. In 1947's Born To Kill, for instance, he appears uncredited as a bellboy who whiles away his idle hours playing cards and getting plastered with too-old-to-be-slatternly hotel resident Audrey Long.

While not exactly an out-and-out sleazeball here, he definitely strikes the viewer as something of a service-economy opportunist. And Kill director Robert Wise, or somebody at studio RKO, must have liked Noonan and/or saw some heavy potential in him, because he showed up a couple of years later in Wise's RKO classic The Set-Up, sporting a particularly ridiculous suit and laying out a line of icky patter to poor Audrey Totter, who's wandering around town wondering what she's gonna do about seemingly doomed boxer husband Robert Ryan.

Now there's a character who sure doesn't look like he'd let himself be taken advantage of even by the likes of Miss Lee. Noonan also played the real-life Western character Charles Ford, brother of Jesse James killer Robert, in two films, Sam Fuller's I Shot Jesse James (and here Noonan's real-life half-brother Ireland played Robert) and The Return of Jesse James (in which Ireland also appears, but not as Ford, but rather as a Jesse James lookalike; how confusing).

But Noonan's work opposite Monroe in Blondes was such that it created something of an archetype, and in 1955, in Richard Fleischer's atypical but thoroughly exceptional noir Violent Saturday, he melded milquetoast and sleaze to extremely memorable effect. 

What makes Saturday an atypical noir has in part to do with the fact that it's in Cinemascope, and very vivid De Luxe color, and that it's set not in a big city but a mid-size Western mining town, Bradenville. Some bad fellows, including Lee Marvin and J. Carrol Naish, are out to rob the local bank. In a sense, the film melds the heist picture with the sick-secrets-of-suburbia melodrama, and from that hybrid, in fact, the film derives its sense of noir. Noonan is Harry Reeves, the seemingly upstanding bank manager; sure, likes a drink eery now and again, but a thoroughly okay guy; and midway through the picture (whose ninety or so minutes are pretty jam-packed with plot, even by the efficient standards of the day and genre) we find out how he really gets his kicks; out "walking" the "dog" (okay, he actually does have a dog), he "lets" himself be led to the back of the local hotel... 

...where the new nurse in town (Virginia Leith, six years away from her, um, defining role as The Brain That Wouldn't Die) is staying. The sight of her changing out of her work clothes is just, well, mesmerizing...

Having thus wed nerdy to dirty, Noonan hit upon a potentially perfect persona in which to embody the square who squirmed for sexual satisfaction and/or liberation. Of course a little more simulated Scotch-drinking was going to help with that. In 1963 Noonan joined one-time 20th Century Fox stablemate Jayne Mansfield (yet another kinda-sorta "next Marilyn Monroe" for that studio, which had also produced Violent Saturday) and he husband, proto-Schwarzenegger bodybuilder turned film performer Mickey Hargitay, for the aspiring-to-smuttiness cheapo sex farce Promises, Promises, notorious for featuring some completely non-diegetic shots of a half-naked Mansfield gyrating on a bed.

Here Noonan, more anti-cool than ever in oversized horn-rims, sousedly ruminates on Hargitay's prodigious pressing...

...and, suffering even more indignity than he did in the hands of Monroe, accepts chastisement from Mansfield.

In 1964, in his first and last directorial effort, Three Nuts In Search of a Bolt, Noonan played a version of himself, an out-of-work actor who agrees to pose as a psychoanalyst. One of his charges was played by Mamie van Doren, another "next Marilyn" who had never signed with Fox, but had been discovered by Howard Hughes, thank you very much. 

The DeNiro perplex

As part of MSN TV's' run-up to the Golden Globes, I examine the mutating mystique of its 2011 Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, a face we all know. 

The "nice" guys of "Tiny Furniture"

I saw Lena Dunham's debut feature Tiny Furniture back in late August, thought slightly well of it with some qualifications, and wrote about it here. Since that time I don't think half a week has gone by without my getting an invitation to yet another screening of the film. Some of these are special screenings, which see Furniture writer-director-star Lena Dunham and some of her colleagues hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, or MOMA, or Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, or some fucking person/thing or other. Very festive, and I don't go; because I've seen the film already.But the invites keep on coming, to the extent that I'm beginning to doubt whether IFC actually intends to really open the film theatrically. An interesting marketing strategy, for sure, if that's the case, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. 

In any event, I suppose IFC's persistence with the screenings is paying off in some respects, as it's succeeded in attracting at least one internet film writer who normally expresses little to no interest in Films Made By And About Young Jobless Urban Americans. I speak, of course, of my colleague and sometimes traveling companion Jeffrey Wells, who saw it the other night and who, in the fashion of Mikey in those Life commercials, liked it. "Dunham is a fine, real-deal actress. I liked her right away, and believed her acting to the extent that it didn't feel like 'acting'," Wells writes. And it's funny, he and I have never discussed his feelings concerning James Mason and...oh, never mind. Anyway. In between a sentence that would make James Agee, Manny Farber, and Otis Ferguson proud were they alive to read it (that would be "The undertones felt a bit lezzy sometimes, but not in a pronounced way") and the obligatory rumination on Dunham's looks (she used to be a chunkster, but she's taken off a little weight, yeah, yeah; down, boy), Wells delivers his verdict on the film's main male characters: "The two guys are 'nice' and interesting to talk to, but they're both kind of into themselves and really not much of a catch." To which I reacted (once I wrapped my head around the weird case issues in that sentence), "What the—?"

Interesting to learn what Jeff considers nice, or "nice," because as far as I was concerned the male love interests of the film, such as they were, constituted pretty much the most repellent white male characters in cinema who aren't Charles Manson in Helter Skelter. Okay, that's an exaggeration—neither of these characters has the energy to contrive mass murder, really—but it's not a stretch to say that these two fellows could just as well have been named "Douche 1" and "Douche 2." There's Jed, the perpetually broke, snide mooch portrayed by Alex Karpovsky, and there's the even more despicable "chef" Keith (David Call), who's got a girlfriend, and is clearly mostly interested in manipulating Dunham's character into stealing pills for him, and whom Wells allows is "a bit of a dick." A bit? Man. These characters make a convincing case that not only is chivalry dead among male heterosexuals in their twenties, but that actual, you know, conversation is as well. These are cats whose idea of a romantic dinner is probably rest-stop Arby's in a drainage ditch. I gathered that part of the film's whole point was that its lead character Aura was sufficiently beaten down—by her self-image, her privileged but non-enriching circumstances, and her uncertainty on "life" "direction"—that these losers came to look like desirable/viable choices to her, and that was part of the film's poignancy. But what do I know? Jeff Wells thought they were "nice."

Incidentally, Wells' commentariat, inasmuch as it weighed in, seemed less than impressed with either the prospect of seeing the film or the film itself as seen. "...middling 'woe-is-me' young-ish, white person of privilege film...", "rich entitled New York douchebag translates her money and connections into a career by crapping out shallow self referential garbage...", "once you've stripped mined [sic] what little your 20-something life has to offer, that vein is tapped out..." Wow. Some very bitter characters over there, huh? But this speaks, I think, to a real problem facing younger filmmakers of this vein, such as it is, or the vein represented by Kentucker Audley's recent Open Five; for all the critical plaudits such films garner, they are often met with reflexive suspicion and/or outright hostility not just by, say, bitter old people, but by potential members of their ostensible target audience who, rather than seeing artful depictions of situations they can "relate" to, see wasteful indulgences. I just wrote "for all the critical plaudits such films garner," but in fact part of the problem can be brought on by such plaudits, which can look like addled overkill or self-interested special pleading. And that's all I've got to say about that, at the moment. (Except that I am tickled by my pal Richard Brody's description of Open Five's Jake Rabinbach as a "rocker;" the guy looks like he'd drop dead of a heart attack forty seconds into a Mission of Burma number...a slow Mission of Burma number...) For the micro-indie filmmaker who's not promoting his or her work as a ticket into the mainstream (which Dunham herself is, as her recent deals with Judd Apatow, HBO, and Scott Rudin indicate), genuine audience-building remains a huge challenge. 

I apologize, sir, for not telling you sooner that you're a DEGENERATE!

Just wanted to get that out there.

For those of you following from home, the news is that the manufacturer of my on-the-fritz-since-July plasma display has managed, according to them, to have successfully rebuilt the defective part that caused all the trouble, and depending on when the part reaches my TV repair facility, I could have my set fixed some time this week. What on earth shall I revel in first? The Criterion Blu-ray of Paths of Glory—the above screen cap is from the standard def edition of a new master/transfer—is only one of many exciting potential choices. I'll keep you posted. A new Blu-ray Consumer Guide should follow the blessed event in short order, if said event comes off. 

Nabokov/von Sternberg/Appel, Jr.

"...carried away by his re-creation of the past..." From von Sternberg's The Last Command 

Surrender (1927) represents the only American appearance of the famous Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine (né Mozzhukin, 1989-1939) whose romantic swashbuckler roles were much admired by adolescent Nabokov (1912016). Mosjoukine made his own miraged appearance in the first stage of young Nabokov's life as exile. After the Revolution his family moved to the Crimea, where Nabokov senior became Minister of Justice in the hopeful Regional Government. One morning in the summer of 1918, with real battles raging in thenorth (the Civil War), Nabokov suddenly met on a mountain trail

a strange cavalier, clad in a Circassian costume, with a tense, perspiring face painted a fantasitc yellow. He kept ferociously tugging at his horse, which, without heeding him, proceeded down the steep path at a curiously purposeful walk, like that of an offended person leaving a party. I had seen runaway horses, but I had never seen a walkaway one before, and my astonishment was given a still more pleasurable edge when I recognized the unfortunate rider as Mozzhuhin, whom Tamara [his first love, the model for Mary—A.A.] and I had so often admired on screen. The film Haji Murad (after Tolstoy's tale of that gallant, rough-riding mountain chief0 was being rehearsed on the mountain pastures of that range. "Stop that brute [Derzhite proklyatoe zhivotnoe]" he said through his teeth as he saw me, but at the same moment, with a mighty sound of crunching and crashing stones, two authentic Tatars came running down to the rescue, and I trudged on, with my butterfly net, toward the upper crags where the Euxine race of the Hippolyte Grayling was expecting me (Speak Memory, p. 247).

All rehearsals concluded, both actor and carefree lepidopterist would soon become permanent emigrés; Surrender starred Mosjoukine as a White Army officer who losed everything in the CIvil War that had provided a backdrop for the actor's unreal meeting with Nabokov. A publicity photograph poses Mosjoukine with Edward Sloman, Surrender's director, and some of those dazed Russian emigré extras "whose only hope and profession was their past." The theme is memorably orchestrated in Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command, (1928), in which Emil Jannings plays an ex-tsarist general who, now a poor old man in Hollywood, applies for work as and extra and is cast to replay his former self in the film-within-the-film. The cruel, dizzying commission and that film's Communist director (William Powell) combine to drive Jannings insane. (Sternberg's scenario was inspired by a "true story" rather than, say, Pirandello's play Henry IV, 1922.) Still photos often fail to communicate the essence of a tragic performance or, even worse, freeze what seems to be an overblown expression (always a possibility in the context of the more stylized "theatrical" action of the silent cinema). 

The haunting quality of The Last Command, however, is preserved in several stills: Jannings about to don his "costume" in the extras' common dressing room; Jannings being inspected like a young recruit by the assistant director and prop man, ready with a box of authentic medals; or the spectacle of Grand Duke Jannings, imprisoned by mirrors and carried away by his re-creation of the past as he bravely confronts a mob of revolutionaries or arrogantly reviews the troops of his last command, many of them played by actual Russian emigrés. "I had fortified my image of the Russian Revolution by including in my cast of extra players an assortment of Russian ex-admirals and generals, a dozen Cossacks, and two former members of the Duma, all victims of the Bolsheviks, and, in particular, an expert on borscht by the name of Koblianski. These men, especially one Cossack general who insisted on keeping my car spotless, viewed Jannings' effort to be Russian with such disdain that I had to order them to conceal it," writes Field Marshal von Sternberg in his autobiography, Fun In A Chinese Laundry (1965).

—Alfred Appel, Jr., from Nabokov's Dark Cinema, Oxford University Press, 1974 

The DVD event of the week, or rather the month, or quite probably the whole year, is Criterion's Three Silent Classics By Josef von Sternberg, which collects the seminal films Underworld, The Docks of New York, and the above-discussed Last Command. (Incidentally, while I could not find the publicity still from Surrender described in the above passage, on the left here is a shot of the actor Mosjoukine.) Mr. Dave Kehr, in his superb assessment of the set and the movies therein for The New York Times, gets down to cases and nails them right away: "In a sense, Sternberg was an avant-garde filmmaker who found himself, by fluke and only for a short while, at the controls of the Hollywood machine, then operating at the peak of its otherworldly artificiality." I should hope to perhaps elaborate on this idea on this blog some time soon. In the meantime, I am hoping that the hereafter, where some believe the good Professor Appel (whose work moved and inspired me in so many ways) travelled to in May of last year, has a very good home theater system.