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

Longer entries this week on Melinda and Melinda and an exchange with Michael Tucker about Gunner Palace, as well as shorter takes on The Upside of Anger, Antares, The Boys and Girl of County Clare, Steamboy, Hostage, Millions, Downfall, Walk on Water and Nowhere Man.

The Essence of Tragicomedy

Reading the semi-contradictory and sometimes-absurd stories about how Woody Allen's movies get made, it's a wonder they aren't all like, say, Hollywood Ending-lightly clever in concept, strenuously executed, perplexingly undernourished.

But, marvel of marvels, Melinda and Melinda, (***) the 69-year-old filmmaker latest, his thirty-fourth as director, has many moments to match his best work, and is easily the best comedy Allen's made in a decade; and perhaps best drama, too, since it's a self-conscious mix of both. (In many ways, it's his most consistently crafted picture since Husbands and Wives.)

In the opening scene, Vilmos Zsigmond's camera sneaks from the cobbled streets of Manhattan's meatpacking district into the honeyed warmth of bistro-style restaurant Pastis. Post-dinner, someone tells a story about a woman he knows, her troubled life, a woman he knows named Melinda. We don't hear the story, but get the reactions of the guests, a comedic off-Broadway playwright, Sy (Wallace Shawn), who finds the terrible story a source of comedy, and Max (Larry Pine), the dramatist, is a countering voice, seeing the tragic in everything. A challenge is struck, and the pair of playwrights, friend-warm and wine-woozy over the protracted dinner, narrate parallel stories. The movie's structure is quickly set up, but a more important cue from the first moments is the supple nicety of Zsigmond's easily cut frames.

There are close-ups and reverse angles, as well as measured track-ins, and the light on the faces is beautiful and sculptured, and we're still only at the set up. Zsigmond's not working the long-shot reserve of too many of Allen's cinematographic collaborators, whose static tableaux often seem more inert than even arcane European experimental filmmakers like Straub-Huillet. From the purposefully obtuse static placements of Carlo di Palma in Crimes and Misdemeanors to the golden daze of lighting in Hollywood Ending by Wedigo von Schultzendorff or Zhao Fe's inert The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen's recent work has often seemed like a case of collaborators not being allowed to collaborate, not given guidance or being willful enough to enliven Allen's undernourished scripts.

Melinda Robicheaux is the billowing anecdote's test case, a frazzled Radha Mitchell, who in the first version of the telling, lurches without notice into a Soho apartment where there's a dinner party thrown by college friends of her, a clutch of painfully drawn, self-loving smug-monkey airheads. "I'm running out of obsequious banter," Jonny Lee Miller, particularly spiteful, gets to bleat, with Chloe Sevigny as his sad-faced wife and Brooke Smith as their enabling best friend. Someone behind the camera is willing to watch the thirtysomething female faces, however, with the same gentle, intent regard as Gordon Willis had for the women in Interiors: even when Melinda explains her recent matched set of dark pasts, "It wasn't a half-hearted attempt, it wasn't a cry for help… I'm still a little fragile, especially when things are closing in," you are gratified to be able to watch Mitchell's habitation of this woman. It's also right before the transition to the movie's parallel gimmick that you realize there's a ready weasel for some of the lovingly acted mouthfuls of declamation: these are the verbal improvisations of two dueling playwrights, one who wants to laugh at death, one of whom wants to weep over burnt entrees: "Chilean sea bass in caramelized phyllo is not scrambled eggs!"

"The essence of life isn't comedy, it's tragedy," is one of the schematic mottos tossed out by the word-workers, but Allen doesn't work to make the two parts consistently dovetail. Once Allen begins to intercut the stories, Mitchell is the only constant, and a marvelous one, able to convey the self-dramatizing gloom of the tragic Melinda as well as the mercurial, indecisive, comic one. "In my defense, I will say I was out of my mind on drugs": does that come from the comic version or the dramatic? Intonation is everything, as well as the moments where each Melinda is given to consider her facile lies when she happens upon a mirror in a room. Another kind of mirror: Will Ferrell plays an Allen-like fretter and fresser in the comic version, and like several actors before him, brings a kit bag of Woodyisms to the set. There's teddy-bear warmth and a layer of distraction, too, rather than mere impersonation on Ferrell's part. Amanda Peet, a lanky study in losing control, playing his indie film-director wife, desperate to finance her "Castration Sonata," has the most Allen-like line of the movie: "Of course we communicate! Now can we not talk about it!"

There are distracting oddities, such as several characters with names out of Damon Runyon or David Cronenberg. Ellis Moonsong? Gotcha. These storybook 28-year-olds are fixated on Mahler and Stravinsky, and Mitchell's called upon to be both flighty and give weight to a line like "I've been on a bus, a Greyhound bus since Tuesday, I must look like the wreck of the Hesperus."

And in each telling, a seductive, black, velvety-voiced pianist - Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Sunjata - is a romantic fulcrum to the complications, a color-blind multi-culti advance in Allen's universe of imagined Manhattans, unless you were to perversely read it as a sublimated desire by Allen to sleep with Bobby Short.

Melinda and Melinda is busier, less mysterious than one movie I can think of with a striking parallel structure about one troubled young woman, Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique, but it has several kinds of generosity that make for a smart entertainment that consistently rewards the ear and eye. The light is luminous, and it makes the actors' faces glow. Tony Scott and his cinematographers did lived-in wonders with Mitchell's features in Man on Fire, but Zsigmond's approach here is more one of portraiture than of hyperstylized stress.

There's just enough of street life, and a selection of French-styled cafes and bistros like Pastis and Café Gitane and Il Buco to suggest Manhattan's present-day theme park of the moneyed mind; Santo Loquasto's set decoration neatly indicates the ever-decorative lives of the characters who will live in those places; and both Zsigmond and Allen are mesmerized by the faces on screen, letting us contemplate either the comic or dramatic discomfort visited upon them by a room of writers. "Life has a malicious way of dealing with great potential," one of the self-serious tut-tuts: watch them squirm.

The Upside of Synopsis

There's a churlish style of movie reviews that offers a plot synopsis, tells you why you'd be an idiot to hate something so imperfect you've seen so many times before, and then offers an undersized life preserver for the survivors of the sinking critique.

The Upside of Anger is one of those rare movies that seems to suit that approach: Hate the title. Hate the supposedly thoughtful child's voiceover that's actually unfathomable. Puzzled by a major twist in the plot. But other than that: writer-director Mike Binder's The Upside of Anger is a million miles away from his sour HBO series, The Mind of the Married Man, and a gratifyingly bittersweet and bracingly dark comedy-drama, a stellar showcase for Joan Allen, the fierce, funny, shamelessly transfixing center of this haphazardly constructed yet rich drama of abandonment, denial, bargaining and acceptance.

A suburban Detroit mother of four-living on "Puritan Avenue"-Terry Wolfmeyer makes the easy presumption when her husband disappears without a word a week after his young Swedish assistant moves back home. She guesses he's run off, too. Slipping into a midlife haze of Grey Goose and blue sarcasm, she makes life heck for her dissimilar daughters: college student Alicia Witt, tense dancer Keri Russell, college-hating Erika Christensen, voiceover-burdened Evan Rachel Wood.

Kevin Costner's goofy-great as her alternately drunk-and-buzzed neighbor, a baseball veteran now doing drive-time radio while refusing to talk baseball. The sexy, crackling slow burn of their courtship is marvelous fun, a feat of actorly, flirtatious perfection, and Allen gets to be regal and raw and rash and simply indelible. Binder and cinematographer Richard Greatrex worship the faces of his actresses and actors, even Binder himself, in a sizable, twisted and funny side role as Costner's producer, a lech named Shep who attaches himself to one of the just-out-of-high-school daughters.

Loosing the Boys of War

"I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin' but a collective hunch. I made some studies: Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it."

Sound like anyone you know? No, it's not a reference to any unreality-based politician: it's out of the mouth of Trudy, Lily Tomlin's bag lady character from "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe." Trudy's lines rang in my head for a couple days after watching Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's Gunner Palace (****), an on-the-ground report drawn from several visits to Baghdad, following the day-in-day-out routines of the 400 frighteningly young soldiers of the 2-3 Field Artillery Battalion (aka the Gunners), stationed in Uday Hussein's opulent former pleasure dome, complete with swimming pool, bombed out during the "Shock and Awe" prelude to the U.S. occupation.

Gunner Palace is a text as ready for adoption and creative misappropriation as any movie since Forrest Gump." Right? Left? Pro-war? Anti-war? Ken Tucker, New York Magazine's former TV critic, now film critic, trashed the movie in the most myopic fashion when it opened in New York City last weekend, for not being the movie he would have made. His stomach-churning lead to a review entitled "Hit Job" "Watching 'Gunner Palace,' I initially wondered whether the filmmakers, Michael Tucker… and Petra Epperlein, were like the people who used to spit on Vietnam veterans when they returned home." Were there "people who use to spit on Vietnam veterans"? Ken Tucker sounds so blasé about this disputed contention, let alone what is shown on screen in the film up for review. But Tony Scott of the New York Times saw a movie closer to reality, the real world, the movie at hand: "In refusing to generalize or to judge, Gunner Palace opens itself up to varying interpretations, all of them likely to be colored by the interpreter's prior opinions about the war. The soldiers'… efficient brutality with which they break into Iraqi homes in their hunt for "bad guys," may suggest a prelude to the abuse at Abu Ghraib (which is where, we are told, many of those arrested will go)."

Yes: it's about the fray. "For y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie," one of the verbal, often profane young soldiers says. You bring your own ideas about war and the representation of it. Some will venture that Gunner Palace is "COPS" writ large, "Grand Theft Auto" in the middle of the streets of Baghdad, Black Hawk Down in real time, but that's the same type of softheaded mush as saying the events of 9/11 unfolded " just like a disaster movie!" Tucker observes. Doesn't judge. Offers witness, not history's long view, not the haircut-with-a-microphone intoning on the evening news. There are the jaded older military bureaucrats, but most of the faces are kids in a crazy war, their boisterous, vivid youth: the military's in loco parentis and the kids are not all right. Generous, confounding, suggestive, elating and nightmarish, Gunner Palace is a vitally important piece of work.

"There's a hunger out there for perspective," Tucker told me in an email exchange before the documentary's appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival and its acquisition by Palm Pictures. Fahrenheit 9/11 was still throwing off heat. "In this heated political season, where you can't turn on the TV or go online without seeing [Moore's] face, it seems that the very idea of what a documentary is has mutated," Tucker wrote. "I haven't seen his film. No doubt it is good entertainment, no doubt provocative. But is it documentary? Most interestingly, in the context of the Iraq war, is that Moore hasn't even been to Iraq. He's filtering secondhand footage. He doesn't have a personal reference for what the audience is seeing."

Living in Berlin, he hadn't seen Jehane Noujaim's Control Room at that point, either, "but I'm sure it allows the audience to take a trip to with the filmmaker to a world that was previously unknown. I'm sure it allows the audience to make up their own minds, about a subject that is very complex. I've tried to do the same. From my first trip to Iraq, I sensed that I could tell a story about young soldiers at war from their perspective-if I just freed myself from making judgments."

Tucker found a mindset for that: "I tried hard to be the guy that 'just pushes the red button.' It was relatively easy while shooting to do that." But, he noted, "returning to the "world", you find that people expect something different. If the reality you have captured doesn't conform to the prevailing perception of that reality, then you feel almost obliged to give in. A while back, I sought out a few known filmmakers to ask their opinions about this dilemma. Albert Maysles told me to forge ahead, to stay true. Jack Laurence, who shot The World of Charlie Company in Vietnam, led me to a story about his filmmaking experience. He wanted to stay true to the soldiers, their experience. Once while doing a standup in front of a platoon, his cameraman turned to the soldiers and asked them if they thought, "what he is saying is true." The answer was yes. When I returned to Baghdad the fourth time last February [2004], I made a similar test. Warts and all, I put a DVD in a laptop and dragged it around to hooches to get comments. I wanted to know if I had stayed true. The answer was "yes". There are many things in this film that will make people uncomfortable. The soldiers know that. As one young soldier-poet says in Gunner Palace, 'You may not like this, but please respect it.'"

How Austrian is it?

Götz Spielmann's Antares, (***) the newest release from Film Movement, has a chilly familiarity yet a lunar austerity; taking place largely in an expansive apartment complex on the outskirts of Vienna-shades of "The Decalogue"-this restrained, transgressive slice of Austrian life follows three women who live there. The affairs of a nurse, a grocery checkout girl and a single mother, inexorably criss and cross, with sex, drugs and frantic passions ruling the day. Symmetrical framings and cool colors deepen the mood of what the director calls "the existential side of sexuality." Like Barbara Alpert's 2003 Free Radicals, Antares suggests Austria as a chilly land that cries out for the warmth of human contact. (Spielmann also calls love a "basic life energy, this mysterious force [that] drives or torments people [unleashing] yearning and destruction, tenderness, fear, courage and loneliness." It's stark and at a few choice moments, shocking work.

Girls and Gooseflesh

A movie for girls who says that the accents of Irish boys give them gooseflesh, John Irvin's short and not quite saccharine Boys and Girl of County Clare (** ½) revels in much of what is touristically Gaelic in its tale of a trio of brothers who tussle from childhood in the world of traditional Irish Ceili music. With a light, picturesque touch, straining for the effortlessness Czech New Wave films of the 1960s, The Boys & Girl From County Claire almost wafts away before it's over. If you love the music, you might like the movie. With Bernard Hill, Colm Meaney, Patrick Bergin, Charlotte Bradley, Andrea Corr (of the tuneful Corrs) and Jim Nesbit.

Hallucinating History

Ten years in the making at a cost of $22 million, digitally marrying two-dimensional and 3-D graphics, Steamboy, (** ½) the latest from Katsuhiro Otomo, director of early anime standard, Akira, is another eyeful from the East, but drawing this time on the West, set in Victorian England during the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, in which a young inventor, Ray (voiced by Paquin) must make sense of a mysterious metal object, a "steam ball," left by his grandfather (Stewart). Any two-three pages of Chris Ware's historical hallucinations exceeds these busy frames, but Steamboy is an odd and intriguing take on the machinations (and machines) of the early moments of the Industrial Revolution. Two versions are being shown; the English-dubbed version with the voices of Paquin, Alfred Molina and Patrick Stewart is 106m; the Japanese-language version runs 120m. Both boast an unusually dense and evocative soundtrack.

Captivated

Bruce Willis grimaces, scowls, murmurs, howls, tilts his head about ten degrees to the left while lifting his chin about five degrees as he keeps his eyes level: the man of squinting action is back in Hostage (** ½). Wouldn't you know: the Los Angeles veteran hostage negotiator who muffs an assignment, leading him to whisk his family away and take a police chief's gig in a bucolic burg in an upstate California now finds himself years later not only having to protect a craven accountant's estate from two levels of assault, but save his own family from the more organized (and masked) bad guys? Forty-year-old French director Florent Emilio Siri, working from Doug Richardson's adaptation of Robert Crais' bestseller, stylizes color and grain in imaginative ways and cross-cuts mercifully to reduce the absurdities of the story-within-a-story, crisis-within-a-crisis structure of the script; some reviewers have suggested that Siri's experience as a director of several videogames authored by Tom Clancy may have contributed to the organization and arrangement of the predicaments faced by the pop-eyed actors and actresses threatened with various forms of psychological and bodily harm.

Taking a Pounding

Next to getting a kiss from the girl who's the apple of his eye after saving her from the school that's in blazes, what's many a young boy's most treasured fantasy? A trunk of cash bouncing out the back of a truck or a train will do nicely, thank you. Director Danny Boyle, most treasured for grown-up, gritty, giddy movies like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later lets slip with Millions (*** ½) and reveals that his antic eye is child-like after all. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce (24 Hour Party People, Hilary and Jackie, Welcome to Sarajevo, Code 2046), a father of seven, conceived a wondrous conceit about Damian and Anthony Cunningham, 9 and 7, respectively (Alex Etel and Lewis McGibbon), two small boys in northern England whose father moves them to a newly constructed suburb after their mother's death. Anthony gets the grownup world, no longer fully innocent, but wide-eyed, freckle-faced ur-boy Damian lives in a place where he addresses saints by name and converses with them about gruesome events of the past. So he's got easy explanations when several hundred thousand pounds in folding cash appears to fall from the sky: the saints want he and his brother to do good. The embrace of good, a satire of materialism, knockabout humor, rich sallies of cinematic fancy: Boyle embraces them all in this loving, lovable gem.

Mad, Bad, Murderous, Suicidal, Human

(Der Untergang) Oliver Hirschbiegel's epic chamber drama, Downfall (*** ½), takes place in a finite time and finite space, almost entirely in Adolf Hitler's bunker as his time, and World War II, ticks toward its end. The great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, known for his taciturn, beagle-eyed watchers, captures the strangulated intonation both of the Hitler known from newsreels and Klaus Kinski's magisterial madman in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. He carries something else: a mantel of madness, of elation, of exhaustion, making for a compelling, flesh-and-blood rendition of how human it is to be evil. In this claustrophobic warren, rituals persist, rants rain on: "If the war is lost, it is immaterial if the German people survive. I will shed not one tear for them." Along with Eva Braun, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels, one of the movie's characters is 25-year-old Traudl Junge, his secretary who in her last days, appeared in the 2002 documentary, Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, the camera keeping its frame around this elderly woman recalling the peculiar events at the end of the dictator's life. Hirschbiegel's film (a Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee), was attacked in Germany by some for its purported empathy, including a denunciation reported in the weekly Die Zeit by expatriate director Wim Wenders. "The lack of an evident perspective," Wenders approximately said, "leads the viewer into a black hole." (Wenders directed Ganz in the classics The American Friend and Wings of Desire.) But Downfall dares us to recognize that those who do wrong are human before they are mad, before they are bad, before they do evil until the world. The seed of murder and madness is in all of us, and those whom we are taught to hate also breathe, dance, grow tired, make a last meal of ravioli, declare their love for the fatherland. It is horrible and not inhuman-it is the very human qualities that make it impossible to look away or to forget.

Devise and Conquer

Walk on Water (***), Israeli director Eytan Fox's complicated if improbable third feature is a smart intrigue, benefiting from strong characterizations and an elementary sexual allegory representing German-Israeli relations. It's an advance from his 2002 Yossi & Jagger, a gay love story set in the ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces, and its stew of concerns may even be too much for one movie, taking on the legacy of the Holocaust, relations with Palestine, the workings the Mossad secret police, homophobia and terrorism. Lior Ashkenazi (Late Marriage) plays the assassin tracking the descendants of a Nazi war criminal; sublimated passions erupt left and right as the meaning of violence is debated, but never defined.

Cutting Satire

Working on a miniscule budget on video, and working with some of the same concerns as Lukas Moodysson's upcoming porn-and violence provocation, A Hole in the Heart, Tim McCann's Nowhere Man (***) is a small, strange trip. (There's an overt nod to the black-hole-at-the-end-of-the-road classic, Detour, by Edgar G. Ulmer, which Nowhere Man also resembles.) It could also be called "A Very Short Engagement" in its scarifying complications: on the eve of his wedding, a man finds a pornographic video starring his fiancée; after a week of argument, she cuts off his penis and holds it for ransom for the unlikely sum of $560. (Tromafilm majordomo Lloyd Kaufman plays the doctor who explains the meager chances for rectifying "the injury.") McCann, whose earlier low-budget work includes Desolation Angels and Revolution # 9 works effectively at this wee scale, and edited, photographed, wrote and co-produced as well as directed this unnerving slice of emascula-sploitation.

March 20, 2004

- Email Ray Pride