..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

March 27 , 2004

Spartan of the Ways

It had been a while since I read New Republic, but in the current issue, I found veteran critic [Stanley
Kaufmann's take on David Mamet's Spartan to be one of the better pieces I've read about the movie, placing it in the context of his career. After listing the better examples of the writer-director's prolific output, Kaufmann writes: "This cursory glance at Mamet's career suggests that, in any accounting of our current cultural treasures, we have too often treated him as little more than a steady provider of varied work. He is not just dependable old Mamet. (To make it even more interesting, he is not all that dependable: some of his work has foundered.) He has already evoked some serious critical study: he deserves a good deal more.(He's also good on the brutality of The Passion of The Christ.)

If it bleeds, it leads

Has anyone written a piece yet about how The Passion of The Christ is a movie custom-made for people who don't go to movies?

Dogmatic

Stephen Holden's New York Times hissy-fit about Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl is pretty disgruntled. Holden writes that Smith didn't live up to his intentions of reflecting his own happy family life; if he had, "it might have signaled his transition from a smart-aleck chronicler of trash-talking suburban slackers and idle mall rats to something more substantial. But sadly, Mr. Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the
chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder." He also approaches notorious woman-hater John Simon's weakness for dismissive misogyny in describing an actress' looks: "[Liv] Tyler, whose monotone matches a face that's the equivalent of pasteurized milk, has never been blander. Instead of a presence, she's an absence."

Roger Ebert, finding the performers charming, captures something more interesting about Tyler: "Liv Tyler is a very particular talent who has sometimes been misused by directors more in love with her beauty than with her appropriateness for their story. Here she is perfectly cast, as the naive and sincere Maya, whose boldness is not a seduction technique but an act of generosity, almost of mercy. It takes a special tone for a woman to convince us she wants to sleep with a man out of the goodness of her heart, but Tyler finds it, and it brings a sweetness to the relationship."

The weirdest review I've read is in the Chicago Reader, where the reviewer takes on several topics, including Smith's relationship with Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, concluding with a sour, seemingly personal note of parricide: "When Smith made Clerks he was in a financial situation even more perilous and delivered a movie that took no prisoners -- but that was before Harvey Weinstein came into his life. I loved my father too, but there comes a time in everyone's life when you have to tell dad to fuck off." Ick.

Surviving desire

Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith's PG-13 paean to the joys and terrors of family life, starts with a funny riff on one of the better-known scenes from Woody Allen's 1976 Oscar-winner Annie Hall: a sequence of head-on shots of little kids in a classroom making precociously mature (and vulgar jokes). At once, the comedy includes Smith's familiar patter as well as alluding to the kind of glossy New York story some never thought he'd make. (And who would expect not one, but two Stephen Sondheim production numbers?) The 34-year-old writer-director began his career wanting to be Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Hal Hartley. Today? He'd be happy, it seems, to make his own wise-ass Annie Hall.

Allen had Gordon Willis to make his static frames look good. Talking about cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, whose widescreen images make Manhattan -- and Jersey! -- glisten, Smith tells me, "I had to hold the dude back. It was the one time he didn't get it. He'd do all these things I just had to go with, but this was one time I said, we have to start slow, we have to let people know it's a film of mine instead of getting fancy right away." But the movie looks great, the first of Smith's movies to have the camera placed rather than dropped into place.

"I'm not a very visual person," he observes, and with classic timing, adds, "Which is why I make films. Even when I'm writing, that shit doesn't occur to me." (Still, there's a smooth little camera move sliding
through a window in an early scene that alludes neatly to a noted shot from Citizen Kane.)

Smith knows that some of his fans, particularly the teenagers who relish his way with scatology, will find the 1990s-set family romance between widowed father Ollie Trinke (Ben Affleck)--here's an ouch! for that character name--and 6-year-old daughter Gertie (the effusive yet still kid-plausible Maya Harding) not to their liking. He liked Harding, he says, because she's not the type of child actor with "the way-deep dimples that were surgically implanted." After the untimely demise of his wife, Ollie, a musical industry publicist, detonates one day at a press conference and holes up for several years back in Jersey at the home of his dad. George Carlin's not just funny--he's good. Once his daughter's in school, Ollie starts thinking of moving back to the city, about the time he meets grad student-video store clerk Liv Tyler. (Despite her schoolmarm specs, she's definitely not your Quentin Tarantino-style trivia nerd.) Smith's shameless with Tyler's toothy smile, holding for several beats after she says naughty things like, "C'mon! Man cannot live by porn alone!"

Referring to movies like "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," Smith jokes, "I just didn't want to become Pauly Shore. People liked the Weasel. Then one day? People were like, "Fuck the Weasel." As the married father of a young daughter, Smith wanted to write about his own life instead of persisting with the same style of comedy. And of his cohort Jay, he adds, "The other part is that Jason Mewes is a massive fucking drug addict."

Swearing comes to Smith like breathing or inhaling cigarette smoke: It's part of the easygoing, burly
auteur's charm. Jennifer Lopez inhabits a few early moments of the movie, and after the release of the
titanic flop Gigli, starring Affleck and Lopez, "the bomb hit and the shrapnel fucking flew." Smith cut
only one shot of a few seconds that showed the pair getting married. Lopez's early departure from the
story was a guarded secret at first. "Then Gigli comes out, and we're like, `She dies in the first fifteen!
Tell your friends!'"

Smith says he's coming from a more mature place than when he made Chasing Amy, which was largely about his relationship with the movie's female lead, Joey Lauren Adams. The lesbian angle sharpened the conflict, but essentially, "I was just one of those boyfriends who was jealous about ex-boyfriends, she didn't care for that shit." Of his beloved wife Jennifer Schwalbach--"Pussywhipped? Hey, I get to fuck her" he mock-whispered at a recent public Q&A--Smith says he's utterly content but "She's always testing the line, [telling me stories about] the bizarre way she fucked other people and whatnot."

So it was time to make Jersey Girl instead of another dip in the shallow end of the gene pool with Jay and Silent Bob. "Yeah. Having a kid and Jason Mewes being on tons of drugs. Which is pretty much the same thing."

The director of Dogma is impressed by the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ, although he hadn't yet seen it when we spoke. "I don't like the bloody Christ," Smith says, reaching out comically like an all-too-gentle Jesus, "I like the buddy Christ. The one who gets beaten and shit? He's not the one I want to focus on. I know he rises in the end, I read the book!"

Adventures in the 60622

Last year, I acted in 25-year-old Chicago filmmaker Gym Jones' Why Would Anyone Do Anything?, which you can view here. He asked me to play the role of a doctor after I reviewed an earlier short of his, Undisciplined (also on his site). The comedy starred stylish Chicago music writer Liz Armstrong, and the gleefully twisted fun she had on screen suggested taking the role would be both a terrible idea and worth the experience. One stern caveat: the only thing more politically incorrect than the pregnancy-themed Why Would Anyone Do Anything? may be Jones' upcoming feature, What Would Teenage Jesus Do?

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