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Act Your Rage

Sitting in a theater on Monday night, I was pretty much dazzled by Spike Lee’s latest, 25th
Hour, but when I sat down to write about it on Tuesday morning, I had second thoughts. Now I’ve had second second thoughts, and I’ve busted my deadline trying to wrestle them out. Telling this quandary to a friend over coffee this afternoon, she smiled and said, "That sounds like the kind of movie that might be great." We’ll see what happens when she sees it, and I’ll work on another take of the movie before next week. For the moment, here’s what I wrote less than twelve hours after seeing Lee’s dense, ambitious tapestry of urban anger: I could be wrong, I could be right.

Spike Lee’s brash, corrosive post-September 11 urban meditation is a haphazard tapestry of seething rage and somehow, despite its slaloming tone and self-importance, it may be the most heart-rending in his vocation of tragic allegories. Moment to moment, it’s fierce, angry and often over-the-top; the story of Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), a fearful but unregenerate white drug dealer who meets up with friends and betrayers the day before he’s about to be sent away for a seven-year prison stint. Lee, working from a script by David Benioff (from Benioff’s novel) leaps from subplot to subplot with reckless abandon and the stakes are seldom clear. Is Monty’s despair at having wrecked his life an accurate allegory of the mood of New York after the terrorist attacks? There is an extended scene played out in the apartment of an arrogant Wall Street type (Barry Pepper); the scene lumbers through tepid exposition as we witness, slightly out of focus, the nightlong gouging of Ground Zero below their anger-slumped forms. Still, there’s an overall mood, raw and extravagantly self-loathing, that makes this mess compelling, at least partly owing to the grainy, color-saturated images of Mexican-born cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, 8 Mile, Frida), but also from the fumes of the actors acting up a storm of testosterone-fueled conflicts. Even Norton’s immense self-regard works here: he may be turning in the same performance he always does, but it suits this sad (not tragic), nasty (not complex) little shit (not man) he’s playing. With Rosario Dawson as Monty’s young, social climber girlfriend (as painted by the script), Brian Cox as his retired fireman father, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (patently terrible) as a childhood friend who teaches school and longs to touch underage student Anna Paquin While Paquin is 20, Lee unfailingly, unflinchingly paints her as the moistest of jail bait, all but staining whatever she touches and wherever she sits.

Good cop, better cop

Blood, guts, bullets and octane, indeed. 32-year-old Joe Carnahan’s first feature with a budget brings a dank greasy grunge to a cop morality tale that seeps into the soul and chills it. I can’t think of a frame or bit of behavior or detail we’re asked to focus on that isn’t ideally calibrated. Nick Tellis (Jason Patric) is a suspended undercover officer who’s brought back to solve the murder of a young officer killed in the line of duty. Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), the slain man’s partner, is out for revenge, and Liotta's bulked-up, goateed, renegade form portends to cross any line. While set in Detroit, the Toronto-shot Narc seems to take place in a clammy fever dream, tightening the screws on urban thrillers of the 1970s like Serpico and The French Connectionn, while dipping into the moral ambiguity of later, tricksier work like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line. David Poland’s done a good job in his lengthy exchanges with Carnahan at The Hot Button; here’s a brief conversation I had with Patric about his choices.

The Tuman Show

For a beery interlude, here’s a small, sorta cinematic appreciation of Tuman’s Alcohol Abuse Center, a well-worn dive bar down the street from my place in Chicago that closed this week.

Coming Distractions

There’s a raft of DVDs I want to find the time to write about before leaving for Sundance next week, but I was especially pleased to sit down with Ernst Lubitsch's pretty much perfect romantic comedy, Trouble In Paradise. It’s now out in a creamy transfer on a dual-layer Criterion disk. Working from a script by the great master of Hollywood story structure, Samson Raphaelson, Lubitsch teases every suggestive bit he can from a story about two jewel thieves who fall in love, under false pretenses, while trying to drain the water from Venetian society. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins are delicious, the complications a pleasure. (It’s amazing that such a sophisticated whiff of piffle was made only a couple of years after the advent of talking pictures.) The DVD includes a decent commentary track by Lubitsch biographer Scott Eyman. Extras include the entirety of Lubitsch's seventeenth film, the 1917 short The Merry Jail. starring the great Emil Jannings. There are also brief tributes to Lubitsch from, notably, Cameron Crowe, Billy Wilder, Roger Ebert and Wes Anderson. The weirdest contribution is a brisk yet arid video introduction by Peter Bogdanovich, unblinkingly wide-eyed behind his familiar owl glasses, dispensing broad, lame impersonations of figures he once met, like French director Jean Renoir. Nothing to complain about, however: one of the most elegant movies you'll ever see looks and sounds better than it ever has on home video.

E-me.