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

November 22 , 2003

After Matt Drudge's periodic spanking of Disney a couple weekends back, taking on the Thanksgiving release from Dimension Films, Miramax's publicists sent out emails reminding reviewers that reviews of Bad Santa be held until opening day. Something about Terry Zwigoff's scalding, splenetic, unrelenting, profane, epically hilarious misanthropy, probably. (Billy Bob Thornton's exclamations of disgust for the world have some of the fervor of R. Lee Ermey's DI in Full Metal Jacket: "Kid? Are you F---ING WITH ME?") But there are other films crying out for publicity (or banishment), including a reviewers' damp nightmare; a patient feat of documentary empathy; Halle Berry's bare skin ; and more holiday swag.

Anything but Anything But Love

When people tell me they wish they were a movie reviewer, I smile, say, sure, sure you do. I like my job. But critics can't always be choosers. Sometimes I'd like to point my acquaintances in the direction of a maudlin, dreadful folly like the wooden 2001 Anything But Love. Isabel Rose (who co-wrote with director Robert Cary) plays Billie Golden, a fortyish waitress stuck in an improbably singing gig at a terminal bar in Queens, a dump without soundproofing that's been around for decades near an airport. Jets drown Billie out, and sometimes the snoring or gargling of grinning, geriatric drunks, captured by Cary as an argument against allowing extras to take part in labor organization.

Billie dreams, but she dreams such ridiculous, rotten, Rita Hayworth dreams - hoping to become the twentieth century's second immortal, redhead torch singer. Beyond the anachronism of her hopes to break into the Manhattan cabaret scene, her singing's wobbly and the costumes she's stuffed into would embarrass Reno Barbie. The alien, octogenarian lust kitten Eartha Kitt is on hand to offer a glimpse of cabaret greatness, to be immediately diminished by a few yawnsome life lessons. Billie stumbles onto a couple of love interests, both with unfortunate names-lawyer Greg Ellenbogen (Cameron Bancroft), a high school crush turned into a cartoonish pillar of Velveeta and Elliot Shepard (Andrew McCarthy), her reluctant piano teacher and a keeper of the art she so esteems.

McCarthy's wild-eyed throughout, seeming dazed at what became of his promising career and making much use of such inexpressive, overwrought gestures as playing with eyeglasses, his hair, his filthy baseball cap, as well as making much use of that desperate expression of his that suggests something warm and yellow is trickling down his pant legs. When Greg and Isabel start their romance, Cary gives us the old-fashioned "we don't know how the fuck to write dialogue, let alone convincing romantic dialogue" montage. There is one scene in a lounge where Rose is in contemporary clothing, red hair down, freckles bared, in a black cocktail dress, pinioned between a pair of daffy trophy blondes: it's a jaw-dropping moment, since we see just how strikingly, delicately, memorably beautiful this actress, this woman, is, and what a sorrow her character is. Equally jaw-dropping are the repeated glimpses of the World Trade Center from Shepard's West Side rehearsal studio. They're a sturdy fact behind the boring drama and my eyes strayed and stayed whenever they appeared.

Work of heart

To watch is to learn. To understand is to love. There are so many pure hopes one can hold for the documentary film form.

Nicolas Philibert's To Be And to Have is a magnificent construction of empathy, a quietly heartfelt portrait of a dozen or so pupils in a single-room school in an isolated French farming village, a bitty boite, in the middle of winter in the midst of farmland.

The town is in Auvergne, called Saint-Etienne sur Usson, and the children are named Alize, Axel, Guillaume, Jessie, Jojo, Johann, Jonathan, Julien, Laura, Letitia, Marie-Elisabeth, Natalie and Olivier. One-hundred-and-four minutes after the film beings, you know them, and well, by name, by face, by quirk.

The teacher's name is Georges Lopez. He's 55, soon to retire. He could be the portrait of an urban academic, kitted out like a Parisian intellectual: Black sweater, groomed gray goatee, rimless glasses. But he is all patience and quiet experience. We watch his concerted cajoling of these children, assured yet kind, and Philibert constructs his film as the illusion of an inevitable, serene succession of lessons floating past, like a French roman fleuve, a river of narrative. Philibert has suggested his is a film "without a subject... Not on but at school." Its rustic character led to accusations of sentimentality. It is more than a minor-key fairytale. Instead, it is a laboratory for us to follow an experiment.

To Be and To Have is a portrait of a group of individuals. It is admiring of a time and of an intimate pedagogical style that has largely passed in Western culture. These days whiled away at school through the change of seasons, with the kids aged from primary to middle school, are idyllic enough to have elicited charges of the movie being reactionary. It's a song to individuality, actually.

It is also a baby-fever dream. The camera regards the children, curious, unformed, charming without effort, quietly beguiling, individuals as cute and mysterious as kittens. You think of innocence, and you wonder, when was mine lost? A viewer's attention might drift from Philibert's direct narrative, but now another child behaves in a fashion that is, precisely, childlike. Darling and undomesticated, a life's damage still minor, the hopeful glow of potential, of better lives, or a better world. Lopez is also a dream of a teacher, implying an intimacy, a consoling, edifying awareness of the past and its lesson, instead of being the human equivalent of a hen, learning to give over golden eggs. The school seems like an extension of home instead of an assembly line.

The kids essentially ignore the film camera. The moment we might realize that, Philibert cuts to cattle being herded in the rain, their gaze balefully regarding the camera operators and audience.

But there are eruptions of emotion, of childishness. We glimpse Lopez' loving nudges toward socialization, individuality, the crafting of means to learn. Some kids get mad, some fight, some are inexpressive with spite. We see the fearful, ragged pissedness of temper one can't yet comprehend.

There is the patient gaze of the teacher and of the documentary camera. Two older boys who've fought, their elbows rest on place mats that are maps of France. While being lecture that words can hurt more than actions, the larger of the two is compulsively cracking his knuckles. Dealing with a troubled boy whose father has cancer, Philibert cuts to a Kiarostami-like shot of a field of wheat, ruffling with wind. One stark tree waves, too.

Philibert's eye is more tender than cute. Despite its reception by some critics, this isn't "Merde! Kids do the darndest things!" The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, for instance, recognized the film's virtues while also wishing it were another sort of film altogether: "The mainly unacknowledged and sometimes intrusive role played by Philibert and his small crew in influencing classroom behavior," he writes, "seems inadequately dealt with in the film proper, and I also worried at times if the out-of-school segments showing the kids at play were partially mythologizing country life" by not showing them doing things like watching television. (Rosenbaum also slights the film's popularity in France, which, by his analysis, equals "sentimentality.")

At one boy's home, as his mother tries to figure out his math problems, the camera catches a little sister with artlessly tangled hair, she's bruised, cut, with scabby legs and in constant motion. "A real child!" You want to cry out. The distraction has been sly: we now have the gift of a shot in the family kitchen like a seventeenth century Dutch genre painting. Mom and boy still sit, but there are four other adult figures leaned over the tablecloth, over the problem, struggling with its elements.

To Be and To Have is a humane film, a thoughtful, hope-filled masterpiece of empathy. "Is this place better than Tahiti?" one child asks, and they know the answer. Lopez tells the camera his ambitions near the end of the film, a day when the sun is setting, his career is near its end; and then there the expression on his face when the last child leaves for summer tells a story you can't forget.

Goth chic

Gothika -- the title has no direct relation to the movie -- was produced by Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis' Dark Castle Entertainment, a partnership formed several years ago to make the kind of medium-budget, outrageous, or even outright ridiculous ghost stories they admired when they were younger. Dark Castle movies include 1999's superfluous yet successful remake of House on Haunted Hill, Thir13en Ghosts and Ghost Ship, memorably mostly for the story of Gabriel Byrne, asked why he was prating on about politics during at interview, barked at a journalist, "What? Would you rather I talked about fuckin' 'Ghost Ship'?!"

As supernatural slumming goes, Gothika's no Sixth Sense, but it's not Ghost Ship, either. I don't know if French director Mathieu Kassovitz's first American feature should be described as a good movie or a bad one, but Gothika gives a range of actors and craftsmen, including cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Requiem for a Dream, Phone Booth) and composer John Ottman (The Usual Suspects, X-2) the chance to whoop it up, sharing a gleeful, lurid time. Gothika, set largely in a standing Quebec penitentiary and on dark country roads, looks absurdly rich for a self-conscious genre romp. Kassovitz also seems to endorse the radical shifts in plot and logic of Sebastian Gutierrez's brazen script, working with the same headlong assurance, if not persuasiveness, as in his incoherent yet ravishingly produced 2001 Euro-serial-killer story, Crimson Rivers. (An actor as well, Kassovitz played the dream-lover in Amelie.)

Berry's Dr. Miranda Grey is smarter than the average cookie, it seems, in the opening scene coaxing Chloe (Penelope Cruz), incarcerated for slaughtering her father, down from her recurrent visions of being raped by a tattooed Satan. She's obnoxiously glib with the rapid-fire analysis and insight common to on-screen therapists and psychologists. She consults with the head of the institution (Charles S. Dutton), who turns out to be her husband. Their tenderness amid talk of "satanic meanderings" is leavened by the over-friendly attentions of fellow doctor Robert Downey, Jr. "We were just talking about repression" Dutton says as Downey fidgets in the doorway. A nice little triangle is established. It's a dark and stormy night. Crossing a covered bridge, Miranda's car almost plows into a small blonde girl in a nightdress, then drives into a ditch. Hoping to help her, Miranda takes her by the arm, the child bursts into flames: blackness. Ten minutes and the world that Gothika has established is over with.

Wholly unlikely yet filled with pert narrative satisfactions, we're suddenly propelled into a "Ladies in the Bughouse" story, where Woodward Penitentiary becomes Miranda's very own snake pit. A terrible crime's been committed in the several days since Miranda was put under medication; Downey tries to help her, but she can't see clearly. So what's the proper thing to do in a case like that? Loose her in the general population with her patients! Have the good Doctor walk naked into the middle of the communal shower for a bit of cinematic humiliation!

Throughout, and especially in that scene, Kassovitz and Co. amply exploit Berry's bottom and bosom, and there's a world of study to be made in how one reveals the assets of an Academy Award-winning performer without quite doing the Full Naughty, camera dipping and ducking, the angles measured just so as with a tape measure, camera booming upwards as she walks past, revealing swathes shoulder blade and collarbone, but never the more precious parts. (Kassovitz & Co. also demonstrate keen interest in keeping Berry barefoot amid her confusions, whether in showers, rain, dust or sluicing blood.)

The dialogue is ripe, shy of risible. "This isn't logical, you're already dead!" a ghost gets told. "Logic is overrated," the ghost shrugs, nice, self-aware rallying cry for the excesses compressed within the movie.

"I'm not deluded, I'm possessed!" is one rallying cry, another: "I don't believe in ghosts." What can you say but "Me, neither, but they believe in me." The walls close in, in inventive profusion, and the last few turns of the plot are gratifyingly over the top. (John Carroll Lynch, as the squirrelly local sheriff, all but breaks out in an operatic aria.)

How old it is getting drag

"How old it is getting drag," to paraphrase the Stones. Theater-trained Richard Day's directorial debut is rife with the cramp that is bad camp, training an untrained camera on three desperate Hollywood actresses, all played by... men!

Start with the names-Evie, Coco and Varla - and it only gets worse. They open their mouths! This is the kind of movie you want to call up your friends while it's going on, like calling from a roadwreck, or a burning building: Come save me, even if the gaudily lit, badly acted, invasively bad movie is a goner. I'm sure there are funny jokes somewhere on this vast earth about abortion-but not here. Eating disorders? Alllllmost funny. I like bad taste, it's no taste that's the killer. What's worse than a dick joke? A small dick joke. What's worse than a small dick joke? An unfunny one. The most graceful element to Girls Will Be Girls, inexplicably released by the usually canny IFC Films, is its terse running time, seventy-nine minutes, a duration, which, under several international agreements, codifies the precise minimum length to call a movie "feature-length" (even when if comes up short in every other department.)

Swag the dog

Focus, which featured for Swimming Pool, promo pool-blue flip-flops and swimming goggles, is getting clever again. For 21 Grams, a movie the title of which has been described variously as the weight of life, or of a chocolate bar, a hummingbird or five nickels, mailed out a postcard inside a transparent bag of inflated plastic, with said nickels attached. Someone must have checked the postal regulations about hummingbirds.

Disney sent out a desk-sized black wooden casket for Haunted Mansion, with thirteen black pencils inside. Talk about gloomy omens...

Adventures in the 606

A hired security guard for the local all-media Warner Bros. screening of Last Samurai asked what my bicycle seat was, then wanded it for good measure.

Remote Possibilities

I'll run notes on a few fall and winter DVD releases to put on your want list later; in the meantime, if you're collecting this stuff, why don't you have Kieslowski's Decalogue [Facets Video] yet? It's a sin not to have it. More next week.

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