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

In a lo-o-o-ng column, words with Shane Black about his madly entertaining writing-directing debut Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang; a review of Domino; talking to Cameron Crowe about happiness, Elizabethtown and unhappy reviews; a sketch of Capote; a consideration of how some viewers are taking the marvelous A History of Violence; and shorts on Loggerheads, The Future of Food, and The Three Rooms of Melancholia.

And, for some older items that didn't make it into columns, over at Pride, Unprejudiced there's even more reviews and interviews, including the delirious Mirrormask; slasher pastiche Hellbent; haunting documentary Wall; mongrel marvel of comedy and documentary illusion The Talent Given Us; the poppy Kamikaze Girls; lyrical Tim Burton's Corpse Bride; Lodge Kerrigan's unforgettably wrenching Keane, and conversations with Steve James about Reel Paradise and Ronald Harwood and Ben Kingsley about l'il Oliver Twist.

..Shane Black Interview ..Pride, Unprejudiced: ..The Blog

"Schleps like you and me who hear the call of the mythical figure": Shane Black

After years of creative silence, Lethal Weapon creator Shane Black's first movie is the $15 million neo-noir Kiss Kiss,, Bang Bang (***), a wicked, witty ride that propels petty thief Robert Downey, Jr. across modern L.A. in quest of a movie role; enter hilariously acerbic gay P.I. Val Kilmer and a raft of knowing movie references (starting with the Pauline Kael allusion in his title). He seemed moody on the overcast afternoon we met in a conference room atop the Chicago Four Seasons, but the 43-year-old writer-director shrugs, "Weather doesn't bother me." As he settles into his chair, there's a slight smile as he confesses, "I had some female trouble and I put it behind me."

Of the convulsive joke-making by both Downey and Kilmer's characters, offering them their best roles in too long, Black says he can write it, but doesn't talk the game: "I'd like to be the sort of raconteur who rattles off quips and bon mots in the moment, but I'm not going to hit you with the dazzler. Most people just say nothing all of the time."

After several years of reported writers' block and depression-"the tough time I was having," he describes it to me-Black retooled a romantic comedy he was struggling with into this relentless caper. At producer Silver Pictures, the first notes were, "There's so much talk in this movie, so many words."

"Dialogue can be fun but most people don't study it," Black says, recalling one of his favorite moments in movies, the very last word, ion voiceover by Morgan Freeman at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. "Hope." We both look away, toward clouds over Lake Michigan.

"What's fun is the juxtaposition," Black notes of his dark humor. "I've got a romantic moment over a spider leg on a tit," and the scene, against the odds, not only works but becomes momentarily sexy. Mostly, Black suggests, the headlong nature of the movie works because he's willing to echo Chandler's method, "the impromptu nature of his storytelling. The plotting is not as important as the characters, but I needed a plot that would allow me to make a Los Angeles movie."

Of tough guy stuff, he says, "I read these books at a very inappropriate age. You know what happens when schleps like you and me who hear the call of the mythical figure." Why a gay P.I.? "Action movies are all about ejaculations anyway, one guy shoots the other guy with his penis."

Black also admits that he "thinks too much," causing some of his problems when he was off the Hollywood writer, but, befriended by James L. Brooks, who told him just to write: "This is creativity. This is writing. Isn't it somehow more noble to be tortured by this?" The bottom line? "If we make $35 million, everyone's happy."

Girl on Fire: Domino

Determined to prove she's not just another pretty set of hipbones, Keira Knightley is game and glittering at the center of Tony Scott's Domino, (** ½) where the brother of Sir Ridley is again out to prove he's Papi Pendejo but also at least the Baron of ADD or Duke of Asperger's. This vastly enjoyable but painfully hyper entertainment is a mescaline-esque maelstrom, co-written by Donnie Darko's Richard Kelly, shotgunned by a Goodfellas-style voiceover is a turbocharged life story of Domino Harvey (whom Scott knew for fifteen years), daughter of the actor Laurence Harvey (star of The Manchurian Candidate), a rebellious Ford model turned bounty hunter whose exploits are eventually tracked, in this telling, by a WB reality show hosted by a couple of Beverly Hills 90210 burnouts. The real Domino died shortly after the film was finished; Scott is also oddly reticent to display Harvey's reported drug use and bisexuality, focusing more on ways to light the feathering peach-fuzz along Knightley's spare jaw line. Feral, cutting shadow and smoke with cheekbones and emphatic lip gloss but also butt crack and lilac lacies, the sometimes-naked (or neatly-doubled) Knightley is not tomboyish so much as she is very skinny as she wreaks chopsocky, choppy-and-overlapping edited havoc through a 1990s LA that seems a suburb of México City. It's not girlie aggro, it's gonzo malice and the actress is up to whatever Scott flings her way. Or, in one memorable line, "Domino, give those goddam nunchucks a rest already." The end credits begin with something precious as each of the actors are recalled, but the last two shots blur reality and invention in a startlingly explosive fashion. With Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez as Domino's crew, Lucy Liu as her interrogator, Christopher Walken, Mena Suvari and Jacqueline Bisset. Tom Waits also stumbles in out of the desert as an unlikely Kurtzian seer.

In cold sangfroid: Capote

Bennett Miller's made two accomplished movies, the documentary, The Cruise (1999), about Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a writer-want-to-be with a furiously fast, painful voice, and now Capote, (****) about a writer with a pinched, painful voice who achieves the pinnacle of his success and never completes another book. Aside from the whiny protagonists, there's no link between the two pictures except intelligence and patience. Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance captures the strangeness of being Truman Capote, and by extension, of being a writer. Serene and studied, Capote well captures what it means to observe, the discomfort of the observer when he thinks he is not being seen, caught out, dissected. Like the book Capote is researching and writing in the movie, "In Cold Blood," the "first nonfiction novel," about two men accused of killing a family in a Kansas farmhouse, Capote is a marvel of empathy, formally and emotionally engaged while building to a powerful, sorrowful conclusion. Catherine Keener speaks volumes as Nell Harper Lee (who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird), just with her keenly calibrated expressions as the friend who accompanies Capote to Kansas as his researcher. Two-thirds or so through, there's one small, exquisite dash of beauty, surely an allusion to a similar set of shots in Bertolucci's The Conformist, and equivalent to Conrad L. Hall's memorable rain-shadowed-on-face shot of Robert Blake from Richard Brooks' film, but it is utterly apt at this instant. We see a widescreen frame of almost total blackness, and a pattern of light from passing headlamps seen through a lattice of Venetian blinds striates bright and there is a cut of a counter-shot of the same light and shadow playing across the sleepless Capote's face. You'll hear much about the acting, fine across the board, but the quiet intelligence and wit of the screenwriting, framing, cutting and lighting, is a joy to behold even as the story moves toward its inevitable tragic conclusion.

..Elizabethtown Review

Figuring fiasco and flameout: Elizabethtown

The trailers pretty much give it away: corporate hotshot Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) has an epic, billion-dollar "failure, fiasco and flame-out" just as his father dies; dispatched by his family to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to retrieve his father's ashes, he meets a set of epic dimples attached to Claire, a perky, pesky flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst.

Constructed around several large setpieces, Cameron Crowe again tinkers with tone, both for better and for worse, in Elizabethtown (** ½). He premiered a longer version at Venice and Toronto. Not altogether inappropriately, considering the kinds of stories Crowe tells as a filmmaker, the most abusive and condescending of notices were filled with the sort of vitriol you'd expect from a spurned lover. But, talking a couple hours before premiering the movie at the opening night of the Chicago International Film Festival, Crowe's content. "It's the [cut] I would have done anyway. What I guess was surprising was that work-in-progress can mean other things. It can mean I'm not going to release it, or it's a troubled movie, or I want to protect myself. But I really believe in the movie and it's made for all the right reasons. The story's not written yet. It comes out in ten days and we'll see what happens. There's something that the movie does to audiences and it's a rarely a passive reaction. I stopped reading 'em at a certain point. I've learned from bad and good reviews."

Crowe, being an old-fashioned kind of storyteller who wants to frame his movies with "premises," opens Elizabethtown with several scenes that make one uneasy-Billy Wilder notions on Ridley Scott scale with potential allusions to his previous movie, the failed Vanilla Sky-but once you're into the movie, these are the clotheslines, and there is finery.

My ears perked up with suspicion during the movie as "Kentucky" (where I'm from) is intoned like it's a place that's unconscionably exotic, like "Constantinople" or "Ulaan Bator." But once on the ground in the Commonwealth, Crowe finds his movie. Part of it is working with cinematographer John Toll. "He likes to honor the face, the story you can tell from the face. Sometimes it's not all about beauty. It's fun to have a guy with that much soul [making] the frame, working with you to tell the story. Vanilla Sky had, certainly, its own interesting… birth. But I learned so much visually. I'm challenged by [him], how can I tell the story more visually, in a complete way?"

Aside from the expected song-packed soundtrack, Crowe's good at finding the right moments for the right sounds, too, the low of freight trains and fall's first crickets. After first falling in with the Elizabethtown clans, Crowe keeps caricature to a minimum. "I just wanted to honor Kentucky. I love the way music sounds there. Toll had shot part of Simpatico there so he was anxious to shoot Kentucky, too. Probably, given the opportunity, I would have dialed the accents down more. We had some interesting rhythms with the accents. One guy was from Biloxi, but that gave it a little flavor. I liked when regional actors would come in and start with what you saw they had been hired for in the past when California came calling. I'd just say, use the voice you walked in with."

The central setpiece is an extended courtship via cell phone by Drew and Claire after they've met, while the pair move through intimate spaces, hers, the approach to her life, into her home and a warm bath, his, the dislocation of a Louisville hotel, is sublimely what Crowe does best, caterwauling posturing and foolishness and self-revelation in the face of the improbability of truest love. Claire's "You want to have a beer over the phone"? is not "I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen" or "You had me at…" but it is sweet in Dunst's mid-South-with-a-dash-of-Mississippi-magnolia drawl. Better still is their meeting later, driving to meet in the middle of their distance in the midst of a forest on a misty Kentucky sand-colored sunrise-"I see your headlights…"; "I see your red hat…"; "There you are."

"The thing that I liked about this movie," Crowe says, "the things that were going to be different, things that had to be dealt with [were that] long phone call, the road trip at the end, the long monologue from [Drew's] mother [Susan Sarandon, doing strange stand-up at a memorial service], the [crazily] long [rendition of] "Freebird," I knew, mathematically, it was going to be tough. I knew it would take a long time sifting and shifting to find a rhythm. I didn't want to call that long phone call down to nothing. My dream was that someone would come to me and say, 'Hey, I noticed how behavior changes, how you're confessing to a stranger and idealizing your life while [also] being yourself while you're unseen by them.' Then you get your courage up to be seen by them and you realize they're still a stranger."

The road trip, a lengthy epilogue, is a daring detour that sets Drew and his father's urn across a landscape of universal grief and what memory you hold-there's a bold citation of the site of Martin Luther King's murder and the haunting Oklahoma City children's memorial-is the oddest turn in an American movie since the end of Spike Lee's The 25th Hour.

John Toll works wonders with the landscape of faces here, and Dunst has never seemed as sunny, and that's saying something. Claire has a willful dorkiness, not tomboyish, but a kook, Fran Kubelik brash, like the young Shirley Maclaine, moueing, parading in floral granny dresses and skirts and flip-flops. "I'm impossible to forget but I'm hard to remember," Claire insists, pestering, pesky. Crowe grins. "Sometimes you don't know you need a people person but that people person knows how to find you when you're in need."

..History Of Violence Review

My History of Violence

Reader, she slugged me.

David Cronenberg makes the kind of smart movies that make me stupid-happy, but all the explication in the world is not making every person I know happy after they've gone to A History of Violence (****) on my recommendation. A few hours before typing this, in fact, I was both slugged and shoved and told just how stupid the movie was. "Hey, I didn't make> the movie," is my usual reply when I get static for having liked a movie more than my interlocutor, but in this case, it seemed diplomatic to run away, just for a little bit.

Superficially a Western, Cronenberg's accomplished, lustrous film, is about Tom Stall, the proprietor of a diner (Viggo Mortensen) who must protect his family after a shoot-out in his Indiana small town causes Philadelphia mobsters to come looking for him, intent that he's a man out of their past, one who had an unpaid debt. Mortensen and Mario Bello, who plays his wife, are tremulously alive in every scene. Cronenberg toys with storytelling conventions, notions and clichés drawn from noir, pulp novels (and a graphic novel, which he says he did not know of before he read the script). Cronenberg offers both the visceral satisfactions of filmed violence and a critique of it, a cool Darwinian game that shifts gears several times in a split second. There's a tremendously smart set of scenes about how power can shift in sexual relations in a committed relationship, and the sex, like the violence, are taut, bravura studies in concision, geometry and suddenness.

And now I have a bruise.

I had the chance to interview Cronenberg the week after the movie's opening, but we got caught in a scheduling bind: a taping of "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross at Navy Pier had run long, traffic was bad, the pillows on the hotel couch didn't offer any lumbar support, and he had a 3:30 live radio interview that couldn't be flipped. It was good to run a couple of observations past the 62-year-old director, looking his age, but fit and content, but there was no way to get a conversation into fourteen minutes after he'd had the luxury of long, loping replies to questions in Ms. Gross' salon.

But it felt good just to offer a few descriptive affirmations, especially since I'd read a dozen earlier interviews, since its Cannes debut and Toronto showing, each one as fresh, wry and witty as the other. But I'd also read a couple of reviews where writers have used the movie as a cudgel to muss the hair of a straw man called "intellectual filmmaking," but my favorite came from Daniel Neman, a writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch, who was irritated to the max by the tasty minimalism. Neman reviews Cronenberg's sleek stunner as "a cheap movie, cheaply filmed and cheaply made. And the editing leaves a lot to be desired, too... David Cronenberg ought to know better, but it is clear that he is working with too little money and too little script." Or, as my acquaintance put it, "Nothing happens! It's all obvious! It's clichés! What were you on?"

Cronenberg's scripts are notoriously short. He says that the Crash pages ran only to a total of 55 or so, and perhaps 66 for the 97-minute History. They're master classes in how quickly you can convey information, and there's a quiet smile on Cronenberg's face as he recalls the numbers. Back to my straw man: "The problem with the story is clear when we consider all the filler used just to stretch the movie to an hour and a half," the Virginian writes. "Cronenberg does not help matters by shooting the film so deadpan, so quietly, that it seems slow and uninteresting. The calm is punctuated by occasional bursts of violence and the disgusting special effects that follow them, but they don't help... It is obvious where Cronenberg's interest picks up, though it is only in a few places… He clearly revels in the scenes of blood and gore, though each one looks rather like the others... What doesn't interest him or the writer is the ending. The [ending] feels like it was written by a committee that jettisoned logic and character motivation just for the sake of ending. The filmmakers want it to end, so it ends."

And so it goes. For the record, Cronenberg has told interviewers, including your correspondent, that the final scene was one of his key demands to New Line, which readily acceded to his choice. I've seen A History of Violence three times, and it was still a thrill down to the smallest bit-Howard Shore's dour, Coplandesque score offers another layer of beauty and deliberation, and William Hurt has a small role that is almost indescribably louche and lovely. Here is one iconic, ironic image: convinced that his family is about to be ambushed at their farmhouse, he must rush to save the day once more. He calls his wife on his cell phone, and on bandaged foot, he run-hobbles across several beautifully composed frames, including one where his head rises above the horizon of a highway lined by autumn yellow and orange and grey trees: Gary Cooper without a horse. Cronenberg grins, "Is that Monty Python or what?"

One from the lab: The Future of Food

The Future of Food, (*** ½) Deborah Koons Garcia's powerful, sober, sobering second feature, after Grateful Dawg, the eminently likeable 2000 documentary about the friendship between the musicians David Grisman and her late husband Jerry, is a feat of social engagement and journalistic expose, presenting in great, frightful and withering detail, the threat of genetically modified agriculture to the world's food supply. She identifies the most monolithic threat as Monsanto, who, patenting hybrid, sterile life forms around the world, and pressing legal action against farmers whose crops are unwittingly and unwillingly contaminated by the conglomerate's patented GM products, mutate the world's ecosystems for profit. Minute by minute, you hope that The Future of Food is a horrible put-on, a manufactured nightmare, a paranoid invention. But it's not. It's a real life horror story, and Garcia's levelheaded work is a cornucopia of a new, and likely enduring, form of global terror

Way down south in the land of family dysfunction: Loggerheads

The South is a devastating fact for storytellers who've grown up there, and several recent movies have captured the strange and clashing myths, notably two North Carolina fables from the past year, which both debuted at Sundance in 2005. Phil Morrison's seductive Junebug, rife with dark, subterranean currents, is still in theaters, and now there's Tim Kirkman's (Dear Jesse, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me) nuanced first fiction feature, the ensemble drama Loggerheads, (** ½) not quite successful but still memorable for its tender performances by strong actors. The title and its metaphorical turtles are strenuous, but Kirkman's command of the 1999-set trio of stories, in different Carolinas settings with the Bush-Gore electoral shenanigans in the background, put the movie within hailing distance of Short Cuts-era Altman. The ramifications of adoption, HIV, the search for birth parents, and religion are among the thematic straits ably maneuvered by Michael Kelly, Kip Pardue, Tess Harper, Chris Sarandon, Michael Learned, and a gloomy Bonnie Hunt, filled with all the agony and empathy she can muster. Mark Geary's score, with songs by Patty Griffin, is a broody plus. 93m.

The beauty of the grave: The Three Rooms of Melancholia

Along with Darwin's Nightmare, (****) Hubert Sauper's frightening documentary about the ecosystem gone vastly wrong along an African lake, Pirjo Honkasalo's epic The Three Rooms of Melancholia (*** ½) is one of the year's most wrenching, rapturous horrors, giving physical weight to the emotional despoliation of post-Soviet Chechnya at war, seen mostly in the faces of orphaned soldier children. The Finnish documentary-maker has been working for several decades, shooting on film in a lyrical, even mystic fashion. Many things aren't explained that we witness in this gravely beautiful film. It's the apotheosis of a sort of elevated Euro-seriousness but Honkasalo has the patience and heart to make a devastating movie rather than a ponderous one. The first user reviewing Three Rooms of Melancholia at the Internet Movie Database believes that it "seems to try to desperately be some kind of serious art house documentary and it's way too "artistic" and way too long shots about all the inessential things make it almost insufferable to watch and at the same time you can't avoid thinking "is any of this really true?" …This is like an amateur Russian version of Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 but with no skills in filmmaking and no entertainment values. It looks just cheap and [like a] purposeless exploitation film." Dear User (who writes English as a second language) You Are So Wrong.

October 22 , 2004

Email Ray Pride