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

Mapping several continents of film this week, including Vince Vaughn on Wedding Crashers, the fun stuff in Michael Bay's The Island, Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit, 69-minute 9 Songs, the economical ache of The Beat My Heart Skipped, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Hustle & Flow, Happy Endings and Intimate Stories.

Somewhere, Jean-Pierre Melville is Smiling

James Toback's 1978 directorial debut, Fingers, is about as balls-out crazy as it gets, a daring existential bleat with Harvey Keitel playing a confused young man, obsessed with music, aspiring to his mother's career as a concert pianist while breaking fingers for his mobster dad. Shot in a fury, filled with self-loathing, misogyny, misanthropic, it's a steely, Stygian cry from the depths of 1970s Manhattan, so wrong it's right. (In his script, the compulsive Toback wrote of his doppelganger, "One senses him at once cocky and on the border of dread, forever close to a break-out from his containment: into sexuality, violence, desperation, or music…") With The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon Coeur s'est arête) (****), Jacques Audiard, the formidable 53-year-old French writer-director of A Self-Made Man and Read My Lips has made an audacious, magnificent variation on Toback's themes and a substantial improvement on its form, eliding much of the frightening sexuality (and the mother in a mental hospital) yet retaining much of the psychological fury. Audiard's own emotional precision is measured in the shots that keep close to his character's head and shoulders. The world is in motion, and the camera seems prepared to hide behind this bold young man in his rashest moments. In the Keitel role, Romain Duris, in the same black leather skin, heeled Chelsea boots and sneer all his won, projects an equally livid inner life as a Parisian real estate fixer who lives in a flux of fucking, fucking-over and essential fucked-uppedness. The Beat That My Heart Skipped, kinetic, tender, as coiled as the blue smoke from a lingering Gauloise, has beauty and thrills to spare. This is masterful filmmaking, but also a superb portrait of rage that must be explored at the risk of suffocation or death. Somewhere, Jean-Pierre Melville is smiling.

Wedding Crashed

Vince Vaughn's slouching in the hotel room chair, looking like all he'd like to do is put his six-five legs up on another one. He's shooting his next movie, The Break-Up, where he's acting and producing, in Chicago, but he's taking a Saturday afternoon to talk about The Wedding Crashers (***), the charming, trash-talking, relentlessly funny comedy he stars in with Owen Wilson share billing. They're a winning, genial pair, glossing over the movie's plottier bits, talking at each other with their diametrically opposed rhythms: Wilson's laconic, reactive persona and Vaughn with his characters' too talky-to-be-a-tic all-ADD ids. But in their R-rated depiction of a pair of thirtysomething juveniles not quite ready to admit they're no longer young, they're alternately tart and sweet, each readily wounded, by the other but also attentive enough to the temperature of the room to roll with any curve in their sensation-greedy game. It's an inspired set-up: giddy and yet its overgrown brats remain optimistically romantic.

MCN: So'd the producers start with the idea, let's say "fuck" as often an entertainingly as possible?

VAUGHN: I got the script originally, and a lot of stuff, the setpieces were there, the scene at the dinner table [a spirited act of masturbation], the football scene [a hard-charging send-up of mindless macho], that was in there. We wrote the entire third act. Because the original draft, it was more obvious. With the dialogue, we just would always, as always, I would write, and Owen would as well, thinking of funnier things to say. Then on the day, we'd improvise some as well but a lot of the dialogue, we'd written before we got there.

MCN: Did you work with the classic idea; let's shoot everything on the page, now we've got some room left to see what turns up.

VAUGHN: Most of the stuff, the jokes, yeah. A lot of my dating rant was written but then I would go off and do other stuff-

MCN: Like your explosion to Owen at one wedding when a woman hooks your eye: "She just eye-fucked the shit out of me"?

VAUGHN: Yeah, yeah. Anything like that, inappropriate or shocking at a wedding is good. "She eye-fucked the shit out of me!" "Shhh! Shhh!"

MCN: There's an unusually cohesive quality to so many of the scenes, as if, in a good way, you'd been able to reshoot until you got it right, from the gangbusters first wedding crash sequence onward. It's a great running start to crosscut all those weddings and all that happy maniac behavior.

VAUGHN: What you want to search for is [a tone that] makes it all seem improvised, that it all just happened in the moment. That's the energy you're looking for. But you know, to have it feel that way, you can't go and improvise an entire movie and track a story from beginning to end. The thing that's confusing about improvisation, is, if you go and you're just trying to say funny things in the moment, you're going to destroy your movie because you might go off-story. It might be funny, but at what great cost? Can you improvise in way that makes it make sense with the next scene and the next scene? So you really have to be able to keep the scene on point, to how it's intended to serve the story. If it's a scene with me and Isla [Fisher, playing an ostensible virgin younger daughter of Christopher Walken] on the beach at the beginning, that scene has to end with me being uncomfortable and her coming off as reckless. [The scene where we're] fighting about going on the island has to come to no conclusion except that [Owen and I are] both very determined in our own directions. So there's more to it than just, "Hey, what's a fun line to say?"

MCN: Is David Dobkin the kind of director who brings this out?

VAUGHN: Dobkin's my favorite. I share a sense of humor with him, he's phenomenal with the camera, he's got a sense of story, he's confident enough to collaborate and to listen. He has great ideas of his own. He's a workaholic.

MCN: Which shows in the attention to detail. If you look at the end credits, there's a roster of wedding consultants. Each of the weddings has its own look, an authentic-seeming look.

VAUGHN: I think that says a lot. Even though it's a comedy, the more you can be real, the more it helps the jokes. It also helps the heart of the story. I know that David really wanted it to be authentic because it makes the crashing 'reality' more viable, or believable is a better word. Because y'know, you're going into these weddings with the burden of saying, okay, I'm trying to get into this reality, to not be caught in this circumstance.

MCN: Your guy likes his cake.

VAUGHN: Part of thing was he liked the girls, obviously, but he loved all the things about weddings that's what makes them likable, forgivable for their adolescent behavior is that there's a real innocence to it. They're excited.

MCN: Whenever you go to a wedding, you're playing a role. Everybody but the groom and bride are wedding crashers in a way.

VAUGHN: They love to eat, they love to dance, they have a good time! They show the bride and groom a good time. When they cut the cake, they sort of elevate it for everybody, they don't ruin it. There's their optimism, the possibilities of true love. My character is genuinely enthusiastic about the whole experience-drinking, dancing, the different rituals at the different weddings.

MCN: Improv's a misunderstood thing unless you've done it or seen a lot. One of the most deadly things is to watch comedians working late at night, and one guy steals focus repeatedly, instead of playing the scene.

VAUGHN: I did take a little bit of improv training here in Chicago, but it was only a couple of months. Really, [it's] just being a student of film and of acting and of life, I guess, not to sound totally goofy. The more you do something, like anything in life, the more you get out of it. I wish I could say there was one particular teacher who showed me some sort of path, but that wasn't the case. I was taking from different teachers, different great things, my own way of approaching it, taking the things that work for me from different people. Some stuff from improvisation, some stuff from Method acting, some stuff from technical acting. Like everyone else, there are certain things are going to work for you better than other things. So it's about trying… I like to go to a bunch of different classes and hear opposing views and try them out. I also think writing and being involved in developing screenplays like Swingers and Made, and obviously I'm involved in this thing, that helps you understand, even as an actor, as you track scenes in a movie. In this scene, my character's afraid to say he's in love with her, in this scene now he's desperate for her, so you're tracking as you go anyway, where your emotional state is. I think it's a combination of all that stuff. And if an accident happens, a happy accident, and you've done your preparation and know who you are, you know how to respond to that in the moment. Improvisation and Method acting are very similar. That's listening. It's not going in and trying [to steal the scene]. It's about listening, listening, listening and then responding. Then it seems like a genuine response, what's said is appropriate to what just happened, but you can't do that if you're disconnected and not paying attention.

MCN: Watch an actor like Gene Hackman, you see that, both his intent listening and directors greedily holding takes where he's doing that.

VAUGHN: Very true. The old saying, acting is listening, is very, very true. You can take in what's being said, and if it helps you emotionally, you're going to feel a certain way about it, and that will dictate what my line is, not a preconceived notion of how my line should sound. I don't think of that. If I know who I am, and I've wired my imagination and wired myself to be in the headspace of the character, you can go in any direction.

MCN: Your character has a gift for physical contact, touching people in a way that's uncomfortable at first and then gratifyingly intimate. Such as the wedding where their cover's almost blown, and he puts his hand on the older gentleman, but then it becomes reassuring rather than odd when he does it a second time.

VAUGHN: That was improvised. That wasn't in the script. My script in that scene, that's an interesting one to talk about. My job in that scene is that my friend has done something and called attention to something that's bizarre. I have to do something that beyond a reasonable doubt believe that this man is off our scent, is going to leave us alone. So as I state my case, if I'm feeling doubt how it'll go, I still have the burden of plugging the dam. So I just came to a place, if I make it about something else, you'll be more like, 'Okay, maybe I should just stay away from this guy.' Or 'I don't even want to deal with what's going on here.' It's one of those weird [moments] that hits a plane in life where it's hard to describe what happened. It's, like you said, comforting. It's inappropriate, but it's almost like you blend in by sticking out. You're so… Only someone who really knew people could be so comfortable as to do something like that. So you wouldn't even assume… If you're asking me if I'm part of the family, and I'm all of a sudden making physical contact and [behaving] in an intimate way, I've assumed the reality, in a physical way, that we have that relationship, and I've gotten past verbally having to explain it. The other actor in the scene, he's at first taken aback, but then he goes into it, so as an audience you're buying that he is accepting of the fact that we're there, or at least he's no longer on the prowl to throw us out of there. A lot of time when scenes don't work or acting seems bad, it's when people say, I'm just gonna say what's written and you're not buying the moment. You leave it at that. The audience won't buy that moment that was on the page if you don't sell that moment. So it really comes from a need to commit to whatever moment there is to be believed, rather than you are saying what's written and hoping it's believed. If that makes sense.

MCN: He's consistently that way, down to kissing Henry Gibson on the mouth. "Let's go for the real thing." It gives the audience a beat of preparation with a line that's funny before the bigger joke of the unwanted intimacy.

VAUGHN: There's genuine affection in that moment, too. It goes with the character. In real life, I'm not that kind of person, like the kind of person Jackie Gleason was, gregarious like that. Or that Belushi or Farley was, where they have warmth to them. And there are cultures that are more "touchy" than others. So he's a guy who's gonna eat a lot, sing a lot, who doesn't have a governor on him. So he's capable in that moment of kissing the priest, in a way that for us, would be "Thank you for listening." That's his way of doing it.

"Great" or "Michael Bay Great"?

Let us define how there could be such a creature as "a great Michael Bay movie."

Roger Ebert's recently defended his awarding of stars to certain genre pictures like the Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard, but The Island (***) doesn't require any equivocations. While in many ways the 40-year-old director's latest movie may be the esthetic equivalent of genetic splicing, his first time working outside of the Jerry Bruckheimer compound, collaborating with producer Steven Spielberg (who gave the script to Bay) and gifted cinematographer Mauro Fiore (Training Day), finds him working with intelligence and uncommon agility, exploiting and elevating everything bright and inventive in his compulsive, propulsive set of skills. Plus, PG-13 may be the best friend a Bay ever had, reining in much of his previously demonstrated gleeful love of profanity, sexual disgust and general bad taste. (As in that critical fave, Bad Boys 2.)

The Island is a terrific surprise, a rousing entertainment, with room for notions about moral responsibility, marvelous offhand production design of a potential near-future, and as the film accelerates, action scenes that are eye-widening kinetic marvels. (Try on this swell burst of action.) It's almost as if Tom Tykwer got his hands on an Andrew Niccol script-can you imagine the dour anxiety and moral conundrums of Gattaca done in the pluperfect bubblegum fashion of Run Lola Run? (I consider that a vast compliment.)

Before delving into the plot, which has a few sturdy twists (especially involving identity indicators within DNA), it's worth repeating a lengthy quote from a piece in the Miami Herald, from Bay's first film professor, Janine Basinger, chairwoman of Connecticut's Wesleyan University Film Studies Department: "I often joke that my tombstone will read `She taught Michael Bay.' ... But I don't think Michael Bay is the devil. I think he's a good filmmaker. He was an award-winning photographer as a high school student, a fully defined visual artist as a kid, and I don't think he approached the medium with the idea of pleasing other people necessarily. Ingmar Bergman said, 'Every great filmmaker has to define film on his own terms,' and in a sense, that's right... For Michael, it's about pace and rapid movement. Michael is actually an abstract artist in the way he uses time, space, light and color. He's almost an experimental filmmaker in that regard. He uses the medium in the fastest, sharpest way that it can be used, and if you don't like it, tough luck.'' (Fiore's cinematography makes the most of grainy blues and greens.)

In an enclosed complex like the blandest and most expensive of health spas, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are members of a community of workers whose only dream is to win a lottery that sends them to The Island. "nature's last remaining pathogen-free zone." (They believe they're the only survivors of a biological apocalypse.)

There are surprises in store, and a few are given away in the next paragraphs. In fact, they're "agnates," clones manufactured at a cost of billions of dollars by a cool, calculating doctor played by Sean Bean, to provide the possibility of longer life for the very wealthy of the mid-twenty-first century. Originally, the agnates were kept in a "persistent vegetative state." (The film was shot before the legislative attempts to sustain the life of the late Terry Schiavo.) But the flesh held no life: our story begins.

At first glimpse, Scarlett Johansson's otherworldly voluptuousness is accentuated by a glassiness that makes her even more of an image from a magazine page, her features as glossy as lip gloss, a David LaChappelle moist dream. On the other hand, Ewan McGregor is lit to show every texture, blemish, acne pit. (A man's face for a man's man?) Making this pair exemplars of genetic perfection is an almost comic notion, even if at PG-13, Mr. McGregor is unable to indulge his custom and flash his sword.

But the intended fate of the characters is sour. They're only a few years old and have the emotional level of a 15-year-old, minus a sex drive. What does the lottery actually hide? McGregor's character has a defect: curiosity. ("I wanna know answers and more.") After a nerve-jangling succession of plot turns and intense scenes, the pair escapes, on the run across the Southwest toward a lovingly designed Los Angeles, in search of their "owners."

Bay's post-Blade Runner Los Angeles, cobbled from downtown L.A. and downtown Detroit, is a treat, making sparing use of airborne electric streetcars, as if artist-anachronist Bruce McCall were a consultant, and managing to design a scene of Harold Lloyd-style peril from many stories above the street, with characters clinging from a single letter logo whose letterform resembles that of the enigmatic billboard in Antonioni's Blow Up.

But as you would expect in an authentic Bay production, Steve Buscemi is on hand as the Keeper of the Exposition, playing a run-at-the-mouth horndog, and after hours, yes, he does hang out in a blue-collar strip club. As he spouts to his girlfriend, "Remember the talk we had about all the talk?" and "Why do I have to be the guy who tells the kids there's no Santa Claus?" And "Just because you eat the burger doesn't mean you want to meet the cow."

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Island is rife with brand names, more with an eye to the bottom line than toward any plausible futurism, reportedly raising a million dollars toward the $130 million budget. Aquafina remains a reprocessed tap water of choice and information kiosks are emblazoned with the MSN butterfly, a logo that will surely have as short a life as a real butterfly or at least the Pan Am and Bell System logos in Kubrick's movie. Gloriously, but most improbably, Amtrak still runs across the desert heartland, but the vehicle is a Maglev train, sleek, levitating, lovely.

Breathless but hardly heartless, The Island is filled with neat details. And when the fated lovers discover the essentials of reproduction, Johansson's quiet raspy murmur is choice: "Wow. That tongue thing is amazing." And so is The Island.

Hustle & Moan

Terrence Howard is a marvel, a wondrous presence, a splendid performer, a man who will continue to do increasingly important work in movies, regardless of how Hustle & Flow (* ½) is received by audiences; his searing habitation of DJay [sic], a Memphis pimp who seeks redemption through rap songs about the daily interaction between himself and his prostitutes almost, almost, but not quite, elevates Craig Brewer's "Rocky" road. Even from the choice of typeface in the opening credits, this John Singleton-Stephanie Allain production is a studio-slick revisiting of 1970s blaxploitation style, yet its journey of salvation may ring hollow to some viewers who will find Brewer's work heavier on the "exploitation" than the "black." But then there's Howard, last seen in a radically different role as a bourgeois television director in Crash: this brilliant actor is on fire. One of the most expensive buys ever at the Sundance Film Festival, Paramount Classics is releasing the movie in corporate synergy with sister concern MTV Films. Not a good sign for what is sometimes called "independent film." With Anthony Alderson, DJ Qualls, Taryn Manning and Ludacris.

Gluttony, vanity, greed, yum

The colors and textures and sounds of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (*** ½) are marvels, but in John August's (Go, Big Fish) adaptation of Roald Dahl's book (while ignoring the existence of the inexplicably liked 1971 version starring Gene Wilder), there may not be enough story and heart for every audience to swoon. The title sequence shows us an assembly line of mechano-fly-type machines more fearfully efficient than War of the Worlds' tripod invaders, all the service of fabricating a simple bar of foil-wrapped chocolate. The frame is ever filled with doodles, such as a high angle shot of the bright red Wonka trucks making deliveries, their tracks a gentle traceries-like pattern of blooming, curved lines in fresh snow. Johnny Depp channels an unlikely combination of Howard Hughes and John Malkovich, playing a sniffy fop who fears all beyond the borders of his costume. (His persnickety, off-putting asides are at their best in a small bit of pile-it-on hipster-talk, after the style of the late, great 1950s scat-bebop comedian Lord Buckley.) Freddie Highmore, with Dumbo, Jr. ears, a fringe of spit-tipped bangs and pale blue eyes like a boy's and not a moppet's, makes an excellent observer to the mayhem that ensues as the other children are dispatched for their gluttony, vanity and greed. Each exit is accompanied by bright, choreographed musical numbers, with lyrics drawn from Dahl, sung by the Oompah-Loompahs. The entirety of their ranks is embodied by a single actor, a small, Indian man with the lovely name of Deep Roy who's appeared in other Burton movies, and whose middle-aged, dark-eyed face, a double for the composer Angelo Badalamenti is atop every shrunken worker in the factory. The 2001: A Space Odyssey homage goes on far too long, but it must be noted: Squirrels: twice as funny as penguins, with half the dignity.

When it's hot, play it cool

Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit 9 Songs (***) sketches the physical relationship of a mismatched young London couple-a grizzled thirtysomething "glaciologist" named Matt and 21-year-old Lisa, a skinny barmaid on antidepressants-through nine concerts at London's Brixton Academy, which alternate with the explicit details of their sexual acts. The grimy, patron's-eye views of songs by the likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Primal Scream, the Dandy Warhols and Franz Ferdinand, have a certain electricity, and the gestures toward and during the couple's sex hold a universal banality that keeps the film both from becoming pornography or from becoming psychological drama. But the grimy video-to-film palate holds a certain truth about concerts and sex: everyone remembers different sensations while sharing the same electrified mood. There are a fistful of tossed-off lines that have some flutter-away authenticity, such as her reading of "Aw, baby, pay attention to me," and "Sometimes when you kiss me, I want to bite you, I don't mean in a nice way, I just want to bite you really, really hard and make you bleed." Ouch! Truly painful are the more pre-determined bits, such as Matt's Antarctica-inspired musings, which seem unfelt and derivative, as does a dip into Michael Nyman's 60th birthday concert at their corner club. Compare the cold sentimentality of Matt's line while flying over the tundra, "When I remember Lisa, I don't think about her clothes, or her work, where she was from, or even what she said. I think of her smell. Her taste. Her skin touching mine" to these more literary lines from Ian McEwan's novel, "Enduring Love": "I caught in the fibers of her sweater the tang of the open air and Imagined I saw the sky spread before me. Everything was touch and breath." While the fellatio and ejaculation scene - notorious since the Cannes debut - is strong stuff, the remainder of the activity turns more Britophile: bondage games and a final act, a grim bit of coitus that's visually centered on the game actress' anus. Please, Farther, not Closer.

Magnetic Maggie

Don Roos bounces back from Bounce (2000), his misguided Ben Affleck-Gwyneth Paltrow romance, with the slangy, intercut stories of Happy Endings, (** ½) exploring the bonds of blood and of affinity. What does it be to be a stepsibling? Roos traces out the boundaries of relationships between stepbrothers and stepsisters, between gay couples (Steve Coogan, David Sutcliffe) and lesbian couples (Laura Dern, Sarah Clarke) who need sperm donors, between a gay teen (Jason Ritter) and a kicky young gold digger (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who wants into his band and his bed until scenting a better catch in the no-longer-virgin's dad (a restrained Tom Arnold). Plus Lisa Kudrow plays a woman who winds up collaborating on a faked documentary about sex workers starring her Mexican boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) in hopes of finding the identity of a child she gave up for adoption from a young blackmailer who wants to get into AFI film school (Jesse Bradford, playing a bearded, longhaired, deluded young shit with delicious, shaggy gusto). Wry, bittersweet, and often laugh-out-loud funny, the same sardonic, gay sensibility Roos exhibited in The Opposite of Sex is amplified here. (The title is the punchline to a dirty joke.) Gyllenhaal is the standout, her hair and features as curlicued as a Ronald Searle illustration yet managing yet another flesh-and-blood cool cucumber.

Patagonian impresss

Intimate Stories (***) (Historias minimas) Carlos Sorin's first feature in over a decade and a half is a slight, dry, shaggy-Pampas story, slowly drawing together the minor-key misadventures and maladies of three people from a small town called Fitz Roy who travel the straight, deserted roads of the less-privilged reaches of Patagonia toward the provincial capitol of San Julien-a young mother who's won a prize on a cheap TV game show called "Multicolored Casino"; a traveling salesman obsessed with getting the perfect cake to impress a young widow on the birthday of a child he's never met; and an old man who's convinced that his dog "Badface" that ran away three years earlier, apparently after judging his owner to be morally suspect, will be in the same town the others are headed toward. Sorin works simply, and with non-actors: there's bittersweet grace, for instance, in a wide shot of the old man sitting on the stoop of his grocery store, "California," after hearing about his dog, and he's framed against flat horizon, flat highway, limitless tan sky. Sorin writes of his setting: "We filmed in Patagonia, land of infinite mesetas and endless routes. It's difficult to film Patagonia without ending up doing a road-movie. Distances and journeys take up a great part of the projects and desires of their inhabitants. That's why Intimate Stories is a road-movie. The characters go through their short stories in the huge prehistoric landscapes."

July 21, 2004

- Email Ray Pride