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

April 11, 2003

Style versus substance: That's at least one concern prompted by Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow, Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, Abbas Kiarostami's Ten and a new biography of Lawrence of Arabia producer Sam Spiegel. There's more below.

Eastern Western

Better Luck Tomorrow, Justin Lin's second feature after the promising Shopping For Fangs, sparked audience arguments at Sundance 2002. It's a kicky original, a stylish burst of serene teen nihilism well served by Paramount-MTV Films' tagline: "Never Underestimate an Overachiever." Following a quartet of peer-pressured Chinese-American high school seniors, who would be caricatured side characters in other American movies, into increasingly deadly crime, Lin's smart, entertaining descent into an unseen-until-now hell is a worthy successor to Scorsese's Mean Streets and Goodfellas, with dazzling momentum and sleek design.

Everyone's wrapped up in the academic pursuits expected of Asian-American students, but other forces are at work as well. (Like in Charles Schulz's Peanuts, this place of clean lines and uncluttered horizons is virtually adult-free.) There are neat allusions to the work of directors like Wong Kar-Wai, Takeshi Kitano and John Woo, but that's not the movie's foreground, just its imaginative wrapper, embracing the characters' romanticized perception of their quickly-fraying world, much as in City of God. Whatever warped angle on bad-ass behavior there is on screen exists first in the characters' own hormone-charged emotions. Lin's also aware of predecessors like Rebel Without a Cause, yet his movie never seems derivative, simply inspired and intensely observant. It's the best teen movie I've seen since Donnie Darko, and I have to say I love its emotional spark and pop panache. The male leads are all dynamic performers: Parry Shen as Ben, the lead genius, Jason J. Tobin, Sung Kang, Roger Fan, and in the role of another smart go-getter, a cheerleader who wants to become a cop, the intensely charismatic Karin Anna Cheung.

Artifice Thief

Neil Jordan's The Good Thief is a snazzy, cosmopolitan lark steeped in themes of fakery and duplicity, suiting the writer-director's wildly eclectic career.

It's a remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's suave 1955 masterpiece of effortless cool, the heist classic Bob le Flambeur, available as a Criterion DVD. Nolte, with more gravel in his voice than a Texas highway, plays weary yet cheery Bob Montagnet, a Marseilles career gambler and sometimes heroin user who may or may not be half-French; may or may not have bought a Picasso from Pablo himself; who may or may not have run out of luck. He's all character, though, this relentless raconteur, and Nolte plays him to the craggy, leonine hilt. "You look good for a man your age," someone tells him. What age is that? he asks. "Stone Age" is the deadpan reply. Bob makes the goddamnedest caveman, a chivalrous savage.

French cop Roger (Tchzeky Karyo), Bob's enabler-in-crime, is more concerned about a clean Bob than a dissolute one. What could he have in mind? Following the contours of most of Melville's work, Jordan, whose other films include The Crying Game, The Butcher Boy, and The End of the Affair, demonstrates the necessary bond between the thief and lawman. (A similar dynamic exists in the work of John Woo, who is also a major Melville disciple, and who is "presenting" the upcoming reissue of the director's final gem, 1970's [Le cercle rouge.

The film opens at a tear with Bob on a bender, yet he's alert enough to become platonic protector to Anne (Georgian actress Nutsa Kukhianidze), a Russian gamine of 17-going-on-60 who's on the verge of turning tricks. (Bob's father-like relationship with Anne echoes Jordan's Mona Lisa.) Kukhianidze adroitly captures a particular eastern European affectlessness. Her nasal deadpan is priceless throughout, especially when called upon to describe how she sees herself: "A very tired girl from a deeply dysfunctional family."

As in the original, Bob has a young protege, Paulo (Said Taghmaoui) who falls in love with Anne, and Bob watches from atop his mount of experience. There are scenes in both pictures where Bob looks upon the twined, sleeping forms of his young charges; Jordan's variation is his most affectionate nod to the earlier work. The 53-year-old writer-director says that he couldn't have made the film without being able to comment on the idea of a remake or a forgery. His solution is to have a casino robbery planned under the noses of the police, which is a distraction from a second robbery. The casino walls are lined with priceless paintings, which are in fact forgeries; the originals are in a nearby vault the regular motley crew of characters will steal while Bob plays roulette. Plot ensues. Yet none of it fazes Bob. "See how simple it all becomes when you embrace your own Judas?" is representative of the lines Nolte works over with his deadpan, not even requiring the use of eyebrows. Each character gets similar privileged moments, and it's more in line with Melville than say, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, which merely apes the French forebear's framing and layering of dark: blacks on grays on greens.

Working on a $26 million budget with cinematographer Chris Menges, who shot Jordan's debut, the lovely and sadly out-of-print Angel (Channel 4 Films has the rights, Jordan tells me) as well as Michael Collins, Jordan is able to confect with light his customary dreamland, as if the entire world were his nightclub. The jam-packed score tickles the ears, ranging from Arabic pop by Cheb Mami and Rachid Taha to Leonard Cohen dirges in his own marble-gargling voice: "You live your life as if it's real, a thousand kisses deep."

Menges' camera has a confidence when it moves into low-rent situations, not as if it's a voyeur over Bob's shoulder, but still ready to embrace the potential chaos in any pursuit. "I was trying to approximate a hangover, basically, the camera style, you know what I mean?," Jordan told me in his clipped Irish brogue in an interview in Chicago. "The feeling your eyes get when you're hungover, y'know? Lights flare too brightly, you avoid direct sunlight. Sometimes movement seems staggered, where we double-printed and shot at twelve frames, stuff like that. Very schizophrenic kind of camera style."

Jordan's best movies have a jazzy sway that trump unimaginative coherence, which may have worked against The Good Thief's fortunes at first. Warner Bros. developed the project, but decided that the sleek, lighter-than-air Ocean's 11 made more sense commercially. (Over a half billion dollars in the bank later, at least their balance sheets are righteous.) Los Angeles Times [fuddy-duddy Kenneth Turan  dismissed the gaudy energy of Jordan's thirteenth movie from behind his big gray beard as "flashy but tiresome... as loaded with pretension as it is atmosphere... unconvincingly romanticized." Another forgery!

My time with Jordan is almost over. We both stare out at from the up-high hotel suite a view of Lake Michigan, toward Navy Pier and its Ferris wheel. It's almost a tableau from one of his movies. The finance for his epic about the Borgia family fell through because of its bleakness, and he took the time to finish his fourth book of fiction. "I ran out of projects," he concedes. "For years, I've had three things [at any given time], wait to see which would happen. I wrote The Borgias, but it wasn't the time. I couldn't get enough money to make it, so I had to stop it. I've been writing, working with actors." There's also a New York thriller in development. He has to call the  screenwriter when I go. But for a moment, we're both transfixed by late afternoon sun off the water. I think of one of Bob's lines in Nolte's amazing rasp: "Isn't beauty always mysterious?"

Video Killed the Movie Star

Some cinema landmarks pass quietly, others in a flurry of press releases.

When Landmark Theaters made an announcement last week that started the countdown for transforming moviegoing as we know it into an all-digital format, despite what audiences, filmmakers or art might demand. With backing from the manufacturers of the projection equipment and its necessary Microsoft software, Landmark's prime urban art-house screens in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York will soon program in digital formats.

Money and second-party investment will accelerate the shift. Theater chains have been strapped for cash over the past decade, after a building boom that left too many cineplexes with too many screens. Chains that have gone into bankruptcy have been bought up by a handful of huge companies, notably Regal Entertainment Group, owned by reclusive Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz. (The word "reclusive" sticks to Anschutz like "rude" to Harvey Weinstein.) The largest chain, with 5,663 screens in 524 locations, combining Regal with Edwards Theaters and United Artists Theaters, it cherry-picked several hundred Hoyts Cinemas in February. Anschutz's cash comes from Qwest Communications, one of the most advanced fiber-optic networks. Wonder what he wants to do with all that real estate? (Several venues have experimented with Tuesday night closed-circuit concerts.)

Such developments are more significant as the consistent journalistic casting of George Lucas as Darth Vader. In the May issue of Premiere, Rick McCallum, producer of Star Wars: Episode I and II says, "We're not trying to force anybody and we're not the antichrist of film. Of course we want 10,000 theaters. We want 37,000 ultimately, but we also know the practical realities of getting those in."

The most galling reality of this baby-step stage of this seemingly inevitable technological and economic shift is how much work there is shot by filmmakers, particularly beginners, in digital formats which are technically inept, attempting to emulate the texture and color range of film with inferior equipment. Will Landmark facilitate the work of adventurous filmmakers who cannot afford the cost of striking multiple 35mm prints of their work? Or will it mean a greater range of inferior, marginal movies being flung into the marketplace? And will it force art-house films out of smaller markets that cannot afford digital projection, with small companies no longer making film prints? Anyone trying to answer those questions today would be a fool.

Still, one of the most remarkable movies you'll see this year, Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, is a DV-to-film work, and a maximal bit of inspired minimalism. Shooting with a consumer-level digital-video camera affixed to the dashboard of a car, Kiarostami offers ten scenes from the life of a beautiful, privileged Tehran divorcee, dealing with her riotously disrespectful 10-year-old son, and several female strangers to whom she offers rides, including a pious older woman, a friend whose boyfriend bullies her, and a prostitute. We don't leave the car. Only one shot reveals the world as anything more than a passing blur. The image quality is often bleached, or blown-out. The grain dances. But a master is at work. It is possible to make something great from almost nothing. But you have to be a Kiarostami, not just some lucky buck with an XL-1 in your hand.

Digital video allows Kiarostami to step back. Although the 35mm cinematography of his The Wind Will Carry Us is astonishingly lustrous, the Iranian director now prefers the results he gets from shooting with small, easily overlooked video equipment. He once told me what he liked most about his shot-on-video ending of Taste of Cherry, which reveals the filmmaking process. He wanted to rupture "what I don't like in cinema, which is the attempt to create the illusion of reality."

With the smart, surprisingly funny Ten, Kiarostami rehearsed with his cast of non-professionals, set up the cameras, told them to drive until they were running out of things to say. No radio setup. No video monitors. In essence, in the moment, and no director. "If anyone were to ask me what I did as a director on this film," he says of the ninety-four minutes he drew from twenty-three hours of footage, "I'd say, 'Nothing and yet if I didn't exist, this film wouldn't have existed.'"

But it's not the "dramaturgy of reality," as one cinema-veritZ pioneer described his ideal about documentary and its construction. There are emotional effects that couldn't have been planned, only coordinated. "In Ten, we have a shot in the car with the little boy facing the camera," the 62-year-old master says. "The scene takes place in front of the camera. And yet there are also people who come over, lower the window and peer into the car. That's documentary. This is background. They look at the camera. But what happens in front of the camera isn't documentary because it's guided and controlled in a way. The person in front of the camera manages to forget its presence; it vanishes for him. Emotion is created in this way."

The little boy is probably the most annoying, angry child I've ever seen in a movie, which is part of his (and Ten's) charm. He was in the row in front of me at an awards ceremony at a film festival in Thessaloniki, Greece, and he was a smart brat just like in the film, and I treasure the glimpse of him framing faces and movements around him with thumb and forefinger of each hand, like the frame of a film. Oh-oh. Don't give him a camera.

But he's not the most memorable part of Ten. There is an unforgettable moment in this movie, like a punch to the heart, that is staggering and beautiful, in which someone reveals an unlikely transformation, something that we don't expect from an Iranian film, nor from this character. We watch the shot, mouth agape. It's an extraordinary lightning bolt of a moment, and to make it even more powerful, there's a technological glitch, which I will ascribe to the sort of situational fortune that Kiarostami is seeking, rather than a canny, planned effect. The shot is out-of-focus, perhaps because of a sudden flurry of movement in the frame. It's one of the few in the movie that is notably soft.

"In my films, there are shots where the emotional impact goes beyond direction," Kiarostami says. "Triumphing over it, and the emotion, becomes more powerful than cinema itself." Cinema. Not film. Not video. Not hi-def. Not exhibition. Not DVD. Cinema. There's the power. There's the rub.

Writing last year in Sight & Sound, Geoff Andrew made interesting between Ten and Krzysztof Kieslowski's last film, Three Colors: Red. "Krzysztof Kieslowski once told me," Andrew writes, "of his affection for what he regarded as his most personal film, Three Colors Red: "It's a bit like one of those car commercials you see on television: it seems so small - there's no action - and yet it's so large inside. There are so many layers there you can find if you want to." The same, perhaps, might be said of 10, which constitutes another crucial advance in a career that has merged humanism, rationalism, mysticism, modernism, postmodernism, socio-political comment, realism and poetry to unique effect. In contrast with so many films being made today, it has nothing to do with flashy technique, fashion, stars, big budgets, special effects, self-aggrandizement or marketing opportunities, and everything to do with using cinema as a tool for the cool, sympathetic contemplation, and celebratio,  of the uncertainties of everyday life. It may just be that Kiarostami's quiet minimalism, more than anything else now on our screens, points to the most richly rewarding route cinema might take on its journey into the future."

The Fat Man Sings

On the other hand, there are the moguls and super-moguls, the screamers, reamers and fat men of the marketplace. "This is the saddest book I ever read," Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of Don Quixote, and I'll say the saddest book I read this month is Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni's Sam Spiegel ($30, Simon & Schuster). A biography rich with the appetite and faults of Sam Spiegel, the legendarily combative and hedonistic (and even quixotic) producer of Lawrence of Arabia, The African Queen, The Bridge over the River Kwai, and On The Waterfront, it celebrates the intelligence and drive of a legendary film figure who was born in old Europe, participated in Zionist efforts in pre-Israel Palestine, then puttered through criminal enterprises in France, England and the United States, all of which deported him.  And then, in his early fifties, success struck.

The product of seven years of intense, impressively footnoted research, "Sam Spiegel"-outside of the Lawrence section, supported by David Lean scholar Kevin Brownlow's extensive records-reads all too much like a hyper-extended Vanity Fair article, hinting at things unknown and perverse with litanies of rhetorical questions and leaving the reader more saddened than enlightened. I'm one who believes a bad person, even those with monstrous souls and appetites, can make or facilitate art, but Fraser-Cavassoni's study is deeply unattractive throughout, suggesting yet another alternately charismatic and belligerent fat man who lives to eat and likes the "softness" of young girls' skin until his dying days, dating women fifty or sixty years younger than himself. The former Women's Wear Daily reporter hints haughtily at the relentless, pre-Viagra libido of a man who believed sex only began at two partners, suggesting bondage and group sex were more important to him than work in his waning years. The writer, daughter of biographer Antonia Fraser and stepdaughter of Harold Pinter, started her career as an assistant on Spiegel's final film, Betrayal, from Pinter's script. Her crisp narrative, leaving us with a self-important, patronizing wretch who used genuine Mitteleuropean charm to weasel the world all his life, is a betrayal all its own, showing the all-too-common patterns of power in the studio system.

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