Underground Underground Directed by Emir Kusturica (New Yorker ...

Easily one of the richest films of the last decade, Kusturica's magisterial film spans 50 years of Yugoslav history, from World War II to the war that tore that fictional country to shreds. Marko (Miki Manojlovic) and Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) are two petty criminals who align with the communist underground, fighting the Nazis through arms dealing and two-bit hooliganism. During Marshal Tito's rule following the war, Marko comes to power as one of the communist dictator's cronies and makes his fortune by keeping Blacky and the other communist fighters imprisoned in a cellar, building weapons to fight the Nazi menace they are unaware has long been vanquished.

Underground is many things: wild-eyed, hilarious, buzzing with energy and ultimately tragic. But one of its more hidden traits is that it is also a musical of sorts. The film begins at full musical gallop, with Marko and Blacky's drunken nighttime rambles accompanied by full orchestra. As Underground progresses, and tragedy begins to overtake the low comedy of early scenes, music slowly but surely vanishes from the film, until by the closing scenes, in war-torn 1992, the rowdy, boozy, delightful horns are entirely absent. Kusturica's film shape-shifts over the course of its nearly three hours, beginning as a raucous frat party and ending with a spiritual and emotional degradation that would not be out of place in Tarkovsky.

The allegorical thrust of Underground sees the years of communist rule as a collective political delusion, an era in which the whole country lived below ground, never seeing the light of day. In Kusturica's vivid imagination, the pathos and tragedy of Yugoslav history is injected with many delightful bits of cinematic business, from the Forrest Gump-esque insertions of the film's characters into old newsreel footage, the smoke billowing out of Blacky's ears as he is being electrically shocked, Blacky's hijacking a hilariously overblown German-language play, Marko's wistful sigh whenever his compatriot is in the midst of implicating him in some catastrophic plan of action, which is often. Underground's exceptional liveliness makes its descent into tragedy all the more affecting.

The final 30 minutes of Underground are enormously powerful, a vision straight out of Bosch of a world gone directly to hell. Witnessing the passage of time is always one of the most powerful effects a work of art can have, and seeing Underground's characters through 50 years of brutality to their final reinventions during the Bosnian war is truly shattering. In the film's closing scene, a modicum of joy returns, and a celebration ensues, but heavy with the knowledge of death and destruction. In Kusturica's world, the only truly successful breakaway state in the Yugoslav nightmare is the ever-growing country of the dead.

?Saul Austerlitz

The Adventures of Indiana Jones Directed by Steven Spielberg (Paramount)

So in the first one, the heads explode and melt; in the second one, you get the bugs and that guy gets his heart ripped out; and in the third one, not a whole lot happens, but a guy gets real old really fast and then turns to dust.

That pretty much sums it up.

The interesting and often frustrating thing here, though, is the extras disc. In general, I have increasingly little patience for these movies that are being released?awful, awful movies?with "10 hours of bonus features!" Who the hell needs that, really? More often than not, the movies were crappy to begin with, and the extras are worse?"deleted scenes" should remain deleted and "outtakes" should remain out. As for six slightly different versions of the trailer and a "making-of featurette" in which all the guilty parties insist that making the picture was "loads of fun"? Well, I don't care what the best boy thinks. I just want to see the damn movie.

To their credit, Paramount didn't go completely overboard on the Indiana Jones extras. The fourth disc in the box set contains brief featurettes about the music, the special effects, the stunts and (my personal favorite) the sound effects.

On top of it all, though, is an exhausting two-and-a-half-hour documentary about the making of all three pictures. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, producers, special-effects people, Lawrence Kasdan, actors who played minor roles, costume designers and all the leads are interviewed. There are occasional interesting anecdotes?the trouble they had with some of the animals, the thinking that was behind the feast scene in Temple of Doom?but for the most part I'd heard most of it before.

The reason the whole damn thing is worth watching is to catch the interview segments with Harrison Ford (who's looking like he went to the same plastic surgeon who botched up Roy Scheider and Al Pacino). Mostly all he does is bitch about his various injuries on the set?riding an elephant led to his herniated disc, a plane ran over his knee, etc. Better still, he's either drunk, or hopped-up on goofballs, or has gulped too many Percocets before the cameras start rolling. Whatever the case, he's capable of little more than slurring and mumbling and taking very long pauses. As a result, his clips tend to run no more than five or 10 seconds, if that long. It's pretty darned funny, and certainly kept me watching.

Oh, and maybe one of these days I'll get around to watching the movies again.

?Jim Knipfel