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

May 2, 2003

Two regrets I have about my return from the Buenos Aires Fifth International Film Festival of Independent Cinema: I wasn't able to take my digital camera, so I have only a handful of shots from a disposable camera to show for my stay. (If my memory doesn't hold out.) And also the flu I seem to have caught, after two weeks of lovely weather and perfect health, after a layover in the Sao Paulo airport that was part of a twenty-six hour voyage home. For next Friday's column, I'm sure I'll have gotten the fortitude back to pull together all my notes on the city, the movies, the discoveries, the hope for Argentine cinema in a time of severe fiscal crisis, and the glorious food at ridiculous prices.

Unloaded

Before seeing the first appearance of Cyclops in X2 at the advance screening I attended, I caught sight of a new sort of mutant: a security guard with night vision goggles, taking in the audience in brilliant battlefield green, searching for any hint of piracy. I've always been chilled by the story about Brian DePalma's preferred seating for previews of his pictures: front row, turned to face the audience. While understandable, this new, impersonal turn toward the press is equally unnerving. Would the front row fanboys on the press list be so low as to be sneak clips for their websites?

An invitation letter arrived today for the press-only screening for The Matrix Reloaded, which includes advance notice that the showing will be "monitored for unauthorized recording" and attendance indicates "consent to a physical search of your belongings and person." I wonder how soon a videotape of a screening audience will be bootlegged on the internet.

Brood Sugar

Trumping the multi-character concoction of The Usual Suspects, Bryan Singer's X-Men sequel, X2, juggles a line-up which challenges his "reputation as a dark, brooding filmmaker" with a cast of fourteen principal super-powered characters and a mix of tones that ranges from delicate comedy to clever sociopolitical commentary. (Early reviews run from the exultant to the merely sour, such as the one by Armond White in this week's New York Press.)

On a larger scale than the original--reportedly costing $120 million, with 800 special effects shots and 200 enhanced shots--X2 is still cheeky, serious-minded and even idealistic at the same time. Despite being based on a long-lived comics series, the emotions seem more of the real world than most studio features, maybe even a blockbuster with a conscience. The oddly resonant scenes include one that Singer describes as  "a coming out scene that goes, very, very, very, very, very, very wrong."

 "Whether you're coming out and you're gay, or you just feel completely alone in the world and reveal yourself, who you are and what your interests are, it's tough," the 38-year-old director says. "Adolescents struggle with this sense of alone-less."

To describe every character, their goofy names, absurd powers and defining wounds would fill a column, as well as give away too much of the smorgasbord of eye candy. The actors include Hugh Jackman, reveling in the "pent-up amnesiac rage" of Wolverine and sporting 1970s Clint Eastwood muttonchops, and the dueling velvetiness of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen ("What have you done now, Charrrrrrrrrrles?" McKellen gets to purr, as well as levitate, smirk to high heaven and symbolically walk on water). Brian Cox, Halle Berry, Famke Jansen, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn -Stamos, Alan Cumming, Anna Paquin, Kelly Hu and Aaron Stanford also join the melee. Does it make sense? I'm not sure how to describe the effect, playing like a fistful of mini-movies, exuberant in individual scenes but dizzyingly complicated overall.

The women seem more decisive than in most movies in X2, you think while watching it, and Singer agrees. "The men are unusually castrated in this picture, I started to realize," he says with some kind of wonder in his voice. "Xavier and Cyclops are imprisoned; Wolverine is relegated to being a babysitter. It's kind of fun that way. Storm makes weather, a tornado? Why not twenty? We had more money and time." He adds, "It's also first time a woman [Berry] in a movie, or so I am told, has been put behind the seat of an F-16 fighter."

There's other gender bending at work.  There's an amusing scene with Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, where he seems to bed several characters, and not only females. "That actually came from an idea my attorney had, my extremely heterosexual attorney, David Feldman," Singer says, grinning. He had the idea "that Hugh Jackman should sleep with Halle Berry. By any means necessary. I said, 'It's not going to happen.' And he said, 'Can he sleep with Rebecca Stamos?' And I'm like, 'No, no, no.' I started thinking... [Her Mystique character] can be anybody. That scene evolved, it became very exciting, and also very expensive." In shooting the scene, an extra bit was filmed for the gag reel with Singer. "Yes, I got a big wet kiss from Hugh Jackman. Women, be jealous! And some men, for that matter. It's really sick, because I'm dressed in Jean's outfit. I'm supposed to be in the position [to illustrate a bit] we were doing then Hugh just grabbed me and gave me a big, wet kiss. I was very disoriented and couldn't fully appreciate the moment."

Singer lapses into publicity-ese. "As rampaging as Wolverine can get, you'd still trust him with your kids. That's what enables him, as volatile as he gets in X2, he's a mother lion defending the cubs. That I think comes from inside Jackman as a person." A pause. "Plus he's pretty."

The violence is toned down for the PG-13 rating. "We first came in with an R rating. We made very insignificant changes," Singer says. "A couple little beats here, little moments here to get it down."

Why? "It's for viewership. You want the film to reach a lot more people. Kids are much more savvy. I don't think it's going to freak anyone out. It's part of my requirements, I'm making X-Men, I'm not trying to make an R-rated X-Men movie, I'm making a PG-13-rated X-Men movie, I'm keenly aware of that. There were some sequences that were a little more intense. But I think it'll play okay."

The opening scene is a terrorist attack on the Oval Office by a mutant with strong religious beliefs. Singer says that the story was conceived before 9/11. "But I think these events, as large as they are, [events like] September 11 and Iraq, I think these kinds of conflicts..." He pauses. "Names have changed, jungles have turned to deserts, but the conflicts have remained the same and they will continue to as long as people of different races and nationalities and religious groups exist on this earth. To comment on it, particularly with the X-Men universe, which was born at the height of the Civil Rights movement, is inevitable and unavoidable."

There's a love scene between two characters who've held back until the middle of this second installment that plays like a riff on one of the most famous scenes in The Empire Strikes Back. "I love The Empire Strikes Back, it's very mush an inspiration to this, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't," Singer claims. Like Empire, he defined his challenge as "making a second film that was more rich in character and with a larger landscape, and perhaps darker, but with humor and more romance. But when I shot that scene, I decided they would kiss on the set that morning. I shut down for about an hour, feeling that in the scene, they were talking about their relationship, not acting on it. After sitting in a field for an hour, it was like, 'Ah! They should kiss!' I turned to the camera crew, I said, 'You look like a bunch of heterosexual males. How many of you think these two characters should kiss? I got eleven yeses, and one, 'Can they do more?'" He continues, "One night toward the end of the shoot, I sat down with some of my friends and watched Empire, which I hadn't watched in years. And there's this damn scene where Princess Leia's helping fix the Millennium Falcon and this guy comes up, he's not as roguish as he thinks..." He trails off, having described his own scene in X2.

"I'm very proud of that moment, it was spontaneous and necessary to further that journey." He pauses. "Thank God I'm friends with George Lucas!"

Friends With the Enemy

Cruelty is something John Malkovich has always claimed to understand. In his intently cinematic debut as a director, the legendary-to-some Steppenwolf actor, based on Nicholas Shakespeare's adaptation of his own sturdy novel, "The Dancer Upstairs," Malkovich does few of the things you'd expect from an actor-turned-director and most of the things you'd want from this complicated character. First shown at Sundance 2002, "Dancer" is a forceful and persuasive variation on one of the most violent pre-Al Qaeda terrorist movements, Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), the 1980s Peruvian post-Maoist radical group, and the 1992 capture of Abimael Guzman, their messianic leader.  Such cell-driven terrorist methods and procedures are now all-too-familiar to a larger world. The film was completed before September 11, 2001, and it's a tribute to Malkovich's intellectual curiosity and dramatic sophistication that "The Dancer Upstairs" continues to have so much to tell us about today's world, and about the decades of recent history that define our particular historical moment. For a longer review that I wrote right after seeing the film at its Sundance debut, go here . There's also an amusing Lynn Hirschberg cover story in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine that may be Fox Searchlight's biggest coup in waiting this long to release Malkovich's film.

 

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