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

March 28, 2003

Somehow all the facile comparisons of the war in Iraq to movies and television and videogames-not reality, not missiles and bombs and fires and dead soldiers and dead civilians-reminds me of a joke. Guy walks into a bar with jumper cables hanging around his neck, yells out, "Gimme a beer." Bartender says, "Okay, but don't start anything." I don't know why it reminds me, but....

Go! Go! Gone!

A few words about Oscar before talking about Chris Rock's Head of State, Peter Sollett's Raising Victor Vargas, Steve James' Stevie, Coline Serreau's Chaos and Milestone's silent comedy DVD compilation The Cook and Other Treasures. Amid the tsunamis of psychosis and bursts of emotion, my two favorite flashes from the Academy Awards that I haven't seen remarked upon: after Roman Polanski's deserved win as Best Director, there's a cutaway to Martin Scorsese, whose face accommodates the loss but almost instantly reveals the wide nervous dangerous grin he had as a young man in Hollywood, in the early 1970s when his malefic black beard and tempestuous demeanor led some to say he looked then like Charles Manson. That, and the glimpse of Harvey Weinstein urging Rob Marshall onto the stage at Chicago's Best Picture win when Martin Richards was going up producer, with a gracious "Go! Go!" Of Adrien Brody, there will be many things to say for many years to come.

Stateless

Chris Rock's toothless PG-13 Head of State is a yawnsome disappointment, existing in an unreal political neverland. There are very few pungent political pokes and even fewer laughs. Shocking, considering how many comedians have said that Rock's post-SNL rebirth as a political voice changed their notion of what comedy can, and ought, to accomplish.

The perfect anecdote

The perfect antidote to an utter wash like Head of State is a modest slice of perfection like Peter Sollett's debut feature, Raising Victor Vargas. Drawing on his superb 1999 short, Five Feet High and Rising, which is on several DVD compilations, Sollett and his collaborators have etched the sort of glorious, tender, comic, oft-profane, full-blooded, fully inhabited microcosm of life and love among teenagers on the Lower East Side of New York that says more than most epics. I reviewed it for indieWIRE.

Watching Big Brother

I've been waiting to see the first dismissive reviews of another Sundance winner, Steve James' generally well-received documentary, Stevie, and the Village Voice's Jim Hoberman does not disappoint. I saw Stevie again recently with an unsentimental young documentary-maker who has a burning passion for cinema verite, and it was interesting to hear her reactions to several elements, including the complicated issue, addressed within the film, of whether James is exploiting someone from his past just by continuing to shoot. (She also had questions about the use of slow motion at certain points, as well as an intermittently foreboding score). Still, I find it a reminder that documentaries are about truth, and great documentaries are about lives.

Hoop Dreams was the 1994 gem from Chicago's Kartemquin Films group, several of whom are involved in Steve James' Stevie, a portrait deeper, denser and darker than that hopeful classic. Through the Big Brother program while in graduate school at Southern Illinois, James had mentored a 10-year-old ball of confusion named Stevie Fielding. Years later, James decided to take a short visit to see how Stevie had fared since, unaware than he had set out on a journey that would result in more than five years of shooting. Shortly after James' first return visit, the angry, confused Fielding was accused of a terrible crime: molesting an 8-year-old niece. James follows the pathways of justice and the cycles of abuse that eddy over the generations of Stevie's family, and those whom Stevie knows in his small Southern Illinois town. While challenging cliched preconceptions about poor Southerners and about family bonds, Stevie is at its core a painfully empathetic, richly etched portrait of a 27-year-old man who has confounded everyone, who has been failed by everyone who's tried to help or love him. Yet we also get glimpses of his lonely, angry step-grandmother, the once abused mother of his young victim, members of the community shocked at Stevie's actions, and most importantly, his learning-impaired girlfriend, Tanya. She radiates hope and love even at the most confusing of times, and her hopeful words at the movie's end, about why "nobody should be lonely," is a moment of radiance, even transcendence.

James worked closely with Kartemquin Films partner Gordon Quinn and Adam Singer during the film's long process, and they were instrumental in insisting that he make himself a character in his own film. Exquisitely paced, it's a generous feat of compassion, as well as a self-critical one, showing how we must look closer at life, as it's not a novel, but inevitably a tragedy. James didn't intend to be a character in his story, he told me before Sundance. "On the first trip down, we decided it made sense to at least do some amount of the filming with me included. Given the personal nature of the approach to this story, it seemed best to have the initial reunion with Stevie [take place] on camera. I did it with reluctance. I've never been a particular fan of the diary film. I've always been pretty suspicious of filmmaker's motives when they include themselves in their films. Part of what made me feel okay about being on camera at first was knowing that as director and editor, I could decide to include it in the final film or leave it out."

But the original modest goals slipped away. "I spent a lot of time grappling with whether it was right to even continue making the film. My journal throughout the making of the film is full of entries questioning my own motives and trying to come to grips with the fact that no matter how much I was castigating myself, I was going to continue making the film. The entries also show my struggle to deal with Stevie himself. How should I treat him? Should I hold him accountable for the crime even though he claimed to be innocent? How could I best help him if--as I firmly believed--he was guilty? These and other questions made me realize that if the film was going to be honest at all, I had to be more willing to insert myself into it. I was never really intending to make an objective portrait of Stevie, but now I knew that I needed to be more involved in his life, movie or no movie. And that if I was going to continue to make the movie, I had to include that. If this sounds like a step-by-step rational realization, it was anything but. Stevie is both the most honest film I have ever made and perhaps will ever make. And it was also the most personally painful."

I wondered how Stevie sits within documentary practice, or more specifically, the Kartemquin tradition. "Good question. I am now, I realize, part of that tradition. `Hoop Dreams' built on their veritŽ tradition of doing socially relevant stories, though no Kartemquin film that I know of had spent years following subjects. And I think that Stevie as a film, it tries, anyway, to paint a very complex portrait of Stevie, his fiance, his family, and the social service and legal system, a portrait in which there are gray areas and no easy answers. Kartemquin's films have often been complex but usually there are clear-cut characters that the audience roots for. Hoop Dreams was no exception. With Stevie, the viewer's feelings about the subjects, myself included, are complicated and at times troubling."

James says the form of the film, like other Kartemquin work, was dictated by the lives they observed. "Once the crime was committed, we knew that we wanted to follow the story until `Stevie' either went free or to prison. That took over four years. I've always considered myself the tortoise of directors. The hares are the guys that can make films or commercials good and fast. I am best chipping away at things. The thing about long-term storytelling that I find most satisfying is the relationships one builds with characters. People surprise me all the time in real life. In movies they rarely do. And I think that in a film if you stay with people long enough you end up with a true and surprisingly real portrait, not a snapshot. And that's infinitely more interesting. Long-term storytelling also makes you feel like you are living inside an unfolding novel. With `Hoop Dreams' I felt like I was in some modern-day Dickens novel. With `Stevie,' it was more like modern-day Faulkner." A longer version of my conversation with James, Quinn and Singer appears in the January 2003 issue of Filmmaker, still on the stands.

Critical Mass

But the most exciting thing that's come my way in weeks is issue 14 of Cinema Scope, a quarterly out of Toronto that you can get in larger cities, Tower Records and online. I'm a contributing editor, and even if I weren't - check out my extended interview about All the Real Girls with David Gordon Green and his cinematographer Tim Orr in the same issue - I'd still think it's the most exciting film magazine being put out in English today. Most of the time, it's like some of the nuttier issues of Film Comment put out under the hands of past editors Richard Corliss and Richard T. Jameson: idiosyncratic and impassioned as can be without sarcasm or cruelty. (For some of that, check out Edward Crouse's trashing of the admirers of James Fotopoulos in the current issue of Film Comment).

Here's what got me happily wound up: publisher and editor Mark Peranson spends ten pages of smaller-than-usual type talking to French critic-turned-filmmaker Olivier Assayas about the state of filmmaking and criticism in the world today. I went to the Vancouver Film Festival this year for a number of reasons, but one of them was to see his latest and most disliked feature, demonlover, and to meet him. As a programmer at that festival and at Rotterdam, Peranson spent a lot more time talking to the charming but staggeringly intense director of Late August, Early September (Fin aožt, debut sŽptembre) and Irma Vep, than I did. Their conversations, conducted in Assayas' fluent English, are some of the most cogent and inspiring words on films I've read in weeks. Here's part of how Peranson sums up this fascinating and misunderstood work: "Assayas takes archetypal characters in familiar situations, filters them through our unexpressed desires for domination, and then watches the sparks fly. Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen), demonlover's "heroine," is a particular kind of archetype produced by international capital. A sexy, take-no-prisoners businesswoman working ... to acquire the Japanese anime porn site demonlover.com, she's part Irma Vep, part Lara Croft, part Sherry Lansing, and the power she craves and exerts is soon enough scrambled. Beginning with a dreamlike, spectacularly nasty confrontation between Nielsen and "special guest star" Gina Gershon, Diane ends up overwhelmed by forces that demands her disempowerment; her control, and the idea of being able to control things, both vanish." A sample Assayas-ism: "Most of the movies I watch don't make sense for me, so I didn't feel like I was falling outside of the usual categories of cinema or filmmaking. I think it has to do with the context in which I made the film, which was, specifically, after making two movies which were straightforwardly narrative.

"Fin aožt, debut sŽptembre is not exactly structured like your mainstream movie, but it has a very clear narrative thread, and it was very autobiographical, with many close-to-documentary aspects.... I just felt I had gone as far as I could in that specific moment in that specific direction. The movies had been doing fairly well, so it's the perfect moment to take maximum risks.... I thought it was also, like, the beginning of the 21st century, and I thought it was a pretty good moment just to start from scratch. Start again and ask myself how I could make something that would (a) be as close as possible to what attracts me aesthetically, as close as possible to my perception of the forces at work in our modern world but (b) would be coherent with the questions I have on what cinema is, meaning in terms of making movies but also in terms of watching movies - what the experience of cinema is in today's society, and questioning the rules of cinema and the rules on which cinema is based. And I think that questioning these rules when you are making a tiny budget semi-experimental film is one thing, but when you do it on a bigger scale, from inside the system, it's much more dangerous and therefore more exciting. It's also about asking myself why in mainstream films - and I'm talking about mainstream French budgets which are very small by US standards - I can't have the freedom of adventure, the freedom of movement that, I don't know, Radiohead have when they are making their recent records, or Don DeLillo has when he's constructing some of his novels. In music, in theatre, in literature you have people who have been breaking these rules for ages, and connecting to wide audiences, so I thought that movies deserve the same."

Read more of the interview at the link above; Palm Pictures releases demonlover later this year.

Chaos theory

Coline Serreau's brilliant black comedy, Chaos, still making its way around the country, is a brisk, pungent take on the cascading deceptions and denial of intimacy in contemporary urban middle class lives. Witty from start to finish, Chaos flings apart the dysfunctional lives of Parisian couple Paul (Vincent Lindon) and Hélène (Catherine Frot). Taking a side street, their world changes when Noemie, a young prostitute (Rachida Brakni) running from her pimps, collides with their car in a bloody smear. "It's easy to walk away from trouble," Paul says. Hélène is mortified, and abandons her husband and son, whose ordered lives quickly disintegrate into all manner of comic emotional anarchy. It's a black comedy of intimacy fatigue, and the zigs at Noemie's past that's both darkly melodramatic and pleasingly clever. The acting's terrific throughout; Brakni won a French Cesar for "most promising screen actress." Serreau makes excellent use of digital video to accelerate the pace of her comedy of flusteration, and we're left with a genuinely contemporary, unpredictable and gratifying comedy without a shred of cynicism. In the war for love and sexual power, Serreau knows where all the hatchets are buried.

Remote Possibilities

I'm still swamped by the extras on Miramax's edition of Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, but I enjoyed taking a look at Milestone's The Cook and Other Treasures, which assembles two extremely funny, once-lost Fatty Arbuckle shorts, 1918's The Cook, which co-stars Buster Keaton, and 1917's A Reckless Romeo. Harold Lloyd's 1920 Number, Please is one of the extras. Criterion's edition of Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe von Trotta's The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum is a timeless examination of terrorism and power, drawn from experiences in 1970s Germany; interviews with the two directors are among the extras, telling complements to a still-valuable political drama.

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