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

July 28, 2003

In Short, Phooey

Beyond their intrinsic qualities, why are movies like 28 Days Later, Whale Rider, Capturing the Friedmans and Spellbound finding such passionate crowds? The dispiriting Hollywood season--I've just seen another big-budget botch that I can't review until next week, and other movies are being withheld from general review. Seabiscuit was previewed for most of Chicago's press after my newspaper deadline, and the Lara Croft sequel after the deadline for this column. If I do go to see these 7:30 p.m. screenings --to which one is generally no longer allowed to invite a guest - I feel like a gatecrasher, an uninvited party guest among the overbooked free-pass guests. It's as if studios have decided that reviews and critics dont matter. In that case, I wonder, why show Hulk or Johnny English or Seabiscuit for preview at all? Let a thousand quote whores bloom, and let me watch something in the uninsulting comfort of home on DVD. Or say, dine at this tasty new Mexican place on the corner.

Have American movies become one big sideshow (See under: comic book-derived coming-of-age origin stories) or one big freakshow (See under: Bad Boys II)? I don't want to think about it - I'd rather run off and join a film festival and, to be honest, I'm not in any rush to see or review movies when it's made inconvenient for everyone who does this job who doesn't have a television show or a job at metropolitan daily. In short: Phooey. No whining. No sense of entitlement, which is rife in a lot of internet-based columns. Just phooey. Let me dream the dreams of others in peace.

Marketing Zombies Instead of to Them

Fox Searchlight furthered its reputation as the most innovative of arthouse marketers by issuing what's arguable the first movie with its own DVD extras while still in the movie theaters. Their 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle from a script by novelist Alex Garland, is a $30-plus-million-and-climbing word-of-mouth hit in the U.S., after recouping its relatively cheap $8 million cost in the U.K. alone.

Even fans I've talked to who felt let down by the film's second half and reshot ending get emotional when they stop me to ask what I thought about this dark gem, which isn't really a zombie movie, isn't really science fiction. Geez! It's a creepy social critique! Is that permitted? Is that entertainment?

In modern-day London, animal-rights activists release apes they don't realize have been infected by researchers with a virus called "Rage." (Knock knock. Who's there? Metaphor.) Our hero wakes up in a depopulated world, and the clues we're given throughout are often ambiguous, even the seemingly upbeat ending. It's the kind of movie where people I know come up to me and ask if I've seen it, then start in on a betrayed rant that I can only answer with, "Hey, I didn't make the damn thing. I only wrote a review of it that you apparently never read."

28 Days Later has been out on DVD in England for a while, and some clever lad or lass at Fox Searchlight came up with the idea realized in the movie's new ads: "See one movie/two endings." The Motion Picture Association of America only allows one version of a film to be in release at any given time, so their solution is to splice Boyle's original ending onto the thousand-plus prints in release. It's a neat extra to an unusual circumstance: if such add-ons becomes commonplace, they'll turn out to be about as interesting as listening to the director's commentary on a movie like Flintstones 2 or Battlefield Earth. I'm tempted to see it again: despite the moldy sheen to the shot-on-digital-video images, there's a grimy, nightmarish consistency that sticks in memory. Plus how many creepycrawlygrimyscary movies are there in the theaters nowadays to take someone to?

Happy Shiny Shiny

DVD releases themselves feel more and more out of control: after I check out the extras on the pile of review copies I get each week, I'm usually too bushed to actually re-watch a movie, no matter how good or even "classic" it is. If I ever had a collector's fervor, it's all burned away now. I've watched so many variations on Criterion's restoration demonstration that I could be a tour guide at their midtown Manhattan headquarters. There's a lulling sameness, like visual NPR. (Imagine watching a waveform of Corey Flintof's voice.)

Among the most driven of DVD collectors are those trolling eBay for out-of-print Criterion titles. Italian Marxist poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, Salo, or, The 120 Days of Sodom, fetches a high premium. Who's seen this movie? It plays this week in Chicago at the Siskel Film Center in 35mm, and it's also showing as part of a revival of Pasolini's last four pictures at cinematheques around the country. I remember the movie's first showing in Chicago, at the Three Penny, in the early 1980s, when the theater's owner (not today's proprietor) whipped out the shears under dark of night and scissored out every scene he found distasteful, losing a good twenty minutes or so in the process. The radical film director's film was a radically different thing, a jumpy, spluttery hash not unlike the Universal Pictures version of Brazil collected on that stuffed-to-the-gills Criterion DVD. (At the end of the run, the owner pasted the print back together before shipping it off to the proper depot.)

The uncut movie? It's surely prized largely for its rarity. "Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide" calls it a "BOMB... Fascists brutalize and degrade adolescents. Sadism, scatology and debauchery galore: Pasolini... wallows in his own sensationalism." That makes for a particularly nasty critique by the unsigned reviewer, as Pasolini was murdered shortly after by a young man who he attempted to pick up, who bashed in his head, stole his convertible and then ran it over Pasolini's head, as the story goes. Novelist Gary Indiana, who wrote an excellent analysis for the BFI's Modern Classic series (an invaluable set of what are essentially superb, extended liner notes) has dismissed the connection. "The problem is... that Pasolini's murder and this particular film were so readily linked, and eclipsed the rest of Pasolini's work, in a certain journalistic kind of discussion. Salo is a satire of consumer society and perfectly consistent with Pasolini's other films and his polemical writings. What he saw as an extreme spiritual crisis in modern society demanded this particular form, and these extremely unnerving images."

To paraphrase a Neil LaBute stock line, a certain disappointed segment of the moviegoing demographic is starting to reject sequels and star vehicles that seem like sequels before-the-fact, and realize it may just be better to be unnerved, spooked, scared or shaken up than to turn to your date afterwards and say, "Hey... Whaddya want to eat?"

In the Time of Nic

Nestled at the butt end of Chicago's Navy Pier in its Grand Ballroom last Saturday night, unnoted by the usual seething throngs threatening to capsize that immense mall, the Chicago International Film Festival tosses its summer gala, a mid-career salute to Nicolas Cage.

It took the star of Con Air twenty years to get here; it takes more than twenty minutes to navigate through Taste of Pier, a Mayor Richard M. Daley daydream come true. Pricey banquet tables are spaced around the ballroom before a the story-high screen that offers video greetings from distant co-workers, close-ups of Cage and clips. Recent CIFF honoree, veteran newsreader, Bill Kurtis intones press-clipping anecdotes about Cage's career. Speedboats chop the slate dusk waters in impossible profusion while Nic drives fast; Nic yells; Nic says "fuck!"

Chicago Tribune reviewer Michael Wilmington mounts the stage, clutching a water bottle, growling his tribute by dropping names of assignment editors for long-since-published profiles in Los Angeles-based publications. He cites a higher authority to challenge another critic's low esteem for Cage's looks: his mother. "You know," he says Mrs. Wilmington told Cage, "'In ten years, you'll be the biggest thing in Hollywood.' My mother couldn't make it tonight, she's got a bad cold, but she was right. John Simon was wrong!"

The auditorium pops with flashes like a field filled with fireflies when a ten-foot-high Cher offers her best wishes. Roger Ebert, on tape, is dressed all in black, and his white hair makes him look more Yohji Yamamoto-chic than even lounge lizard John Malkovich, who purrs a non-anecdote on tape. Ebert says that Cage's Leaving Las Vegas character, "hungover beyond belief" makes it "one of the best movies I've ever seen." Ebert extends the expected sort of tribute by calling the star of Family Man "one of our great actors, one of our most valuable actors."

Cage's uncle Francis Coppola sends a tape as well, one that's badly underexposed, his face occluded like Kurtz's in Apocalypse Now if only Brando had worn Hawaiian shirts. Taking the stage, Cage shrugs at his twenty-two years in the biz, saying, "I still don't really know what it is that I do," aside from the gift of getting "paid for lying" while looking for "truth." "If you think of ten million years from now, I don't know what movies will mean to the animals that exist then," the star of Gone in 60 Seconds ventures.

Soon, the Pier's regularly scheduled Saturday fireworks erupt. "I love fireworks. I convinced him they're in his honor," jokes CIFF boss Michael Kutza at the bar. So are they going to spell out "Nic"? "Clint," he says, laughing, dropping the name of the previous honoree. "I convinced him last year!"

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