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

Quick takes on the brilliantly dour chamber drama We Don't Live Here Anymore, the claustrophobic French thriller Red Lights, the suggestive Japanese chiller Ju-on, Nicotina, and a long conversation with Richard Kelly roundabout why he persisted and made Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut.

You call this living?

Ed Bluestone, a nearly forgotten 1970s comic used to joke, "Who needs pets? Everybody's got stupid friends." In a sideways kind of way, We Don't Live Here Anymore, John Curran's filming of Larry Gross' adept, dark, almost-three-decades-old adaptation of two short stories by the late writer Andre Dubus, reminds me of that crack, in that the quartet of supposedly-comfy but self-destructive academic couples on show are like that friend you have who's always hoping not to choose wrong this time, but to choose the right wrong date or partner or affair. (Everybody knows a stupid fucker.)

The nonspecific Pacific Northwest settings are a damp and crunchy setting for the four alternating viewpoints of a pair of loving parents who happen to be partner swapping as well. A modest, fiery dissection of middle-class privilege and of how smart people can let their idle dreams eat them alive, it's a spitting cousin to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf that boasts the caliber of performances, by Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, Mark Ruffalo, and especially Laura Dern that can only be described as searing. The dour, aching mood suggests something deeply sorrowful about the masochistic grandeur of self-delusion, the armature of denial.

White flight fever

Cedric Kahn's memorably irritating L'ennui (1998), about a philosophy professor who becomes obsessed with a dark younger woman, didn't prepare me for the somnolent precision of his Georges Simenon adaptation, Red Lights. Partaking of some notions about suspense and suspicions shared by Hitchcock, and more pointedly, the curdled portraits of bourgeois disaffection directed by his countryman Claude Chabrol, Red Lights finds a tense couple driving out through Paris' stifling traffic to pick up their kids from a summer camp in the south of France. Helene (Carole Bouquet) is late to meet her husband Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin, simply superb), and he downs several drinks while waiting, only to see her saying goodbye from some distance to a male stranger. He lets his paranoia simmer, they bicker, he drinks more. And then she disappears. Kahn escalates the suspense in delicious increments, and the movie becomes as claustrophobic as Antoine's car, as Antoine's mind. Even more chilling is the face that Antoine's aware of his situation, playing off other figures with humor.

Don't go in the house again

Ju-on director Shimuzu Takashi has just made an American remake, The Grudge, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, of this modestly budgeted Japanese chiller, the third in a series. Reportedly, Shimuzu shot on the same locations as with this small, suggestive supernatural telling. A home care worker's curiosity at the home of a bed-ridden patient leads her to opens a door sealed with duct tape, which releases a "horrible evil" that's been responsible for the deaths of several people who have died in the house. Sam Raimi, who produced the remake, overstates the case by calling it "the most frightening film I've ever seen," but it's more sinister than shocking, the dark doings of its evil spirit of vengeance more memorable when you think of them a few days later than while watching the terse, simple litany of victims struck down by an angry dark vapor.

Smoked

Hugo Rodriguez's slight heist-driven black comedy, Nicotina is a small, profane diversion, with all the pluses and minuses you'd guess if I were to call it a Mexican Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The same producers who were responsible for Amores Perros made this 2003 caper, told in simulated real time. Diego Luna (Y tu mama tambien, The Terminal) plays a perverted nerd of a hacker who owns his building, but spies on a woman who lives in on of his apartments. He's in the middle of cracking Swiss bank codes for a gangster who wants to buy a fortune in diamonds from Russian gangsters when she finds out about his audio and video surveillance of her bedroom, leading to him supplying the wrong CD of data to the mobsters. More profanity and violence ensue. There's a modest marzipan quality to the light of the film's darkened, depopulated streets, but ultimately, Nicotina's a derivative tale better suited for happy chance discovery on late night cable than a full-fare night out at the movies.

L.A. Twister

The debut feature of Sven Pape, whose credits include editing James Cameron's IMAX 3-D Ghosts of the Abyss is one more story of friends palling around L.A. trying to break through the conspiracy of distaste that Southern California always turns out to be in a movie like this. (L.A. Twister makes Swingers seem epic.) Lenny and Ethan-why not Lenny and George? Why not Lenny and Squiggy?-are determined to find love, fame and fortune while writing scripts and looking for roles in a stock Hollywood "underbelly" of hardly-dressed sets and grotesque side characters. Zack Ward (who, years ago, played the bully in A Christmas Story) and Tony Daly are game in an off-Melrose showcase actorish way, but the likeably swear-filled banter is ultimately wearying. From a play by Geoffrey Saville-Read.

Dark, Darko, darkest

Donnie Darko may travel through time but he just won't die.

As the John Hughes of his self-invented "tangent universe," Richard Kelly has been living since 1998 with the movie Donnie Darko,"one of the most heartfelt, heartening, puzzling, weird and wonderful writer director debuts in memory. He was 23 then, when he wrote the script, and in 2001, the finished movie played well at Sundance, failed to get a major distributor, had its music changed and its cut locked at under two hours.

Kelly's tonally insolent story-science fiction, a comedy, a romance, a musical, a satire of cult religion, a gorgeous portrait of articulated teen confusion, a drama of the aftermath of a plane accident--landed with a thud at Halloween 2001, only a few weeks after the events of September 11. Since then, with its DVD release, midnight shows and one-week runs at venues in big cites, the movie's developed a word-of-mouth following. Newmarket, the company that released Donnie Darko after their debut with Memento, has since successfully distributed movies like Monster and The Passion of the Christ anted up for the now-29-year-old director to revisit his movie with an "extended remix," shifting the music to Kelly's original choices and to add twenty minutes of deleted and new footage. For those who've gotten comfortable with the twists of a movie marketed as "Dark, darker, Darko," some of the material may be too explanatory, offering answers where once there were many mysteries. Yet it also offers supple illumination of the family dynamics that nurtured Jake Gyllenhaal's sensitive, haunted superhero of the everyday.

Kelly wrote the movie in 1998, when he was 23. So of the movie's setting, he tells me one early morning last week, still boyish in rimless glasses, running pants and t-shirt, " I was 13 in 1988."

PRIDE: The use of the music reminds me of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, where some viewers might think the 18-year-olds are the identification figures, when in fact the real point-of-view comes from the 14-year-old, who's just discovering music through the older ears.

KELLY: Yeah. Yeah. This was the music that I heard from my brother's room. I was 13, so my brother was much more astute, he was 16 or 17 at the time, so he was definitely like buying... I mean, clearly Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, he was going through that stage. But it was also Tears for Fears, INXS, Joy division. So it was almost like the music I wasn't quite cool enough to listen to yet, y'know?

PRIDE: Seeping from under the door?

KELLY: Not that I was listening, but I remember there was Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, and some of the more, y'know, metal stuff. My brother would listen to that, Quiet Riot, Ratt, there was the metal side. Then there was the more pop. I remember the pop music like "Kokomo." Eighty-eight was the year of "Kokomo," the Beach Boys song.

PRIDE: The first time I saw Donnie Darko in a theater was on a first date. I'd say it was a good date movie.

KELLY: Really? That's good! It makes me proud if it's a date film. At the Independent Spirit Awards, because we were nominated for a few things, at the awards presentation they did a joke about how dark and depressing a lot of the films were, like which film is going to make you least likely to get laid after the screening. Us, In the Bedroom, other movies where people are dead at the end. So that's good to hear that maybe they were wrong.

PRIDE: Is there anything that people can ask that still surprise you?

KELLY: It's just like the movie, it won't die. I am happy that it still goes on and on and it provokes people, it provokes discussion and it's of interest to people. Sometimes I still think the movie is just slowly being discovered. There are a lot of people who haven't seen it. It's been like a pure word-of-mouth, the very essence of word-of-mouth advertising is what built this film. I think two of the most instrumental things in the resurrection of this film are Internet and DVD. I think that the fact that someone living in a remote village in Alaska now has a broadband connection and Netflix or Amazon.com. He can now order the Bicycle Thief on DVD and have it delivered to his house in a day or two. Fifteen years ago, for a guy in as remote village in Alaska to get his hands on a copy of The Bicycle Thief would have been extraordinarily difficult if not impossible. In a way, it has democratized; it's made art readily accessible in even the remote regions of the planet. It has subverted the corporate system of, what will Blockbuster show, put on their shelf.

PRIDE: Was this a problem when the earlier version of the movie went to market?

KELLY: When Newmarket cut a deal with Fox, someone had to service, to deliver the DVD, Fox said, 'Yeah, we'll pick it up for DVD.' Otherwise, Blockbuster wouldn't carry it. People can now purchase whatever they want, not only what Blockbuster makes available to them, right? It all comes down to the Internet in the end. It's changing everything, it's adjusting everything for better and for worse in different degrees. This movie wouldn't have been resuscitated if it were not for that.

PRIDE: With his IFC releases and Newmarket work, Bob Berney seems to always be very aware of how to take advantage of unexpected events.

KELLY: The reason it was such a hit in the UK was that all the film hardcore film people buy Region 1 DVDs there, because they want it first. That fueled the word of mouth in the UK and made it a theatrical hit. Bob really understands the method to the madness of distribution. When you see these 60% drops after the first weekend... The studios can pump so many marketing dollars on billboards, TV ads, radio spots, internet, they can saturate the market even if the movie is a gigantic piece of crap. They can dupe the audience into showing up to give them a colossal opening weekend.

PRIDE: The traveling circus doesn't give refunds.

KELLY: Yeah. The shame is, they'd rather spend all that marketing for a movie that is just a safe piece of crap than God forbid, spend all that marketing on a really edgy, ballsy, bold project.

PRIDE: Once upon a time, Star Wars was considered edgy.

KELLY: It's a shame they'd rather be safe, we know it's a piece of crap, and we know there's gonna be a 61% drop after the first weekend, but we'll still do fine internationally but we'd rather do that than put this same oomph... Imagine if they put the same oomph behind, what if they marketed LA Confidential with the same gusto they marketed SWAT. I haven't seen SWAT, so, nothing against it.

PRIDE: You mean movies that are more a package than a labor of love.

KELLY: Yeah. If they even gave half the marketing to... I just think there's such an overriding cynicism to the whole process where they think, oh, that's too highbrow, pull back on the marketing, because people are just stupid. They think everyone in America is so stupid they can only market the really lowbrow action, the broad comedies.

PRIDE: So this is a tough moment?

KELLY: I feel like the business is in a really low place right now. The studios, all they want to make are remakes, sequels, remakes of TV shows into movies. A certain kind of horror film remake. The only horror movies they want to make right now are remakes. Remakes of the Japanese films... Then there's a movie about a princess or a girl who wants to be a princess, goes to London, meets her guy.

PRIDE: Is this reinforced by your current experience trying to have an open conversation with studios about what you want to make?

KELLY: Yeah. We don't have a distributor yet for my next film because the whole package is coming together imminently, in a week or so... but my agents keep telling me, my agents tell me, Rich, the studios, they know what they want to make. They have their slate. They want to make this, this, this and this. At every studio there's maybe one or two slots for something provocative or interesting to release in November or December. There's one or two slots where they'll do something that is Oscar bait. If there weren't financial gain to be had from the Oscar race... thank God there are box office bumps because the Oscar telecast gets big ratings. That's really the only reason they throw a couple of prestige pictures out there. 'Wow, if we get some Oscar noms, we can make $100 million.' In the end, it all comes down to those, that red carpet, the ratings bonanza for the Oscars is because of the red carpet, everyone wants to see what everyone's wearing. Because of the ratings bonanza, people then boost the box office of films that are nominated. Then because of that box office boost, it makes studios think, 'Okay, well, shit, we've got to release a couple of good films this year!'

PRIDE: How can you beat that?

KELLY: It's this weird cycle where you have to... You want to dictate to the studio, 'Here is what I want to make, please distribute it. Please finance and distribute it.' Or the studio goes, 'These are the pictures we want to make. Come direct one of the pictures we want to do.' It's much easier to do that than it is to try to hand them your stuff. Especially when your first film goes to a whopping $500,000 at the box office. They look at your spreadsheet and they go, 'Are you kidding? No.'

PRIDE: Cult's an indefinable word thrown around by journalists, do you get people asking how Donnie Darko's 'cult following' helps you?

KELLY: Studio heads don't care about cult followings. That does not translate. There is a spreadsheet. They have a computer formula. They plug in the genre first. Because everything has to be put into a category. Then they plug in the star. Then they plug in the director, right? Everyone has numbers. It's like your credit rating. Movie stars have power numbers based on their box office, international and domestic. When they're determining what the budget of the film should be, they're plugging into this computer program. There's this person sitting there, and they don't even read the screenplay. They don't read the screenplay. They don't even bother. They read a synopsis of it. These foreign [buyers], they're like, you have Richard Gere. It's a romantic comedy. The director is Spike Lee. Something absurd. A romantic comedy starring Richard Gere and Britney Spears, directed by Spike Lee. And then they plug those elements in. they look at Spike Lee's box office track record, they look at Richard Gere's, they look at Britney Spears' box office track record, what romantic comedies gross worldwide based on all that context. And they spit out a number. They say, 'This is what this film is worth in the marketplace.' They don't even read the script. Then that's the law. The law of the land.

PRIDE: It sounds like you're making genetically modified organisms. Patent that DNA.

KELLY: It is not an exaggeration. The really provocative $20 million film, around the $20 million-ish range, which is what the film I'm about to make [Southland Tales] is in that kind of range, the studios are a little frightened. They look for some foreign financing. You get your cast assembled, then you try to go back and get a distributor signed on for a rent-a-system deal. That's what Tony Scott just did with my script, Domino. He got Keira Knightley, he got Samuel Hadida to write the check for the whole movie and New Line's going to distribute it. So everyone's happy. Here's what it is. You'd be surprised, all the foreign people come back and [show that] they live and die by cast and what cast will work for them. They'll come to me and say, 'So-and-so doesn't mean anything.' 'I'd like to cast so-and-so, their movies make a fortune in the US.' And they say, 'But so-and-so is only a comedy star and comedy doesn't translate internationally.' It gets really maddening and depressing.

PRIDE: Mastering the art of the deal.

KELLY: Yeah, and it's all gonna collapse. The key is to getting to do this, part of why this Director's Cut is important for my career is that if you can establish any kind of brand as a director where your name as director means something, your ability to raise financing based on the name of the director, they'll let you cast. LA Confidential, for example. Thank god someone like Arnon Milchan took a chance. Curtis Hanson gave him a big presentation and said, 'This is my vision for the movie. I want to cast this guy Russell Crowe, this guy Guy Pearce, and Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger.' And he said, 'I believe in this project even though those names might not mean anything in the marketplace, I'm gonna give you $30-40 million,' whatever he got to make that film. That's a ballsy move. It's almost next to impossible someone will do that. If I had the script of LA Confidential today, today's equivalent of Guy Pearce or Russell Crowe, everyone would be like, 'Fuck you. We might give your $8 million for those guys.' You can't make L.A. Confidential for eight million. So it's really, it's not a good place right now. The only way to combat that is to just prove somehow that your worth and your numerical value in the marketplace is higher. It sucks to live and die by those rules, but...

PRIDE: Watching the movie again last night from all the way at the back of the theater, I was definitely seeing some Kubrick framing. Especially in some of the school washroom and the rabbit conversations. Frontal things, 90 degree cuts instead of intermediate angles.

KELLY: Probably to me he's the greatest filmmaker ever. I definitely felt like this movie had to have a control about it. It had to have a subjective point of view, particularly in encounters with the rabbit. We chose a certain symmetrical staring-in-the-lens quality to those encounters. So it ended up, Jake, sometimes I felt like he was channeling Malcolm McDowell here a few times, in Clockwork, but he's such a y'know, a charismatic guy, even when gee's going off the deep end, you're still drawn to that character. Part of why I was so lucky to cast him is that no matter what he does in the movie, he remains sympathetic, he remains, you're seeing someone who to the outside universe is going off the deep end, yet I hope even in the Directors Cut, you're realizing he's not crazy, not at all. He's exposed to all this new information he's trying to deal with, he's trying to solve this riddle.

PRIDE: I've always been moved by the superhero idea in the movie with Cherita Chin, worshipful in the background, and now there are all these extra shots of her as the audience surrogate. 'I am the audience, I love you with jaw wide open, I worship you.'

KELLY: Yeah, yeah. She kinda knows. Gretchen [Jena Malone] is like Lois Lane, but I don't know if there's a character in comic mythology [like her]. But in Alfred Hitchcock films, there's the geeky girl with the glasses who's in love [with the hero], in Rear Window, it's the housekeeper who shows up to tend to Jimmy Stewart who's clearly in love with him, but she's kind of the nerdy sidekick. Cherita Chin is kind of like that Hitchcock character. I should have given her horn rim glasses.

PRIDE: There are a lot of quotable lines, and people do repeat them, how exactly do you suck a fuck?

KELLY: [laughs] I love interesting permutations of cuss words. It's always better than the inane insult that makes the person spewing the insult look even more idiotic than the person receiving it.

PRIDE: There are other things, though, that are more inspired. There's a scene that really works as screenwriting, Drew's character and Noah Wyle's character, they're in the teacher's lounge, she's eating something out of a Tupperware container, he looks up, says, "Donnie Darko." And she says, "How 'bout it." I was teaching a class recently and made them watch that snippet four times: their relationship, their body language, their intimacy, their concern and admiration, all comes through with a minimum of text.

KELLY: Yeah. A lot of it came down to just simplifying down to the point where less is more. Find a way to say what the whole scene is about in just one moment. Even the deleted scene that got restored in the Directors Cut, of the parents in the restaurant. There was all this dialogue it was the end of the night, I was like, 'Fuck it, you just say... [lines deleted]. I let the camera roll and Mary improvised, they started laughing and I just let it roll.

August 21 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride