The Screengrab

On the occasion of the DVD release of 1970's The Boys In The Band, Andrew O'Hehir has interviewed William Friedkin. Friedkin is best known to the general public as the man who engineered the back-to-back successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, then flopped forever more. For hardcore film nerds and auteurists, he's either a constant failure or an underrated master.

Aside from small cult affairs like 2003's The Hunted — a fairly brilliant pared-down continuous chase film derided for its deliberate lack of characterization — the reason Friedkin annoys a lot of people are a twin pair of gay-themed films viewed fairly continuously as homophobic. The Boys In The Band annoyed post-Stonewall gays for its ostensibly stereotypical portrait of self-loathing queens going at it for condescending straight viewers having their worst fears confirmed. 1980's Cruising — cop Al Pacino vs. gay murderers in New York's S&M scene — was reviled even before it was filmed; as Trenton Straube wrote when the film was re-issued on DVD last year, the Village Voice's Arthur Bell predicted it would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." When it was released, the National Gay Task Force compared it to The Birth Of A Nation.

Whether or not the films are inadvertently homophobic is beside the point. What O'Hehir's interview shows is something I've suspected for a long time: Friedkin is a director so sociopathically honed in on exploring environments, he's completely indifferent when it comes to any sense of social responsibility.

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We’re going to miss bringing you word from the Format War frontline here at the Screengrab. But all things must pass and so it is with the high definition format war. In a statement released yesterday, Toshiba announced that they will no longer be developing or manufacturing HD-DVD players.

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2007 was a pretty good year for moviegoing, but it may have been an even better one for DVDs. Even the acrimonious racket over the format battles couldn't obscure the almost steady flood of eye-catching product issued on shiny steel discs. For starters, a number of the most exciting new movies of the last twelve months were released in especially fine, often two-disc editions, including Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, The Host, and Knocked Up in its "unrated, expanded" form. But there's also been a treasure trove of oldies and oddities of every kind, sure to be of interest to anyone who was lucky enough to score a gift certificate or two over the holidays.

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We're pleased to have an exclusive clip from the new Twin Peaks "Gold Box Edition" DVD set, which finally supplants a couple of incomplete older releases. The old Season 1 box didn't even feature the pilot, a ridiculous omission that this set corrects with both the U.S. and European versions. It's also got a ton of bonus stuff (including, I'm delighted to report, Kyle MacLachlan's Twin Peaks sketch on SNL), assembled by DVD maestro Charles de Lauzirika, who produced the spectacular Alien Quadrilogy box and whose new Blade Runner set I am itching to get my hands on. In any case, it's good news, and you will surely relish this clip from the bonus features, of the costume contest at the "Return to Twin Peaks" fan convention. (That guy really looks like MacLachlan, no?) — Peter Smith