Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

February 21, 2002

The best thing about the Oscars? It means the end of columns predicting the outcome of the balloting. In the February 17 weekly Variety, Peter Bart weighs in with a column on revisiting the year's movies through Academy screener DVDs and VHS tapes, and like a longtime metro daily columnist who won't let his copy be touched, someone at the paper is having their laugh by not having to copy-edit whoppers out of Bart's prose. There's a reference to  "New Line Pictures" instead of "New Line Cinema"; even on movies like Final Destination 2, New Line is a company that's always kept "cinema" in the American lexicon. And what about the whoopers? "Now, I'm grateful if someone wants to discourse on Proust, but I don't want really want to be exposed to the hidden nuances of the Ya Ya Sisterhood or the subtler metaphors in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Some movies are better left unexplained." And some columns? Better left unwritten. Or, should we say, untyped?

L.A. Lawless

Dark Blue may hew too close to the contours of  David Ayer's script for Training Day for some critics, but it has its own crazy, complicated verve. Ayer adapted a short story by astringent poet of dark-dark L.A., James Ellroy for Dark Blue and Ron Shelton's film offers juicy bits for a grizzled Kurt Russell as a veteran do-it-at-all-costs older cop who's come from "a family of gunfighters" and Scott Speedwell as his earnest pup of a protégé. What sets the film apart is being set against the backdrop of the days leading up to the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the four LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. Sturdy moralizing, but emphatic acting and rich, rippling dialogue as well. Russell's rippling glee as a baddie is infectious. With Michael Michel as the female cop who gets out Speedwell's way and into Russell's, Ving Rhames as the flawed officer who wants to be the first African American L.A. police chief and Brendan Gleeson as a gleefully corrupt fixer. The film opens with the home video footage of the Rodney King beating; its official, tasteful title is "George Holliday's video," named after the man who shot it.

The Real Girl

In David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls the 27-year-old director's sophomore follow-up to George Washington, Zooey Deschanel is girlhood itself. For my indieWIRE review of the film, click here. The movie's starriest moments belong to her, as a dippy virgin who a 22-year-old tomcat falls for. Deschanel, startlingly present and transparent in her performances in small roles in movies such as Almost Famous and The Good Girl is an all-American marvel. What Audrey Tautou is to French movies, Deschanel is to ours. She's quite an individual, getting ardent expressiveness out of potential bromides like "I was thinking I like you because I can say what's on my mind." Her customary elongated enunciation is drawn out further by adopting a touch of the Carolinas accent.

There's a scene that made my eyes sting both times I saw the film: Noel leans in to her besotted boy and says: "Come here, let me tell you a secret" and when he leans closer, whispers "hellohellohellohellohello." "That was Zooey," Green quickly admitted in a conversation at Sundance. "That was all her. That was rehearsal. Me and her and [co-star] Paul [Schneider] spent a lot of time sitting in these bathtubs? On locations, you could hide in the bathroom and put on music. She came up with that, the credit is hers. That's her heart and her soul. Those little whispers and little moments, it's not a witty screenwriter behind there, it's a genuine girl that feels things and has a sensitivity you fall in love with. At least I do, y'know? It's those little moments that make relationships I've had memorable. It's the weird little quirks in girls' mannerisms and behavior. Going on a structured date and going through the routines of a relationships are inconsequential and ultimately forgettable. But it's those little things that just stab you when they're gone, when you know you're not going to get that whisper in your ear anymore."

Green says his movie is a reaction to other movies about teen and twentysomething romance. "Every step of the way, I thought I could bring something to a genre that nobody had seen before and that everybody could identify with," he says in his fast Texas-reared drawl. "Never once did I say, I want to make an obscure art film about love and relationships. I wanted to make a film that my mom's friends like, that an 18-year-old girl likes, that a 36-year-old construction-working man that's bruised with tattoos likes. I think it's gonna challenge them to realize they don't have to be told every emotion along the way, they don't have to exposed to every plot point. You just emotionally connect to people in a way, that if we're successful, in a way that the details are insignificant, the plot, the structuring details are insignificant. What's more important is what they're wearing, how they're looking at each other, how they touch each other, what you do and do not see about them."

Out of his Depp

Freak floods. High winds. Fighter jets. Prostate inflammation. What more can stop the making of Terry Gilliam's long-in-the-works vision of Cervantes' "Don Quixote," starring Johnny Depp, Jean Rochefort, Vanessa Paradis, and a trio of bare-chested, breast-blubbering giants? Insurance adjusters. Lost in La Mancha is Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's thrilling, damn entertaining, even quixotic tragicomedy of a Gilliam film that goes straight to hell in its first week of production. Given complete access after their only-on-DVD documentary, The Hamster Factor, on the making and almost-unmaking of 12 Monkeys, Fulton and Pepe were on hand as the $30 million project detonated under the weight of most every nightmare a filmmaker could dream up. Neatly structured, it captures Gilliam's great enthusiasm, willingness to be shown in any circumstance, and the years of dreaming over a film he still hopes to make. It'll be the first compulsory movie for Film 101 that will have students laughing through their cold chills.

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