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

July 18, 2003

Burst in Air

The past couple weeks in the Midwest, every other day the heat breaks and the electrical storms take over the night and there's more lightning in the sky than in Jerry Bruckheimer's modest production company logo.

Of the three pages devoted to Bruckheimer's exploits in the press book to Bad Boys II, I have admire the opening: "Even if you miss the signature lightning bolt that identifies every one of his productions, and whether you're in a dark theatre looking up at a seventy-foot screen or your own home watching a twenty-seven inch picture, you know when you're looking at a Jerry Bruckheimer production. One of the most successful producers of all time, he is a filmmaker and now a television mogul who loves telling a story, respects his audiences and delivers a visual feast unmistakably his own." Michael Bay, stand back: prepare to be respected.

A few words about Bad Boys II, then Claire Denis' ode to the mature one night stand, Friday Night and how it aligns with the work of Nan Goldin and Liz Phair's new album; the nutty Garage Days and the itch-making but loving Stone Reader.

Michael Bay: Reloaded

What does it cost to make a movie like Bad Boys II? I mean, other than in human dignity? Is this the same Jerry Bruckheimer that made Black Hawk Down and owns an Echinacea ranch in Kentucky?

Bad Boys II knows as much about seduction as a 10-year-old boy knows how to jerk off. Despite some modest echoes of Ye Olde Miami Vice in its makeup, Bad Boys II doesn't remind me of television. Several extended sections of the DSM-IV, maybe: if anyone wants a colorful illustration of the psychosis of big-budget movies that fully explore the sensibilities of its runamok auteurs, hooboy, I don't want to see anything nuttier or more nihilist than this for a long time to come. Some colleagues suggest going back and catching Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, which was co-written by Marianne Wibberley and Cormac Wibberley, two of Bad Boys II's credited screenwriters.

While credits pop past, the opening scenes burn up a couple tens of millions of dollars with slick, familiar super-swooping Bay-style action. Cinematographer Amir Mokri, who once shot delicate films like Joy Luck Club, or sharp-edged grunge like Slamdance or The Salton Sea now works on projects like Coyote Ugly and this contraption, the images concluding with Bay's directorial credit under a Klan cross in flames.

With all this pizzazz at his disposal, Bay still, within those de luxe opening moments, has to soil himself with an obvious, oleaginous supposedly Cuban baddie whose first few words on screen including "Fokking beetches," a local term of endearment, one presumes. (Not in old Havana, but perhaps in Bay's palatial compound, a "two-story, 10,000-square-foot, five-bedroom house, so high on a hill that he can see the Pacific Ocean and the city," according to a spread of his spread in July 17's New York Times, alerting us to his more sensitive spending habits.

Plot? Two narcs -- madman Martin Lawrence, cock-of-the-walk Will Smith - -bicker in Miami, having committed enough terrorist-style atrocities that it's a wonder the movie isn't about secret military tribunals. A Cuban drug lord is exporting Ecstasy inside of John Doe stiffs. Cue the raft of character actors in need of a powerful opening weekend to keep up the career.

Yes, these are lovely go-boom practical stunts, and like The Matrix: Reloaded and Terminator 3: The Rise of The Machines, big monster machines wreak havoc with neat digital enhancements. (Bad Boys II pulls an old-fashioned C-movie Roger Corman trick--the vehicles compacted down into kibble are usually along the lines of fifteen year old K-Cars with bad paint jobs.) "Oh, that one puckered up my butthole," Smith purrs from behind the wheel after one twirling hulk spins past his ears.

One car crash begets another, and soon two hours and twenty minutes of quality a/c have passed. There are non-sequiturs galore, and I concede that I did laugh a lot between bouts of cringing and exchanged mutters with a regular-guy sort of colleague I watched the detonations with. There's one scene of nutty vaudeville when the pair pretend to be gangstas to a 15-year-old who wants to date Lawrence's daughter, but much of the rest of Lawrence's presence is simple minstrelsy. Roll eyes. Act cra-a-azy. Say "motherfucker." Repeat.

I always hope for the best even with a nutjob prospect like this. Along with the Charlie's Angels team, the script, no doubt given over to many hands, including Mr. Bay's, is credited to Ron Shelton and reformed junkie and "Alf" writer Jerry Stahl, whose joy in the needle was chronicled in Permanent Midnight, his memoir and eventual Ben Stiller vehicle. (Stahl now writes television for Bruckheimer.) Seeing these two contrary pranksters names in the credits seems almost as perverse as seeing Robert "Chinatown" Towne's name on the Mission: Impossible scripts. While the movie seems at brief turns to be subverting or lampooning its Maxim-overdrive point-of-view, it quickly turns fetishistic.

Consider Bay and Mokri's fiber-optic-style nookie-cam, first snaking, then striding between thonged stripper ass-cheeks in a wet-T-shirt enriched dance club, or the brand names that tickle like an autistic's mantra through even the most violent and gruesome scenes: Lite, Skyy, MGD, Porsche, GMC Yukon, Sony, Panasonic, Double Gulp, Dell, "Bacardi mojitos," Pepsi, Cadillac,

After the shopping spree, let's open up the nastier can of worms: Bad Boys II is especially taken with gay sex, rat sex, necrophilia and exploding body parts. And rat sex. Perhaps the movie should have been called "Body Parts II." It's just that disgusting. And that's not a moral quibble at all: it's just peculiar to see so much awful human Moo-and-Oink larding the screen, often slamming wetly into the camera's lens. There's more icky splatter than in a chicken processing plant.

Consider the heightened esthetic virtues of one bravura, post-David Fincher bit of digital wizardry, a bullet's point-of-view gouging someone's ass cheek, as the camera digitally swirls past the character's face, then back toward the bullet, which loudly, wetly, has its blood-puddling way with a baddie's face.

"It hit the meat," Smith says, exploring his buddy's bottom. "It's ain't nowhere near the hole." (The movie tops itself in meanness and vulgarity, repeatedly, perhaps most memorably in the iteration, "Fucking ratones eating my fucking money, rat fuckers, rat fuckers.")

Decadent or nihilist? It's the devil's dance. The aftermath of every action set piece is shown as ankle deep in debris and spent shells like firecracker casings in an old fashioned Mott Street Chinese New Year. The movie readily pranks over the line into high-octane decadence, and once the outright allegations that Cuba's sustained existence is because of drug manufacturing (rather than the charges that drugs are trafficked through the island), it can't be called anything but disjointed swill.

When the Bad Boys wind up tiptoeing through a minefield at the front gate of the Guantanamo Naval Base, after a shameless theft of Jackie Chan's famous destroy-the-hillside-shantytown climax from 1985's Police Story, anything's possible. I thought maybe, a musical number with orange-jumpsuited, hand-, waist- and foot-manacled Al Qaeda suspects. After all, as Bay notes in the press kit, unlike in the original Bad Boys, "I tried to make this one a little edgier and more real."

Irony's not dead, only quality.

Text and Texture

What amount of tingle and touch can lead to a smile of sublime satisfaction?

Claire Denis, bless her French heart, is willing to slow narrative down to gesture, gesture that indicates impulse a character is only starting to perceive. I love her Beau Travail (1999), a lyrical study of contemporary French Legionaries going through the motions of past notions of masculinity. Her most recent, Trouble Every Day (2001), is a luminous botch, a Paris-set vampire story (so much story is elided, you're left to guess) which is very, very bad, yet formally luscious in its framing, almost pretentiously elliptical editing and its creamy design and lighting. Like many of Denis' movies, it's impassioned yet serene, almost impossibly cool in tone.

With Friday Night (Vendredi soir), Denis works again with cinematographer Agnes Godard, editor Nelly Quettier and composer Dickon Hinchliffe (of Tindersticks, which scored Trouble Every Day, Nenette et Boni). Laure (Valerie Lemercier) is a fortyish Parisienne whose evening begins as she locks the door of the flat she's just locked up for the last time. She's packed. Essentially homeless, if only for the first few hours of this weekend of change. She's moving in the next day with her boyfriend. The city's stalled, too, snarled by a transit strike. Laure is a heartbeat from falling asleep, stilled, car's heater tracing humidity across the windows, a flutter of the eye and her life could turn dream. Or Jean (Vincent Landon), a total stranger, could let himself into her passenger side, a man who carries himself with weary cool, ask for a light, come into her life.

The film is dedicated "To Nan," and as the story progresses in its quiet, unexplained fashion, one realizes the film is not only a tribute to gesture, hesitation, unsentimental desire, but also to photographer Nan Goldin. Lemercier somewhat resembles her, and Goldin's autobiographical work often takes place in weathered interiors with features similar to those in Denis' film, such as faded wallpaper, nubby chenille, lamplight that pools quieter than streetlight. There's almost no language. Two experienced, yet solitary people meet. They exchange their presence, but not their stories. Not foolish words. A few words spoken atop raw emotions, based on the novel by co-writer Emmanuele Bernheim. In the press notes, Bernheim captures her project, but also Denis' clear-eyed, unsentimental command of this night that could as easily be taking place in one of Laure's eye-flutters as in the confines of the sweetly shabby hotel they find themselves walking toward. They offer, they give, but they do not consume. They move toward an image that closes the film, a grownup, satiated version of the final shots of Jean-Pierre Leaud's run to the sea that ends Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

"I wrote from the woman's point of view," Bernheim says, "I tried to describe a primitive impulse, a sort of urge that has nothing to do with any ideas of bourgeois adultery. It's not because she had decided to move in with her boyfriend the next day that all this happens on that particular evening. It's sort of irrepressible, almost animal urge that has nothing sentimental about it. It lacks the alibi of sentiment and yet it's something fairly pure. There's this man's smell, and nothing counts anymore."

"Fuck and Run"

A different sort of smell has been the reviews of a new CD, Liz Phair's self-titled fourth album, and I'd decided to wait to pick it up despite admiring many of her songs. In this past Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times, columnist Lloyd Sachs wrote one of the best pieces of meta-criticism I've read in weeks of too many showbiz meta, cutting to the core of many complaints I have about career critics as well as the meta-meta-crit hall-of-mirrors stalked by a few Internet columnists who shall remain rudderless.

"The surest sign that an album is worthy is the sound of critics piling on. If an album gets everyone in a dither, it has to have something going for it--if not in the grooves, then in the attitude," Sachs writes. There was enough reflect to get me to buy the album. "The pop fan in pop critics suffers from a certain gullibility in believing that artists are there to serve only them, that they are duty bound to toe the line and stay within the realm of the music that has earned them an audience," he writes, and some critiques of Denis' Trouble Every Day and Friday Night have shown similar impatience. Hasn't she done this before, goes the whine.

I wonder when I read such plaints: can't you see the grain dancing behind the lovers' faces in the corners of that hotel room, the light gloaming off a pinball machine onto an impossibly young girl's face in a bistro the couple find themselves in, or even in the erratic grain of Phair's voice? In a song called "Rock Me," her sexual paean is to a man a decade her junior. "I bet you a cigarette you won't regret my timmmmmme," she sings, not quite sustaining the note.

I love the texture of her voice, my ear somehow isolating the production pile-on of Avril Lavigne's producer-collaborators The Matrix. "I want to play Xbox on your floor/say hi to your roommate who's next door," she strains, and the simplicity of the story, along with the imperfect voice, makes me happy. Even when she launches into a bit of self-parody, assuming a younger soul should have a record collection that includes her desire to be a "blowjob queen" who will "fuck and run," that "Your record collection don't exist/you don't even know who Liz Phair is," the charm lies in the yodeling elongation of her own name, not for its self-consciousness but the layers of consciousness in the notes of her imperfect voice.

It's strange when critics assume a work isn't on purpose. A female friend obsessing over a new Blur song to me blew up in the most appealing way at the mention of "Liz Phair," the album: yes, she'd been disappointed, it sounded like radio, it wasn't the privileged but forlorn Wicker Park bar bopper singing anymore: I didn't press the point. Even with a stolid gesso of production stratagems pounding through many of the songs, I hear the voice, its grain, its flaws, its human failings. It's a lot like Denis' project, to trade plot for the coolly experiential. A tincture of sexism seems to rise up against certain work, but it's good to assume artists like Denis and Phair know every goddamn thing they're up to, just like male artists, even when the strain leads to flameout. Girls just wanna not be judged.

Garage Days

What to say about a goofy, raggedy-ass movie that veers from visionary thrills to dumb-ass comedy, shamelessly mixing digital fever-dream inspiration with the story of a motley clutch of pals palling about in Sydney's Newtown, dreaming of becoming the noisiest Australian garage band of them all... but don't have the talent to even drink, take drugs, kiss, break up, cheat, or wear tight leather pants properly? Seeing it the first time at Sundance, a couple of friends were flabbergasted at the mix of tones, particularly broad comedy, staying in their seats only because of the directorial acumen of Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City). A lot of journalists have been layering praise on distributor Fox Searchlight lately, and beyond the well-earned successes of Bend It Like Beckham and 28 Days Later, the ad campaign for this movie shows why: "What if you finally got your big break and you just plain sucked?" The movie in a nutshell.

Except for a subplot involving a lipsticked cantaloupe as a baby substitute, Garage Days is splendidly weird fun, and its helium highs of inspiration make up for many, many bad jokes. The cast, male and female, is also almost uniformly pretty, and Proyas' insistence on shooting in and recreating an urban bohemia he knows, is sweet.

Stone Deaf

Mark Moskowitz has spent twenty years making political campaign commercials. In his first feature, Stone Reader, he's on-camera as much as anyone. Let us consider him a "character" in his narrative, and let me say that I don't like the character he plays. He's sternly square, with frumpy sweaters, a busy mustache and a tendency to show himself on screen thumping objects down a little too hard, raking the leaves in his yard with a small, pissy fury. He reads books. In just over two hours, we will discover how many. (Moskowitz even ends his hosanna to the love of lit with a reading list, prissily listing Shakespeare by his signature, "Sks.") He's fixated on one particular book, a first novel published in 1972, "The Stones of Summer" by Dow Mossman. Moskowitz didn't finish reading the book until 1999. He went looking for Mossman's other work. It didn't exist. And no one had heard of Mossman.

If we believe the neat structure of Stone Reader, Moskowitz, between work and family commitments, takes just over a year to build a highway of 16mm film stock that leads him, clue by clue, across ten states, toward Mossman's phantom. It's a remarkable feat, actually, a portrait of overweening narcissism that outdoes Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore, yet can bring you to tears and shocked laughter at how many insights the story holds. It's probably the most cruddy-looking movie that I would be tempted to call a small masterpiece. We hear from the likes of the late literary critic Leslie Fiedler, veteran books editor Bob Gottlieb ("Catch-22" is among the babies he tended) and writer and Iowa Writer's Workshop capo Frank Conroy. The love of writing, books and the lore of writer's lives resonate throughout, as does the irony that Mossman may have been a one-off writer who poured his soul into one tome, and Moskowitz may well be a one-off documentary-maker.

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