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

August 9, 2003

The canonical cudgel

After my review of S.W.A.T. appeared earlier this week on the site, a reader who hadn't seen the movie wrote that he'd read three early reviews that disparaged "music video editing and style and overall slickness" and that it may have been wrong to mention it in the same breath as Michael Mann's magisterial Heat.

You like this fizzy minor apocalypse or you don't. There's a lot going on in the individual shots of S.W.A.T. that to my eye, were lovingly detailed. The performances are controlled, keenly understated without being one-note. And I know I'm leaning to extravagance in comparing S.W.A.T.'s location work to that of Michael Mann, but I'm willing to go out on a limb for something that tickles my fancy even at the risk of sounding merely contrarian. I had fun watching it, and the multiple forms of coverage seemed less rock video-ish than jumpy and vivid.

The reviewer for the Chicago Reader predictably referred to "closet fascists" and "charismatic storm troopers" while asserting that the story's chase in the L.A. subway was "a subtle stratagem on the criminals' part, since most Angelenos are unaware of its existence." (Not taking the Metro along its peculiar corridors doesn't mean residents of Los Angeles don't know it exists.)

Roger Ebert seemed to recognize the same elements I liked, while a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune who tends to like almost every movie that reminds him of things he saw in college and right afterwards, writes that it's "a cop thriller for moviegoing masochists... near-incoherent... emotionally bankrupt... senseless mess... ranks near the bottom... business-as-usual acting... ludicrous script... greed-inspired farrago... absurd... ridiculous... chivvying... big, empty shell... gallivanting... a marketing gimmick disguised as a movie project, bare of sense and humanity... showily shot and edited." Relentless, he hauls out the canonical cudgel, invoking Kurosawa and Peckinpah to pummel director Clark Johnson.

The longer I do this, the more I think of myself as an enthusiast instead of a reviewer. Some people seem to think they're paid to piss on every evanescent, transient pleasure that runs through the projector gate, while I'm looking for things that represent life as a succession of sensual instants. Flickers. Something like life, or like dreams, or like the unlikely, uncommon meeting of the two. So, the Tribune's writer can concentrate on his dyspepsia, I'll think on Mexican-born Gabriel Beristain's lighting of the features of Michelle Rodriguez, capturing the sculpture of each bone in her face without smudging her sleek brown skin, or the pouts and floppy-bang tosses Olivier Martinez is allowed to indulge for the camera.

Re-revisionism

More than forty friends and colleagues called, emailed or stopped me on the street after the Chicago Reader's August 1 capsule review of Sam Green and Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground. Reviewer Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "Unfortunately Green and Siegel are less politically adventurous than most of their subjects: they bluntly note the wholesale slaughter of innocent Vietnamese that fueled the Weathermen's desperation, but they allow Rudd [sic] to compare some Weatherman terrorism to 9/11 [sic] without acknowledging the ongoing slaughter of innocents in the Middle East that has clearly motivated al Qaeda."

What, I was asked, did I think Rosenbaum was possibly saying? Dunno, I said, since the Reader has a reputation for refashioning less-than-transparent writing. Rosenbaum's assertion seemed to require at least a few thousand words more explication. The August 8 capsule in the Reader still bears Rosenbaum's byline, but the more categorical comments have been ironed out. The review now concludes, "Unfortunately, the closer the filmmakers get to the present, the less politically adventurous they are. They're graphic and powerful on this nation's slaughter of innocent Vietnamese (which, rightly or wrongly, motivated the Weathermen's terrorism), but are completely silent about the recent and ongoing slaughter of innocents in the Middle East and Afghanistan, so that Rudd's pivotal comparison [sic] of Weatherman terrorism with 9/11 [sic] is denied any wider context."

Two errors remain uncorrected: the statement attributed to Mark Rudd was made by Brian Flanagan, whose "pivotal comparison of Weathermen terrorism with 9/11," in fact referred to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993.

It reminds me of the old Peanuts cartoon. Linus has returned a book to Lucy, she asks, "What did you think of the biography of George Washington?" "I learned a lot," Linus tells his sis, "But it didn't tell me everything I wanted to know about Abraham Lincoln."

Here's the ending of my indieWIRE review of the doc from Sundance: "In its quiet, studied fashion, the ten minutes of interviews that cap Green and Siegel's doc suggest a universal truth. We all fail to be perfect, we fail our idealism, we fail history, all because we fail to be immortal. The last few interview segments in The Weathermen are heartening, saddening and true. The film's most striking moment comes at the end when group member Naomi Jaffe, older, married with children, reflects the inevitable sorrow of a life long-lived. Her beliefs haven't changed so much as the times; if not for her family, she tells us, sure, she'd do it all over again."

Every time I see you falling

Buffalo Soldiers, Gregor Jordan's severe black comedy, is a period piece in too many ways for its own good. Based on a novel by Robert O'Connor, also a satire of restive U. S. soldiers in Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it partakes of a kind of take-no-prisoners cynicism that is bracing in its own right as well as unlike most safe studio filmmaking these days (or even so-called indie work). Plus, it's a cheeky, impertinent parallel to earlier lampoons of the military mindset, such as Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." (Sounds like what used to be classified as a Miramax film. Oh! It is.) Shot in the spring of 2001, it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival that fall and sealed a deal with Miramax Pictures on September 10, 2001. (O'Connor's stepdaughter was one of those murdered in the World Trade Center.) Since then, postponement has followed postponement, as the studio, believing in the film, awaited a time when the movie could possibly be marketed.

Roy Elwood (a superbly seductive Joaquin Phoenix) is a military clerk who's hard-wired himself into every bit of wrongdoing on the Cold War base, making a killing in the black market. A new top sergeant, Robert Lee (Scott Glenn, flintier than flint), a caricature of a hard-assed Vietnam vet, wants to bring rules to the base, and conflict ensues, particularly after he meets Lee's daughter and decides to bed her. There are moments in Buffalo Soldiers that are truly stellar: funny, savage and sweetly stylized. (A falling dream in the opening scene comes to a thudding halt, a sudden violent horizontal slamming against the gleaming golden verticals of Rockefeller Center.) And in an instance or two, Buffalo Soldiers is also drenchingly sexy. My favorite scene is Phoenix and Anna Paquin's mutual seduction, set in a bar after they've both eaten Ecstasy, scored to a drawn out version of New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle." ("Every time I see you falling/I get down on my knees and cry.") Jordan manages to compose one of the most convincingly tactile scenes I've seen portraying how certain moments extend or distend within subjective space. (Part of the trick, he told me, was that the music was blasting in playback and Phoenix and Paquin are genuinely shouting their flirtations at each other; the dialogue we hear was created during ADR.)

Severe clear

There is a pretentious novel I waded through once for no particularly good reason but I was so happy when I came to the end of it, and this climactic line, which I remember as: "They saw what they did but they did not know what they had done." (The book is "Lookout Cartridge" by James McElroy.)
I've been wondering how long it will be before a truly great piece of fiction will come out of the events of September 11, something that doesn't partake of the responsibility of personal witness or poker-faced reportage or bathetic sentiment. The most startling thing I've seen on film remains Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's contribution to September 11, the omnibus feature released in Europe as Alejandro Gonzalez 11' 09' 01. His "shock-tactic glimpses of people jumping from the towers is crudely exploitative," insisted the Observer's critic. Sample Gonzalez Inarritu's elucidation of his deeply haunting, shattering segment. Or as the final words of his segment say, in Arabic, "Does God's light guide us or blind us?"

I had a chance to see 11'09'01 on screen in April. I was wandering down Avenida Corrientes, the Broadway of Buenos Aires with its rows of live theatres and a few old movie palaces still lit. There were movies to see at the festival I was attending, but I wondered what would have made it onto the commercial bookings in the insolvent nation, and found a single screen at one showing 11'09'01. The clash of cultures was more striking in that half-attended matinee than seeing a bootleg copy in my own living room. I just finished reading Janette Turner Hospital's intricate and compelling literary thriller, "Due Preparations for the Plague" (Norton), which was mostly complete before the fall of 2001; Turner Hospital made certain adjustments to keep her complex study of survivor guilt and cultural complicity from directly alluding to September 11, yet any novel that begins with a character's September nightmares of a plane hijacking many years earlier has a spooky, prescient topicality.

So now the September Esquire, with Tom Junod's "The Falling Man." Have you ever seen photographer Richard Drew's geometrically perfect composition of one of the figures plummeting to earth from the Twin Towers? It ran in many newspapers on September 11, including the New York Times, but has seldom been reprinted since. Of the figure, Junod writes, "In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling he might very well be flying."

Junod's essay, searching for the man and why we would want to search for him, is one of the most artfully composed, serenely coruscating bits of magazine journalism I've read in too many months. It is the sort of writing that starts as anecdote-about photography, memory, legacy--and quietly cascades into a feat of assertion. It's a classic example of post-new Journalism style and Junod remains one of the best practitioners. I get tears and chills from several passages, for their terror, beauty and precision. An extra shiver: a gnat lands as I read under the bright lamp on in my girlfriend's painting studio, he's the size of a man in the photo, moving alongside the falling figure in sudden gnat step-motion.

How can fiction scar like observed truth? How might narrative scorch like the reality we suffer in our gut each day, with occasional life-righting, life-affirming or life-affrighting raptures and shocks?
How can art confront these feelings? How can we make language and compile images that rebuke television, advertisements and spin?

Simply: by allowing ourselves to feel, as in Junod's prose, in Inarritu's provocative film, by thinking clearly, remembering to ask unsentimental questions, remembering to decipher what lies behind the answers.

Truest, bluest

In limited release, there's I'm Juli, a small, Amelie-esque German road movie. Fatih Akin's hilarious border-crosser, stars Run Lola Run's Moritz Bleibtreau pursuing a mysterious Turkish woman from Hamburg to Istanbul while fate is being forced by another woman, Christiane Paul, whose eyes hold one of the truest and bluest gazes in recent movies. The story races across southeastern Europe, and it may be the most polished German caper I've seen since Tom Tykwer's masterful bubblegum. It also has a sweet, likeably corny scene about someone discovering marijuana, both amusing and lovely under a sky of night stars. It's already played New York and Los Angeles; it should be on video soon.

Frears and loathing

I had an enjoyable lunch with Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose central performance as an immigrant in underground London with dark secrets in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things is difficult to describe beyond saying "Wow. Wow. You see this yet?" (Cue the overworked superlatives.) I'll work to post that interview in coming columns.

 

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