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

Good Nutjob

Giddy verbal nonsense marks Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (***), a send-up of strutting male morons in a 1970s television newsroom. Will Ferrell's latest writing-starring gig a truly guilty "afternoon delight," if we can appropriate the title of one of that decade's giddiest wedges of treacle that prompts a full-on, a cappella musical number. Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, a San Diego local TV anchorman without a whit of self-awareness. He's surrounded by a like nest of ninnies, including cowboy-hat wearing, sexually confused sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner), street reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), and dumb-as-a-box-of-bodega-cauliflower weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell). (Plus Fred Willard's the station manager.) Their macho strutting, bad hair, worse mustaches and unappetizing colognes get challenged when the unheard happens--a woman's added to their team, Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate).

Chicago Tribune TV writer Steve Johnson weighed in on the accuracy of the setting and behavior-almost none, he claims, having mastered the quirks of a banal history few really give a damn about-but the array of comically weird detours, non sequitur-style verbal noodling and cameos are ample compensation. (Anchorman also has the most laughs in a single movie since Shrek 2.) Director and co-writer Adam McKay was a founding member of the Upright Citizens' Brigade comedy group, as well as a Saturday Night Live alumnus, and Anchorman's end-credit outtakes reveal a little of the madness of he and Ferrell's method. In several reaction shots from the movie, takes of Ferrell and other actors riffing on their lines are rapidly jumpcut together, four or five or six discarded possibilities that are as funny. Lunacy. Hooray.

Tabled

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Antoine Fuqua and credited screenwriter David Franzoni burrow deep into the Hollywood imagination to bring on the origin of the Camelot mythology, as well as the joke about the baby's arm with an apple on the end. (Ray Winstone was the feller who dealt it.)

As history and spectacle and pageantry, King Arthur, (** 1/2), even with its fourth century savagery, far from the better-known pretty-pretty Lady of the Lake-style romanticism, is one of an increasingly common genre of big-budget moviemaking: the utterly unnecessary piece of laudable craft.

King Arthur never has the sweep of a work of passion like any of John Boorman's many movies that drink deep at the reflecting pool of Arthurian legend. A lot of levers have to get pulled to make a violent, large-scale period epic like this, but it still feels like all it took was one little button. Wielded, of course, by Bruckheimer, with his legendary high-priced last-minute tweakage.

It's easy to tell the international cast of actors apart by the extravagant follicular dandyism: Call it "Bravehair." For instance, Clive Owen has cute little black curls; Ray Winstone, he of the sexual brags, has his head shaven; Saxon antagonist Stellan Skarsgaard has a wooly wig and beard, looking oddly like Geoffrey Rush at a preliminary costume session for a no-budget "King Lear"; and Til Schweiger, with Bugs Bunny fangs and a little Fred Durst-like twigs-and-berries of beard dangling down, a distraction as you wait for someone to tug or chop it before smiting his smirking face.

Keira Knightley, playing Guinevere, gets a late, rousing battle passage to showcase her coltish vigor, half-naked in khaki-and-forest bodypaint, breasts pinioned by straps and Theda Bara-style raccoon eye makeup. Most intriguing, coming from the producer of Black Hawk Down, with its searing take on an American military urban battle, are parallels, intentional or no, to contemporary history: the occupation of Iraq. There are secret torture chambers; beheadings; soldiers are dragooned for long terms against their will; the "final" mission that comprises the bulk of the movie comes on a night when Arthur and his men expected to be handed the equivalent of discharge papers. Rome, they're told, is about to withdraw from Britain under the dark of night, leaving the place to the savage Saxons. (The screening I attended was on the day legal authority of Iraq was hastily transferred to Iraqis.)

A Hard Man is Good to Find

Consider silence.

What can you do with an empty, yet forbidding, urban nightscape? Or with the human face, Clive Owen's face? In I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (****), director Mike Hodges, who turns , who turns 72 this month, works chilly wonders for the second time with the hardy, minimalist actor. Even across an epic canvas like King Arthur, the always-precise Owen holds the screen like a simmering Sean Connery and an effortless Cary Grant combined.

After their critical success in 1999's Croupier, they've turned to the austere samurai variation of a seven-year-old script by Hodges' longtime colleague and friend Trevor Preston. (Hodges, as is his custom, shares the "a film by" possessory credit with Preston.) Cinematographer Mike Garfath, who also shot Croupier, works mostly at night and in interiors here, taking the black of noir and adding the blue of bruise.

Behind a formidably forbidding mess of beard, Owen plays Will Graham, who, for better or worse, shares a name with the protagonist of Michael Mann's Manhunter. He's a gangster, a hard man, who had to get out, out of London, and out of crime, and he's lived for three years in a camper in the north of England, off the grid and out of mind. Beloved younger brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an incautious and womanizing smalltime coke dealer is stalked and raped-what a coroner calls "non-consensual buggery," which was once the British legal term for male rape.

Malcolm McDowell plays Boad, the cold, older family man who resents Davey's youth and beauty. Boad sees Davey, charmed and charming, at a party and puts it in mind: I will destroy him. ("He was everything I loathed… I wanted to show him what he was… Nothing… Nothing... He was less than nothing.") In his humiliation, Davey apparently kills himself in his bath. Enter: Will.

Consider that silence as well: the things you cannot know about another person: fears, weaknesses, guilt. (Despite several characters' venturing or denial, including the coroner's observation that, like most male rape victims, Davey ejaculated, the movie never pins down his sexuality.)

Can you be "both cerebral and muscular," as the 2004 Sundance program notes suggested? We're right at the corner of asperity and pretension in this elliptical, slow burn revenge tale. (I like the view from there.)

Hodges, who shot several documentaries about his favored filmmakers in the 1960s, is open in his praise for the French directors Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville, never great box office or consistently big on the laughs.

Meeting Hodges early one morning this year at Sundance was to meet a bubbling-over cinephile, citing examples from Jean-Luc Godard, for his relentless invention; Bresson, for the savor of sound; and Melville, for his dissection of male codes of honor (as well the caged parakeet from Le Samourai that hops restlessly in Davey's empty flat.)

Comparisons to Hodges' own, near-nihilist Get Carter (1970) are also inevitable, as are ones to Steven Soderbergh's memorably sleek yet scrambled The Limey (1999). But the methodical feel of Hodges' pictures is singular. Hodges shoots quick and lean. He has a marvelous, refined eye for how to use interiors to indicate psychological displacement, often by revealing the depths of a space only after we have been seen smaller bits. Choices of set and prop design are unusually telling, as well, significant without being unduly showy. (The bathroom where Davey dies is claustrophobic as hell.) He constructs a mood of gloom instead of relying on propulsive plotting and easily described twists. He also captures something rarely seen: the look and chilly wetness of the Brixton backstreets of London late at night when they're unpeopled.

The movie's been read by some as homophobic, rather than reflecting primal fear. Hodges laughed as he confessed to me, "I think if I sat down to write a script of my own, I wouldn't necessarily write one about male rape."

Preston, who came to writing after scrapes with a criminal element, suggested to Hodges, the director says, as he does in his screenplay, that for a certain criminal class, such a violation "undermines the whole of their personality."

Other performances are lovingly measured as well, notably, Charlotte Rampling as Helen, an abandoned former lover of Will's. There's a dimly lit scene in her café where she asks why he's come back, why he's exposing himself to his former cohorts and enemies. What is that lost expression on that face she loved? "It's grief for a life wasted. And now there's Davey, another fucking wasted life. And I'm going to find out why."

Like most of the movie's terse bursts of dialogue, it's blunt, broody stuff and lovely. "Look at what I've become," Will says in perhaps his most sustained eruption. "I sometimes don't speak to another living soul for days, weeks, always on the move. I trust nothing. No one. And it has nothing to do with escape."

If that sounds like your cup of hemlock, you're in for an unflinching treat, a chilly masterpiece.

Sticky Sex

There’s a kind of mopey-dopiness from a day in the sun, too little to eat, too little on your mind: here’s a movie that fully embodies like that kind of light-headed distraction. Thai director Achitapong “Joe” Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (Sud Sanaeha) (****) is a lyrical daydream and road movie, with political undercurrents and explicit sex.

A graduate of Chicago's School of the Art Institute, whose first feature was the equally enigmatic and playful semi-documentary exquisite-corpse Mysterious Object at Noon (on PlexiFilm DVD), Weerasethakul is an original: a bold, funny, and always surprising filmmaker.

On the border between Thailand and Burma, the site of decades of political disputes and battles, the lives of three people overlap: Min, a Burmese illegal immigrant, his Thai girlfriend, Roong, who works in a factory assembly line making comically silly exportable junk, and Orn, an older woman who is Roong's friend. Their daily lives simmer, but they, and the film, do not dwell on the politics, merely hoping for a wet, cool afternoon in the jungle.

Weerasethakul's dreamy non-actors sustain the mood. A sample of Joe W.'s lyrical oddities: there are no opening credits, but once Roong and Min escape in a car along the highway to the affecting lilt of a technopop song, about fifty minutes into the movie, the full credits appear as the vehicle moves from civilization to a stickier part of summer. (Blissfully Yours preceded Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to the screen, which uses its main titles similarly.)

It's a memorable experience; Apichatpong is an obstinate new force. A prizewinner at many festivals, its showing at Chicago's Facets Multimedia is a world theatrical premiere.

July 9 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride