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

..Hot Button Review

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Full Mental Jerkoff: Jarhead

There's a shaggy God story that finds a movie director at the Pearly Gates, anxious to learn from passed peers. He asks St. Peter about Stanley Kubrick, how he fills the eons. "It's gonna be a while," St. Peter says sternly. And why in the life-after-life not? The white-beareded gatekeeper shrugs, "God still has questions."

Well aware he's treading on St. Stanley's estimable turf, director Sam Mendes opens Jarhead (**) answers your first question with one of a succession of canny, coolly self-conscious pre-emptive strikes: a D.I. pillories recruits with scat-mouthed fervor in a quick montage both, winking to us, yes I've seen a movie called Full Metal Jacket.

In the design and pacing of each skit-like scene, Jarhead is smooth and measured. Most of Jarhead, primarily the story of "Swoff," or Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), a writerly young Marine sniper, is comprised of waiting: a vivid months-long vigil in the Kuwaiti desert during "Desert Storm" leading up to what would be an only-100 hour long war. Surreal happens.

Roger Deakins is one of the best cinematographers working today, and even when a movie does not fully succeed, there is much to admire and learn from the work of film and sound editor Walter Murch. (Jarhead quotes a scene from Apocalypse Now that angries up the recruits, recutting something he helped edited almost thirty years ago.) Surely something fresh, something alarming and discomfiting could be drawn from the raw material in Swofford's best-selling book, yet Mendes' Jarhead feels not only derivative but also superfluous. It strains to be about war, neither pro nor con, rousing no rabble, avoiding Corps porn. There are few air-to-ground perspectives, the focus remaining squarely in the Marines' bootsteps. As one character says in William R. Broyles' script, typical of the on-the-nose writing, "Fuck politics, all right? We're here, all the rest is bullshit."

What can we take from this assembly of scenes and attitudes? Young men go to war, jerk off, wait, tremble, jerk off, sublimate hormonal surges through the firing of weapons. (Or grow more frustrated if they cannot shoot.) Beyond that, much of the movie is earnestly artistic, like a mash-up of video whiz (and Kubrick acolyte) Mark Romanek's most covetous impulses, as if a bomb went off at Book Soup in Hollywood somewhere between Art and Film. After three features, Mendes' eclecticism suggests painless esthetic as anesthetic, as if we're watching the Restoration Hardware mounting of Elem Klimov's woolly World War II epic Come and See, or a hip-flask taste of Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Intentionally, the episodic character is all semantics and no drama, a series of tableaux vivant instead of three sturdy acts. (This is a description of what the movie is, and not necessarily a critique.) The outcome of the entire enterprise is less disorientation than affectlessness. This is obviously the movie Mendes meant to make: not the consideration of guilt of Courage Under Fire, the sarcasm of Three Kings, but instead a modest apocalypse along the lines of Werner Herzog's majestic documentary about the Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze, Lessons of Darkness. There is grandeur in Herzog's earth-as-hell, man's troops insect-small and dusted with black ash, subject to a crushing, Brobdingnagian fate. But Jake Gyllenhaal's wide eyes, whatever their virtues in themselves or how directors have explored them, are not as profound as what he is supposed to be witnessing: the despoliation of nature sundered and plundered. In Jarhead, men wait wide-eyed in the desert to witness visions from other movies: a Tarkovskian white horse oiled black in night black amid dark and equally oiled sky; Lawrence of Arabia-styled Arabs on camels, flickering in heat shimmer across desert distance.

As with any wall of flame, there is something sublime in these jets of black, yellow and rind-orange flame-think, "this is the end, my friend"-but in Mendes' hands, it is callow and presentational. While the soldier's perspective is honored, the arrays of figures and actions loosely across the widescreen frame seem confined by a stage director's eye. There is foreground and horizon, and while this approach might ring true to the soldier's feet-and-head-in-the-sand experience, it does not transform it anything greater. I'd actually like to own the coffee table book, which will be likely resemble series of brightly colored, captioned cards pinned to an expansive wildness of cork: all schema and theme, pictures but not gravity. Simply, Jarhead lacks severity and scale. When pictorial effects such as the horizon of gas jets on the horizon bring to mind tapers in paintings by Georges de la Tour or Gerhard Richter, the horror or the daze ought to click and kick and haunt rather than just be pretty-pretty.

Think of the last shots of Full Metal Jacket or the finale of Paths of Glory, or any of the three Apocalypse Now endings floating out there. Something flipped out ought to have preceded the movie's brilliant but unearned final line: "We are still in the desert." So speaks Christ, Vladimir and Estragon, Luis Buñuel, Viet vet Bill Broyles, Bush 41, Bush 43, the U S of fucking A, man on fucking earth.

Stages of Denial: The Dying Gaul

I'm sold on anyone who can sell Steve Reich to let them plunder his previously recorded music to score a film, and it's the ideal sonic bed, if drenching, for playwright Craig Lucas' feature directorial debut, a chamber drama about the social, sexual and artistic crises of a trio of Hollywood types: pushy exec Jeffrey (Campbell Scott) and his wife, Elaine (Patricia Clarkson) (Clarkson and Scott are a real-life couple) and young, gay screenwriter Robert (Peter Sarsgard), who has a coveted screenplay called The Dying Gaul (** ½). The performances are impeccable, and sometimes even magnficent, and as shot by Bobby Bukowski, honeyed Angeleno light plays unironically off moneyed white-on-cream interiors. Drawn from Lucas' stage play, the result is chilly and brittle, artificial yet diverting: Set in 1995, Jeffrey wants to take Robert's screenplay and change the sex of one of his AIDS-stricken characters: "We will not make The Dying Gaul with two men in bed, falling in love, surviving pain and all the blah-blah-blah," Jeffrey insists. More psychosexual intrigue comes when bisexual Jeffrey tries to start an affair with Robert, which his wife discovers in one of too many sequences employing internet chat room exchanges. (It's the least cinematic aspect of Lucas' relatively nimble visualization of his stage lay.) 101m.

Forty Shades of Subjective

Forty Shades of Blue (*** ½), Ira Sachs' second feature (after The Delta, 1999), captures levels of passive-aggressiveness among families and lovers in a way that few filmmakers dare. Sachs cites the late French director Maurice Pialat as a major influence, and the movie's willingness to allow its Russian-born female lead (played by Dina Korzun) to be alternately opaque and manipulative is brave, as is its quiet depiction of contempt in an unhappy Memphis household. Rip Torn's magnetic, if familiar, as a blustering Southern musician and patriarch who does not have the will or time to change, and Dickon Hinchliffe's refrains add emotion, as close to Michael Nyman's broody compositions for Michael Winterbottom or as Hinchliffe's work for Claire Denis and his band Tindersticks. Of the movie's patient look, Sachs told me, "My DoP Julian Whatley and I were very influenced by the work Ken Loach did with the cinematographer Chris Menges in the early 80s, in films like Kes and Looks and Smiles, a certain kind of shooting style that was both objective, and observational, while at the same time maintaining a real intimacy and beauty. You can look at any frame of Kes and find a strong, evocative image; there is always a strong sense of architecture, and light that carries the apparent realism into another plane, a plane of beauty, and intentionality. Forty Shades begins with this kind of objective style, and moves through the course of the movie to something much more subjective, and emotional. The realism transforms in the last quarter of the film to a kind of romanticism, which can be seen in both a change in the shooting style-there are more close-ups, and even a single dolly shot in the last chapter of the film-as well as a much more direct use of the film score to heighten emotion. If at the start of the film Loach was our guide, in the last ten minutes, it's Fassbinder, particularly in his films like Martha and Veronika Voss that became our guidepost. I was also affected in this manner by certain choices that Dina Korzun made as an actress in these scenes, where she too moved away from realism, and towards stronger, more abstract, almost Brechtian performance style. She conveys the internal struggle of the character in a very deliberate manner in her body, her movement, a certain monotone in her vocal delivery. I was struck by the deliberate nature of her performance in these scenes on the set, and I found that this change of tone defined the end of the movie as we were editing."

Suicide's not Painless: Paradise Now

"What can I say, life is filled with surprises." Hany Abu-Assad's taut, breathless, timely political thriller Paradise Now (*** ½) keenly follows two young Palestinian men, slacker-ish childhood friends who repair cars together, Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Sulima) through the hours after being given the nod to become suicide bombers. Abu-Assad, who made Rana's Wedding (2003), is bold yet deft: much of the movie's running time is fraught with the tension Alfred Hitchcock described in the potential setup of a child with a bomb on a bus or a bomb under a table where cards are being played-a bomb that does not go off. The daily minutiae of West Bank life-blockades, streets and traffic, storefronts, a mother priming pitas with olive oil and stuffing them with tomatoes, onions, olives, hummus in an ideally framed instant-adds up. But the key passages of the film, which is rich with deft satirical touches, is the meeting of the cell in a disused tile factory that resembles the ruin of an ancient hamam as the men are prepared for their mission, from a final meal to the arming of body bombs to the flubs in the taping of a "martyr video." The pair make mistakes, shaven, shorn, dressed in dark suits as if they were Men in Black: "Why does he look like a settler?" one bystander asks with confusion. Abu-Assad is a gifted storyteller, with a sense of moment and drama, and Paradise Now offers ironic perspective rather than indignant vilification. This is no propaganda film, not for any side of any issue. The female characters are striking, too, including Hiam Abbass as Saïd's mother and Lubna Azabal's genial-and-fierce-by-turns role as Suha, a Paris-born Palestinian woman who's come to Nablus after years in Morocco. Suha gets to ask some of the angriest questions, and Azabal is something to watch in those scenes. 90m.

..The Trailer

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The Short and Short of it: The Squid and the Whale

One of the easiest bobs of blah-blah-blah and yackety-yak you can say of a literate, beautifully constructed, richly inhabited, suprising and even shocking movie is, "It's just like a short story." But the intimate, precise, wonderfully perceptive The Squid and The Whale, (*** ½) coming from Noah Baumbach (the 1995 Kicking and Screaming), who is the son of a former film critic and a novelist (and married to Jennifer Jason Leigh) is just like a small, perfectly observed movie. Two teenage brothers, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg, from Roger Dodger) and younger Frank, (Owen Kline, son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates), discover the impossibility of shared custody when their parents, Park Slope, Brooklyn intellectuals, separate sometime in the late 1980s. "Mom and me versus you and Dad," young Frank says. Bernard, an overbearing professor and flailing mid-list novelist, is played by Jeff Daniels with ideal, shaggy-bearded middle-aged dolor, and Joan, the dissatisfied wife with a story about to be published in the New York, who takes up with tennis pro Billy Baldwin played with sweet unseemly vitriol by Laura Linney. The entire enterprise is thick with melancholy and mortification and its wit is piercing without sentiment. (Such as the complications involving a student of Bernard's played by Anna Paquin with more of her habitual fluttery vampiness than usual, who sexually teases both Bernard and Walt; further itchiness comes from the fact Paquin was Daniels' daughter in Fly Away Home.) Plus: sexual awakenings have seldom been this mortifying in American movies (for both of the boys). The Squid and the Whale is masterful in being both horrifying and hilarious, often at the same moments. Gratifyingly, there's no condescension: all the characters are richly etched, imperfect people, and the truths on display feel drawn from hard-won experience. The ending, like an ideally timed slap to the cheek, is perfect. 80m.

Geek for Greek: The Weeping Meadow

Theo Angelopoulos is a reigning merchant of gloom, one of the last of the generation of ur-Euro art filmmakers, such as Russia's Andrei Tarkovsky, who never met a rain cloud he didn't like, or Hungary's Miklos Jancsó, who took the craning, darting, wheeling extended take to lyrical and fevered extremes in his 1960s efforts that crossed the Central European plains. Angelopoulos' best work includes The Traveling Players (1975) and Landscape in the Mist (1988), transposing Greek myth against the timeless landscapes of Macedonia, the northern Greece of his childhood. With The Weeping Meadow (Trilogia I: To Livadi pou dakryzei, 2004), Angelopoulos has begun a trilogy of twentieth-century Greek and Greek Diaspora life that he hopes will extend into this century, if finances and his advancing age permit. My first exposure to The Weeping Meadow was in the city where it's set, Thessaloniki, without subtitles, and I had the privilege of wandering a major shantytown set that had been built on the contemporary waterfront of the city described in the movie as "the city of refugees." The story begins in 1919, six years after the city was shorn from the Ottoman Empire to become part of Greece once more, when a émigré family returns from terrible times in Odessa. Weddings and betrayals at weddings ensue, world war comes, civil war breaks out, patterning from Greek myth, ellipsis reigns, extravagant visuals loom and grow. In some ways, I liked The Weeping Meadow (co-written by Tonina Guerra) better with plotting half-understood, with my modest comprehension of Greek, when I could lose myself in the overcast skies-Angelopoulos, outdoing Woody Allen, will not shoot when the sun shines, and one village setting was used, then abandoned for over a year so that it could flood-and the remarkable settings beneath them. At their most involving, his movies become tapestries of ruined or drowned worlds, and Eleni Karaindrou's dour, elegiac score, as always, figures and prefigures the massing of crowds, the scattering of sheep, the revelation of terrible injustices. (For instance, in the flooded town, the image of trees festooned with hanged sheep carcasses is bold, gorgeous, horrible and affecting beyond description.) Yet, for most viewers, the work is undeniably solemn and distance, and the storytelling, in smallest particulars, will lack essential intimate grace. Have strong Greek coffee beforehand, or, don't anyone I said this, but Turkish will do just fine. 167m.

DVD 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

5
Heights
The last movie hands-on produced by late producer Ismail Merchant of Merchant-Ivory, Chris Terrio's Heights (** 1/2) (Sony, $25) is a nicely acted drama of the trivial worries of Manhattan's privileged. Cinematographer Jim Denault's exquisitely measured light is lovely.

4
9 Songs
Would 9 Songs (***) (TLA, $25) have gotten more butts in seats if they'd just called it "Michael Winterbottom's Tits and Bums"?

3
Millions
Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's sweet, loopy charmer of a fable, Millions (Fox, $28), is a sophisticated kidpic; 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. The embrace of good, a satire of materialism, knockabout humor, rich sallies of cinematic fancy: Boyle embraces them all in this loving, lovable gem. Extras include feature-length commentary by both Boyle and Boyce.

2
Office Space: Not Quite Special Edition
A few deleted scenes and recent interviews are the only extras of note on Office Space: Special Edition (Film *** 1/2) (Fox, $20); Mike Judge's original cartoons are nowhere to be seen, and Fox still hasn't twisted his arm sufficiently to get him to do commentary. Where's the flair in that?

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1
Pickpocket
Robert Bresson's compact 1959 masterpiece, Pickpocket (****) (Criterion, $40) demonstrates what an intently physical director this often mischaracterized artist is. Michel (Martin LaSalle) fancies himself a Nietzschean superman, dressed in drab, worn undertaker's weeds living in a squalid wreck of a garret, with soiled volumes in tall French-style stacks amid dust and mildew, a Dostoevskian shabbiness pitted against the Parisian modernity of the subway and streets outside, the crisp pork-pie hats on passersby, the Perrier, Gauloise and Cinzano ads. From watching a stranger pick pockets, he discovers the finer points of a new trade when he is not prating on about the role of the outsider to what few friends he has, even to a police captain who suspects him. Michel seeks crime, but also punishment. (There's even an important moment with a pinball machine, perhaps the ideal Bressonian player.) LaSalle's hollow cheeks and wide eyes resemble Montgomery Clift-or, for a latter-day parallel, Joseph Fiennes-are gaunt with unspecified need. Martin Scorsese, in Taxi Driver, and Taxi Driver' screenwriter Paul Schrader, in American Gigolo and Light Sleeper, have drawn bits from the cool grace of Pickpocket, but that should not obscure the essential erotic fluency of this startling movie's sparse frames and its extremely controlled soundtrack. Like Max Ophuls, Bresson is a master of the pregnant moment at the base of stairwells, the confinement of corridors, the palpable threat of doors half-ajar. There is also the counterpoint of sound, the racketing of the city, its streets, Metro and train stations. Listen for the crisp, healthy sound of a kid wallet, violated, thrown onto a track-bed's gravel. Its tactility is agonizingly precise; erotic, even. Also: an old book trashed to the tile, the sound of pages tearing from the spine. Think also of the heartbeat of man thieving from man in the Metro when he's finally betrayed by his impulses at the racetrack: the thunder of horses' hooves as he turns his head and behind himself, his fingers find the desired wad. There's the rising of sound of metro wheels against tracks, a murmur that rises as he moves close to palm a stranger's wallet. "I was scared. He got away from me, my heart beat faster," Michel narrates of this homoerotic dance of theft, the sly frottage of the pickpocket's trade. Later, a friend catches him at his custom, seeing a glance at a wallet peeking from a topcoat like a womanizer caught in a glimpse of calves or the cut of cleavage, a man who sees the world only as a crowded scrum of desired objects. Transcendence is potentially everywhere, in Bresson's vision. Extras: Schrader does a video introduction; commentary by Cinematheque Ontario's James Quandt, who edited the invaluable 1999 compilation, "Robert Bresson,"; a 1960 television interview with Bresson; an essay by Gary Indiana; Babette Mangolte's 2003 documentary, The Models of Pickpocket, following the actors from the film; more.

November 6, 2004

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