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

Brave new cut

They used to call longtime Rolling Stone editor and writer David Felton-who grew up to work on Beavis and Butt-head -"The Stonecutter."

Assigned an important cover story, Felton refused for weeks on end to show the copy to editor Jann Wenner. He demanded thousands more words of space. Okay, says Wenner. Two issues passed. Finally, with yet another issue three days late to the printer, Wenner asks, David, what's wrong?

"If I can just nail the lead," Felton says.

Recent tinkering with long-finished movies by directors who ought to have less on their time - hello, Francis Coppola; goodbye One From the Heart - leaves a warm spot in my heart for Felton and his endless, fruitless fidgeting. There are many jokes about why it's said movies are "released": it's because the money guys have to pry them out of the unwilling hands of the creative guys. In a similar light, I was prepared to be annoyed by George Lucas' digital retooling of his 1971 feature, THX-1138. Almost thirty-five years, George, did you nail the lead?

Based on his USC student film, THX 1138 4EDB, and set in the twenty-fifth-century, the $700,000 THX 1138 is a spare, sleek dystopian parable that is a mix of many things - Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," the insane asylum setting of Peter Brook's Marat/Sade, the serene geometry of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Winston Smith's journey in "1984" - yet it's a disquieting, dryly comic chamber drama that suggests other directions Daddy Star Wars might have taken. (In a nice touch it's rumored that the title was inspired by Lucas' mnemonic for his first Bay Area phone number, 849-1138.) Veteran sound designer and film editor Walter Murch, of late the left hand of Anthony Minghella, is credited with Lucas on the screenplay here. His sound design is as important as Lalo Schrifrin's pre-Eno ambient score. It's so richly imagined, I could see putting the DVD in just to listen.

The embellished version of THX 1138, with considerable CGI alterations, is almost different enough to consider it a new movie, more than a "remix." Both versions follow a couple-THX (Robert Duvall) and LUH (Maggie Omie) - who rebel against the constantly surveilled life, committing acts of "drug evasion." THX is a narcotized maker of android police, a technician creating the very means of his oppression. The underground world these white-clad, shaved-head technicians occupy is studded with conveniently located phone booth confessionals, occupied by Ohm, a pre-recorded deity, a murmuring mechanized representation of the Christ-face on the Shroud of Turin. "You are a true believer," Ohm ululates.

"Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. Thou art a subject of the divine. Created in the image of man, by the masses, for the masses. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy."

It's a long way from there to Jar-Jar Binks.

While Lucas was still Francis Coppola's bearded amanuensis, filming a making-of of The Rain People, he said something to the effect that he didn't care for studios collaborating with the filmmaker; he'd be content to go out and film raindrops turning dust to mud. Instead, he made Marin County into an image factory, but with this first feature, Lucas made the kind of serious, mature work that belies the increasingly gummy Star Wars mythology. The director of the painfully lugubrious late Star Wars episodes, we have to remember, also made the memorable American Graffiti, and was originally to direct Apocalypse Now. (Some of his ideas about shooting that project on 16mm news film were recycled in the peculiar misfire More American Graffiti.)

As a sidenote, Lucas the experimental industrialist, also produced one of the first movies to be made largely without sets - unfunny comedy Radioland Murders - and that promise has been brought to fruition by another mind, Kerry Conran, in his wisecracking Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, opening next week.

But that's to consider Lucas' influence as a captain of industry and keeper of capital. Was Lucas ever an artist? I have a sneaking suspicion he still is, based on the stylish look and magnificent soundtrack of this cannily rejiggered revisiting of his first, unhappy exposure to a movie studio's enforced collaboration.

An online video obsessive has compared the laserdisc of THX-1138-1971 with THX-1138-2004, including shots from each version, highlighting shots impossible at the time the film was made and others that have had small details added or erased. Two documentaries, including one about the early days of American Zoetrope, are included on the DVD, but the advance copy provided by Warner Home Video included only the movie.

Detour

There are slick treats in the post-Mamet grift-and-switch of Fabian Bielinsky's 2000 Argentine thriller, Nine Queens (Nueva Reinas). Bielinsky's script and direction work with cunning subtext as it plays along the avenidas of Buenos Aires, slyly mimicking the troubled economy of colorful Argentina. (His use of long lenses to capture his characters while the real world bustles around them is sophisticated as well.) Which brings us to Criminal, a Steven Soderbergh-produced remake, co-written by Soderbergh under his coy "Sam Lowry" pseudonym, set on the side streets of Los Angeles with no subtext to speak of. It's all predictable flimflammery, and if you've seen Nine Queens, the effort by director Gregory Jacobs, Soderbergh's longtime assistant director, can only be described as superfluous and unnecessary. It's a short movie, under 90 minutes, with John C. O'Reilly and Diego Luna taking the primary roles, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Mullan in smaller ones. The great cinematographer Chris Menges makes something creamy of the grittier environs of southern California (unlike the sparkly phantasmagoria of his work on The Good Thief). Stephen Mirrione, also a Soderbergh stalwart, is co-editor, and the telling moves with dispatch. But it all plays like a pallid X-ray of Soderbergh's style, and a productive study about the dangers of self-parody might be made. Criminal is really, really efficient and really, really boring.

"Hurt me, hurt me!" said the masochist. "Noooooo," said the sadist.

Watchable, teachable, indelible, The Five Obstructions - now making its way across the country--is a magical master class in the vagaries of filmmaking, film conception, production and cocking a snoot at one's mentors. It's a battle of wills between sly, snotty sadist Lars von Trier and serene poet-diplomat-documentary maker Jorgen Leth, whose 1960s short The Perfect Human Trier claims as a favorite. He challenges the older Leth: You will remake this film five times, and I will offer you a different challenge each time. ("I will set up limitation, commands or prohibitions, which means you have to do the film all other again.") For instance, they both hate cartoons, so Leth must journey to Austin, Texas, to make an animated version with Waking Life's Bob Sabiston. Smart, funny, insightful, and dense with implications about the creative instinct, The Five Obstructions is essential. An impending DVD release is supposed to provide Leth's original film as well as the five variations. (To show any of the films at their full duration within a feature-length version would make for an entirely different and surely less useful project.)

Legally masala

Watching Vanity Fair is like window-shopping for a movie you're going to see later. Mira Nair's a confectioner par excellence, the individual settings in movies like Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra a treat. There's little disagreeable in her scrappy yet sumptuous embroidering upon Julian Fellowes' (Gosford Park) script of Thackeray's novel. Nair's eastern touches, down to a final shot that's a snort of snark, are sweet and appropriate in light of passages in the novel and of Thackeray's own Colonial-era high regard for India. The side roles are inhabited like comfy carpet slippers by notable British faces willing to slide into quick-sketch caricature (Jim Broadbent, Bob Hoskins, Romola Garai, Rhys Ifans, James Purefoy, Eileen Atkins). Central, of course, is Reese Witherspoon, a superlative screen presence since her debut at 15 in Man in the Moon (1991) all the way to Election and Legally Blonde. The ideas seems to let some contemporary air in through her small, chiseled features, letting Becky Sharp be all Sharpie in her attempted rise in a society where her beauty and many talents, including singing, are unworthy, unless accompanied by a mound of loot. Pregnant during the shoot (as Becky herself is late in the story), Witherspoon is radiant, very good in a not-entirely-central role drawn from a novel notoriously "without a hero." Her characteristic intensity, electric with focus in the way that only tiny women ever are, holds the eye, but never takes full purchase on the heart. Nair's stalwarts, cinematographer Declan Quinn and composer Mychael Danna, add valuable notes to her latest masala.

Josh Hartnett is homeless

You're in Chicago, you know where Wicker Park is, right, right there at the corner of Flash and Clueless? A Chicago producer assembles financing from an Armenian-American-controlled studio and hires Scotsman Paul McGuigan to remake a Hitchcockian murder thriller set in Paris with Montreal doubling for the Windy City. (Minus the murder.) Result: there's a smoky-smokestack trailer called "Frank's Chili Dogs" right there in the middle of a pocket park that looks nothing whatsoever like Wicker Park.

Drawing from Gilles Mimouni's tense 1996 L'appartement, the production reportedly was set for Joel Schumacher treatment, starring Brendan Fraser, on the cobbles of Greenwich Village,but September 2001 effaced those plans. So now we have Josh Hartnett, a man whose bland performance and creamy skin would make milk fear for pimples. A little more energy, he might smirk.

In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw has a sweet lashing for Hartnett. "What is Josh Hartnett thinking?" he writes. "Perhaps the question can be usefully rephrased by removing the first word. His great, dopey and largely immobile face sits there on the screen like that of an older actor who's OD-ed on Botox. Insofar as it conveys any emotion at all, it is the anxiety of someone who has multi-tasking issues with chewing gum and walking."

The sets are dreary, looking nothing like any place people work or live, and certainly not a neighborhood of Chicago I know well. Why use the name of a place and then make it look like nowhere at all? As the press notes tell us, the filmmakers set out in a "Quebec suburb to capture the quirky quintessence of Wicker's Park's trendy boutiques and cafes [pledging] fidelity to the actual locations that inspired the title." (Bullshit.)

Diane Kruger, dreary in Troy, is wan as Hartnett's bland lost love, and Rose Byrne, a good actress, is called upon to widen her eyes to the point of aneurysm (ours, not hers). Cliff Martinez's score is sweet, if inappropriate, sounding as if it's drifting in from the adjacent auditorium.

WTC: The First 24 Hours

"History is written by the victors," Winston Churchill wrote, measuring the myths a society lives by. In Etienne Sauret's pair of documentaries, WTC: The First 24 Hours, and his hour-long Collateral Damages, drawn from a year spent talking to a small group of New York City firefighters, the filmmakers demonstrated that icons are inscribed with the heart.

Showing this week at Facets Multimedia in Chicago, these two haunting films prompt a few questions. What is the meaning of Sauret's images as the grave moments recede? What does it mean to look upon these fragments only three years on?

The falling buildings fall on the same timeline, in the same fashion; the deadly white powder dusts its world. The facts do not change. Our perceptions alter. Grief plies its course. Anger subsides to a small, hard coal. The Towers fail again as you watch.

To witness this once more, these first, unmediated glimpses of the architectural explosion, is it inoculation? Invocation? A secular parody of devotion? A reminder of dumbstruck horror, of adrenalin that went rigid rather than febrile? Or a mere feat of remembrance, of remonstrance of what cools and subsides?

Small wonders

There are reasons small movies take their time to criss-cross the country, mostly economic. One is the costs of 35mm prints, which can cost a couple thousand dollars each, as well as substantial shipping costs and inevitable damage to the delicate celluloid. That, along with television advertising, is one of the film industry's largest expenditures. But with several chains, such as Regal and AMC, consolidating their holdings nationwide and installing digital projection equipment for studio releases, small films may benefit as well.

Enid Zentelis' Evergreen, a modest movie that would otherwise only show on a fistful of screens at a time, finds AMC Theaters putting their money where their indies are, releasing the sometimes-touching 2004 Sundance drama this week at 115 theaters in twenty-seven cities. There are many, many factors in the matrix of compromises that is commercial film distribution, but small movies of the kind that make it to the Sundance Film Festival may well be an unintended beneficiary. (Your neck of the woods, too.)

Until now, it's been an unheard-of circumstance, this leap of faith occurring because of the consolidation of ownership and new technology. Whatever its financial outcome, it will likely be a major test case for emerging strategies for future releases of good yet modest movies.

Evergreen, small, tender, nuanced, got a few rave reviews at Sundance, but it seemed it would wind up another post-festival casualty. (Its good fortune is mixed; the agreement for its release came too quickly to arrange a record release for its heartfelt, hopeful score by John Stiratt and Patrick Sansone, who record as Autumn Defense, and are also part of Wilco.)

One of the several gratifying elements about this unexpected release is that it's also the rare movie-and a deeply sincere one--that wrestles with the daily dilemmas of the working poor and the grubbier levels of class conflicts, including how one can become easily disappointed with one's economically disadvantaged family. Zentelis cites the influence of Italian neorealists, which would include Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief, as well as Barbara Ehrenreich's recent nonfiction book, "Nickel and Dimed," which chronicles several months the author spent at the badly paying jobs available to the downwardly mobile.

Evergreen details the tribulations of 14-year-old Henrietta (Addie Land), known to all as Henri, in a green yet drab working class Pacific Northwest setting - Everett, Washington gets shipped off by mom Cara Seymour to her grandmother's dump of a shack on the edge of town until her mother can get her life together. Soon, a boy, the handsome, has-it-all Chat Turly (Noah Fleiss) enters the picture, with all the kinds of conflicts you'd expect, but nicely detailed.

Things grow more complicated after she's all but adopted by Chat's well-off family, the mother and father played by Bruce Davison and Mary Kay Place. The conflicts are everyday, but hardly ordinary. Is love money? Is money love?

Place is particularly good as an agoraphobic slowly unwinding. Land, a natural for movies, is apple-cheeked and with angry wide-eyes, both vulnerable and defiant. Henri's reaction to the increasingly odd behavior of the Turlys teaches familiar lessons.

Still, everyone's looking for dignity, carving out a moment, or a joke, that takes a load off for a sec. Gary Farmer, playing a Native American casino worker with eyes on Henri's mom, has a joke about his rattletrap of a "pony" that's typical of the best of Zentelis' wry understatement: "I made this car… I stole it piece-by-piece in my lunchbox while I worked for GM."

Bits like that aren't laugh-out-loud, but they're warmly earnest. While little gems like this, a cousin to Hilary Birmingham's 2000 rural rhapsody, Tully, have found audiences in big cities and on DVD, Evergreen is an intriguing test of how regional moviegoers served by AMC will react to this kind of thematically downbeat yet emotionally buoyant fare.

What do THEY know?

Okay, I'm lost. William Arntz, Betsy Chase and Mark Vicente are credited as the directors of What The #$*! Do We Know!?, a movie the title of which I thought was a joke when I saw it on a marquee on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica a few months ago. Three directors of no note and a fussy, busy, new-agey essay movie. its look isreminiscent of mid-budget commercials, interspersing a talking heads interviews about quantum physics and consciousness with Portland-set dramatic vignettes starring Marlee Matlin. (A deaf actress bombarded by aural stimuli: there's no use made of this odd irony.) What The #$*! Do We Know!? is filled to bursting with ideas, but almost none of them are about how to make a movie.

September 12, 2004

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