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

June 13, 2003

I'm not complaining

Whenever someone says they're not doing something, I assume they're doing the thing they say they're not doing, but let me start by saying: I'm not complaining.

But I have to wonder: how the heck does an average, intelligent moviegoer keep up with movie choices?

It's been more than a decade since I've kept up with movies by scouring the listings in Chicago, seeing what's cheap at the Logan or what's still hiding out at the Davis in second-run or on the biggest possible screen, theaters like the Edens of McClurg Court, the equivalent of today's River East 21, figuring what evenings were free, if a double feature would be double the fun, keeping tabs of what friend enjoyed going to which kinds of movies.

It's a privilege, being a movie reviewer. You can create a comprehensive notion of what the world of movies is like, choosing to regard or disregard the opinions and tastes of others. You become a specialist, or a curmudgeon, an enthusiast, or a bore.

Happy to schlep

The largest film festivals, like Sundance and Toronto are enormous cornucopias, where you can choose a dozen or three movies that suit your own interests and the likely tastes of your readers. Smaller, regional festivals, like one's I've been happy to schlep to in cities like Winnipeg, Vancouver, Thessaloniki, Greece, and Buenos Aires can show how movies are loved or reviled in other cultures. Plus the regular weekly gig: in Chicago, where I do most of my work, screenings fill most days. There's a potential of ten or fifteen movies being previewed during the day week in and week out. A few reviewers try to be completists, seeing everything. (Roger Ebert, aren't your eyes tired?) Seeing movies in a small, comfortable, private screening room, projected by a tenacious and devoted entrepreneur, is also something to value, despite the stench of vile lunches tucked into by the Morlocks of the Midwestern dark; the guys who yo-yo the thermostat up and down during screenings from chilly to toasty, as well as the intermittent gales of weirdly inappropriate I-got-the-joke-yuck-yuck laughter.

Eleven movies open for at least a week's run this Friday in Chicago. Hollywood Homicide made me laugh at its wacky moments; there's more below in an interview with avid raconteur Ron Shelton. A Hindi film that not even the Internet Movie Database knows anything about. Plus 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's chiller about a SARS-like virus depopulating the planet, has sneak previews around the country.

What have you seen that's good lately?

People are always apologizing for asking me about movies, which I have no problem with. I love them, and when a movie's rotten, I'm in love with lost potential: it's easier to learn from a flubbed film than from one that seems perfect. I'm terrible at coming up with lists, though. "What have you seen that's good lately?" makes me want to say, "Don't you read the paper?" But I never do.

Once we get to talking about what makes some movie tick, especially one that I don't get at all, like The Royal Tenenbaums, it's the best kind of feeling. It's a conversation instead of an Olympian proclamation belched down from on high.

I've started asking my own questions: are you part of that unquantified, supposedly burgeoning audience that's not comprised of boys and men under 25? Do you see three in a month in a theater? Five? Or are you one of those popcorn-and-red-wine tripleheader DVD evening people? Or someone who watches everything every made by a director in a fell swoop of a weekend?

The answers always surprise me. But so does that list of new releases now that the sun's out and finally June.  Finally, Chicago is no longer the Wintry City. How many niches are out there?  I have to wonder. Sometimes it seems there's more screens than there is art. A month of small, average movies? No fun. A couple of the films opening are veterans of the festival circuit; unlike a couple of titles widening throughout the month, like next week's Whale Rider and Aki Kaurismaki's brilliantly deadpan The Man Without a Past,  they haven't been audience favorite award winners.

Taking a breath

To my dismay, several colleagues liked Respiro, an Italian sun-sea-and-madwoman melodrama by Emanuele Crialese. One went so far as to esteem it as "sui generis," as something they had not seen before. Let's see: experienced actress (Valerio Golino) goes photogenically mad against the killingly rich azure of a fish-filled sea on an island near western Sicily; colorful urchin boys swear and tease and taunt each other, alternately half-naked or naked as they pull pranks and grow concerned as mom's acting out (and acting) becomes less and less explicable. The story could be timeless; the clichés certainly are. A haunting final image is attenuated to the point that it seems the whole point of the film being distributed, if not being made. (Or the occasional nudity of comely signorina Golino.)

More than a feeling

Sweet Sixteen from socially conscious English director Ken Loach is a far calmer spectacle: a chance to witness a young actor who holds the screen as fixedly as weather. Martin Compston stars as Liam, a pimply, lithe force of nature, a Scot boy not quite sixteen who falls into increasingly clever and dangerous crime schemes in order to provide for his mother, who'll be released from jail in time for his sixteenth birthday. She took the fall for her boyfriend, who continues to deal drugs along with Liam's mean-spirited grandfather.

Like in Loach's earlier working-class dramas Riff-Raff and Raining Stones, the profane-yet-comic never-despairing dialogue is subtitled. (Not every iteration of "feck" and "fecking" makes it onto print.) It's a sad story, but exhilarating, and it never turns didactic, as Loach's lesser work tends to do. Paul Laverty, who wrote Loach's memorable My Name is Joe, simply lays out the facts: bad place, bad time, few choices, charismatic boy, there but for the grace of... Liam's future is uncertain; Compston's, you have to hope, will be onscreen. Like the best movies, Loach and Laverty gently, confidently lead us toward feeling instead of simply holding an opinion.

L.A. Story

Hollywood Homicide is a big, loud, funny, sometimes dark, often sexy, generally over-the-top cop-buddy comedy.

Even if the chart of subplots and the drawn out comedy chase scene that ends this Harrison Ford-Josh Hartnett brew leaves an audience winded, it's still a Ron Shelton movie, which means comedy about adults and adult self-delusion. (Plus a silly sexy subplot with Lena Olin: I hope I can look fourteen percent that good half-naked at 53.)

Shelton's Dark Blue, released earlier this year, was a murky look at police corruption against the backdrop of the Rodney King riots. His technical advisor, Bob Souza, was full of outrageous stories about his career, including the fact that most detectives in LAPD moonlight. Shelton got the idea that they should sit down afterwards and write their "Light Blue," aka Hollywood Homicide, together.

"I was holed up in my place, he was holed up in his place," the 57-year-old former minor-league baseballer tells me. "But due to a thousand meetings in bars and dinners, we had a very careful outline. He and I would write and email back and forth and back and forth and sometimes I would say, I don't have any idea what this procedural thing is, you write it and then I'm going to have a pass at it. Or I would send a scene and say, make sure a cop can look at this and say this is how it would go down."

More difficult was the editing. In shooting and editing, Shelton juggled many tonal shifts. The underlying crime investigation and a subplot involving a madam (Lolita Davidovich, who we get too little of) being pressured by the vice squad could be drawn from documentaries by Nick Broomfield (Biggie and Tupac and Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, respectively). The comedy goes into overdrive at times, but the slyer moments are nicely reminiscent of the underestimated 1970s satires of Michael Ritchie (Bad News Bears, Smile, Semi-Tough). The movie shows strain, but not in a bad way: you can tell everything possible has been done in the editing room to allow for exploiting the Los Angeles setting in a vigorous and inventive way, and balancing the serious main plot with a run-amok buffet of comic subplots. Was tone the major concern?

"I think you asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question," he says. "That's the question I asked myself every day shooting it, every day cutting it. How we chose to cut it and my getting away with this tonal balancing act... The world will tell me if I did or I didn't. These are the choices I'm going to live or die by. Any real comedy is obviously-it's an old truism-based on pain and reality."

He refers to his earlier work. "I always think that my movies, you could always do a dark flip side of the exact story line. I could describe a 40-year-old woman who goes to the ballpark wearing too much makeup and sleeping with 19-year-old guys and when the 38-year-old has-been comes to town who's right for her and he refuses to talk to her, this could be Tennessee Williams, but it happens to be Bull Durham. I could describe two guys who hang out on the playground, playing basketball, pretending they're better than they are as their life slips away, that's White Men Can't Jump. It could be something else and so I always think when I'm writing something with a comic world view, I'm always thinking, what is the serious story I'm writing?"

He went back to classics after a false start with the opening. "We did cut way back, the violent murder at the beginning was very graphic. I cut it back to when the gunshots start, we get out. When I showed it to an audience for the first time, it took forty minutes for people to get over the murder. So I realized, I went back to Some Like It Hot.  There's a killing at the beginning of that. But it's not very graphic."

And he cops to the elements pulled from the news. "Obviously, the headlines of Tupac and Biggie, I've read everything, I'm fascinated by it, I've seen the documentaries, I've read the books. I don't know who did what to who but it's a nasty world and I just wanted to use that as a backdrop and obviously, it's nothing more than a stage for us. We didn't do anything remotely profound with that world. I think that's a subject for a great movie, though."

"Bob, the stories he had, were so absurd and outrageous," Shelton says of his writing partner, "that I had to keep grounding them. He and his partner are on the John Holmes murders. He said the first thing that they did when they came to the murder scene was call in the finger-printer, put up yellow tape. They shut the windows. Now there's flies. You have to shut the windows, I don't know why. Some police-procedure thing. First thing he did is fingerprint and photograph the refrigerator. Why? Because it's full of beer and they want to start drinking it, they know they're going to be there thirty-six hours. Okay, this is the stuff, this is my kind of movie!" he grins. "That's how I first wrote the scene." Everyone hated the scene, hated the characters. "I had to start the movie a little more procedural because it's a common language for the audience. It's not good just because it's true."

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