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

Vincent Gallo is an artist, but you'll have to wait until the next column to find out why. (And James Toback is a wry nutcase, but more on that when When Will I Be Loved premieres in Toronto.) Meanwhile: the graceful drama of Mean Creek and a few words about Hero, Rosenstrasse, Bang Rajan, The Blonds, Exorcist: The Beginning, Oasis, Playtime in 70mm, Suspect Zero and Uncovered.

Stand by y'all

What's an average kid to do?

Especially if you're not quite a teenager and you're up a river in rural Oregon with a handful of your best friends and a bad joke becomes a worse situation and now you've all got a dead body on your hands. What began as a prank to get revenge on an outsized loudmouth bully in Mean Creek, Jacob Aaron Estes' debut feature as writer-director, a taut thriller and a compact allegory, grows into a complex and resonant tragedy.

Rory Culkin's shy Sam, who, in the first scene, toys with the DV camera of overweight George (Joshua Peck, a marvel of intelligence and neediness), gets beat down one more time. Protective older brother Rocky (Trevor Morgan) plans their comeuppance: they'll invite George on Sam's supposed birthday on an upriver trip, pants him and send him the many miles back to town. Complicating the picture are Rocky's older friends Clyde and Marty (Ryan Kelley and an angry, brooding Scot Mechlowicz) and Sam's perhaps-girlfriend and voice-of-reason Millie (radiant, straightforward Carly Schroeder).

Each role and each performance is lovingly etched. Of Millie, Estes observes, "She's caught between becoming a teenager and still being just a kid. It' s a really narrow window, a moment when suddenly girls turn into women. And I needed an actress who really had an innate sense of innocence, innocence, really, is the best word to describe it, someone who was exuberant, and not jaded. The whole arc of her character, she ends up being so diminished by what happens and then I needed to take this character and turn her into somebody who's been really badly hurt and suddenly looking at the world with a whole new perspective."

Schroeder suited Estes' lead as well. "Rory Culkin's a pretty small guy and we needed to find somebody that didn't overwhelm him physically, that seemed visually compatible. We kept looking younger and younger and after seeing about 150 girls personally and my casting director had seen like 350, on the last day before we nearly gave up and hired the wrong person, she came in and just dazzled us."

Why? "I wanted kids that just felt like kids, not kids that felt like angst-ridden pilot actors, because some of them are so wound up, there's so much pressure on them, being pushed really hard. I didn't want that."

The character of Millie is plainspoken, but, as Estes points out, "there are levels where that character is able to be really straightforward and others where she's not." Those moments, which you'll have to discover, are among Mean Creek's many small grace notes in observing how young people deal with their lives.

An American Film Institute directing fellow, Estes won the competitive Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his script, and developed it at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, with the help of a director, actors and a dramaturg. But Estes is quick to note that Mean Creek never took the form of a playscript. "It would have been amazing to stage [as a play] on a river! It could have been interesting, I supposed... but it was always a scrreenpaly." [An important part of the plot is revealed in the remainder of this piece.]

One of the gratifying things about Estes' control of suspense is that anything seems possible, but it never turns cheap. Gun. Car. Angry. Booze. Body. Oh-oh. "Gun. Yeah. At a certain point, my dramaturge said to me, 'A kid is dead. Let's deal with that.' Another playwright at O'Neill, Adam Rapp, said to me, one of the talented artists chirping in my ear, we were talking about the old saying, you take out a gun in the first act, you've got to use it in the third. We were talking about that, and he said, 'Yeah, but sometimes it's better to let the balloon get bigger and bigger and bigger and never let it pop.'"

The development process helped. "Writing's often done in a vacuum, you know that. But dramatic writing is not in a vacuum. Actors read it out loud, and conflict emerges like imagery does on film. It's not just the words anymore. So witnessing that and listening to the actors and the dramaturg playing out patterns they saw in the script, made it even better. Writing requires a lot of rewriting, and you need feedback sometimes. Technically, I hadn't developed, at that point, a resolution that had the same kind of clarity that the first and second acts had. What happened in the very first shots, after George died, pretty much as it plays now, Once George died, I let it spiral out of control and bodies started piling up."

As screenwriter, Estes never considered the terse, exacting visual style director Estes adopted. "I never thought about the budget when I wrote the script. I just wrote what I thought was necessary. I didn't ever want to go anywhere the kids weren't. I didn't feel like I needed to cut back to the outside world."

"A lot of things spring up because of budgetary issues and they take on a life of their own," he says of the film's lovely, idiosyncratic greens and grays and grain. "Super-16 was always the right format for a lot of reasons. Some of it was just physical, we had to be shooting a lot of film because time was of the essence and the Super-16 camera is really easy to manage, it's light compared to a 35mm camera. A [director of photography] can have it on their shoulder all of the time, the reels last twelve minutes as opposed to six. We have eleven-minute scenes and I didn't want to call 'cut' to change a magazine in those conditions. You can move around a lot faster. But visually, the thing that controls the look is that it was almost exclusively handheld and we were shooting it from the various characters' point-of-view."

Despite the substantial authority of Estes' accomplishment in Mean Creek, there will inevitably be comparisons made to teen standards like The Outsiders, River's Edge and Stand by Me. "I don't mind those comparisons," Estes says. "River's Edge and Stand by Me, there's a dead body involved and there's teenagers. In Mean Creek, the kids are responsible for that death. They're culpable. In those movies, it's just a body that's found. That's a huge difference. And another difference is you get to know that body before it dies, all sorts of feelings about that person before they die."

Even as an audience member, you watch George and go, oh my god, he's brilliant, he's a genius, he's unbearable, he's fucked up, he's an ass, shut him up! Estes laughs. "First thing that happened when I started writing this story was, I said, I don't want this guy to just be a villain," he says. "I don't want these kids to just be these malicious kids that kill him. I wanted the villain to be complicated. And once I realized that I could make him complicated by exposing his inner life and his neediness, since I was writing about kids who are basically good kids plotting to humiliate this guy in a playful notion, I wanted them to be intelligent and complex, too, by recognizing their humanity, once I recognized that idea, I made the whole script almost about that tug-of-war of relating to George and then hating George, feeling sorry for George. I wanted the audience, the moment where he gets pushed over into the water, to feel what the kids are feeling in that instant, almost, 'I wish he would die.' But then to have those feelings complicated by this central conflict, how they're seeing George as a potentially decent person. All those amazing reactions are the fuel of the movie."

Curtains and screens

Zhang Yimou's dazzling, hypnotic, formally astounding freight train of expressionist glee, Hero, (Ying xiong, 2002) leaves a chilly aftertaste, yet its rich and rewarding historical canvas can only be called a masterpiece. It's also a palimpsest lingering in mind as a manner of hero worship that seems an apologia for two millennia of China's rule-by-warlord. The haughty pageantry and dazzling choreography of the splintered narrative are as gratifying to the eye as anything you might name in this young century. Warriors fly, skip like dragonflies over the skin of lakes. Swordsmen and swordswomen levitate. The sky blackens with rains of arrows. Droplets of rain hesitate, linger, play at the blue of a sword's blade. Leaves know empathy: a scatter of autumn's yellow turns the red of blood as another figure falls. Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar-Wai's customary cinematography, assists in the headlong embrace of cinematic grandeur. Superb and masterful, it's a major piece of work. With Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung and Ziyi Zhang. While the ads include "presented by Quentin Tarantino," those words didn't appear on the print I saw. Reportedly, this ninety-six minute version is Zhang's cut, and not a Miramaxaminimalization. And it's on 2,031 screens! Wow. Armond White's piece in NYPress is very good.

Taking Thai

When something's loud enough to wake up Oliver Stone, pay attention! Stone's presenting Thanit Jitnukul's Bang Rajan (2000) - the most successful Thai film ever, they say - an outrageously intense historical epic about the eighth century struggle between the Burmese and Siamese before the formation of modern Thailand. For all its gritty, underbudgeted zeal, it's still got an earlier film beat, Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol's sixteenth century watch-extras-die canvas, released here in 2003 as Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai. Hundreds of thousands of Burmese troops mass to attack the Siamese capital in Bang Rajan, but are held back for five months by stalwart villagers who inventively repel the occupying force. Strange without being truly exotic, it's an eyeful even when story strands stray.

Disappearing act

(Los rubeos) What if your parents were killed, you were cut off from family memories, no mythology of self-knowledge with which to grapple, to hope to grasp? An inventive, daring, heartwrenching Argentine personal documentary, Albertina Carri's collagist The Blonds traces her attempts to recover her family's history after her popular mother and father were "disappeared" by the military dictatorship-abducted, murdered--when she was 3 or 4 years old. Carri inserts level after level of narrative subterfuge-an actress plays the director, for instance, disappearing herself, watching the actress interrogating the real-life neighbors of her passed parents. There's playful gamesmanship throughout, such as animated Legos offering up a bucolic fantasy of happy family life to contrast with her spotty memories of the past. A worthy descendant of Argentineans like Borges and Cortazar, Carri's film was one of the sterling thrills of a visit to the 2003 Independent Film festival of Buenos Aires, where it swept the local awards. It's genuinely inquisitive, poetic and unrelenting work. She can't let go of memory. You won't let go of hers.

Bring on the puke

Remakes are one thing, but a remake of a movie no one's seen yet? Paul Schrader was hired by Morgan Creek moneyman-majordomo and rights holder James G. Robinson (Juwanna Man, The King and I) to make a psychologically eerie prequel to the events of The Exorcist. This was right after its $100 million-plus grossing 2000 reissue with extra footage), and Schrader drew from scripts by William Wisher (Terminator 2) and Caleb Carr (The Alienist). The handful of friends of Schrader who have seen his version find it restrained and haunting; Robinson wanted grue. Schrader's shelved $35 million version may wind up on the DVD release of this version. He also brought on Renny Harlin, director of Driven and Cutthroat Island, of late a hack of the lowest odor whose serial killer item, Mindhunters, languishes somewhere in one or another Miramax subbasement. It's already played in Azerbaijan, which should have been the dumping ground for this hiccuppy, crude mess, tolerable more for its burnished interiors shot (for a second time) by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now) than its hateful obsession with inventive new ways to murder children. Evil lives. Ask Paul. With Stellan Skarsaard.

Sick with love

The South Korean film industry ranks high among transgressive national cinemas, and Lee Chang-Dong's doomed romance, Oasis (2002) is one of the more challenging to make it off the festival circuit and into arthouse bookings. Jong-Du (Sol Kyung-gu) is a slightly retarded misfit just out of prison, a three-time loser destined for more trouble, especially after he tries to find the family of the man killed in the hit-and-run accident he took the fall for. There he meets Gong-Ju (Moon So-ri), daughter of the dead man, who has cerebral palsy, and whose disability checks are being squandered by her brother. Avoiding a play-by-play, it's simplest to say that Oasis embodies Lee's reflection that "Love is a fantasy shared by just two people," with the brackish skepticism of a latter-day Fassbinder. Lee puts us inside the lives, the fantasies, the failures of outsiders-and society, too. Beautiful and sorrowful, occasionally lyrical, Oasis is unforgettable.

Obsessive behavior

One of the paragons of obsessive cinema is finally available in the format it was produced in: Jacques Tati's staggeringly smart and sweetly funny masterpiece, Playtime, (1967) was shot on acres of sets he built, a "Tativille" to mock and embrace the modernist city, and shot in 70mm. Dear reader, Playtime bankrupted him. The film's 70mm negative was misplaced for many years, but after its rediscovery in the late 1990s, Tati's daughter supervised the restoration.

Much of Tati’s humor and vision of the modern city relies on extreme long shots, in which things are happening in all corners of the frame, within the setting of an exhibition hall, an office composed of many partitioned warrens, a restaurant self-combusting on its opening night. On the Criterion DVD (which has technical flaws, including cuts and re-framing ), the image is a mere shadow of what you see in 70mm. There’s a rumor circulating that an improved edition will be released in the next several months.

Playtime is the rare movie that seems a fresh experience each time you see it, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of its prime interpreters, has even suggested moving around during a showing, changing seats to get a different perspective on a deeply humane comedy about the potential for dehumanization in a world of grids, barriers and confinement.

Streets of protest

Yup, another movie about the Holocaust. Yet Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse manages to be compelling drama about a little-known sliver of life lived in horrific times, and what from my memory, is the rare German movie about Germans who resisted the Nazis. Based on true events, von Trotta's decade-in-the-making labor takes the name of a Berlin street, where, in 1943, Jewish men who had "intermarried" and their children were rounded up before deportation. In an unlikely feat of public assembly and protest, their Aryan wives and mothers gathered to demand their freedom.

I'd recently revisited DVDs of two movies von Trotta made with ex-husband Volker Schlondorff, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum and Coup de Grace, and Rosenstrasse, at its best moments, is from the same cloth: sturdy, concerned, and very, very German in its bursts of melodramatic intensity. The real-life figures showed rare nobility in their collective action; in their worn conception, von Trotta's characters are just a little... noble. The latter-day framework in New York City is an intrusion.

Misbegotten

Susan Sontag called E. Elias Merhige's deeply eccentric debut feature, Begotten, "One of the ten most important films of modern times." While Merhige's more spare Shadow of the Vampire (2000) had its admirers, his attempt to reconcile his inventive visuals with the studio system, Suspect Zero, a reportedly long-delayed suspenser produced by Tom Cruise's company, is altogether stranger. (And duller.)

Paramount's had good fortune with serial killer movies, but this one's more like a glossary of cool and horrifying visual kicks than a satisfying narrative on the level of plotting or empathy. It's easy to take the convention of "empathetic" characters for granted until you meet up with a papery bit of flash like this. Merhige has a great eye. Aaron Eckhart is the stock failed FBI agent who's busted down from a berth in Texas to the New Mexico desert.

Eckhart can be an interestingly shifty and resentful presence, but here he mostly squints his small eyes and works to keep his passive character's jaw from hitting the pavement. But his character's being stalked by someone - a killer, a superbrain, a superbrain killer? - who's killing other serial killers because he's mastered something called "remote viewing" through secret U.S. government training (based on a real-world folly).

Oh, Ben Kingsley, uncured ham, salty dog: Marlon Brando will never offer us a "Milk Dud?" again, but long may you enliven hapless botches like this. With Carrie Anne-Moss as the stock ex-lover of the stock FBI agent, who gets a couple of kick-ass moments but mostly gets to squint her dark eyes and look leathery in the daylight.

The New Mexico clouds, as caught by Merhige and cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) repeatedly indicate the hand of God in the most wondrous of ways. (Reportedly, the state lent the production $7.5 million toward a cut of any profits.) With Harry J. Lennix as the stock FBI agent who just doesn't believe any of this shit is happening. Plus an odd cameo by screenwriter Robert Towne (a Cruise-Wagner stalwart) with a Band-Aid amid the freckles on his receding hairline.

Unspoken

Activist documentarian Robert Greenwald's spit-and-transparent-tape broadsides are a beneficiary of the growing number of screens with video projection capability, but few things to show: Witness the last-minute booking of Outfoxed across the country, as well as the bookings of a revised version of an earlier film, now entitled Uncovered: The War on Iraq (Its fifty-six minute version played on video and on some smaller screens as Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War.) Whether one agrees with the evidence collated by Greenwald and his collaborators, or finds his perspective unduly partisan, his work remains an appropriately bellicose rejoinder to the irresponsibility of corporate-owned mass media in addressing the issues of the day, and the moral complicity of citizens in the face of decisions made in our name by politicians.

Why does there have to be a Robert Greenwald giving voice to someone like Rand Beers, who worked for thirty years in the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs, resigned five days before the start of the Iraq War (he's now John Kerry's National Security Advisor)? Why instead do the likes of CNNFoxMSNBCABCCBSNBC embrace the shouted unreason of the same bunch of pundits? Where, oh where, has journalism gone? The way of skepticism, that's where. Greenwald's work is important, and the voices assembled in Uncovered should not be unheard.

August 30 , 2004

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