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

January16, 2004

My desk runneth over! Some final Sundance notes, 50 First Dates, The Dreamers, Touching the Void, Catch That Kid, Miracle, and a leftover chat with Topher Grace from the still-likable, halfway-to-video Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! . Plus, for those in cities where it's just opened, a bit about City of God. Plus a few choice words with the proprietor of a new website devoted to "modern furniture and naked people."

Next go-round, I'll do my darndest to get to Tanner '88 on Sundance Channel, John Boorman's wonderful memoir, "Adventures of a Suburban Boy," Joe Eszterhas' "Hollywood Animal" and a survey of recent DVDs.

Take, screen, this is my pass

Screening notice came in the mail today for The Passion of the Christ, imprinted with my name, address, RSVP number, the fact that it's non-transferable and must be forked over at the door… plus a review embargo date. I hope to be in a forgiving mood after. Tacking it to the wall so I don't forget.

Happy V.D.

In the latest crude, shapeless, shamelessly narcissistic, surprisingly witless Adam Sandler self-love fiesta, 50 First Dates, the homely one plays Henry Roth -- not, one hopes, named for the writer of the great novel "Call It Sleep"--who lives on Oahu and has what appears to be a slacker-styled part-time job tending to aquatic creatures that have indigestion. Stage actress and husky-voiced radio voiceover artist Lusia Strus has a thankless role as a horny but sexually ambiguous sidekick who gets bathed in gallons and gallons and gallons of walrus puke. Drew Barrymore's always game to play her standard doughy, dewy flower-child hippy cutie, but director Peter Segal and cinematographer Jack Green (hired, the production notes attest, for his work on Clint Eastwood's comedies with monkeys and laughfest Unforgiven) do her no favors.

The script, credited to one George Wing, sets Barrymore up as a woman with incurable brain damage whose father and brother recreate the last day before her accident down to collecting hundreds of identical Sunday newspapers and sitting diligently through endless replays of a video of The Sixth Sense. Then, to compound the trauma, she must suffer the entreaties (and twerpy jabber songs) of Sandler. (There's a recurrent bit about using a toothpick to create a "waffle door" in her perpetual breakfast. Sean Astin plays her brother with a weird speech (and comic) impediment, and like Sandler with the strange accumulation of shots of his feet in Teva sandals and Rob Schneider as a middle-aged stoner in too-tight swim briefs, Astin's character's muscle fetish straddles mockery of the movie's target audience of sexually insecure young males and a chubby-chaser-style glorification of the schlubby male body as a sexual totem.

Many 1980s pop songs from bands like The Cure and Spandau Ballet are covered by bands I haven't heard of. Barrymore's nasty car crash is scored to a snippet of a Flaming Lips song. Among small graces, maybe that fee will help cover Lips frontman Wayne Coyne's dry-cleaning bills. An extended dedication to Sandler's recently deceased father fills the screen soon after the nightmare ending, mimicking the worst Groundhog Day-style terror visited upon Barrymore's still-damaged character: yes, you wake every morning to see the sun shine and watch a videotape that reminds you: This Is Your Life. Even with their misfires, the Farrelly brothers seem more like national treasures after each attempt by other filmmakers to ape their blend of grossness and feeling.

Cerebral skin

"The first time I went to the Cinematheque Francaise, I thought, only the French," begins the opening narration of Bernardo Bertolucci's swooning, solipsistic NC-17 The Dreamers. (I Sognatori) "Only the French would show films in a palace."

Even at the age of 63, Bertolucci again demonstrates that movies are the lingua franca of his mind, that each and every sound and gesture of the world gets filed away and massaged into his movies, perfumed with the sensual perception that comes at the trailing edge of a long life's knowingness.

Often, his movies are loopy. Silly. Silly about silly people or silly things: much of Stealing Beauty, for instance. Within the Freud-Marx-father-church mélange that comprises much of his work, themes of twinning and isolation often recur for this secret sharer who has been both to confession and to therapy. He's intrigued by the freedom to choose one's prison: Besieged, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, and lastly, The Dreamers. Besieged is one of the most sophisticated movies about interior space you could ever hope to see, a quiet, elegant lesson plan in how to place the camera and select focal lengths in order to reveal psychology with minimal dialogue.

The Dreamers, adapted by critic Gilbert Adair ("Love and Death on Long Island") from his own novel "The Holy Innocents," has been lightly controversial for its few moments of nudity that are genteel even in the context of fashion spreads in European magazines. The Dreamers dares to concern itself with the private raptures of cinephilia. How can a convulsive love of movies inform a young life, how can you live a tactile rhetoric of graze, touch, reveal, conceal? And are you going to keep those pants on or what?

It's 1968. Matthew (Michael Pitt) is an American who falls into the embrace of a creepily close set of twins, the handsome yet unsettling Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel). They sense he can break their bond, their lifelong confinement, their incestuous flirtations that have not been consummated. A quiet homage early on when the trio first conspire finds the shadows of their figures fingering lengthily across the side of a building like the haunting image that marks the stately, elongated passing of an age at the end of Renoir's The Rules of the Game. ("Everyone has their reasons," a character states in that movie.)

The parents leave for the country. A vast, dark floor-through becomes their castle. Dreamy in its swelter of specifics, its furnishings and its movie posters and stills, the apartment's swoony involutions move through a nautilus-shell-like labyrinth of tome-choked shelving, the camera spiraling into the center of the dark, mysterious home, between hoardings of slim-volumed poetry books.

Bertolucci literally quotes with footage from movies they adore (as he does as well). He cross-cuts as they mimic the manufactured lives they've seen on screen, Isabelle does her Garbo intercut with the reel Queen Christina, their Bande a part-like sprint through the Louvre is breathlessly spliced with Godard's original. It's a heady broth for the movie-steeped, in scenes like where the three argue over the transcendence of Keaton versus Chaplin while Jimi plays in the background, and a covetable three-sheet for Godard's La chinoise is the decorative chinoiserie behind them.

But it is décor, a succession of emblems. They don't know themselves yet, so they haven't fully fathomed the stories, the emotions, the hurt behind romance. ("There are no names/for the colours that really matter," the poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe wrote.) Isabelle's a virgin still, and her spilt blood that she and Matthew lavish on each other is a challenge to Godard's notorious joke, "It's not blood, it's red."

They all get naked. There's a coda to a masturbation scene in which Isabelle carefully wipes cum from a glossy of Marlene Dietrich. They meet each other's dares readily. Fauve colors burst whimsically from within the shadowy patinas: bare skin, breasts, buttocks, pubis, penis as warmly wet as spring's late rains. As our ugly American, Pitt's too pretty. (Too pretty to live, not for the role.) He moves with a feline stalk, a cat lope, all but cantering as the camera inscribes fleet measured curlicues in the worn crepuscular hues of the flat they play within. The trio are intruders in the glaucous, liquorish comfort, a burnished bourgeois womb, suffused with a lived-in warmth found more often in a palm-size snifter. It's like Caravaggio, if his light could ever be considered everyday. (Imagine such a humor and the fact of living within it.)

Pitt's pillowy pretty-boy-ness contrasts with their darker French-English features, he's an idealized version of the watcher in the dark, as if his face had soaked in the reflection of so much submissive beauty playing off the reflective screen up ahead. Bertolucci's camera loves Pitt, drawing a boy as ungainly and downy and unaware of his motions as a foal unfolding. He also loves Green's Isabelle, her large breasts and wide nipples, but also close-ups soaking up her wide blue eyes and her forest floor of reckless freckles across her broad cheekbones. Bertolucci's camera also tracks along her nude body to her bared labia as if stalking the final framing, that of the painter Courbet's notoriously carnal close-up, "The Origin of the World."

The story doesn't add up to much until the air rushes into the place at movie's end, as the streets go to riot. Still, there's a hothouse authenticity that allows small, shivery frissons to bloom. Bertolucci's attention to so many details in the frame includes a welter of shots that include clocks, indicating a specific time, and always one that makes sense to the scene at hand. Green's hair is caught aflame in one instant, the image, in one of two notable moments in The Dreamers, is slowed and a sudden wisp of sizzle sounds. Pitt swats it instinctively, lightly, the shot returns to its twenty-four-frame-per-second nature. It is a moment worth so many more entire movies; the other is the stunning final shot, robotic hordes of riot cops jumping over protestors, barricades, the camera, going over our heads as flames feebly persist on the macadam and Edith Piaf sings, "Je regrette rien."

"I regret nothing," she's singing. On the cobbles, youth's tepid flames gutter ineffectually.

Hot mountain

Brazilian director Fernando Meirielles made a lot of commercials and co-directed a couple of kids' films before taking on City of God, a fictionalization of novelist Paolo Lins' youthful experience surviving the favelas (slums) outside of Rio de Janeiro. Indelible fun to watch, City of God (co-directed by Katia Lund) is a self-mythologizing portrait of the allure and despair of juvenile crime in a milieu that offers no other escape. Does the subject matter deserve a less psychedelic approach than Meirielles and his collaborators have taken? Is the movie mere gloss, Pixote on speed; fever dream Tarantino; epic blaxploitation? It's a lot more, dizzying, dazzling, never flinching from the harshness of what its many characters go through in the tale's three samba-and-pop drenched decades of speakable horror. Complicated, bloody, humid, lurid, flashy, inspired and terrifying, Meirelles' movie may reach its emotional height when a gang of children, known as the Runts, armed with pistols from one of several warring drug lords in the favela, recruit even younger children at gunpoint. What happens next is terrible, gut wrenching and so much more honest about the origins and results of youth violence than our own filmmakers, or at least, our financiers care to be. It's the kind of art that genuinely confronts the question, what is the value of human life? And why are we so reckless with the fate of the youth of the world?

Pretty pictures

I've read too many Sundance summaries after the fact. Caught up in the swim of the event, I was following my own leads, hearing an invigoratingly wide range of conversations, but it's remarkable how much of the attitude and sentiment's the same in reports from across the spectrum. In the last several days, my hope of providing more snapshots from the slopes got blown all to hell, as couch surfing became a major competitive sport. No complaints: just fewer words filed.

Below, a few choice notes on the handful of greats, but first links to a couple of other pieces, including my Oscar-nomination morning conversation with a co-director of The Weather Underground; the social scene at a cocktail party for a death penalty moratorium, including indicted former governor of Illinois George Ryan and a small profile of the Chicago producer and director of Nightingale in a Music Box at Slamdance.

For an interesting look I hadn't seen elsewhere about a pre-Sundance event, OneDance: The People's Summit, involving political activists and doc filmmakers, and wrasslin' over "ego, territorial trauma and the like," go here.

The Control room

Where several colleagues and I found delicate balance, a handful of others have scorned Jehane Noujaim's verite stunner The Control Room, such as City Pages' Rob Nelson, who wrote in the Village Voice, "Some viewers would beg to differ with my reading of Control Room as a highly effective recruiting film for Al Jazeera. (Where do I send my resume?)" It seemed representative of the sort of weary, glib writing out of 2004 Sundance.

So a few days ago, it was lovely to find (in London's Independent newspaper) doc-maker Vikram Jayanti's provocative list of "The Ten Best Documentaries", where he slated The Control Room behind Burden of Dreams, Cane Toads and Cannibal Tours, writing that it's "one of the bravest documentaries ever made, filmed in the control room of Al-Jazeera during the … invasion of Iraq. Every American and many Brits should watch it: a transformative work of political art, like The Battle of Algiers, that changes how you see the world forever."

Wow. Wow. Would I go that far? The Telegraph's SF Said saw it at Berlin on February 9, and called it "brilliant," which it certainly is.

Noujaim, whose father is Egyptian and whose mother hails from the Hoosier state, essentially hightailed it to Qatar when war was imminent, not knowing what she would be able to discover in the thirty days of her visa. Hassan Ibrahim, a British-born Sudanese journalist for Al-Jazeera is neatly matched by an increasingly pensive American military liaison to Arab news channels, Lt. John Rushing, and one of Noujaim's gifts is how she listens, and how the concerns, intelligence and hopes of each of her handful of "characters" is carefully, scrupulously delineated over the course of her valuable, balanced and moving film.

Here's what she told Danny Schechter for Filmmaker magazine: "I wanted to find people who were really trying to understand the other side, who were complex characters. I didn't want to take the cheap shot at Fox News - you know, it's very easy to do that. I thought that picking intelligent characters would be the best [approach]. You have to follow somebody you have a belief in. You have to feel that there may be something they might discover because their mind is open enough to discover it. I don't think it's interesting to follow characters who you know are never going to change."

Tarnation

What a mad montage of one man's life. Thirty-one-year-old Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation got called a "masterpiece" in the Sundance catalog, this alleged $218.32 production pieced together (in an earlier form) in three weeks on Apple's iMovie software. For over twenty years, Caouette had been documenting his troubled (to say the least) upbringing and his relationship with his damaged mother, and one of the most heartening things about this first-time effort is that it could become better still with a little bit more shaping. That's a likely prospect, considering how much music is in the film, how integral it is to the shape of each passage of Caouette's dizzying recollections, and how tough some of it might be to clear even with the names of Gus van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell attached. Amid the Super-8 images and video diaries, there's also a rich use of printed language on screen that takes one of cinema verite's conventions and turns it to something more insistent, subjective and memorable.

We Don't Live Here Anymore

John Curran's filming of Larry Gross' over-twenty-year-old adaptation of two Andre Dubus short stories is a small, fiery dissection of middle-class privilege, of how smart people can let their idle dreams eat them alive. There'll be more to say when this spitting cousin to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Is released later this year: suffice it to say for now the acting by Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, Mark Ruffalo, and particularly, Laura Dern, is searing.

Take two restraining orders and call me in the morning

Some of the most entertaining movies at Sundance were docs, including Mika Ronkainen's Zentropa-financed performance art lark, Screaming Men, 75 minutes in the working life of a Finnish choir of men who… scream.

Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me - described as made "for no particular demographic or scientific reason" by my colleague John Anderson of Newsday - is a prankish, post-Michael Moore provocation, in which a healthy man eats himself sick over 30 days by gulping down three meals a day of junk food, endangering his health and his relationship with his girlfriend, a vegan chef. It's the first release announced from new distributor Roadside Attractions, which is partnered with Samuel Goldwyn Films. Playful, pissed off and sometimes downright mean, Spurlock's pic is still a worthy exploration of why the word food has to be followed by "processing" in the modern age.

Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan's important The Corporation is also slated for imminent release (Achbar co-directed the Noam Chomsky doc Manufacturing Consent). Taking on many of the graphic elements of training and corporate videos, it's one of the great recent examples of the essay film, fleet, funny, frightening, relentless, and one of the sweetest jobs of editing I've seen in ages, marshaling an incredible amount of information and testimony in under two-and-a-half hours. It ain't no Bowling for Columbine: the makers are much more intent on a very specific target.

Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth's The Five Obstructions also has distribution: it's a funny and oft-thrilling portrait of two talented artists encouraging each other to keener accomplishments and greater mischief. It has much to say about the necessary friction in the filmmaking enterprise.

Zatoichi

What a delirious delight. Takeshi Kitano's latest should be out in the next few months from Miramax, and it's a sharp, sophisticated satire (and embrace) of several Japanese martial arts genre traditions, including a use of computer generated imagery to make the spray of blood as otherworldly and elegant as streams of calligraphy, and its modern-day tap dance curtain scene has to be seen to be disbelieved.

Down to the Bone

Producer Susan Leber's a colleague, so I'll only comment that the special prize for Vera Farmigia's to-the-bone performance deserves the notice it's getting, including its special jury prize on awards night.

The Hunting of the President

Stupidity knows no bounds. Conceit, hubris, all that bad stuff. How could someone worth tens of millions of dollars like Harry Thomason (admittedly from the syndication sitcom "Designing Women") apply his name as co-director to a movie as trashy, as subpar, as lurid, as downright awful as The Hunting of the President? To examine the politics behind the attacks on his friend Bill Clinton while he was president is a worthy subject. To paraphrase my Uncle Shortie, this embarrassing junk would be the black sheep at the Turd family reunion. I saw it with a documentarian I admire; we nearly got whiplash from shooting looks at each other during the interminable duration of this disaster.

I held my bile at the Q&A afterwards when the first questioner asked why spurious stock footage was inserted clumsily time after time, yet Thomason's answers to questions indicated that any criticism would be met with George W. Bush-style bravado, essentially saying, You're with me, or you're against me. Co-director Nickolas Perry, whose credits include work on A&E's "Biography" series said that they didn't have any footage of many of the events described, and he'd always wanted to drop "entertaining," if beside-the-point stock footage into a project. It's one of the stupidest excuses for a lack of imagination (and talent) I've ever heard.

A summer release is threatened, with Thomason claiming it's going to Cannes. Not in competition, I'd bet, and when it's released? I am so against you.

Puck'd

A slow burn, compact epic about an inarticulate dreamer, Gavin O'Connor's Miracle is a sweet surprise. For the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, the United States Ice Hockey team was a haphazard bunch of college kids, pulled together by gruff, obstinate coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell). Who would they eventually face? The Soviet Union's professional team, many of whom had played together for over a decade.

Gavin O'Connor's only other movie is the 1999 Sundance mother-daughter entry Tumbleweeds, which boasts a splendid performance by Janet McTeer and Kimberly Brown as her contentious daughter. (The producers minted 2002's Dennis Quaid/Disney sports movie hit, The Rookie.) O'Connor demonstrates a feathery touch in a sledgehammer genre, but he remains very much a director of actors.

The lack of fashion of almost twenty-five years ago is quickly sketched in: cheap tweed jackets, tacky v-neck sweaters, and yes, plaid trousers. From first glimpse, Russell's Brooks looks like a man out of time, or of no time. (O'Connor has written that "Herb Brooks was a hockey egghead, a mad scientist and the team was his lab experiment.") As Brooks takes the few months he has to mold his fresh charges in his variations on Soviet and Canadian, hockey teams, he glares, masticates under a bowl cut, looking initially like a pudgy and defeated Bill Pullman. Patricia Clarkson, an actress who cannot be inauthentic, plays Brooks' worried wife. Together, Clarkson and Russell the kind of performers who don't need speeches, only glances and silences. Russell's slight Minnesota accent goes in and out, but it hardly matters. (Noah Emmerich offers a capable assist as Brooks' right hand man, with his idiosyncratic line readings and endlessly upbeat expressions.)

The hockey team's another matter. It's strange at first, having trouble differentiating all these ropy black-haired bundles of twentysomething testosterone, until you realize that's part of the movie's game: they're a team. They're one unit, molded by Brooks. In most movies, casting directors go for a variety of types, but almost to a player, the twenty members of the hockey team resemble one another: pretty cheekbones, blue eyes, floppy dark bangs falling into their faces. Daniel Stoloff's shooting and John Gilroy's editing aptitude work with that limitation. O'Connor understands the gifts and strengths of his middle-aged players. The faces we learn are those of Russell, Emmerich and Clarkson, the experienced ones instead of the callow ones. There's the occasional ill-focused or ill-composed re-framing of a shot, and it never seems unplanned, merely effortlessly dynamic. There's genre aptitude to burn here. (Mark Isham's score is filled with Sturming and Dranging, more Steve Reich at a few moments on the ice than his own customary trumpet-led style.)

The filmmakers shot 133 plays, they claim, and there's a jittery vitality if not a noticeable variety to the untrained eye. O'Connor favors in-close shots, handheld at the right moments, cut with a razory accuracy. While a big proponent of compositions that place large objects in the foreground before booming upward to reveal the point of the shot, it becomes vocabulary rather than mannerism over the machined 135 minutes of the movie.

"Ach, so much hate and fear," an older coach reflects on the US and Soviet saber rattling at that point in the cold war, and there is a somber and sober underpinning to the story, a simmering melancholy at the end of Jimmy Carter's term, and especially after the taking of hostages in Tehran.

There are small period details that jar nicely: NBC's late anchorwoman Jessica Savitch announces the Iranian hostage footage. A wall of telegrams-strangely with a fake logo instead of Western Union's-congratulate the team on its first successes. But the most telling is a montage during which Brooks is driving home and listening to the radio, a speech of several minutes by Carter. The President's words are common as the idealism bled into the southern dirt. It's where a pop song montage might go in another film. Carter's words are infused with the same idealism as Brooks will carry to the Games. It's kind of beautiful, the language a rebuke to blind allegiance without "common faith" and idealism.

Similarly, when the team arrives to play at New York's Madison Square Garden in an exhibition game, a helicopter shots establishes Manhattan, and dead center, the World Trade Center and the strains of the pre-game swells of the Star Spangled Banner. Someone in the audience unfurls a banner: "Soviets Get The Puck Out of Afghanistan." Still, the movie never turns to jingoism. It's uplift without schmaltz, and hope without apology. Grimy-looking, dashed together, packed with facts, Miracle is still a pretty picture.

Catch that cold

"Catch that cold" would be more fun. "Dad, you said standing on the top of Mt. Everest as the best day of your life! It's a sorrow to report that with the fairly godawful Catch That Kid, Bart Freundlich is just as tonally meshuginah a director of kiddie techo diversions as he is of his own inconsequential child-of-privilege maundering, like The Myth of Fingerprints and World Traveler. A ridiculously slack attempt at kinetic heist thrills for the younger set, Kid lacks the giddy invention and simple glee of Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids franchise (and likely the Danish film it's based upon as well). Kristin Stewart, best remembered as Jodie Foster's daughter in Panic Room, is the stalwart daughter who hatches a plan to rob a bank her mother (Jennifer Beals) has designed the security system for, in order to finance experimental surgery in Denmark for her dad-not that kind-who becomes paralyzed after one of the two boys who adores her touches her dad's wound a little too emphatically. Go-cart chases in downtown L.A. ensue. With her hair pulled back, Stewart has a handsome, androgynous severity: could you imagine Willem Dafoe as a young teenage girl? Her angularity is compelling, and she's a strong performer. Still, in a movie this lame, it's hard not to simply stare at Stewart's large, readily, exquisitely objectifiable ears. The other kid casting settles for striking faces rather than the prehensile dewiness of a subversively sexualized picture like Peter Pan. The dialogue is littered with vulgarisms like "fart-knocker" and "butt-munch" (which sounds uncomfortably close to a collision of the director's first and last names.) James Le Gros simpers uneasily as a caricature of a security officer; Michael des Barres plays Malcolm McDowell-lite as a smug bank president.

Heights of folly

There are adventures in the wild that I think I understand, but mountain climbing, no matter how it's depicted, has never struck me as the great wild exploit it's held to be. (Don't even get me started on my acrophobia.) Dehydration, disfigurement and death, that's what's always come to mind. There's a full menu of same in Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void, based on Joe Simpson's book about his experiences in 1985 when he and Simon Yates foolishly braved the only mountain in the Peruvian range that hadn't been scaled. They moved upward in the fleet, unencumbered Alpine style, with no backup. Three-and-a-half days in, the worst possible disaster happened, with Simpson falling and smashing his leg. Macdonald, whose work includes the 2000 Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September and a memoir of his grandfather's achievements, "Emeric Pressburger: the Life and Death of a Screenwriter," works in a by-the-throat style, mingling latter-day interviews with Simpson and Yates with recreations in Peru and the Alps. Actors retrace their steps, their follies, their near-death experiences. And although you see Simpson and Yates, years after their tortuous days spent in their mid-twenties, the recreations manage to capture the sensations and fear in a way that full-on fiction or a "purer" form of documentary never could. It's an icy thrill.

Wholly innocents

Robert Luketic extends the goofy comic timing and invention he demonstrated in Legally Blonde with the carefully calibrated silliness of Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! A romantic triangle that gets turned twice in the course of the comedy, Tad pits a West Virginia Piggly Wiggly manager (Topher Grace) against a bad-boy movie star (Josh Duhamel) for the affections of the longtime love (and coworker) he's never gotten the nerve to ask out (a surprisingly funny and charming ). It's genre material, expertly put through the paces, with unexpectedly masterful timing, and without a shred of condescension to any of the characters. (They're supported by Sean Hayes and Nathan Lane as Tad's manager and agent, both named Richard Levy, and the up-and-coming charmer Ginnifer Goodwin, a delight of a sidekick at the PW.)

"The best thing about the movie that the plot is so straightforward and so driven," Grace tells me when I ask if it's too simple, too sweet. "You can tell from the poster, y'know, exactly where it's going. I think especially with a comedy, it's important to be really straightforward."

If someone called it predictable-"I'd like to meet those people," Grace interjects with his sideways grin. He laughs. We know who's going to get the girl. "I think you're absolutely right and I think that is one of the things we talked about setting out. It's not that these movies aren't supposed to be predictable, in fact, they're, they're, I mean, they're formula," he says in his familiar criss-crossing comic rhythms. "I think when people mess with how predictable these movies are, they come up with a bad result. I do think that it's about the craftsmanship and making the best version of that story that's been told to date."

There's a discomfiting scene where Grace's character confronts Tad in the men's room of a bar, and he threatens him, "I'll tear you to pieces with my bare hands or vicious rhetoric!" "The thing that's really interesting, which you're touching on, is that I think a lot of people play that role, the quintessential 'friend' role, the other guy, with weakness or some kind of fault. Too something. It was really important to me from the get-go that he not be a victim of anything but circumstance. Because it's the worst circumstance ever. It's like Brad Pitt just came to town. And he's dating the girl you're about to finally ask out. To me, it was important. In every scene, Pete has a lot of strength and that was really important to me."

Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum dubbed Grace the "next Tom Hanks." "I just hope she's right!" He goes through several sheepish smiles. "Y'know, no. It was like… I don't think… You know…" He stammers charmingly. "But I, I… I think, what she was referring to more were people who started on sitcoms who made the transition. I hope that's true, certainly I'm working very hard to have an afterlife. '70s' is like the greatest experience I've had in my life and I would continue doing it forever if I thought it would actually continue forever. This film is a romantic comedy, but I think I got to do what I love to do in 70s, balancing comedy with real heart. But that to me, why do a role where you can't play both? There' s no purpose."

Grace didn't' get to work with Nathan Lane, but indirectly, Lane led Grace's transition from being a teen tennis fanatic to a working actor. "I was discovered in high school for '70s,' I was in 'A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,' and I made sure to come to set when he was working, I told him that it was basically a rip-off of what I had seen him do on Broadway like the year before, so I said, 'Thank you for my career!'"

But he also strategizes. "When I was trying to get the part in Tad, I went in and made this speech the first day with these DreamWorks execs, I'd just read the script a second time, I pored over it, I said, 'There are two guys in this life. There's the guy you wanna be and the guy you are.' And this film is great, because it actually has both of those guys in it and I get which guy I am. It's Tom Hanks versus Tom Cruise. You only get to be one of those guys!"

And what kind of guy is his director? "He breathes this genre. Whatever David Lean is to epics, Robert Luketic is to romantic comedies," Grace gushes. "He always walks in, adds that little touch that would make the whole scene. When I saw Legally Blonde, I was on an airplane, and I was like, 'Jesus! This is really smart and really funny.' It didn't rope me into the theater, but…"

Even stammering, Grace is funny. Can you learn comic timing? "I think you just have it. I don't think you can learn comic timing. I think a sense of humor is a sense of self. It's not really so much about being funny, it's more about your sense of the world and what you take seriously and what you don't."

Did he have to research a character who couldn't tell a girl he loved her? Are you kidding? That's my whole life. I went to this co-ed boarding school, that's how I did research for this role. I'm like him, I'm strong about it! I would hope that Topher, if he weren't in this film-sorry to speak about myself in the third person-would actually go watch it…"

Or watch it on a plane? He grins, shrugs, winningly, a measure of Hanks-like self-deprecation. "Well, Topher's a dick sometimes."

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