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

October 20, 2003

Thrill kill

While Elvis Mitchell seems never to have met an Everything But The Girl lyric that can't be twisted to reflect a movie on review, some of the driest wit among the trio of lead writers (Mitchell, A. O. Scott, Stephen Holden) comes from the ratings summaries at the end of each long review. Whereas the MPAA's inscrutable newspeak is clearer than usual, allowing that Kill Bill Vol.l warrants its R rating for "for strong bloody violence, language and some sexual content," Scott writes that it "has shootings, stabbings, beatings, beheadings, disembowelings, amputations, mutilations, eye-gougings, slicings, choppings, bitings and a spanking. Also some naughty words."

Tarantino, like many posters on the Internet, continues to weave metaphors to indicate that his fever dream of creepy, agitated appropriation is above objective criticism. Here's another quote attributed to the gentleman and scholar: "Sure, Kill Bill is violent, sure it's fucking intense, but it's a Tarantino movie. You don't go to a Metallica concert and ask the fuckers to turn the music down."

Ever-perceptive John Powers concludes in his LA Weekly review, "If nothing else, Vol. 1 is undeniably a fan-boy's paradise, with cinematic references sprouting like so many mushrooms. In fact, the movie's huge press kit reads rather like one of those skeleton keys to Ulysses or Finnegans Wake that help explain Joyce's countless cultural allusions. Explaining Tarantino's every intention - he's a man who wants to be understood - it makes a nerdish point of telling us that the glass nightclub floor at the House of Blue Leaves comes from Seijun Suzuki's hallucinatory 1965 gangster pic Tokyo Drifter, and that the young Japanese actress who plays Go Go Yubari ventured a similar role in the late Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale." Let the DVD commentary begin.

Intimacy

Movies about love and loss are about to wash over autumn's moviegoers, from Richard Curtis' souped-up trademark comedy Love, Actually, the Sundance Series' Dopamine (now playing, reviewed below) and Isabel Coixet's contrived but touching My Life Without Me (reviewed below). The next couple weeks alone include Jane Campion's melancholy, luxuriantly stylized In The Cut, in which I found more to like on a second viewing, and Christian Jeffs' sylvan Sylvia, seeking to create the emotional wash of Sylvia Plath's poetry without resorting to more than a piece or two of the iconic poetess' writing. Can a filmmaker find a concrete equivalent of a line like "the light of the mind, cold and planetary"? Or "the sea's incoherences"? It's an absorbing effort; my interview with Jeffs (who directed 2001's Rain) should appear next week. To cite another fragment of Plath's work, "Love, the world/Suddenly turns, turns colour" breathes in Sylvia more than you'd think it could.

To turn briefly from longing to downright smut, here's a link to my review of Lisa Carver's The Lisa Diaries, an expansion of her notoriously randy self-revelations that originally appeared at Nerve.com. And to veer back to the heart, please check out my interview with Peter Hedges' about the sources of Pieces of April in the November issue of SOMA magazine.

Drug is the love

Tired eyes meet anxious eyes, longing matches longing, but impulses are unequal: how many times does that happen on a street corner, in a cafe, the local tavern?

One of the small things gotten very right in Mark Decena's Dopamine, an unassuming yet impressive and memorable story of love in the modern world, is how the two protagonists, Rand (John Livingston), a stressed-to-incoherence computer programmer and Sarah (Sabrina Lloyd), an emotionally complex preschool teacher, first catch glimpses of each other in a corner bar in San Francisco's Mission District.

A part of the gratifying effect comes from the look, a slightly muzzy high-definition video palette the filmmakers have designed, which, in this particular scene, captures the dim room in deep focus, but also carefully, quietly, diminishes the gleaming quality of color as it captured by video. Another is how quietly the song of the bar, the unobtrusive sound of music play in the background, while Rand and Winston, his alpha-dog co-programmer dissect the working day without really listening to each other. They've spent over two years at the end of the dot-com boom designing, for pay, a computer program that is designed to involve shy children with a coy but slyly interactive animated bird named, coyly, cutely, precisely, "Koy-Koy."

We have only about that much information when Rand and Sarah first meet. We know that Rand believes love is more chemical than emotional, driven by calculations made in our bloodstream against our will by endorphins and dopamine and other chemicals, tricks of the body that soothe our soul when succor is most needed. His father (William Windom), a disenchanted scientist, pounds Rand with these theories time and again, railing against the void that Alzheimer's Rand's mother has tumbled into after fifty satisfying years with him.

Livingston is handsome in a thirtysomething-next-door kind of way, short hair chewed back from a high forehead, a quiet smile wanting to tickle out, eyes that hold wells of hurt, compassion, or perhaps only confusion. As Rand, his hands tickle along his pint of beer while Winston makes with his own theories, which mostly involve himself and sex. Other end of the bar, enter Sarah. There are differences in the way HD video captures the human face than on film. While Dopamine is being shown on 35mm film, the contours of the bones of a face, the texture of skin, the gleam off one's eyes, have a look that can be discomfitingly harsh, such as the sandpaper-skin close-ups in Wayne Wang's The Center of the World. But, as Decena shows, with the color correction and other digital tweaking that the format affords filmmakers, it's also possible to capture what is most splendid about the most ordinary of faces. In a few seconds, Decena will interpolate fantasy imagery of the surge of chemicals through the brain that accompany Rand's first glimpse of Sarah and Sarah's hello-sailor gaze toward Rand, but in the instant their vulnerabilities chime? It's all the eyes. Rand's: liquid, lost. Sarah's: obsidian, eager, wishful. Yes, a portion is due to the actors' craft, some to the storyline-wishy-washy Rand is about to lose this first flicker to his blazing asshole of a buddy Winston, who blatantly cock-blocks Rand from Sarah-but also to the work of a committed crew of filmmakers making their first picture: they know how two people can look at each other, making themselves vulnerable as vulnerable can be in a split-second.

They have needs. They have baggage that can fill a bus terminal. Dopamine will fill that out for us as its story unfolds. In this moment, however, we know Rand is wounded. We know that Sarah is hungry, going home with rut-happy Winston for the night, but, in what one can infer is a painful pattern finds herself almost immediately dismayed, runs from that ready burst of intimacy into denial.

How will love, and Koy-Koy bring them together? In surprising ways. Dopamine has been described as the first feature to go all the way through the Sundance Institute's programs, beginning as a 1999 screenwriters' lab project, continuing in successive incarnations as a directors' lab project, debuting at the 2003 festival, and now being distributed under the wing of the Sundance Film Series, the previous entry of which was the more aggressively videocentric immigration saga, In This World. Dopamine also won a prize for being the festival feature to make the most imaginative use of science.

So for its Sundance lineage, Dopamine has the whiff of perhaps being an earnest little trifle. The title is off-putting. Computer technology is usually death on screen. Video-to-film is still an emerging artistic enterprise. And yet, the quiet, assured dignity that Decena and co-writer Timothy Breitbach offer all their intelligent, talkative characters-even unregenerate ass Winston-is rare and heartening, and even in the emotional thicket of Dopamine's third act, where Rand and Sarah wash away their reservoirs of reserve, where they simply display their mutual loneliness in the most naked of revelations, the movie's intelligence is singular. You want Rand and Sarah to love, but you want Decena and Breitbach and their collaborators to fall in love as well, with another set of characters, an even more intricate narrative that will take less than four years this time to surprise and satisfy the audiences that discover Dopamine's quiet high.

Return to "me"

"There's no such thing as normal people."

And certainly not in Spanish director Isabel Coixet's English-language debut, My Life Without Me, a sweet and lyrical, lushly-hued confection about what legacy we might leave if we knew we were dying. In rain-soggy Vancouver, shot in by cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu (with Coixet operating the camera) in a style beyond chill and damp, into an aquatic gloom, 23-year-old Anne (Sarah Polley, pale, tiny, fierce as breath) has been married since 17, has two sweet daughters, loves her underemployed husband (Scott Speedman), works a night shift, cleaning at a college. Beat-down mom Deborah Harry, hale yet defeated, bakes for a hotel on the same hours, lives in the house-trailer next door to Anne's.

Anne thinks she's pregnant again. That wouldn't be so bad. She goes to the doctor. He tells her he can never look a patient in the eye. As the doctor, Leonor Watling's odd, charming performance is so strange it seems everyday and normal. He tells her she has only a few weeks to live, offers her ginger candy. On her translucent features in close up, her reaction to her death sentence is ur-Canadian, deadpan as heck: "Pretty far gone, eh?" And divinely lit, there is a single stripe of tear down her pallored cheek. Leaving, she hides her diagnosis from the start, looking for spurts of joy in her world of hurt.

Produced by Pedro Almodovar, My Life Without Me is both eccentric and heartening, as adventurous in its own way as Almodovar's own later work (yet not quite so refined and precise). Coixet's eye is trained. Her years as a director of commercials (as well as a handful of previous features) serves her well. There is a superb sense of place. Coixet makes the movie a confidently giddy daydream of quiet too-much-ness. There is a scene where Anne's husband holds her, she sings to him, almost a murmur, tousles his hair sideways, her long straight hair falling like the vertical curtain of colored beads behind them. The shot holds. It is heartbreakingly intimate.

She skips work. Sits in a cafe late one night. She takes out a spiral notebook with pink pages. Her daughters' bead bracelets graze the page. She makes a list of things to do before she dies. Her handwriting, a scrawl, a girl-woman's script, is superimposed, white against the bottom of the frame. There's a grouchy customer with a bad mustache (Mark Ruffalo). A grouchier waitress she borrows a pen from. There are misspellings. Ruffalo watches her, this tiny woman, this almost girl-child, making a to-do list. Laundry? "8. Make someone fall in love whith [sic] me."

Someone does: the gloomy wanderer played by Ruffalo. A flirtation ensues. There is a scene where she winds up with the bookish man and they are alone in his undecorated place-he hasn't refurnished since the wife and furniture left him-and he begins to read aloud from novelist John Berger's "To A Wedding," a transfixing paragraph about preparations for death. Polley slaps the paperback away with an abrupt lashing-out. She's calm then, sinks back into his arms, he instinctively holds her, but not too tightly. His joy in the prose is an abstraction, her reaction natural.

There is another entry on the list, another scene, leaving birthday wishes for her daughters for every year until they're 18. The imagining of what each of those years will hold, for one daughter from 4 to 18, the other from 6 to 18, are filled with love and tears. It is an absurd project, Anne at water's edge, in her car, night skyline part of the gleaming wet behind her, clutching a cassette recorder, murmuring years of love not to come. At first, the device is an annoyance, implausible and seemingly heartless. Still, it becomes more heartfelt, and thoughts of contrivance or sentimentality pass, if you are watching the wonder that is Polley's face as she inhabits this moment, these imaginings. In her own understated way, she's always a terrifically volatile performer, her large eyes and sly, smart smile indicating as much as the text of the script, yet here, with a less educated, less headstrong character, she remains a compelling actress.

Anne, however, does get a handful of outbursts, the anger powering them beyond the understanding of those who hear them. "Without dreams, you can't fucking live!" she yells at one point. "And in the commercials? Everyone is so fucking happy!" Mocking that "happiness," Coixet later includes a strange, lovely fantasy ballet where Anne's shopping late at night, and everyone in the market begins to dance to the Muzak, a Caetano Veloso-like ballad. (Coixet says that inspiration came on the set, where things just seemed too dull, and she shot the scene without worrying whether its tone was too surreal for the rest of the picture.)

Anne met her husband at the last Nirvana concert. An ick-worthy line that works near the end of the movie goes, "You'll always be the guy who took his t-shirt off to wipe my tears away." There is an intermittent voiceover filled with naive poeticizing as well: "You pray this will be the life without you."

Each moment when My Life About Me seemed precious, another bit would come along-some detail of decor or landscape, of performance or composition, and I allowed its charm to take hold. Precious? Aren't we all, inside our heads, warming by the fantasy of who we love and who loves us?

Remote Possibilities

So I've watched two of the documentary supplements on the box set of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola, Veronica Voss, and the astonishing The Marriage of Maria Braun; managed to watch two of eight early Roman Polanski short films (1957-1962) on the Knife in the Water two-disc set; watching the contemporary behind-the-scenes footage from Jean-Pierre Melville's great, stylish Le Cercle Rouge; listened to five minutes of Steven Soderbergh's self-effacing commentary to the self-effacing, barking mad Schizopolis; stared longingly at the Facets issues of Andrzej Wajda's Polish masterpieces Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds, which I haven't seen for years and haven't found the time to since they arrived; and flipped back and forth through IFC's three-hour edition of A Decade Under the Influence, hoping gamely for more nuggets from Robert Altman. I catch up with all those, there are always more to come. So many good and great films and do any of us have the time to sit back and re-watch them all? Still, one of my top ten films, long in the works, has been postponed again, but for a good reason. On the Criterion Collection's website, an early 2004 date has been notched for Jean Renoir's bittersweet 1939 comedy-drama The Rules of The Game. With portions of its negative lost during World War II, it's never had the gloss that the original prints surely held. Originally due as a two-disc edition at the end of this year, after months spent creating a high-definition master, a French lab "finally unearthed the fine-grain master of the reconstructed version, one generation closer to the original than anything previously available. A similar discovery delayed the release of another Renoir classic, Grand Illusion, intended to be Criterion's first release," their site says

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