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

A few words from David O. Russell and Jason Schwartzman about I Heart Huckabees, an appreciation of Los Angeles Plays Itself, and shorter takes on Going Upriver, Tying the Knot, Rick, The Yes Men, Gozu and Zelary.

Being and Toomuchnesss

I don't know if I like I Heart Huckabees (***), but big chunks of this mad philosophical trampoline act I simply love, and the last half hour finds almost serene equipoise as it completes a buoyant mosaic of unlikely comic and philosophical conceits.

Jason Schwartzman plays Albert Markovski, a social activist whose life is a mess and after a few personal musings-the movie opens with his Tourettic incantation of "Fuck! Shit!"-he finds himself in the offices of a pair of Bernard and Vivian Jaffe, "existential detectives," a married couple played by a prim Lily Tomlin and a goofy Dustin Hoffman, hair grown out in a gray Beatle mop. One of his antagonists is Brad Stand (Jude Law), an executive for the Wal Mart-like conglomerate Huckabees, whose golden boy ascent is complicated by his relationship with Huckabees spokesblonde Dawn (Naomi Watts). Mark Wahlberg is sweet and hilarious as an anti-petroleum fireman, whose discovery of love while rescuing someone is the loveliest moment in the movie, and somehow Isabelle Huppert sashays in as French philosopher Caterine Vauban, the arch nemesis of the Jaffes. There's a lot more than that, and there are lyrical moments, particularly a couple of romantic and sexual ones I won't give away, but one small example of how the spare yet bright cinematography is used is that Russell understands how Huppert's freckles are an axiom of cinema, especially when she's barelegged in high heels and challenging a young man's sexual prowess in a bog of black mud.

Russell doesn't spend that much time setting the scene, he just goes at it, and the effect is less spasmodic than spiraling, Russell riffing with ninja glee: watch these moves, I'll take you down with my sleight-of-hand. You're tempted to type "David O. Anderson," with Russell's go-for-broke instincts toward farcical too-muchness nestling alongside the work of the Andersons Wes and Paul T. But he's as much into farce as parsing his musings on the big questions influenced by Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (a lowercase "how am i not myself?" is almost the last stick of type to appear onscreen in the final credits).

After a couple of earlier encounters, Russell is one of those interviewees who I don't look forward to; the conversation is as much an interrogation of premises as straightforward answers. Mostly, meeting he and Schwartzman, I was curious to learn how a movie like this is conceived, written, rewritten, edited: what's the process to keep it from deflating into tonal mayhem? Russell didn't care for the question. I wondered aloud if the mix of serious and comedic was something that occurred right way, did the film start with the idea of exploring ideas about existence, and then how do you get this framework, these characters? How confident were you about the stylization?

"Which stylization?" he asks. The conceit of the "existential detectives" leads us through the comedy and the queries of the universe. "No, I just decided we were going to have a universe where this exists. There's not going to be any big discussion of it, if that's what you mean."

Explanation is the death of the joke, so that follows logically in the footsteps of Groundhog Day, which doesn't offer enlightenment on why its events occur. "It just happens," Russell agrees, nodding. He turns to Schwartzman, asking if he understood my question.

Schwartzman suggests this refinement: "In making the movie, was there a kind of comedy that needed to be employed to make it work, a certain kind?"

Russell nods, turns to me. "So you're saying it's two separate elements? I don't understand what you're saying… The comedy and the…"

Let's take it another way, which came first, the chicken or the Zen? "They're the same thing to me. As a Zen monk once said to me, 'If you're not laughing, you're not getting the joke.' It's not like, you have serious questions over here and comedy about it over there. I think it is the same thing. To me, people who are serious about these matters are simultaneously serious and funny, as I have been all my life. I think when you commit yourself to something, you're automatically a bit different from convention. That automatically creates a kind of discomfort, a nervous energy, that is funny, that is funny or disturbing to people. I love that departure point, when somebody is asking questions like [Jason's] character, which I think is a strength.

"He's in this zone of flux," Russell continues, "asking these questions. I think it's harder to sustain, that's why most people don't do it, like the movie says. Would you rather just stay on the surface and not think about these things? But when someone's on the shakier ground of exploring these things, that's a good thing, that's a strong thing."

Russell takes a breath. "Those are my favorite people, like the characters in this movie, who, regardless of convention, kind of want to go to that place where you [get away from the] habitual mind. I'd say there are lots of ways in life that people do that."

He's been quoted as saying that he wants the audience to feel "destabilized." "Which is a good place to be," Schwartzman says. "Somebody asked me, 'Man, that character's pretty fucked up, huh, gotta go to these existential detectives, gotta get his life figured out, that's pretty low, huh?' And I was like, 'No, I don't think so, man.' I think that he doesn't realize it, but he's in the reverse place, he's in a good place, because he's chosen to wake up and ask questions and go to these people to help him understand the universe. It's a healthy place. And a human right that people don't take advantage of. Like citizen's arrest or something! He's in a good place. But he feels fucked up."

But it's better, Schwartzman says as he leans back, "than if you just sit on the couch and go, 'Yeah, I got it all figured out.' You'd be totally on the wrong side of town then, thinking you've got anything figured out."

A couple of other interesting perspectives on the movie: From the opening line of Manohla Dargis' review of David O. Russell's new movie, opening today in New York and Los Angeles -"The high-wire comedy I Heart Huckabees captures liberal-left despair with astonishingly good humor: it's Fahrenheit 9/11 for the screwball set" -I can't tell what she's means, but it sure sounds good. The rest of the review zings-she integrates rafts of references and sidelong notions with watch-this-Elvis aplomb: "I Heart Huckabees is a comedy of dialectics, in which opposing dualities slug it out like wounded lovers, but it's nothing if not deeply sincere. Mr. Russell [is] clearly furious about the state of things (you name it) but, like Jon Stewart, [he] slide[s] in the knife with a smile."

Armond White's up on the big white blanket, too, in New York Press: "The central character['s] opening narration -"Fuck! Shit!" - shows Russell translating a young adult American's interior monologue into a version of Tourette's Syndrome. Everything [the character] does can be described as a fit."

Welcome to Los Angeles

A gloriously epic, erudite, even messianic "personal essay," Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (****), in very limited release after a healthy festival life, chronicles the filmmaker's irritations and elations about how his lifelong home is represented.

Sprawling like the city itself, the longtime CalArts film professor's almost-three-hour meditation on reality and representation is immensely generous and always-entertaining movie. He's working in a relatively new genre, a movie largely drawn from pre-existing footage, but not "found" footage of home movies or industrial filmmakers. Directors like Craig Baldwin, Mark Rappaport and particularly Godard, in his Histoires du cinema, have recycled clips from the movies of others to their own ends, without seeking permission from the copyright holders. Petersen's movie is playing cinematheques like Film Forum in New York and the Siskel Film Center in Chicago, but barring some sort of super-clearance license, or a series of blind eyes turned by customarily-greedy studios, I doubt he'll be able to release his masterpiece on DVD. (The editing of documentaries like Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 is often calibrated so that clips from the work of others fall under the legal definition of "fair use.")

"Silly geography makes for silly movies," Andersen asserts, scrupulous conscience of the integrity of the much-derided metropolis. "I know movies aren't about places, they're about stories," is typical of Andersen's voiceover, delivered with laconic, Ellroyesque sinew by New York filmmaker Encke King. Only one in forty citizens work in show business, he points out as he goes about his dizzying, dazzling business of dicing nearly 200 movies, ranging from the esteemed like Chinatown to the little-known like Kent MacKenzie's semi-documentary 1961 The Exiles, about Indians living in the about-to-be-demolished Bunker Hill district. (He also knows his horror and porn.) Andersen esteems the unlikely, such as Toby Halicki's great, mad naiveté in the original, oddball Gone in 60 Seconds, a nearly-nonstop on-location demolition derby, "an anti-humanist masterpiece of bodies and machines in motion" that would have delighted Dziga Vertov.

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky once observed, "The city of The Third Man or the city of Blade Runner is a descendent of the sensibility of Dickens and Baudelaire and others who discovered the poetic in the industrial city-the smoke, the dust, the winding streets." And so we get Thom Andersen as that poet of place.

Shooting on location, even with substantial alterations to the landscape, cannot help but be an accidental documentary of a city. "If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities," Andersen contends, "perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations. He's also good on distinguishing between a "high tourist" filmmaker like Michelangelo Antonioni, whose Zabriskie Point is silly but keen on the specific landscape and "low tourist" directors like Hitchcock, who only understand a city as bold in its look as San Francisco. And there's a simply great segment about the simplicity and strangeness of Jack Webb's Dragnet rat-a-tat of cutting and speaking: he asserts there's "transcendental simplicity" there, in the school of Ozu and Bresson.

He's pissy-and specifically so-about such easy clichés and icon-mongering as the recurrent use of the great modernist residences of Los Angeles as homes of bad guys, particularly in L.A. Confidential. (Andersen also disdains the Hollywood Walk of Fame -"The walk of shame" for its preponderance of blacklist era namers of names; Joan Didion's neurasthenic snapshots-"mystical blatherings"-of bleached-out "absurdly overprivileged" lives; and those who shorten the name of the city to "L.A."). Andersen is a practical man, drawn to buildings, neighborhoods, builders and myths, as fond of downtown's optimistic Bradbury Building as he is of George Kennedy's stoic potato mug from 1970s disaster movies. He even finds a place for the "Luddite hippie vampires" of an obscurity called Messiah of Evil, using an absurdly protracted zombie scene as a snapshot of a certain kind of supermarket in the early 1970s.

Andersen's other insights atop the quick-flash collation of clips include how the "teen noir" landscape of Rebel without a Cause, is Nicholas Ray imagining the city as a musical soundstage without adults to choreograph the damage. And he calls John Cassavetes' movies "comedies," esteeming his "eyes and ears for ordinary madness… His comedies face up to tragedy and reject it… For Cassavetes, happiness is the only truth, so he drank himself to death." There's a neat trashing of the soul-blinding narcissism of Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall as well as anything that might be pulled out of Henry Jaglom's squashed little hat.

And of the acid-era expressionism of John Boorman's great portrait of objects in L.A., Andersen asserts, "people who hate Los Angeles love Point Blank." He's able to speak of Brian de Palma and Jon Jost in the same measured breath, but he's at his best embracing and spitting out received wisdom, such as Roman Polanski's reigning cynicism, which the filmmaker identifies as dangerous-"cynicism tells us we are powerless" yet he's right to quote Polanski's snarky "There's no more beautiful city in the world, provided it's seen by night and from a distance" as typical mythmaking of a place where lives are actually lived.

The last segment, dealing with the early, neorealist black-and-white 16mm films of African American directors like Haile Gerima, Billy Woodruff and Charles Burnett, is overtly polemical and bleak. Yet the overall sense is one of celebration and of how history ought to be divined: warily, wittily, lovingly.

Swift Rebuttal

George Butler is a canny producer and director, and a superb photographer as well; his movies include Pumping Iron, which introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger to an unwitting world and a recent series of films about Ernest Shackleford's Antarctic journey, including Endurance and the IMAX rendition. He's also known Senator John Kerry for thirty-five years, and he's fixed upon how his friend's life was shaped by the war in Vietnam and the war back home in Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (***). Gratifyingly, it's a well-edited, densely argued rejoinder, rising above hagiography, to the stench of latter-day political slanders. (One of the four editors cut Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) Butler's portrait of Kerry, a man who the media persist in calling a mystery to potential voters (an admission of failure by those writers) shows someone who's intrigued by the notion of nobility, not the "nobility" of gentry or a sense of entitlement, but a drive to engage and change to world, to understand what shapes the forces of our society. Butler and his writer Joseph Doorman (based on Douglas Brinkley's book, "Tour of Duty") provides context for what set a life in politics in motion, as opposed to vicious, insupportable smears. It's heart-stopping to see how long Republicans have had it in for the Senator whose committee later uncovered the Iran-Contra crimes of the Reagan-bush administration. Along with tapes of Nixon and Haldeman saying there's no dirt on the young Kerry, there's evidence of the recruiting of the young John O'Neill (today the major mouth behind the discredited Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) by Nixon hatchetman Charles Colson to attack Kerry. To remain idealistic in the face of gunfire, dirty tricks, slander and lies: that's inspiring to me.

Knottiness

Tying the Knot (** ½), directed by Jim de Seve, is a painfully topical snapshot, another impassioned, polemical documentary that takes up where broadcast journalism left off long ago. For three years, De Seve, viewing the issue as one of civil rights, has followed the controversy over domestic partnerships in the United States, ranging from the recognition of life partners to sharing of benefits to gay marriage. The result is an intent, witty portrait of love and hate, suggesting a civil war in the offing, as some of the congressional supports of the Federal Marriage Amendment seem to want to foment. Tying the Knot is about the people--faces, histories-and de Seve does not forget that in the couple dozen lives he examines.

Cursed!

Lemony Snicket says"fuck"! .Rick (***), writer Daniel Handler's very loose adaptation of "Rigoletto," directed with calm aplomb by veteran editor Curtiss Clayton (Drugstore Cowboy, Buffalo '66), is a weird yet engaging chamber drama and performance vehicle for the gifted, always-fascinating Bill Pullman. Pullman's "Rick O'Lette" is a closed-off drone for the Image Corporation, as versed in the passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive corporate banter as his much younger boss, Duke (Aaron Stanford). (Some of their behavior and language might make the characters in "The Company of Men" want to compulsively wash their hands.) He lives for his job, and his high-school-age daughter, the blooming Eve (the splendid Agnes Bruckner) after the death of his wife. But we don't know that yet: first we get Sandra Oh as an interviewee he berates, then humiliates at a nightclub when he finds her waitressing there. She gives him a literal curse, telling him he has an "evil soul, I curse you, I curse you, Rick O'Lette." Suddenly, he can't even catch a taxi, let alone a break. The satire is brittle, some of the language overly fanciful or given over to a theatrical-style pert terseness, but this post-Hal Hartley snack is never brittle, and shows a keen sense of the night light of Midtown. The digital cinematography is by Lisa Rinzler; the choice of locations suggests a passed, clubby Art Deco New York that in fact still stands. While Rick is an elegant, pocket-sized portrait of a man whose soul has been sucked out by acquiescing to corporate life, Clayton is onto other things, demonstrating a keen appreciation of redheads: in the small cast, there are at least three.

Yes, I say, Yes

Every choice is political? Every choice is performance in The Yes Men (***), a slim yet subversive and hilarious documentary by Chris Smith (American Movie), Sarah Price and Dan Ollman, chronicling the inspired pranks and enormous balls of the Yippie-ish, anticorporatist Yes Men. The Yes Men, for the purposes of the events in this movie, are the eloquent, defiant and genuinely witty Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano. The pair had founded a few insubordinate websites, such as RTMark.com, but the creation of a site satirizing the language and aims of the World Trade Organization led to invitations to explain the non-governmental, corporation-driven organization to various groups in places as far-flung as Australia, Austria, Finland and upstate New York. Donning thrift-store suits, threadbare rhetoric and undergoing the ritual of homegrown buzz cuts (the clippers are a prominent prop throughout), they travel with preposterous propositions and names like Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer. How are those Groucho Marxist presentations greeted? Therein lies the comedy. There's a spare amount of background given about the group, but that only makes the comedy more chilling, especially in their presentation to a roomful of college students about how McDonald's and the WTO had figured out a way to recycle hamburgers through several cycles of shit. Swift wept.

Czech Mark

The World War II canvas of Zelary (*** ½), the Czech Republic's 2003 Best Foreign Language Film nominee, based on anautobiographical novel, World holds nothing groundbreaking, but it is lovingly observed, beautifully made and heartfelt. It's 1943, and the Nazis occupy Czechoslovakia; Eliska (Ana Geislerova), whose medical career was cut short when the Germans closed the universities, belongs to the resistance, but works as a nurse alongside Richard, her lover, a surgeon. One night, Joza, a seriously injured man from a rural mountain village - Zelary - is brought in, and the only thing that can save him is a blood transfusion from Eliska. Almost immediately, the resistance group is found out and Eliska is shipped away, where, in order to survive, she must marry Joza, the simple mountain man. Like the protagonist of The Pianist, she must accept what is forced on her in order to survive, but in the idyllic yet harsh rural landscape, discoveries are made, love is found, barriers are transcended. It sounds like it could be just so much goo, but in fact, it's a touching two-and-a-half hours. Petr Ostrouchov's sorrowful score is a major plus: pretty, surging, and intermittently, deservedly, portentous.

Ready, Set, Gozu

Sadism, surrealism, insanely overdesigned action setpieces, yakuzas and ghosts: could it be anyone but Japan's most vociferously prolific director, deadpan Takashi Miike? Gozu (***), Miike-san's latest example of off-the-cuff Nipponese tatterdemalion-he makes six or seven pictures a year-is his own stew of disgust and gleeful inventiveness, even if you can trace David Lynch-style hicks, David Cronenberg-derived body horror and a few other influences jostling in the ragshop of Miike's mind. Miike seems less a director than a shooter: he says he "intuits the balance" as he's concerned that "it's too obvious when violent or intense scenes are overthought or overplanned." Even without thinking through the cow-headed demon of Gozu's title, there's dementia to spare. Making a list of the garish and fetishistic grossness, even without fashioning it into a review, could run a couple thousand words.

October 8, 2004

- Email Ray Pride