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

October 25, 2003

Wary movie

Just as the credits to Scary Movie 3 ended, my date turns to me, says, "Did we just see a movie?" (I could not come up with a worthy reply.) While a lack of the NC-17-deserved obscenity of the first two installments was refreshing, the PG-13 version still finds time to make lame jokes about pedophiliac priests and Michael Jackson's alleged pederasty. The literal-minded rehashing of elements of Signs, 8 Mile and The Ring were weirdly dull as well, particularly if, like my friend, you hadn't seen all the movies.

Just another fresh hell

On June 12, 2000, Sandro do Nasciemento, who lived in one of the worst neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, hijacked the main local bus, Bus 174 , holding hostages and fending off the police for five hours before almost-inevitable violence. Television cameras were there, broadcasting live. The police didn't hold them back. The pressure on the cops intensified over the course of the standoff as the footage was seen across the city and country. The intense, intimate focus of Jose Padilha's documentary is shocking in its intensity, even in the interview segments that chart Nasciemento's descent into the worst of Brazilian squalor, including witnessing the death of his mother as a child, and the slaughter of many of his friends who were sleeping on church steps, taken down by police officers. Was Nasciemento a victim? Padilha suggests that all of Brazil is, with endless problems stoking a inferno of merciless misery. Shocking and perhaps even great, Bus 174 takes the world to task.

Shitholes and less fresh hells

Paramount Pictures has got a lock on a certain kind of supremely machined women's picture, the sort of strenuous love story that parallels the kind of "suffering Christ" roles historically favored by the self-absorbed likes of Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner. The white-man's-burden romance Beyond Borders is almost beyond belief in its enshrinement of Angelina Jolie as a long-suffering ambassador to the world, like the real-life Audrey Hepburn, if she'd ever qualified in Thai kickboxing. With those superhuman lips that are alternately fascinating and disfiguring, dressed in ever-shapely summer dresses, sleeveless t-shirts or black formfitting cat suits in even the most bereft of "shithole[s] in hell," as the script puts it, Jolie makes a more high-toned kind of female-fantasy action figure than in the Tomb Raider movies. While Martin Campbell directed the Bond entry Goldeneye, this romance between a foreign aid bureaucrat and hunky, driven, haunted, selfless, hunky relief work doctor Clive "For fucking fuck's sake!" Owen lurches in its travels from London to Ethiopia to Cambodia to Chechnya, seemingly on a quest for David Lean-like impact--"Lara of Arabia," anyone? However the soap-orific script by Caspian Tredwell-Owen grows, it's hard to forget a movie that incorporates the deathless insight, "Sarah, you know as well as I do that Chechnya is a very dangerous place." Or as Owen's character might put it, "No fucking shit, lady." And let us not forget the motto of filmmakers who make movies about dying children: leave no clicheunturned.

Poetic licentiousness

"Dying is an art... I do it exceptionally well..."

And quoting from Sylvia Plath is an easy journalistic twitch, done exceptionally often when it comes to writing about Christine Jeffs' brooding, reserved Sylvia.

Sylvia opens with this fragment of Plath's poetry, insuring we know that we are about to witness an iconic death. With the announcement that there would be a Plath film biography, fears of "Sylvia Illustrated," the story of a poster girl for picturesque depression came to mind. But when Jeffs, whose lyrical first feature, Rain, was ripe with tactile layers of longing, was signed, my hopes were high.

Only a few scraps of the writing of Plath and her oft-censured husband Ted Hughes line the screenplay, working under the legal concept of "fair use." Plath and Hughes' daughter did not want any film made, preventing all but a few phrases from being incorporated. "The blood jet is poetry/there is no stopping it," one of Plath's insistent phrases states.

It's a peculiar thing. Without access to the poetry, that "blood jet," some audiences may be perplexed by the drama on screen, but those who have sampled the many biographical perspectives on the couples lives will bring their own backstory. Daniel Craig's Hughes is not presented as a bad guy, nor is Plath presented as a madwoman of the arts, someone for whom verse could be divined only through torturous self-absorption.

Paltrow plays off her customary patrician hauteur and achieves something fresh, at first playing the incandescent yet clumsy 24-year-old icon-tall, brash and clumsy, gunning her bike down English alleyways while wearing a pink cashmere twin set. Toward film's end, when Plath descends into blacker and blacker moods, Paltrow hits other notes, sorrowful and resounding ones.

Craig's Hughes has the dark allure of the man known from in Plath's teeming, live-wire journals, achingly alert yet terrifyingly intimate at times. The brooding poet. ("He's my black marauder," Plath murmurs.) But it's Sylvia's story, a story of her suffering from wanting the poetry, the babies, the man, and Hughes is less than central to this telling despite his alternately being disdained as irresponsible to Sylvia or responsible only to his own art. "It does get confusing, you read all the books," the 38-year-old New Zealander told me. "It's the key love affair, he is the love of her life. It is 'Sylvia and Ted,' in a way, but he has an affair and leaves the story. During that time, we're with Sylvia. But we don't make the choice to leave her behind and hang out with Ted and [the new woman] during that time."

"This is the light of the mind" is a line of Plath's that I repeat to Jeffs, and she says that the couple's shared experiences and their differing accounts were central to her. "You see two different scenes, described by two poets, and you get a sense of the differences, their backgrounds and drives. It's fascinating. I found Sylvia's poetry so visual and emotive, it was a great way in for me, to get under the text." The script had been researched and written before Jeffs replaced another director. "I would have poetry stuck all over my script, so the poems gave me a sense of the emotions coming into play."

"You don't see her writing until he's gone," Jeffs points out, which makes the narrative even more tragic. At 30, she has found her muse and her voice and yet in weeks she will be dead by her own hand. John Brownlow's script quietly points toward the loss of work we would never have from her singular mind. "Her writing changed." In the last weeks of her life, Plath sometimes wrote a finished poem or three a day. "But like Ted told her, 'It's not just about putting words on the page, it's about having something to say.'"

Capturing sensation and intensity: there is a scene where they're out on the water and its insurgent power faces them both down. "That's an amazing example of how the physicality of the moment and the emotion of the moment collide, you know? At the end, where she's talking about her father dying, and the sea starts to surge? You can see her, she looks like all her emotions are rolling around inside her. There's a great look on [Paltrow's] face. The water there, it feels like it completely blends with her emotions."

Is it a literal-minded approach, I ask, wondering about the viewer less aware of the lives and work of the couple? I felt it was really important, if I was going to make a film about these two poets, to look at the imagery they used. Even thought the script is drama-based, and could have been a biopic type thing, it seemed my job was to imbue some of that detail in a visual sense and the collision of that with the emotions underneath the scene. When you make a film, you have to do that anyway. But it was particularly important here, to find a way inside her but also open it up visually."

Another underplayed scene that leads to panic is set at the dinner party where Hughes met the woman for whom he leaves Plath. He is in the kitchen doing the washing up with the woman. There is a translucent divider, from the dining room we see shapes move, voices. But nothing is definitive. "Yeah. If you were Sylvia in that moment, you will definitely think, you realize she completely believes something's going on," Jeffs says. Plath stalks into the kitchen. "Then she says, 'I see you,' she hisses to him. And he's like, 'See what?' There's that whole chicken-egg thing. I think they drove each other. She also knew he was a womanizer before. If you look at her personality, her emotions could very much drive other people around her. But I think that she was incredibly sensitive and because her feelings were so close, she could intuit things before they happened."

Alone, Plath writes. She returns to the city, hoping to define herself by herself and her work alone. The movie shows her black despair, but in fact at the time, words are falling from her like volts from a socket, choking rainstorms of words, an organic staccato.

The inner life of driven genius is tough to dramatize, particularly if you don't have access to her poetry or journals. But Jeffs' movie finds an emotional tenor, one that mingles performance and drenching mood, and that transcends banality and bathos. I ask Jeffs if she could have lived up to the challenge of a version that had access to the verse? "It's a hard thing to say. It's also how much of it would have been embedded in the screenplay. More realistic, what if I had access in post-production? I could have used it as a voice the way I have in places, to counterpoint. Because we didn't have access, I tried to incorporate feelings and interpretations into the actual process of making the movie, the visuals, so on and so forth. I wanted the landscapes she saw and feelings she felt."

Artists united

The performances in Peter Hedges' Pieces of April, however, have an authentic vitality that makes a few iffy and forgettable comedy routines forgivable.

While the story of a family that may be sharing its last Thanksgiving at their eldest daughter's Lower East Side apartment has a couple of cutely quirky moments too many in its brief eight-one minutes, first-time director Hedges knows his way with actors. Mom (Patricia Clarkson) has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and prodigal daughter April (Katie Holmes) wants to bring everyone, including her younger brother and sister and dotty Grandmother together. But, horrors! Her oven doesn't work, so she has to canvass door-to-door in her tenement building to find someone among the multiculti neighbors in her warren who can help her cook her goddam turkey before her station wagon-bound family arrives.

Shot on digital video in sixteen days for under $300,000 after two earlier productions collapsed, Pieces of April includes two truly memorable performances: the always-thrilling Patricia Clarkson, acidulous, genuine; and Katie Holmes' April, kitted out as some kind of scatty kewpie-punk. April Burns is one of the great movie black sheep in memory, a sweet fuck-up. Holmes' performance is inspired, as if past directors had seen only a lanky, very pretty woman and kept their distance. "It became so clear the first time I met her," Hedges told me in a recent phone interview from his Brooklyn office, with the gusto almost everything seems to inspire in his conversation. "She responded to the material in a very strong way. It spoke to her in ways that a script might not always to a younger actor. Some people could look at this script and just say she's a girl trying to cook a turkey, what's the big deal? But Katie got it, it was clear from our conversation. It was clear, too, that she was eager to do something surprising."

Hedges gushes as well over Clarkson's "fearlessness," adding that one of the movie's "covert agendas" is for Clarkson to "be given every award for acting there is. She is a beautiful, funny woman but she is not afraid to show an unseemly or inappropriate side."

What's the secret to getting such a sturdy cast to work for scale, I wonder. "You give them something they ache to do. The fact that Katie's so terrific in the movie is completely a tribute to her. She was willing to work without the trailer and all the perks and comforts people in her position get used to. And she stayed with it through every trial, and I think if anybody had permission to bail when we moved to [the lower budget], it was Katie. She wrapped (Dawson's Creek) on December 1, and then came to New York to work in conditions that were kind but never comfortable. I just think the world of her. If I were to have a daughter, I would just pray she grew up to be Katie Holmes. And the other thing, over the years, I've met the girls, the handful of girls who are in every movie. The one thing I know about Katie is she's flown coach in her life. And she remembers. It was really important on our movie, there was nothing extra. It was just the work."

The 41-year-old actor-turned-playwright-novelist-screenwriter got an Oscar nomination for co-writing the adaptation of About a Boy, but his education began on another set, when Lasse Hallstrom allowed him to observe the making of What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

Still, with only one film under his belt, Hedges is an evangelist of digital video's handiness. "I come from the theater, so the gift of the small camera is that you can do long takes, you don't have to constantly cut and reload it. It felt to me like I was back in rehearsal room with really good actors. It had this laboratory feeling, technology [letting you react when] you had an idea, you could just turn around and realize it. Because we had so few days to shoot, it was really a blessing that we could shoot so much [videotape]."

The speed of production had its own stress. "Nothing was easy but it didn't take a lot of equipment to realize a shot. So much of working at that budget level and with those time constraints is getting what you can and letting the limitations of time and place and budget shape your choices. I didn't have time to doubt what I'd written. Whenever I'm given too much time or too much room, I tend to complicate what I'm doing and over-think it and doubt it."

His insight even comes with a joke. "There's a great story I heard once about an art teacher who was a supervisor of arts teachers and she went into an elementary school and looked at the paintings from the first grade, the third grade, the fifth grade. The first graders' work was primitive, the fifth graders, over-complicated, but the third graders? The work was something spectacular. 'How do you them to paint this way?' The teacher says, 'Oh, I just know when to take the paintings away.'"

Heart of a Lovedog

Gina Gershon is the hard, harsh, cracked, unregenerate resistant, resilient, relentless center of veteran music supervisor Alex Steyermark's attitude-and-adrenaline enriched debut feature, Prey For Rock and Roll, and I'd say that a good thing. Gershon's character, Jacki, is a past-40 singer-guitarist who's been playing for a couple decades in Clam Dandy, an all-girl Los Angeles rock band, and she feels time running out: biological, musical, energy. Her performance grates at times, and her willingness to be abrasive and hard is a brave thing. Drea de Matteo plays bass; Lori Petty's on lead guitar and Shelly Cole is on drums. The L.A. club milieu is nicely sketched, and the clichŽs about record contracts and studio time are done with down-and-dirty elan. It's based on the autobiographical musical by Cheri Lovedog, who wrote many of the songs.

Remote Possibilities

Here's the real kill-thrill: the ridiculously prolific Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer tops even his Audition for slashingly stylized mayhem. Based upon Hideo Yamamoto's serialized manga "Koroshiya 1," it's an morality tale-about revenge--with all-star bad guys. Be warned: there's stomach-churning torture involving, but not limited to, kung fu, pins and needles, razor blades, and rivers of crimson, the brilliant geysers of rush that Quentin Tarantino claims to be re-purposing in the lugubrious magpie posturing of Kill Bill. I'm not sure I know why I find Miike's anxious voice more compelling that Tarantino's. Maybe it's because his characters seem to be, rather than try. In a neon ghetto of Tokyo, there's a complex called Yakuza Mansion. A Yakuza boss disappears and his underlings seek revenge, including the masochistic Kakirhara, played by the serene Tadanobu Asano (Nagisa Oshima's Taboo; the upcoming Last Life on Earth). One of the scarified Kakihara's set-pieces involves a gangster suspended from the ceiling, whose tattooed back is studded with acupuncture needles and then treated to an improvised torture using shabu-shabu cooking techniques. Like many of 43-year-old Miike-san's movies, Ichi alternates violence with dolorously inventive visual poetry. Too much already? Enter Ichi the Killer, who inflicts the same pain that Kakihara metes out but also desires.

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