Baa-movie

There are any number of productive, constructive things I could have done this past Tuesday. I could have learned a new trade. Volunteered. Written the first page of that novel I've been constructing in my head, the one that will surely win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay when the popular, critically acclaimed film comes out, and quite possibly a Tony when it is performed as a Broadway musical.

But instead, I killed time, and maybe a few of the brain cells needed for the more important work ahead, at a screening of Black Sheep, a film wherein genetically mutated sheep put the bite on unfortunate New Zealanders.

The first-time writer/director, Jonathan King, has clearly taken the early, disreputable, unsavory (and frequently hilarious) films of future fantasy wunderkind and Kiwi legend, Peter Jackson, to heart, and soul. (Jackson's Weta Workshop provided Black Sheep's old school makeup and model effects, which are fully in keeping with the blood-and-guts-and-laughs aesthetic of his off-the-wall Bad Taste and Dead Alive.) I suspect his fragile young mind was also warped by viewings of 1972's Night of the Lepus, where Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh are besieged by giant killer rabbits. The more the hopping bunnies are rigged to look scary, with bloody incisors and the like, the funnier they are. Do not miss its next appearance on TCM, which really tests the channel's definition of "classic."

New Zealand's thriving, and docile, sheep population is even more unlikely to be stirred toward movie mayhem. Shaking things up in the paddocks is genetic engineering by animal sadomasochist Oliver Oldfield (Matt Chamberlain), who wants to create his own brand of sheep. Oliver's younger, therapy-wracked brother Henry (Nathan Meister) simply wants out of the trade after many years away from the family farm. But his visit coincides with a bungled attempt at animal rescue by ecological do-gooders, who succeed only in liberating a bad-tempered fetal beastie from its storage tube. The puppety creature sinks its newly carnivorous teeth into the more obnoxious of the greens, then one of its own normal brethren. This gives rise to a bucolic countryside swiftly filling with man-eating sheep, and man/sheep hybrids that persist in giving long-winded environmental speeches despite the impediments of hoofs and wool.

I laughed, my guilt over what I might be doing subsiding with each new shock comedy bit, usually something involving severed limbs munched on by the newly deranged wool providers, a twist on a familiar horror movie cliche, or the inevitable sheep shagging jokes, which the movie takes a while to get to. There is also the entirely incidental beauty of the setting, shot in ravishing widescreen by Richard Bluck, and a cheerful rubbishing of eco- and psychiatric-speak as Henry and his hippy-dippy "lunatic greenie" girlfriend Experience (Danielle Mason) find love on the run from herds of ravening sheep.

The film runs out of gas sometime before the sheep do, but at 87 minutes, no matter. Horror comedy fans: Ewe will eat up Black Sheep, which IFC First Take and The Weinstein Company release on Friday.

Fierce People, finally

I received a screening invite today to the coming-of-age story Fierce People. But I'd already seen it.

Two years ago.

2005. In real terms, how long has this not-quite-new film from actor/director Griffin Dunne been sitting on the shelf? Since before I was married. Before we moved to Brooklyn. Before I started this blog. Before the younger, cooler kids gravitated to YouTube and MySpace. When Paris Hilton roamed freely about the earth.

Not a long time, maybe. But, a long time.

Why the holdup? As two years is an eternity for a critiquist who sees film after play after DVD, let's refresh my memory with the plot synopsis provided in the e-mail.

"In this coming of age film, set in the 80's, Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin) has an opportunity to visit his anthropologist dad, during the summer, helping with his study and observations of a primitive South American tribe called Yanomano, or 'Fierce People.' After a series of events, caused by his loving, but drug- addicted, mom, Liz Earl (Diane Lane), he ends up spending the summer with Ogden C. Osborne (Donald Sutherland) and his wealthy eccentric family on their sprawling estate in the 'wilds' of New Jersey. The summer turns out to be a life-altering experience for Liz, but even more so for Finn who learns about drugs, sex and the very real threat to his survival. In the end he discovers that the 'Fierce People' of the New Jersey privileged are much more dangerous than ones in South America."

It's coming back to me know. Lane is good. Sutherland is good--but as I recall, he's ill with cancer and is having himself chemically castrated, a funk that Lane's massages help him out of. Something weird like that. Yelchin, who's made a few films since this one went missing, figures in a terrible scene where he is seemingly really castrated by the preppy no-goodniks, one of whom I recall is played by Chris Evans, before he hooked up with The Fantastic Four. A strange, ambiguous, distasteful scene, one I wrote skeptically about to its prior publicist when asked how I liked the show. ("Fix that scene, clarify it, do something with it," I remember writing.)

That's the problem with Fierce People. It's not that it's really bad. But it's not really good, either, and not really good in a squeamish sort of way. I can imagine Dunne fighting with the former distributor, Lionsgate (when that outfit was still Lions Gate), not to touch the film in his preferred cut, the one that had we-get-the-point-already scenes of the native tribespeople walking through the manicured grounds of Sutherland's mansion. Time will tell if he won that battle, if indeed there was a battle, but the film now has a distributor, After Dark Films, that sounds like a skin flick exhibitor. I wonder just how widely it will be seen, or if this is just a token move before the DVD streets.

And, still, when it will be seen. The PR says "September 7, 2007--TBD." To Be Determined. C'mon, now: Let these People free.

Praising Parker Posey

Parker Posey, who has reigned over American independent cinema since the mid-90s, is on her way to becoming the darling of the nascent HDNet Movies channel, with two premieres in as many months. Broken English, a romantic comedy with more than amour on its mind, bows tonight at 9pm EST, with an encore showing at 11pm; Magnolia Pictures is handling the theatrical release beginning this Friday, June 22, with the DVD following next week. (As she is at the center of this tripartite approach to rustling viewership Posey could be said to be the Queen of All Media, if only for a week or so.) Last month's hi-def Posey, Fay Grim, was grim all right, with seasick Dutch-angled camerawork that made it watchable only for the hardiest of Hal Hartley's few remaining hardcore devotees (how he must detest the Tarantinos and Little Miss Sunshines of the world for mucking up the US independent film scene).

But Broken English, the first feature from writer-director Zoe Cassavetes, is a tough-love charmer, with Posey's finest performance to date. Her funny, touching, and faultless portrayal is not to be missed, in the best of the Americans-in-Paris indies I have seen to date (Julie Delpy's amusing cross-cultural clash, 2 Days in Paris, which opens in early April, is runner-up. Digression: Francophilia reigns at the arthouse, with BAM Rose Cinemas devoting all of its commercial screens to French and France-set films tomorrow.)

Posey plays Nora Wilder, who could very well be Posey's Party Girl long after the party has ended. Nora, who wanted to be an artist but never got very far, works a nebulous job as a VIP concierge at a trendy hotel in downtown Manhattan, an occupation as nowhere as her love life as she settles (or, rather, unsettles) into her late 30s. Her mother, played by Cassavetes' mom, Gena Rowlands, presses her to find a man, no easy task, as she sets herself up for disappointment with a self-involved TV star (Justin Theroux) and watches another prospect (Josh Hamilton) wilt when confronted by his ex on another disastrous date. More promising is Julien (Melvin Poupaud), a Frenchman who works on film sets, obviously a good job to have these days. But Julien's time in New York is short, which forces Nora out of her comfort zone and off to the airport, to somehow find him in Paris (irritated by her clinging to her nothing-in-particular life, he has left in a huff, without leaving an address). Accompanying her is her best friend, Audrey (Drea de Matteo), who is questioning her seemingly perfect marriage to a screenwriter. Complications, leavened with a Gallic charm, ensue.

Like her director father, Cassavetes is unafraid to plumb hard-to-get-at emotions, but Broken English has a lighter, more impressionistic touch, reminiscent of the films of another screen scion, Sofia Coppola. Posey is perfectly believable as Nora, a character I have known, and maybe been (the bad date scenes strike a funny-only-in-retrospect chord for both sexes). It's interesting how Posey divides people. I have one friend who was quite serious about wanting to marry her, and others who cross themselves when she shows up in a film. It's a question of immersion, I think; if you've followed the 38-year-old's indie career closely, to know her is to love her, in a range of roles, like The Daytrippers, the splendid Clockwatchers, and many others, where she can find more variation in character. Studio work tends to flatten her appeal--she's hired to bring a certain frazzled "Poseyness," or a second-banana bitchiness, to films like Superman Returns, a curious, modern day-set Frankenstein (a TV movie intended to launch a series that subsequently languished), and Blade: Trinity, where she had to spit out venomous lines through a mouthful of enormous vampire teeth. These are not her finest hours, but if they're all you seen (those, and You've Got Mail, thanklessly standing between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan), that will be your impression.

Posey has been cast in a Fox TV series this fall, The Return of Jezebel James, opposite the Delacorte's present Juliet outdoors in Central Park, Lauren Ambrose. Careerwise, too, our Party Girl--was that only 1995? Is that so far away now?--is growing up, and I imagine out, of the finicky, low-paying indie scene. But Cassavetes has given her, and us, a parting gift, should this be the last time for a while that we see her in such a large part in a small film. Under cameraman Jim Pirozzi's deft HD lighting she has never looked so bedragglingly beautiful; she and the post-Sopranos de Matteo are effortlessly convincing as best friends, slightly separated by their choices in life; and she is finely attuned to every note in Cassavetes' insightful, observant script. If this is to be a sendoff, it is a good one.

A sound decision

Finally, the Tony Awards has decided that sound design is more than just wiring actors with mics, a practice members of the old guard still detest. But it's never too late to catch up with late 20th century modes of thinking (and with the Drama Desk Awards, which has long had audio as a category), and I applaud the painfully overdue decision to make sound design a category for plays and musicals. The 2006-2007 winners should surely have been the soon-to-close Talk Radio, with its exquisitely rendered and multitiered audio design, and Spring Awakening, which pokes a little fun at onstage mics.

Bond's next challenge

Having beaten the odds by successfully casting Daniel Craig as 007, the Bond team has taken on a new challenge: Director Marc Forster, the prestige hack behind Monster's Ball (for which Bond girl-to-be Halle Berry won her Oscar), Finding Neverland, Stay (flee!), and Stranger Than Fiction, which looked too twee for me to bother with. His slick, empty movies have won awards, some praise, etc., but there's not much going on under the hood of his vehicles, and little to suggest he's right for the series. As the gamble on Craig more than worked out, I can only trust the producers on this one, but wish Martin Campbell, who got the series off the ropes with GoldenEye and rebooted it with Casino Royale, had stuck around for the as-yet-untitled Bond 22.

Industrial Landscapes

"You missed the opening tracking shot!" the publicist yelled at me as I arrived late for a screening of the meditative documentary Manufactured Landscapes (Zeitgeist Films), which opens June 20 for a two-week run at New York's Film Forum. Sue me, or, rather, the MTA and its faltering D train. And, as it happens, I hadn't missed it, not entirely: There were still two minutes (out of seven) to go as director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler roamed the Olympian expanse of a Chinese manufacturing plant, the kind of vast, yet eerily anonymous, space prominently featured in this month's Sino-centric Atlantic Monthly. You can all but hear the strains of Strauss in the background as the camera progresses through this inner space, much as Stanley Kubrick had the spaceships photographed in 2001. When the lens comes to a full stop, the image freezes, into a still life...and we are looking at one of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's large-scale images from the new industrial revolution, one that we are, or should be, aware that is happening not in our backyard, and one that is rarely seen in its enormity.

I use the word "enormity" advisedly. Yes, it's a shock to realize what's happening as China and other rapidly developing nations exhaust world resources to provide for the inexhaustible global economy. But it has a terrible beauty; Kubrickian, with a dash of David Cronenberg and, with Burtynsky at the helm, maybe a touch of Ansel Adams, an Adams fascinated by disruption and decay. The photographer started by snapping images of rock quarries, scarred fissures of earth like open wounds on the planet. This led to an inquiry as to where all the ore and minerals being dug up were going. The answer: China, which has been flexing its manufacturing might over the last 20 years. When I lived in Hong Kong I remember being impressed at how quickly the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, a "special economic zone," was growing. Today, there's nothing special about it; city-size complexes churning out goods of all kinds are the norm. We see the photographer at work, getting (and being denied) permission to arrange one of his shoots, whose exactitude matches that of the factory superiors, who ride herd on the armies of young workers fitting components and products together (we see one employee upbraided for shoddy workmanship, a lapse that is said to threaten the entire enterprise). The micro (or perhaps macro) cosms photographed include Cankun, the world's largest maker of irons, which employs 23,000; sports shoe maker Yu Yuan, with a whopping 90,000 workers in shoe business, and Deda, China's biggest chicken processor, which helps feed all those workers.

Burtynsky also photographs villages that exist to recycle electronic waste, plastics, and metal, all work done by hand. What I found most breathtaking were his images of shipbreakers in Bangladesh (pictured), where the world's vessels go to die (the subject of a haunting Atlantic article, not on its site). Imagine the ships of Titanic or Fitzcarraldo being broken up and scoured for useful bits, then remember that this awesome, surreal, and frightening sight--it is dangerous work, performed for a pittance--is happening on the other side of the world and not on a soundstage.

Manufactured Landscapes has its banal side. The photographer gives rote answers to questions at gallery exhibitions, and I felt a certain impatience with his concerned but apolitical stance from Baichwal. It's as if there are two films going on at once: The one about Burtynsky, and the one that Baichwal wants to extrapolate from his work. (Both are stuck with a somewhat droning score; Philip Glass and Koyaanisqatsi this is not.) The film is at its best when observing the simple dictum, show, not tell. The photographer's pictures, beautifully presented and embroidered upon in 35mm, really are worth a thousand words, but I will leave you with some of Burtynsky's from the press notes, which I obtained on the fly. "These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire--a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."

Brooklyn on foot

Taking a break from theater, fellow Drama Desk member and Medill grad Adrienne Onofri has written her first book, Walking Brooklyn, which Wilderness Press will publish next month. The book offers 30 tours exploring historical legacies, neighborhood culture, side streets, and waterways, and the excerpt she gave me pretty much takes me right outside my doorstep to Fort Greene, where Richard Wright wrote Native Son and where Spike Lee and Marianne Moore have called home. Sounds like a good reason to get outside and give my legs a stretch this summer.

Wiseman on Wednesday

Esteemed documentarian Frederick Wiseman's latest film, State Legislature, airs tonight on PBS, at 9pm EST. There's no better use for public television than to air lengthy, deep-dish accounts like this one, where Wiseman trains his camera on the inner workings of the Idaho state legislature. His documentaries are completely no frills--there is no narration, no editorializing, no score, and little editing, as the vignettes he focuses on play out. Think Andy Warhol capturing lawmakers and other functionaries being themselves in "the Factory." But they come to root out the humanity from underneath the mundane accretion of details and process, which makes them abundantly interesting if you immerse yourself in them.

Pest control

A few words about William Friedkin's adaptation of Tracy Letts' hit play Bug. Michael Shannon, the avenging angel figure in World Trade Center, reprises his stage success, and is clearly scuttling on to bigger things.

Creature featurettes

Some people fire up their grills in summer, I fire up my DVD player for primetime viewing. I'll dispatch the final episode of the first season of The Tudors, the first Showtime series to capture my fancy, tonight. And there will be space on the DVR to pick up the fourth season of HBO's Entourage, which makes for agreeable seasonal viewing, and CBS' US version of the Brit hit Creature Comforts, which very quietly slipped onto the off-season schedule. With one episode aired thus far, and a second scheduled for 8pm EST tonight, it's worth calling attention to.

Its producer, Nick Park's esteemed Aardman Animations, has been having a tough time in the Yank market. Its first claymation-technique feature, Chicken Run, was a hit in 2000. But the first, clever film to spotlight its popular Wallace and Gromit, 2005's Curse of the Were-rabbit, was a boxoffice disappointment here, and last year's Flushed Away an aptly titled write-off that led to the early dissolution of its distribution pact with DreamWorks. And its studios burned in a recent fire. With much bad karma, it's unsurprising that CBS has chosen it to lead off an evening of sitcom repeats.

Unsurprising, but wrong-headed. Creature Comforts delivers the comic goods, and should be better attended, and not just as a download to be peered at on a 2" screen. Aardman won an Oscar for its first, short-film incarnation in 1989, then revived the concept in England for series in 2003 and 2005. The animation has been fancied up just a bit for this US version, but the show remains the same. Interviewers fanned out across the country to ask ordinary folks about their lives, jobs, relationships, and aspirations. The answers were then wedded to Aardman's inimitable, personable animal animations.

Amusement frequently ensues: A pretentious conversation about wine now unfolds as two male dogs sniffing around a female poodle's rear ("It has the hint of Cassis"). A little boy, transposed into a frog, tells doctor jokes badly, to an audience of crickets--when one fails to respond, he gets slurped up. Later in the episode, when the boy threatens to tell waiter jokes, all the remaining crickets applaud wearily.

The humor in the British series, which are available on DVD, is the reticence of the human subjects. Shyness is not a problem on this side of the pond, as the interviewees kvetch and kvell and expostulate. Their comments are brilliantly matched to the animals, and the 30 minutes of tightly edited sketches fly by. Now that you know where to find it, look it up.

Tony and the Tonys

A rare summer TV season faceoff has ended in our house, and it was pretty much a tie. Like others in my theater- and Sopranos-loving circle, I thought we would watch the first televised hour of the Tony Awards on CBS, switch over to The Sopranos series finale on HBO, then track back to the awards, followed by a middle-hour recap of the Radio City Music Hall action on our DVR. But once the Tonys started, and The Coast of Utopia and Spring Awakening began their marches through the categories, we had to stick with them. Tony cooled his heels for a while.

The Tonys were pretty much a surprise-free zone, as if anyone could topple Christine Ebersole from winning for Grey Gardens (as I predicted a whole year ago). Coast picked up seven awards, a record for a Broadway play, and Spring dominated the musicals category. Company and Journey's End, whose journey has ended, were deserved revival winners. The shocker, if it could be called that in this most genteel of awards telecasts, was David Hyde Pierce clipping Raul Esparza's wings; I can only assume the voters felt sympathy for Pierce's having to carry the iron Curtains on his back through sheer professionalism and likabilty.

My eyebrow went up a little when Julie White won best actress in a play, her show, The Little Dog Laughed, a rare comedy, having closed some time ago. But it had a healthy off Broadway run and if she had lost we would have been deprived the most entertaining acceptance speech of the evening. Other excitement came from John Mahoney's belated bleep during his poorly scripted bit and the pre-bleeped Awakening number. The Tonys bashers are out in force but despite missteps here and there I always find the show a refreshing way to recap and wind down from the season, and there was a nice symmetry to CBS' former first lady of Sunday nights, Angela Lansbury, begin and end the program.

The Tony bashers will clearly be baying for Sopranos creator David Chase's blood over the final episode. I never bought into its greatest TV show ever rep; once the crucial Nancy Marchand had passed away the program was rudderless for some time, with very uneven stretches thereafter. Its sadly-never-ended HBO stablemate, Deadwood, may lay claim to the title. But the first two seasons are extraordinarily good, and over seven it never ceased to be appointment television, even when we went about two years between appointments. Last week's tense and shockingly action-packed episode satisfied viewers who were into whackings; the finale was more reflective and "Chase-ian," with its big hit exaggerated into over-the-top black comedy, and a sudden-death fade, after a nerve-jangling buildup putting us squarely into Tony's shoes, scored to the (ironic?) strains of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." Not that there wasn't some information for us to go on to create our own perfect ending, but I suspect viewers will be dissatisfied at the perceived cop-out. Check here for what will be provocative postings.

And now I can prety much catch up on my DVD viewing for a few months.

Home sweet scandal

We just picked up a copy of the 2007 Boerum Hill Historical Brooklyn Calendar, provided by the Boerum Hill Association. True, it's June, but the photos and information are timeless. For one thing, the calendar would seem to confirm that we do in fact live in Boerum Hill. We'd always felt that we lived in a nameless intersection of that neighborhood, Park Slope, and Fort Greene, one that the realtors have taken to calling the "BAM Cultural District," after that local landmark. I like that, and if more culture enters the developing district that name may yet stick. But for now, I'm proud to be a Boerum Hiller, or Boerumer, or Boerumite; I'm not sure anyone has a name for that, either.

I picked up a few things from the calendar. January revealed that the UA Court Street cinema, about a 15-minute walk from our place, was in the 1870s co-occupied by the borough branch of the New York Conservatory of Music and C.H. Rivers' Dancing Academy; a century later, after converting to the movies and showing foreign and art films as the Borough Hall Theatre till the 1960s, it was a porn place, the Cinart. The space was demolished in 1998, then was revived by UA, minus its gray-white sandstone exterior.

July's entry is even closer to home. Right next door to us on State Street, which bustled with live entertainment venues nearby, was the Oxford Theatre, which seated 800. Its Oxford Follies burlesque shows in the 1930s were frequently raided, but audience ardor for them only cooled in July 1951, when the theater was destroyed by fire. The period photo used, which shows figures of dancing girls perched atop the marquee, suggests the ground floor of our building was a pub or restaurant. The image is partially obscured by the Flatbush Avenue portion of the 5th Avenue El train, which was torn down in the early 1940s.

Today it's all condos. To a newcomer, it has always seemed to be condos. But that is an illusion this calendar, welcome despite the lateness of the date, dispels.

Sour notes

In interviews, Olivier Dahan, the writer-director of La Vie En Rose, compares its subject, France's "little sparrow," Edith Piaf, to Billie Holiday. It's an apt comparison, one that extends to the films made from their lives. Like Lady Sings the Blues, La Vie En Rose is pretty much a mess--held together, and made riveting, by a brilliant, pulled-from-the-guts performance by its lead. I never would have figured the decoratively pretty Marion Cotillard (A Good Year, A Very Long Engagement) for the earthy, drug-addled Piaf, but, aided by terrific lip-syncing, she gives herself over entirely to the role. Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote, say, has nothing on this, except for a coherent script in his corner.

Dahan's prior credit was the fast-paced, nonsensical sequel Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse. From there to a life of Piaf was a stretch, but the means are pretty much the same: String the audience out on sensational scenes, and put logic aside. There's a love of filmmaking here, which pays off in one or two bravura sequences, but it's misapplied. Rather than the usual soup-to-nuts biopic approach, Dahan says he wanted the film to be impressionistic, to flow from the songs. Fine, but I really wish I had my laptop with me, set to Piaf's Wikipedia entry, so I could have kept better track of who Gerard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Seigner were playing and what they were doing as they popped in and out of the movie.

La Vie En Rose, which Picturehouse opens June 8, plays on, furiously but somehow listlessly, for 140 minutes, as we're whisked from one highlight to another in Piaf's but hyper-active 47-year life. It works in quieter scenes, like Piaf's doomed romance with boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean Pierre-Martins), where we get more of the information we need and can let it sink in a bit; that segment closes with a killer tracking shot that ends on a concert stage, the film's strongest realization of Dahan's emotions-first style of direction. Too much of it, though, can be boiled down to Michael Musto's cracking wise about it in the Village Voice, that "the movie basically consists of a series of people saying, 'Edith, brace yourself for some bad news,'" as she falls in and out of addiction and on and off stages in Europe and America.(The good news, like her role in the French Resistance, is entirely ignored as the movie racks up the catastrophes with family, men, and pills.) We don't need another musty biopic, but clarity has its virtues. Still, for Cotillard's titanic effort, La Vie En Rose demands attention, if cautiously.


Speaking of jazz-age wrecks, New York's Film Forum is coincidentally reviving Bruce Weber's portrait of the glacially cool Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, beginning June 8 for a three-week run. A 1988 Academy Award nominee for best documentary, the examination/autopsy of the singer/trumpeter (he died, in a mysterious fall from a hotel window close to Amsterdam's drug trade, before it opened) premiered at the theater, and has been out of public circulation for 14 years. Josh Hartnett is threatening a Walk The Line-style biopic, but this is the real deal, as filtered through the dreamily black-and-white lens of the photographer/director.

We see Baker, his idol, in period performance and film footage, including a role in an Italian flick that I found out later was directed by future horrormeister Lucio Fulci. The hard-faced, Jan-Michael Vincent-like car wreck he became, after a lifetime of hard drug use (speedballs were his candidly admitted favorite), turns up for interviews, and to croak out a few songs, like Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue," for a coterie of young admirers including Chris Isaak (the inheritor of his tradition, if not lifestyle) and former Tim Burton muse Lisa Marie. The film inspired me to pick up a Chet Baker collection on CD, but his verveless, monochromatic performances of standards (rock might have been his true calling, but he never heard it) are a drag, man, after a few numbers. (His "Look for the Silver Lining" is used on Turner Classic Movies.) Baker's thin voice was pretty much used up by the late 1980s, but he continued to exert a certain look-don't-touch fascination, an arms-length seductiveness that was clearly difficult for his wives and family members to break free from. Spiffed up for this new release, Let's Get Lost continues to cast a spell from the twilight underside of cool.

New York's IFC Center continues its "First Films" revival series with Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche (1985), which, like Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, has never been the easiest movie to see. Like Burnett's film, which enjoyed a successful run at the center, it looks as if Mala Noche will be getting an official DVD release (the Janus Films label, a harbinger of Criterion Collection release, is appended to the new print) but if you can try to see the film here. The rough-hewn black-and-white cinematography (with a playful burst into color during the closing credits) has been digitally done over, giving the film, which Van Sant shot in the rain-slicked streets of Portland, OR, for $25,000, an elegance I doubt it ever had before.

The film, about a liquor store clerk's ill-starred but not entirely doomed look for love in the city's Mexican immigrant community, has a certain kinship to My Own Private Idaho, and an open-hearted and winning lead performance from Tim Streeter, who promptly disappeared from the screen. So, too, in his own way, has Van Sant, who has made himself as marginal as his characters and whose recent run of films given over to ciphers and ennui excites few outside of Cannes. I miss the Van Sant who made Mala Noche, part of that most fertile time in American independent cinema, and back again as a reminder.

Subway to Asia

Subway Cinema has announced the lineup of this year's New York Asian Film Festival, which runs June 22-July 8. Splitting the event between the IFC Center and the 100-year-old Japan Society, which is co-presenting this year, is a good idea. Its former home, Anthology Film Archives, is something of a barn, which makes underperformers (and there are some each year) look really puny. And this is shaping up as the biggest fest yet, with outdoor screenings and other special programming on the menu.

Of the selections, I've only seen Johnnie To's Exiled, a virtuoso piece of gangster filmmaking, though Korea's City of Violence seems like it could top it for sheer bad-assedness. Park Chanwook's I'm A Cyborg, But That's Okay, starring local pop sensation Rain, has gotten a mixed response for its "sweet, loopy romance" yet represents a new vein for the OldBoy director to tap into. I've heard good things about at least one of the two Death Note horror pictures from Japan, which you can sort out as a two-fer, and the country also offers an eight-years-in-the-making anime that sounds a little like the number two version of Urinetown. The Banquet, a period Chinese Hamlet, is promising, and who cannot love the write-up for Thailand's Dynamite Warrior, the kind of off-the-wall fun this festival excels in?

My kind of town, still

The city of Chicago, reflecting multitudes. I took this picture by shooting right into "The Bean," as Anish Kapoor's undulating sculpture, a highlight of beautiful Millennium Park, is called by locals. If Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards was going to be like this I'd have no complaints at all and would in fact bring my own shovel to pitch in and help make it happen. Chicago's Frank Gehry component, the Millennium Park bandshell, is a lot more inspired, and inspired, than the "Miss Liberty" (ugh!) planned right across Fourth Avenue from us.

The park wasn't ready when I last visited Chicago in 2001; in fact, I wrote a Stagebill article about the organizers, who were on edge about getting all the necessary funding. But they did, and the results are terrific. Chicago has also stolen some thunder from the "first city" by hosting the first, excellent production of the Brit hit Jerry Springer--The Opera,which runs at the small but commanding Bailiwick Rep through July 8. And I hadn't realized how much I missed stuffed pizza till we hit Gino's East (back at its old location since a move, but in a sleeker, street-level building), Giordano's, and Carmen's (which has the edge on cheese, but Gino's still comes out on top).

We hadn't ridden the El in years till our short sojourn the week before last, on unusually hot days. It's now color-coordinated, and the Red line took us past familiar haunts like Wrigley Field and the Aragon Ballroom to Howard Street (so cold and windswept in winter) and the Purple Evanston line. The hue is of course derived from Northwestern's school colors, but those colors are one of the few things the town has retained since I was there last in 1997. The good news is that those who opposed the McDonald's when I was a student (not me; I went once every week, before my cholesterol and triglycerides started spiking) won the battle; it closed years ago. But the war has been lost. The old storefronts remain, and you can still get a Gutbuster-size Dr. Pepper at Buffalo Joe's, but in place of the Sherman Snack Shop is a Cosi; wine bars, wine shops, and big brand names proliferate; J.K. Sweets serves "international cuisine" along with its cookies; and Carmen's Pizza, a local legend, has been shunted to a dimly lit building in the shadow of an 18-theater megaplex that adjoins a Wolfgang Puck restaurant.

If that thing, around Church and Maple--which, to be fair, looked quite posh from a quick tour of its lobby and has six art cinemas to go along with the 12 showing Shrek the Third--had existed when I was a student, I never would have gone to Chicago as much as I did. Back then, at the dawn of home video time, Evanston had the much-missed Varsity, which became a Cineplex Odeon theater showing nothing but campus favorite The Big Chill till it caught a big chill and shuttered, a theater on Main I think, and a small multiplex on Central that I slogged through all kinds of weather to attend.

While the campus has added a few new buildings, including a moderne complex for the Medill School of Journalism steps away from ivy-encrusted Fisk Hall, it felt happily unchanged, though smaller (well, I was smaller, or at least younger, and thinner, then). Have a look. Just ignore the massive condo projects going up in the back of the frame. I thought we were in Evanston, CA, and not Evanston, IL, but such are changing times.

The Summer issue of Cineaste, online and on sale

"Amazing Grace"/How sweet the sound/The Summer issue of Cineaste/Is now in town." Well, something like that, as the British abolitionist drama makes the cover. Parts of the edition, which spotlights Balkan cinema in a timely 44-page supplement given its award-winning prominence at the Cannes Film Festival this year, are also online. Plus there are some web exclusives, including a report on Warner Bros.' many DVD box sets by yours truly. Your summer reading is looking up.

Screen scene (June 1 edition)

With the biggest of the summer "threequels" all now in release, the movies are getting a little smaller, and the indies are reclaiming some ground starting today.

If the lovesickness of the finely acted Away From Her was a little too dry, literary, or "Canadian" for your taste, attend the tabloid-flavored true-life New York story of amor in extremis, Crazy Love (Magnolia Pictures). The facts have been picked over in advance of the documentary's release, but seeing is disbelieving. Love is literally blind for Linda Riss, who was left disfigured and all-but-sightless when an unhinged admirer, Burt Pugach, hired three men to throw lye in her face in a notorious 1959 attack. Pugach, a lawyer and two-bit movie producer (of 1958's obscure Death Over My Shoulder), went to prison for 14 years, during which time he infuriated state officials by acting as "in-house" counsel for fellow felons like Willie Sutton (the one who said he robbed bans "because that's where the money was"). Upon his release, the policewoman who had threatened to kill Pugach if he ever dared show his face again had a change of heart, and acted as matchmaker for Pugach and Riss, who had stubbornly, even glamorously, faced adversity but was succumbing to depression. The two have been married for 32 years, a union that has survived its nightmarish beginning and a seeming recidivism on Pugach's part, in a 1997 courtroom drama involving a second stalking incident that refocused attention on the unlikely, yet media-genic, lovebirds.

The co-directors, Dan Klores and actor Fisher Stevens, let the couple make their own case, first in separate interviews, then together. There is an at times arch use of music and a few clumsy attempts at style, but despite guest talking heads like columnist Jimmy Breslin this is mostly a classic two-hander, and maybe the next Grey Gardens. The same controversy, over why this distasteful material was considered worth digging up on film, looms. Fortunately, the problems of stalking and violence against women, so taboo in its era, get much more attention today, and Crazy Love is a time capsule look to when such behavior was routinely ignored or covered up, except in the most explosive cases.

Life has made Burt and Linda characters, who play up to the camera, but Linda, who faced the death over her shoulder as head-on and unconventionally as possible, has an unmistakable pluck--she suggests that her endless nagging and bickering amounts to a life sentence for Burt, who, imprisoned by his affection, can only react sheepishly to her barrage. He gets no sympathy, and rightly so, but is the focus of the film's most bizarrely funny recollection. His secretary recalls that at the low point of his obsession he barricaded himself in his office and endlessly played the Hoagy Carmichael hit "Linda" ("When I go to sleep/I never count sheep/I count all the charms/About Linda") on his ukulele, singing the lyrics to his pet iguana, who was named "Iggy." Much of Crazy Love can make you squirmy, but I laughed out loud at that one.

Timur Bekmambetov's Day Watch continues the hectic supernatural saga of last year's Night Watch, with the forces of Light and Dark taking their centuries-long war to the streets of present-day Moscow for a second round. This involves mistaken-identity soul switching and more fancy vehicular mayhem, as cars speed along the sides of skyscrapers and minarets. As the title suggests it's a somewhat lighter film than its predecessor, for all the Russian breast-beating about fathers and sons that goes on when the movie stops long enough to consider the emotional, rather than the technocratic gee-whiz, side of things. But it's also a longer one, and the low-budget inventiveness that marked the first installment feels slicker, and emptier, this time. The appealingly morose lead, Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), is sidelined as the pummeling special and sound effects thrash about, bringing the story to a conclusion that I'm not sure how a proposed third, English-language followup, Dusk Watch, will work around. If you ever wanted to see a movie that for more than two hours looks and sounds like one of those annoying anti-piracy ads that pop up on DVDs, then Day Watch is the one for you. Just sit way back in the theater to avoid eyestrain as the smash-cut edits and floating, multicolored subtitles flood the screen.

It's hard to avoid gallows humor when writing about Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, a recessive, pocket biopic about Britain's Albert Pierrepoint, who carried on the family trade from his father and hustled a total of 450 convicted criminals to their deaths, including 17 women (like Ruth Ellis, the subject of 1985's Dance with a Stranger, and the last woman hanged in England) before his trade was abolished. Pierrepoint, who died in 1992, became something an anti-capital punishment figure in later years. But he came to enjoy his grisly fame in the aftermath of his export to Germany to carry out the sentences in the Nuremberg trials, during which tabloid photographers exposed his carefully concealed identity. He took pride in his problem-free career--it took him 45 seconds to hang each prisoner, without a single mishap--and opened a pub at the height of his notoriety. From what I gather the movie trumps up the turning point of his moral awakening, as a desperate friend falls into crime and slips into prison, but the point is made. By the time we get there, we, too, have become too used to Pierrepoint's ghastly routine, which director Adrian Shergold shows without fuss or elaboration, and need a jolt to our passive acceptance to the facts of death.

The excellent Timothy Spall, a big man who favors tiny, precise gestures as the meticulous Pierrepoint, adds another richly colored portrait to his gallery of portrayals. Juliet Stevenson, as his quietly ambitious wife, and Eddie Marsan as their hapless acquaintance are good in equal measure. Crime watchers will enjoy the gallery of rogues paraded out in cameos, including Ellis. The brown-on-gray look of the film, recalling Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, feels true to the period and the subject matter. I tried to resist, but Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, is well-executed (and, in a switcheroo the precision-tuned Pierrepoint would have objected to, the film is now opening June 8).

Paper Mill Playhouse secures bank loan...

...and Bob Cashill (the other Bob Cashill, my dad that is) plays a key part in the drama to keep the venerable New Jersey institution solvent. This may be the closest either of us will get to the professional stage.

Brando Classic Movies

Turner Classic Movies is reairing Leslie Greif's new documentary Brando tonight, at the crack-of-dawn slot from 3:15am, but that's what VCRs and DVRs are for. Like most of its engaging histories (Richard Schickel's current Bienvenue Cannes is another) Brando is more affectionate than probing, but with a runtime of three hours (over two 90-minute parts, both of which will be shown this morning) it digs a little deeper than most, and has the breadth to give an all-star cast of talking heads more time to talk.

Interestingly, actors who worked with Brando, like Edward Norton and Jane Fonda, say little about his actual on-set presence. But a poised and reflective Fonda (has 70 ever looked so inviting an age?) is quite insightful discussing his political activism, and familiar war stories about the likes of The Godfather (pictured) are all the more vivid when co-stars Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall are on camera retelling them. The freshest, and best, anecdotes come from less familiar sources. Director George Englund, a long-time friend of the actor, candidly discusses the rupture that occurred when they worked together on 1963's The Ugly American, as ego and laziness clouded Brando's career. (Englund's wife, Cloris Leachman, continued to take his late-night phone calls, which came so late the actor sometimes dozed off between sentences). And Ed Begley, Jr., steals the show when, late in the second part, he relates a hilarious story about one of Brando's environmental whims. It's in Peter Manso's dirt-shoveling 1994 bio of the actor, but Begley's imitation of Brando is dead-on funny. (If only they had brought cameras to Sotheby's New York auction of his personal effects, in 2005; I wandered through the public viewing, which included his cars, furniture, annotated scripts, and DVDs--was he really a fan of Batman & Robin?)

Brando is at its best when its subject is simply observed working, or politely answering and evading, simultaneously, talk show queries. (The Tahitian footage is striking, too.) And the golden era film clips are magnificent; one quibble is that The Men, his undervalued first film, is again short-shrifted when the show moves from the stage and screen adaptations of A Streetcar Named Desire, as if Fred Zinnemann's war veteran picture had never happened in between. Such eloquence when he was on top of his game (see also his own One Eyed Jacks, and Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!, for further proof his greatness); so much waste when he walked through parts or lent his name to junk.

I had a few words about him in an article that is soon to run on Cineaste's website, about a recently issued box set of his films: "I picked up The Marlon Brando Collection, and was baffled to find that The Formula, produced in 1980, was positioned before 1953's Julius Caesar. I quickly realized that the films were boxed alphabetically, and not chronologically, which offended my delicate cineaste sensibilities. Viewed alphabetically, the five films are a time travel experiment gone horribly wrong, with the bloated, out-of-it Brando pulling rank on the most exciting actor of his generation; the unwary might never get past The Formula, the newest film in any of the collections I viewed, and the worst, with Brando and George C. Scott plodding through murky Big Oil intrigue like two weary brontosaurs. I immediately reshuffled the discs, as any self-respecting movie lover should do, and watched them in date order, where they form an intriguing electrocardiogram of a career. Brando ("from T-shirt to toga," reads the box copy) more than holds his own against the likes of John Gielgud and James Mason in the formal surroundings of the Shakespeare adaptation. The Teahouse of the August Moon, where the actor turns Japanese, is an awkward attempt by the performer to fit into the Hollywood mainstream of the mid-Fifties, but Brando gives his uneasy, stereotyped role something of a pulse. 1962's Mutiny on the Bounty has the actor literally at sea, trying to impose some personality on a heavy-duty epic typical of its time. John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, from 1967, is a definite spike, one of the best and certainly the most unusual of the films Brando made in the wilderness years before The Godfather. Opposite a brash Elizabeth Taylor, he is constantly surprising as a career office wrestling with his submerged homosexuality. But the jolt wouldn't last. Finally, and sadly, comes the flat line of The Formula, and his immortal offer to Scott: "Milk Dud?"

A hint of Paprika

I dozed off during Paprika, which Sony Pictures Classics opens May 25. Sound asleep. Not for long, but I think enough to enhance the experience of seeing the latest anime from Japan's Satoshi Kon. How can that be?

Based on this synopsis from Dave Kehr at The New York Times, which ran in last Sunday's edition, you'd think cat-napping would be an impossibility. The film is about a female "dream detective," whose investigative handle is "Paprika." She pops in and out of the consciousness of her client, a hard-bitten dick in the waking world plagued by nightmares in the sleeping one. A lot of colorful stuff happens when the machine that controls and monitors the dream detecting is stolen. To wit: "A sofa, a refrigerator, a microwave oven and a vacuum cleaner dance and twist their way down a confetti-covered street. Right behind them come the frogs playing trumpets; a group of tipsy raccoons, clutching bottles of sake; and a band of friendly cats, raising their paws in greeting. But the scene becomes wilder and stranger, and the mood shifts to something more sinister. Along come robots, anatomical models, masked demons, a swaggering samurai, the Venus de Milo and Godzilla. That seems to be the popular culture contingent; behind them, bouncing along with everyone else, are several religious and political figures: the Virgin Mary, Buddha, the Statue of Liberty, not to mention the red gates ("torii") that normally guard Shinto shrines."

Couldn't have said it better myself. And I did see all this. It parade of it stomps across the screen a few times during the picture. I think for most viewers this mad spectacle will open up the cerebellum, but mine gets tired out from too much ocular overload. Fatigue almost always sets in for me at CGI-filled pictures, where tons of fancy fantasy imagery hits our eyes with tsunami force, almost too fast for us to register. It's more strain than gain. I felt the Sandman visiting me during the tiresome Spider-Man 3, in more ways than one. But Paprika, while tiring, isn't tiresome. When I was under, my head resting against the back of my seat, I'm sure I wasn't off in some netherworld of my mind's own choosing but a version of Kon's. Taking a little break from the action onscreen sharpened my senses for more when I awoke. It's almost like a subliminal effect.

I don't know much about anime, a vast genre that I feel hopeless to explore. I've seen some of the acknowledged classics, like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, but have never really related to the animation style or the dense, sci-fi tinged plots. It's not for me. (Hayao Miyazaki's films, like Howl's Moving Castle, which I do enjoy, are different, more fairy tale-like, than its brethren.) The febrile imagination behind Paprika, though, opens a few other avenues of exploration--its notion of movie love as an enraptured dream state is intriguing, and the ending, where a character is deposited in front of a theater showcasing Kon's other films, is funny without being pompous. There's some weird, kind of sexually bent stuff involving outsized, devouring girls, which maybe I wish I hadn't been awake to witness, but this is also par for the course. These films do loop-the-loops where content is concerned.

Paprika is something to see, but given its accent on sleeping states resting through parts of it is an option. Bring a pillow, and your capacity to dream.

Spring awakens at Drama Desk awards

The 2006-2007 season Drama Desk awards have been announced. Nominations enthusiasm for LoveMusik was decisively checkmated at the event, with the dreary show, up for 12 awards, only winning two, one for its star Donna Murphy (and they were both co-wins, reflecting a distinct split of opinion over its merits; happily, 110 in the Shade's Audra McDonald got in there, too). I only liked the first third of The Coast of Utopia (pictured), and would have been happier to see Blackbird take best play, but Tom Stoppard's triptych had an early lock on the classy, good-for-you spectacle vote and its wins in the technical categories were no surprise. Company and Journey's End, the latter soon to close, were apt winners, as was Spring Awakening.

As usual, the nominees spread the wealth throughout New York's theater scene, but the winners were almost wholly Great White Way; only Edward Scissorhands, which stopped over in Brooklyn, and the saccharine Off Broadway musical In the Heights, a puzzling winner, previously announced, for outstanding ensemble, received honors at last night's ceremony. I was disappointed that Nilaja Sun's moving No Child..., which I saw under the voting wire last Thursday night, was left behind in its bid to win outstanding solo performance, but the received wisdom is that an Off or Off Off Broadway show getting a nomination is a win in and of itself. And Sun will be touring her show once its near year-long run at the Barrow Street Theatre ends June 3.

Little Dieter flies again

Werner Herzog appears in person this weekend at New York's Film Forum, to kick off a three-week retrospective of his documentary filmmaking. Go if you can: The combination of his distinctive German accent and patient, soft-spoken, tell-it-like-it-is storytelling is mesmerizing. I heard him speak at the 1992 San Jose Film Festival, where he presented his truly searing look at the Kuwait oil fires started during the Gulf War, Lessons of Darkness. The evening was one of the highlights of my two-year stay in Silicon Valley, before its boom and bust.

Lessons of Darkness is part of this retrospective, as are a number of inspiring documentaries made by others, like Errol Morris' Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida, and Hubert Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare, which starkly relates how inconvenient truths are besetting Tanzania. Tonight offers an opportunity to see his outstanding 1997 portrait of U.S. airman Dieter Dengler, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (pictured). Dengler's obsessive interest in flight saw him through a deprived and brutal childhood in Nazi Germany; when his village was destroyed by American bombers, he and his family decamped to the States, where fulfilling his dream he became a Navy pilot. But destiny denied him what would have been a reversal of roles, from oppressed to oppressor: On his first, top-secret mission over Laos, during the Vietnam War, he was shot down, and captured by capricious, trigger-happy Pathet Lao soldiers. Given up for dead in this uncharted territory, along with fellow American prisoners who had been jailed for two years, Dengler plotted escape. The incredible details of his escape and rescue, which Herzog filmed with Dengler at the actual locations, are the crux of the piece.

Herzog has made Dengler's story into a feature film, Rescue Dawn, which MGM will release July 4. The date can't be entirely coincidental; there is a rah-rah component to Dengler's story in the film. What's inspiring about the documentary, however, feels flat and unleavened in Rescue Dawn, which had a troubled production history. By the time we reach the climax, which comes across differently than from how Dengler (who died in 2001 of Lou Gehrig's disease) describes it, you get the feeling that Herzog has left the editing suite. Herzog doesn't do triumphant, and you get the feeling that he left the film in the hands of its many mettlesome producers to finish as they wished, complete with a sudden addition of bombast to Klaus Badelt's score.


In interviews, Herzog asserts that he always wanted to make Dengler's story into a feature, and that the 80-minute documentary is its trailer. If so, then this is a case where the coming attraction definitively trumps the actual movie. Rescue Dawn (pictured) isn't bad, but it is broken-backed; according to a Vanity Fair article that ran last year (when the film was supposed to have been released) the writer-director, known for his fearless exploration of locations, was discouraged when he was obliged to shoot in the more accomodating Thailand and not Laos. A pall of missed opportunities over what Herzog felt was a dream project hangs over Rescue Dawn (not a particularly Herzogian title). Like Herzog's lesser films--and his more sporadically produced features have paled alongside his more numerous and consistently excellent documentaries, including 2005's Grizzly Man, for years--the two-hour-plus Rescue Dawn is logy, and rarely as involving as a making-of featurette about its turbulent production would be.

Part of the problem may be Herzog's immersion in the subject. He wants us to feel the humidity and stupor of prison camp life, and he does, all too well; the statis of the prison scenes, which are nimbly described by Dengler in the documentary, is completely enervating. That he seems to encourage his performers to behave, rather than act, is a real issue with twitchy Jeremy Davies, who is cast as one of the captives. Davies is more a prisoner of Method acting than he is of war, and when supporting player duty passes from him to co-star Steve Zahn, who brings a lighter touch to a poignant role, the film shakes off some of its tedium. Herzog is most fortunate in his star, Christian Bale. He loses Dengler's German accent, but in one of his yo-yo dieting regimens was also willing to lose the weight, and is credibly cast as Dengler. More than the physique, though, Bale captures Dengler's can-do spirit, which makes the documentary so watchable. Life in the camp is its own adventure, and Bale's Dengler tears into it, almost oblivious to how hairsbreadth his new existence is. Rescue Dawn consolidates Bale's hold as one of the finest young film stars, one capable of elevating problem material (like last year's Harsh Times) through his smart self-assurance.

What's really missing from Rescue Dawn, however, is Herzog. His documentary narrations--questioning, respectful, speculative--are superb, and it's easy to see how he gets subjects like Dengler to open up on difficult, close-to-the-bone subjects. His commitment to the documentary form, which in the case of Little Dieter Needs to Fly is largely less show than tell, and utterly fascinating to listen to, is commendable. The uneven Rescue Dawn is worth a look, too, but the possibility of a Herzog commentary track on the eventual DVD is more tantalizing than experiencing the film without his guiding spirit.

Hand(re)Made Films

Word from Cannes is that the classic British gangster picture The Long Good Friday (1980), among the finest of a excellent slate of movies put out by the George Harrison-owned HandMade Films in the 1980s, is being remade under the auspices of the company's current owners. It'll be relocated, updated, contemporized, etc. by director Paul W.S. Anderson, of Resident Evil and Aliens vs. Predator fame.

The original film is so much a product of its Blighty milieu, and so well-acted by Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, it's hard to figure what anyone is getting for the trouble and expense of a remake except a title beloved by film buffs who will undoubtedly shun the new picture. The new, but retro-thinking, HandMade is also...sacrilege...redoing one of my very favorites, Mona Lisa, with Kids director Larry Clark (!). A remake, or sequel, or who knows maybe both to Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits is in the works, and stage versions of Withnail and I and A Private Function are planned.

HandMade does have some originals on its slate. But the reliance on would-be trendy, with-it reduxes of a catalog that has hardly aged a day in terms of quality and is readily accessible to the younger, presumably culturally illiterate cinephiles being courted suggests a name change is in order. FactoryMade, perhaps? MachineTooled?

UK's Hammer Films is allegedly back from the dead, too, but its plans are unknown. Variety also reports that Dario Argento's classic chillers from the 70's, like Suspiria, will be refitted for today's Goth kids. Rest assured that the 30-year-old Suspiria, available on DVD, is entirely capable of scaring the MySpace generation on its own. But the horror film makers I loved in my youth, alas, are all cashing in on their handmade masterpieces, with John Carpenter and Wes Craven treating their resumes like 401ks that can be banked on as they hit their senior years. Buffs moan and complain about the filmmakers behind redos like the upcoming Halloween remake--they should instead blame their money-grubbing creators, who have given up creature features for creature comforts.

All the rage

The rage virus returns in 28 Weeks Later, an idea for a sequel that sounded straight-to-video but emerges as the scariest horror movie since The Descent, and I don't frighten easily. There was no particular reason, save the usual financial one, to continue Danny Boyle's superior 2002 thriller 28 Days Later and the title smacks of convenience and maybe desperation (next will come 28 Months Later, followed by 28 Years Later, 28 Decades Later, and so on). But it works.

The director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, made the quite different metaphysical mind-bender Intacto in 2001, and prejudiced as I was against the idea I was a little sorry to see that this would be his followup. He takes a different tack, however, and gives it distinction. I missed the pastoral (if misleading) lulls of the first picture and its richer, more eccentric characterizations, yet the stripped-to-the-bone style Fresnadillo employs pays off. At least half of the 91-minute movie is filmed on the run, shot herky-jerkily (but coherently) by Enrique Chediak, as if he, too, were in frenzied panic from hordes of blood-spewing "infected" (not zombies) who want nothing more than to add you to their number.

The first sequences, set during the siege of the first film, are real throat grabbers; you figure that the star, Full Monty character lead Robert Carlyle, is going to make it, but his survival comes at tremendous emotional cost--you can empathize, but not really sympathize, with him--and the way the film is scripted (by the director, Rowan Joffe, and Jesus Olmo) there's no telling how long we can expect to identify with him as the lead. The narratively similar Children of Men also brought up new themes from episode to episode--this may be the new scriptwriting paradigm--but Clive Owen stuck around to the end of the picture to see us through the apocalypse. So does Carlyle, but not in a way I could have anticipated, and each new shift has its own center--a military scientist (Rose Byrne) protecting Carlyle's scientifically invaluable children, then, when the proverbial all hell breaks loose, a disaffected U.S. grunt (the underrated Jeremy Renner) who balks at NATO's termination policy. But how long these centers will hold is key to the suspense, which is backed by composer John Murphy's embroidering of his mournful electronica themes from the first film.

The inevitable post-9/11 parallels, with Britain held hostage by an uncomprehending occupying force, are sensibly handled; even the innocents caught in the crosshairs realize that the firepower aimed their way is likely necessary. Fresnadillo goes a little trigger-happy witb the digital effects, including an over-the-top demolition sequence mimicking one from Grindhouse--for the audience I was with, the most unsettling scene was a simple drawing of blood, which had one aisle sitter crying "Back to Spidey! Back to Spidey now!" as he scrurried out the door. But Fresnadillo delivers the payload with the film's most awesome, and distressing, scene: The firebombing of London, reminiscent not of 9/11 but of continental horrors like the bombing of Dresden. The film may be called 28 Weeks Later, but it reflects a terrible history besides.

Raspberries for Blueberry

As so often happens with film festivals, the opening attraction of the 60th Cannes, Wong Kar Wai's U.S. debut My Blueberry Nights, has the bitter taste of lemon to it. Wong's acolytes in the critical community are no doubt forming a protective phalanx around him as I write, but if Variety's is one of the kinder reviews ("its ambition and accomplishment remain modest in the extreme") his detractors would seem to have the edge. Me, I go back and forth, sometimes in the same film; aspects sink into the cortex, while the rest can come off as precious navel-gazing, if elegant to look at and listen to (I rarely go back for return visits, though). Wong can take heart in that Michelangelo Antonioni's reviled visit to America, Zabriskie Point, looks better today than it did in 1970.

What I can't quite wrap my head around is how and why the Hong Kong filmmaker chose as his co-writer Edgar-winning mystery novelist Lawrence Block, known for his hard-hitting detective stories (like 8 Million Ways to Die, quirkily filmed in 1986). There is an alcoholic cop in the storyline, but much of it sounds a little like the twee Janet Jackson/John Singleton picture Poetic Justice (memorably described in an article I read at the time as "about a hairdresser, named Justice, who's poetic") and why Wong thought that senior citizen tough guy Block--not exactly Nora Ephron or Erich Segal--could help middle-of-the-road non-actress Norah Jones strike romantic sparks with boring boxoffice poison Jude Law is a puzzler. On paper, it's one of the stranger writer/director pairings since New York liberal blowhard Paddy Chayefsky and gonzo Brit Ken Russell were yoked together on Altered States once Arthur Penn dropped out, but this one is by choice. On screen, those of us far from the Croisette will have to wait and see once the hoping-for-a-hit-after-Grindhouse Weinstein Company cultivates Blueberry (the second pie-obsessed movie in a week, following Waitress) stateside, then hope that Wong and Block explain themselves on DVD.

Talking Tonys

As Spring Awakening (pictured) basks most deservedly in its 11 Tony nominations today it's "the bitch of living," to quote one of its song titles, for the passed over and just plain overlooked. Playbill has the honor roll; All That Chat, meanwhile, has succumbed to the theater version of the rage virus from 28 Weeks Later, as the chatterati get their licks in about the Kristin Chenoweth "snub" (to which I say, ha! Bad show, bad show) and other issues.

Setting aside my own viral and visceral reactions for the moment, I can say that the Tonys did iron out a few quirks in the Drama Desk nominations, though given the wider range of my group it is an apples and oranges comparison. Early ardor about the insipid LoveMusik clearly, and correctly, cooled; turning the turbulent pairing of composer Kurt Weill and performer Lotte Lenya into the jukeboxed story of another bickering Broadway couple was a seriously sophomoric idea, and for this lack of vision director Harold Prince and book writer Alfred Uhry were rightly denied turns at the dais. (Somewhere in the cosmos, you can hear Bertolt Brecht, a cartoon character in the show, laughing his heinie off at the gross sentimentalization committed by the author of Driving Miss Daisy.)

It was nice--being nice now--to see that Translations, a stunning revival that seemed to have been lost in a fog of amnesia where end-of-season honors were concerned, is up for best revival. Maybe its multiple nominations, including best revival, will finally rouse an audience for the shattering Journey's End, which is in the boxoffice trenches. I suppose my not seeing the revival of Inherit the Wind makes a monkey out of me, but it's unlikely to evolve into an award winner.

Weeks after seeing it I'm having a hard time remembering anything about Curtains, the musical that nominators who couldn't bring themselves to pencil in the peppier and more engaging Legally Blonde went for. Not that Elle was snubbed but, omigod, the producers must be having a cow that they won't get a big production number on the Tonys telecast. 110 in the Shade's Audra McDonald mounts a strong challenge to Grey Gardens' Christine Ebersole in the musical performer races but as I predicted last year Ebersole will hold fast, though I suspect Spring Awakening has the edge for top musical honor. It's a shame, though, that Lea Michele couldn't have bumped Curtains' Debra Monk and LoveMusik's miscast and performance-missing Donna Murphy from the competitive actress slot.

Let's break it down. Nominations that surprised me, in a good way: Newcomer Stark Sands, from Nip/Tuck to Journey's End, plus its exquisitely naturalistic set and lighting design; Ethan Hawke, the best thing about the best part (Voyage) of The Coast of Utopia; Kevin Adams' Drama Desk-overlooked lighting for Spring Awakening.

Nominations that surprised me, in a not-so-good way: The inevitable but not really worthy Angela Lansbury, phoning in Deuce from courtside; Swoosie Kurtz in the forgotten Heartbreak House revival; the featured actress nominees of the curious Coram Boy, a nice piece of theatricalization but one that did not come off as an involving drama. I'm tough on the ladies this year.

And add a close-to-ridiculous and Misbegotten Kevin Spacey as a performer who I was glad not to make the cut. Harrumph.

Some snap winners on June 10, when the Tonys are telecast on CBS: Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon; Eve Best for A Moon for the Misbegotten; The Coast of Utopia for Play; Spring Awakening for Musical; Raul Esparza for Company; and Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson for Grey Gardens. I can't snap winners fast enough in other categories, where given multiple nominations for performers in shows or nods in multiple categories vote-splitting could be rife.

The Tonys, by the way, are up against another Tony, Soprano, as he kisses HBO goodbye that night, but he'll forgive you if you DVR him for a night.

For a few final thoughts on the close of the Broadway season 2006-2007, click here.

Is Big better bigger?

In my post last week on Lee Marvin, I forgot to mention that an essential credit with director Sam Fuller, 1980's The Big Red One, is playing May 13 and 18 at Lincoln Center. The oversight was unintentional, but perhaps subconscious. The retrospective sceenings are of the 2004 "reconstruction" of the film, which runs 158 minutes, and not of the version I saw several times on cable in the early 1980s and own on DVD, which comes in at under two hours. With all due respect to Fuller, who was disenchanted with the cutting, I prefer the shorter version, and regret that the "fuller" version has displaced it (the special edition of the title on DVD contains only the reconstructed version; the version I own seems to have gone out of print). Despite the addition of 40 minutes, it's the longer version that leaves me feeling short-changed; for the one or two sequences that add something compensatory, others that fall outside of the viewpoint of Fuller-esque narrator Robert Carradine disrupt the structure, and scenes that benefit from the compression in the theatrical cut now dawdle. Fuller is better faster and tighter, and the loose, episodic, autobiographical Big Red One is just too unwieldy at greater length. I feel the same about the better-disciplined theatrical version of Apocalypse Now; its extension is merely tiresome.

Given their histories there was sufficient reason to revisit The Big Red One and Apocalypse Now, flawed, fascinating films in either version. But most of the director's cuts, un-cuts, extended editions, etc. that are on the market are just that, marketing gimmicks designed to get the unwary to double-, triple-, or quadruple-dip on a film that was more than adequate the first time around. Most of these are pseudo-cuts, achieved by reintegrating the deleted scenes showcased as extras on prior editions into the narrative, where more often than not they do little except make your recollection of how the film once flowed hiccup. The guiding force, if it can be called that, is the distributor, looking to soak up a little more lucre on a movie trotted out one more time to the DVD racks.

But the more interesting ones are the ones that the directors, producers, or other creative personnel tinkered with. And some do work. The grandaddy of the form, on laserdisc (and onto DVD), was James Cameron's The Abyss, which truly benefited from its expanded ending. His extensions to Aliens and Terminator 2, by contrast, add more running time than meaning to the films, and I find myself watching the theatrical cuts when I'm in a king of the world state of mind (Titanic is thankfully un-augmented on DVD). There is a crucial revelation in the extended Aliens--we learn that the embattled Ripley's daughter has died during her decades-long hypersleep, which adds considerable urgency to her relationship with her surrogate in the film. Once you know this, though, you don't need to sit through butt-twitching delaying tactics on the way to the big finish. And, trust me, you really don't need to see Terminator 2's "future coda," with a grandmotherly Linda Hamilton stuck in embarrassing old-age makeup.

Sometimes the augmenting approach does pay off. Ridley Scott always intended to increase his maligned Kingdom of Heaven for DVD, and the lengthened film progresses at a grander, more epic pace, making Orlando Bloom's transition from blacksmith to crusader far less abrupt and arbitrary. The three-hour Almost Famous that Cameron Crowe prepared sweeps key scenes with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lester Bangs from off the cutting-room floor, and enriches almost every scene with tart dialogue and more flavorful characterization. And directors do sometimes exercise the power to cut: Oliver Stone first shrank, then lavishly grew, his Alexander on disc, in separate releases following the theatrical cut's DVD debut (once was enough for most viewers). And the DC (director's cut) of Tony Scott's Revenge, released on DVD this week, is 20 minutes shorter than the flabby release version, which is sure to displease fans for whom cut is synonymous with more, not less.


Revenge, a clinker, is one of several DCs to street in recent weeks. I can't imagine Payback amounting to much no matter how much is added or subtracted, and the only way to fix The Natural is to trash its ending, a betrayal of its source. Of greater personal interest are extended editions of Big and Donnie Brasco, which were also released this week. The latter picture, directed by Mike Newell, is one of the more underrated gangster films, a largely low-key character study with the mournful, hang-dog tone of The Sopranos, which started airing two years after its release. Al Pacino can show that he can still underplay--his last scene, a bit of business letting himself out of his apartment, is quietly devastating--and a non-cutesy Johnny Depp makes me long for the days when his talent was largely a treasure known only to cinephiles. (A sane Anne Heche also makes a vivid impression.) The 20 minutes of new scenes add to the texture of the film without causing it to break stride; a gritty, detailed piece, it feels more densely realized, and not swamped with superfluous flourishes. That sad, somber, daylight-never-breaking feeling it so powerfully creates is sustained. Then again, the supplemental features of past DVD editions of the theatrical cut have not been retained, so if you don't care to see more of the film--it's not a make-or-break proposition--this extended cut is an offer you can refuse.

Big is a different matter. The film is a delight, but it is a delight because the director, Penny Marshall, cut the modern-day fable to a trim and fit 102 minutes. Marshall has some presence in the extras on this disc--its star, Tom Hanks, who has chaperoned an expanded cut of his That Thing You Do! onto DVD this week, is conspicuously absent--but this is largely a writer's cut, adding almost a half-hour of business to the feature. I'm fond of Big, and I blanched whenever a new scene or scene extension popped up; each one felt like a detour my memory was forced to take. Frustrated, I gave up after an hour. A perfect light diversion had become fattening and bad for me. It reminded me less of Big, the movie, than Big, the bad Broadway musical, with no song-and-dance numbers and more book scenes added.

But Fox, smartly, has included the original cut on this two-disc edition. It's what we all remember and it deserves to remain in circulation, and the new print is nice and snappy-looking. Big is not always better, but it is tolerable if all the variants are included for the sake of comparison and choice under one roof, and all the extras ported over for convenience. If the studios want to us to flirt with these tarted-up versions, they should remember that everyone fondly recalls their first loves.

A Blonde, a Blackbird, and some Boys

Omigod! Legally Blonde, the musical, kicks off three entries as the theater season winds down in New York, all from the Live Design website. And Cheek by Jowl's Cymbeline at BAM gets a quick beheading at Theater News Online.

Spring cleaning

It's only May 2 by the calendar but the summer movie season begins tomorrow at midnight with the release of Spider-Man 3. Sequels, remakes, and originals that feel like sequels and remakes, and costing more than the GNP of several countries, give me pause. But before wading into them, a look at what's come before the onslaught.


Disturbia. The No. 1 movie at the boxoffice these last three weeks is Rear Window for kids, and if it leads any of them back to the source then it will have done its job. They'll be surprised to find that the Hitchcock film, while taking full advantage of its voyeuristic set-up, also critiques such behavior, a consideration that the writers and director of the new movie have ignored. Disturbia luxuriates in the peekaboo possibilities of home surveillance gadgetry you can find at any CompUSA store, and the only one to complain is the bad guy (David Morse), whose own house is outfitted with a brine pit stuffed with bedraggled corpses. In the commercial cinema, at least, civil liberties and the right to privacy are suspect, and the feel-good implied by computerized peeping tom-ism is likely to stick in the craw of anyone not bamboozled enough to still care. Otherwise Disturbia is a familiar, efficient, somewhat poky thriller, lucky in its lead, 20-going-on-15 years old Shia LaBeouf, whose large, soulful eyes and rebellious (but not too rebellious) attitude are clearly a draw for the target audience. If only John Hughes were around to find more interesting ways to explore his formative years than this picture, Transformers, and the next Indiana Jones movie.

Fracture. Rising young Academy Award nominee Ryan Gosling breaks onto the "big time" with this minor legal thriller, as a chomping-at-the-bit public defender bedeviled by the felon from hell, Anthony Hopkins. The senior actor, who has tried to kill his faithless wife and is making little attempt to evade prosecution, reuses his Lecterisms and is as stale as week-old ham. For his part, Gosling tries to make his role work for him, and sinks into its callowness; he's watchable, but the movies are full of on-the-make lawyers growing moral backbones and there's only so much distinction he can lend. The director, Gregory Hoblit, has a better story of this type to his credit (Primal Fear) but has had this one filmed in a gauzy way where grittiness was called for, and stalls the surprise ending for so long it's no particular shock to anyone when it comes. A full two hours is too long to spend on a scenario like this, which had the makings to be like one of those Levinson/Link Columbo-type TV movies that Hopkins made years before he put on Hannibal's mask.


Hot Fuzz. Funny, but not Shaun of the Dead funny. That film was a near-perfect blend of astute character comedy with on-the-money movie spoofery that woke the dead with laughter. This time, the scale tips too far over into the self-referential cinematic gags, and explicitly references movies like Point Break and Bad Boys II that were already way over-the-top. There's little for Hot Fuzz to add, or play off of, and the gags are largely buckshot. Still, it's hard to truly dislike a comedy that, after a lot of leisurely paced and poundingly edited non sequiturs, comes alive in the home stretch to allow deeply lined action movie vets like Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward, and Stuart Wilson to haul out semi-automatic weapons one more time and blast away at landmarks in the twee English town where the Wicker Man-like story unfolds.

Private Fears in Public Places. I can only assume that the Alan Ayckbourn comedy on which Alain Resnais has based his latest film had actual humor to it. For the screen Resnais leaches most of it out of the stage play, leaving only the dry husks of its would-be friends and lovers rendezvousing in an endless Parisian winter behind when all their uncomfortable truths and evasions have been laid bare. But it is fascinating to watch Resnais' paring knife whittle away at a fine cast of veteran French performers, all of whom are at an age when most films lose interest in people. And the play has been very elegantly translated to the wide screen, with imagery that has a liquid clarity. The film is as soft--and as cold--as the cascading snowfall that acts as dissolves between scenes.


Waitress. A comedy too slight and lightweight to bear the weight of the tragedy that surrounds it. The writer and director Adrienne Shelly, who also co-stars, was murdered last November, and what was meant to be a whimsical and uplifting story based around her anxieties about impending motherhood now has the pall of an epitaph. Working hard to dispel the gloom is its star, Keri Russell, who gives off a sweetly warming glow as she tries to juggle an uncaring husband (the inevitable Jeremy Sisto) and an overly helpful obgyn (Nathan Fillion) while baking numerous delicious-looking pies for every emotional happenstance on the job. Lightly refreshing, it's a cute, little movie, with none other than Andy Griffith as the small-town grump who lends a hand to the empowerment, and it marked a change in the weather for an actress who first made her mark in cooler independent fare like Hal Hartley's Trust. That she died on an upswing is at best cold comfort.

Year of the Dog. The writer, Mike White, is a disturber of the peace. 2000's Chuck and Buck is one of the braver indies in recent years, and his smackdown on Hollywood violence in today's New York Times is food for thought, and politically incorrect in an industry that would just rather move on from the latest real-life tragedy (why do Americans like me clamor to repeal the so-called "right to bear arms," while resisting the notion that fictional characters might lay down their weapons, too?). There is no firepower in his directorial debut but its leading character, Peggy (Molly Shannon), stings, with her stubborn, almost psychotic, refusal to stick to the status quo. A dog lover, Peggy (played uncomfortably close to the bone by the actress), comes unglued when her pet passes away; a need to nurture leads to acts of aggression, and by the close the film is Repulsion with canines, as Peggy is surrounded not by phantom hands but by frolicsome pooches. The very ending too neatly ties a ribbon around its themes, which were more compelling when less defined. Yet the air of deadpan hysteria, which a fine cast including John C. Reilly, Peter Sarsgaard, Regina King, and Laura Dern all breathe, lingers.