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

The Fire This Time

On Saturday night, Fahrenheit 9/11's grosses surpassed $103 million.

The Black Moore

Last week, Paramount announced that Alan Moore's Watchmen is going to be a Darren Aronofsky project-which I hope becomes a movie instead of another stalled piece of work. Scott Thill's Salon interview with the so-smart visionary of the graphic novel, The Man Who Invented the Future (subscription or day pass after watching an ad) is a solid read, including this: "Television and movies have short-circuited reality… I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen."

Festage

A few hundred words I wrote about two smaller festivals that I truly like are up at Filmmaker magazine's website. Winnipeg's FilmExchange, an all-Canadian conspiracy of taste and the documentary fest, Images of the 21st Century in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Coming and Going

Next week I hope to weigh in on Shimuzu Takashi's Ju-on: The Grudge, Zatochi: The Blind Swordsman, notes on a second viewing of Richard Linklater's romantic masterpiece of longing and regret, Before Sunset, and The Manchurian Candidate.

Remake Man

But for now, here's a preview of my interview with Jonathan Demme, on the subject of remakes of beloved pictures like The Manchurian Candidate: "I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good, or even great, movie. I think what's sacrilegious is to make a bad movie, whether it's a remake or an original. I've felt, it's what I always tell my actor friends, anybody who's in this [business], this thing, you've gotta try to hold out and only do the scripts, do the material that offers you the opportunity to do your best work. Because if you do stuff that doesn't give you that opportunity? Your work's not gonna be good. And you're gonna suffer in the long run from that. So, again, I don't care if it's a remake if it's a great script with parts in it that can attract fantastic actors, God, y'know, to make the movie."

Towering

I've been meaning to write about Dan Algrant's long-delayed Al Pacino-starring beaker of bile, People I Know (** ½), recently out on DVD. Pacino's portrait of the last day in the life of a career Manhattan publicist is both extravagant and focused, yet the movie's descent into 1970s Alan Pakula-type paranoia doesn't hold up. It seems small and forced in certain ways, and its greatest interest remains its pre-9/11 disillusionment with life in Manhattan. The DVD includes two scenes that were cut, which still didn't get the movie onto more than a couple of screens when it was desultorily released. Both involve the World Trade Center, and Algrant's commentary (shared with theater director Gregory Mosher) and frank concessions about restraints of budget and taste are interesting. He agrees that the breathtaking vision Pacino's character has one hung-over morning of the Twin Towers turning on their side is too much, but expresses regret on losing a lovely framing at the north of Washington Square Park, a shot from a taxicab driving downtown on Fifth Avenue that perfectly situates the gleaming towers through the park's arch.

Dark Chicago

Sometimes I wonder who shot the dog.

Reading negative reviews of a movie like I, Robot (***), you wonder what stunted the writer (besides years of sitting in the dark watching film after film). At what age, what breed was the dog, what was its name? And how did its passing mar the emotions of the reviewer for life?

I, Robot, a perky pup in its own right, has almost nothing to do with Isaac Asimov's short stories, with its perfunctory lone-wolf cop plot transplanted from an earlier script. Alex Proyas' film was "suggested" by Asimov's work, the credits say; they actually added elements from his stories late in the game after finally securing the rights. Strike 1 for older reviewers who still revere their madeleine of decaying wood-pulp SF paperbacks, strike 2 for not being a groundbreaking narrative of vigorous novelty.

But what's actually up on screen is lean and clean, limber work by a director whose visual invention truly shone in Dark City, but also shows in a formally ambitious misfire like Garage Days.

Ordinarily, I have the bliss of seeing a movie fresh, before others have weighed in. But Fox chose not to make I, Robot available until after last week's deadline. There are very specific writers whose work is gratifying to check out afterwards-Manohla Dargis of the New York Times among younger critics, Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal among the gray-and there are others I read out of frantic boredom while filling time over coffee.

But, as too few writers seem to allow, movies that aren't very good on certain levels can be a delight on others, and I'm not talking about the new "VIP edition" of Showgirls that comes with your own personal set of tasseled pasties.

Tony Scott in the New York Times, as is his literary bent, was dismissive of I, Robot for a familiar plaint against Fight Club on its release: paradox. "Dramatizing the threat of runaway technology seems to demand ever greater technological innovation."

Cool point. But what I want to know is what does the movie sound like? Most plot synopses make movies sound the same, run together in one blur of what-happened-next. What does it look like, if you consider the sensory thing up there on screen, rather than plot. There's theme galore in I, Robot, and that point surely didn't escape the filmmakers. But was it fun for you?

Expecting visionary scripts to be turned into big-budget pictures is a sad pursuit, a matter of not seeing the trees for the paper. The flaws of I, Robot include editing and writing that seem rushed and characterization that is only daubed in. But is that purposeful understatement or omission?

Chicago, 2035: Detective Spooner (Will Smith), wisecracking and suspicious of the new generation of robots about to arrive in the streets, is the inevitable solitary cop who knows, leading to conflict with all manner of authority, from his boss at work to grandma at home. James Cromwell plays the leading robotic innovator, at least as a hologram that provides post mortem clues to Spooner after his own suicide. Enter scientist Dr. Calvin (a frustratingly robotic Bridget Moynahan) to help the nice detective and the audience to understand what's at stake. (The future of man, wouldn't you know?) There's also one "good" robot, the late scientist's favorite, which he named Sonny. (He's voiced by Alan Tudyk, an actor whose calm tones riff sweetly off the deadpan voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Like all good retro-futurists, Proyas and his team cherry-pick from the past. Spooner wears a pair of 2004 Chuck Taylors, and you could guess that the character was probably born right around this very year, but several details like that are left for the audience to consider, rather than being stressed. (There's a funny, chilling brief reference to the "one of us!" chant from Freaks, for instance.)

Most of the futuristic exteriors are striking, especially for those who know the prairie topography of Chicago. The Wrigley Building stands, and the Marina Towers are still stubby and steadfast in the 3-D skyline creation of a futuristic city that works overtime. Along with the Hancock and Sears tower, the skyline is dominated by the lair of the possibly evil U. S. Robotics corporation (no relation to the 1990s modem manufacturer), lording over the city and the expanses of the Lake Michigan landfill from a Petronas Tower-like Tower of Babel, a massive ugly knotted spire that seems to have been plopped down on Wacker Drive in place of the Hyatt.

Proyas' movie shows some budgetary creaks: Vancouver's alleyways, with their three-sided electric poles, look nothing like Chicago's, and there's a painfully expository walk-and-talk between Spooner and Calvin that takes place entirely in a long alleyway. Two pages of dialogue and no set dressing: that's one way to catch up to a tight budget. A couple of street-level sets are repeated, funkily resembles downtown Winnipeg more than anything characteristically Midwestern.

The robots rebel: as in most dystopic tales that make it to the screen, technology is bad. But Proyas' use of technology to create several intricately choreographed action scenes with dozens and even hundreds of robots, are kinetic marvels, especially a late night showdown with ranks of anthropomorphic machinery eddying over the bridge at Michigan and Wacker. (The dizzying, swooper-duper gymbaling cameras defy gravity but not perception in their magical computer-generated patterns.) The "Lake Michigan landfill" is also home to a mechanical graveyard, with acres of boxcars like a salaryman shantytown for retired robots.

What do you get when a robot, like a corporation, is considered human? Stripped-down, basic moral conflict, conflicted characters, plus a lot of cool, shiny stuff to marvel at. An unpretentious, unassuming good time is no dog at all: it makes you feel like shooting the messenger instead.

Entertaining Children

Does mourning only end with the death of the mourner?

Tod Williams' somber second feature, The Door in the Floor (***) is a refined achievement: an adult-themed picture, richly and rewardingly detailed in dialogue, décor and psychology. It's also frankly sexual. After two viewings, the subtlety of the performances is even more admirable than at first sight.

Drawn from the opening couple hundred or so pages of John Irving's novel, "A Widow for One Year," The Door in the Floor is a worthy flowering of the talent that wandered through his first film, The Adventures of Sebastian Cole (1998). While comparisons will be made between this haunting movie and Todd Field's super-somber In the Bedroom, no one has the corner on grief.

Transposing the 1950s era of Irving's novel to the Hamptons of today-a milieu Williams, the son of a well-known architect who grew up in Greenwich Village in the same artist's housing as Vin Diesel-the writer-director makes choices from frame to frame that belie the relatively modest $7 million budget.

Moderating a Q&A at the Chicago premiere of The Door in the Floor, a few days before he married Gretchen Mol, I had a few simple questions of the unassuming but serenely confident Williams, one of which was, what kinds of movies does he want to make? His answer, in essence: Movies that last, movies that matter, movies that are as rich, suggestive and mysterious as the ones Stanley Kubrick made. (Not the sort of mumbledy-peg you hear on "Project Greenlight," you have to admit.)

Jeff Bridges gives a lovingly layered performance as Ted Cole, a successful writer and illustrator whose wife, Marion (Kim Basinger) melts in and out of her days after the death of their teenage sons. (In the several years it took to get the movie made, Williams says, he felt the recurrence of the "Cole" family name in the material, along with a key produced being named "Ted Hope" were, well, hopeful signs.) Ted and Marion also have a 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, never merely cute, and an even more charismatic presence than her older sister Dakota). After the tragedy, Ted moved the family out to the water's edge to attempt to recover.

Williams' post-Wyeth idea of the Hamptons seems serene, with damped pastels out-of-doors that even more softly lit indoors, particularly in scenes that involve Marion. When Ted's around, things are darker, taking place by night, or around near-naked brunette models (Mimi Rogers) being rendered in broad strokes of squid ink.

Ted loves the life he's had, but his way of coping is a kind of antic caddishness, behaving and dressing in ways that burst through the well-groomed manners of the rich enclave he's bought into. (Some of the smartest vulgarity you'll see all year is part of this picture's rich loam.) Ted doesn't drive, for reasons left vague, and needs an assistant, or more likely, it seems, a driver for the summer.

A lanky, gawky bundle of hormones named Eddie (Jon Foster), who wants to be a writer and whose father taught the Coles' son, comes on board. Enter: comparisons to Summer of '42, with its teasing sexual dynamic between an older woman and a callow boy. With grateful wonderment, you begin to think: who is Eddie here to assist, anyway?

Ted's alpha-male jealousy of the younger man is one of the movie's many highlights, and Bridges does wonders with his character's affected way of speaking, like he's just finished chewing ice cubes. Consider: "I need a pen with a broad nib and some red ink, red like blood, not a fire engine"; the practiced refrain, "I'm just an entertainer of children who likes to draw"; and a passage, not from Irving, that Williams concedes is his self-criticism of what he sees as the failings of Sebastian Cole, "Everything in fiction is a tool, pain, betrayal, even death."

Each composition, each small prop, each flicker of emotion across a seemingly impassive face, are lovingly etched. Even in smaller roles-Broadway stalwart Donna Murphy, as a frame shop owner, made my month with her orotund way with the precious line, "I framed a painting for them by Sibley called the Incarnation of Diabolus." It's giddy perfection: this character, this person would say this in that way, and no other.

As lit by Terry Stacy, designed by Thérèse DePrez, cut by Affonso Goncalves, and scored by Marcelo Zarvos, The Door in the Floor is consummately crafted, poignantly observed, and even manages by the last shot to make its cloddish-sounding title into something memorably resonant.

Next up, Williams directs Benicio del Toro in an adaptation Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. It'll be dark, Williams promises. He says he even surprised himself with how dark the ending will be.

Verites

Steve James' conflicted Stevie (*** 1/2) makes its Cinemax debut on July 27. You can check my earlier review where I talk to the co-director of Hoop Dreams about the long-term making of something deeply personal. "Hoop Dreams was the 1994 gem from Chicago's Kartemquin Films group, several of whom are involved in Stevie, a portrait deeper, denser and darker than that hopeful classic," I wrote earlier.

July 27 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride