..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

March 12 , 2004

Greek to me

The first exchange in Spartan, David Mamet’s spare yet bravura new thriller about the worth of blood in the face of politics is fashioned with his usual bent, coy genius: Val Kilmer, playing a covert operative, asks a trainee: “Do you wish to quit?” As shot by Juan Ruiz Anchía, even Mamet’s images seep widescreen paranoia, even when on out on open highway. And the dialogue is his most hard-edged in many movies, filled with stiff-dicked ramrod rectitude, words accompanied by the steeliest of mano-a-mano glares. The formal diction flows with the cussed writer’s customary carborundum rat-a-tat-tat. Mamet’s stage directions in his screenplays are written ALL CAPS and with profuse, staccato punctuation. This is how Kilmer’s bitten-off speech patterns would look: “You. Mother. F--er!” Mamet’s men walk the walk and bark the bark. Everybody’s a sharpie: “Shall I tell you what’s going to happen when we find you out?”

As for genre thrills, Mamet’s a canny oxymoronist, all bloodless and bloody at once. There’s glistening beauty in his rudimentary visual abstractions. The movie’s cheapness allows him to reduce space to something very simple, very close at hand or unpopulated. Neon glistens upon macadam, faces shimmer in strenuously spectral toplight and doom-blue sidelight. (Mamet also revels in the carnal crunch of a cheekbone mashed to brick, a forearm crunched over a corrugated tin barricade.) The plot’s concerned at first about a young woman who’s kidnapped, and Kilmer’s obligation is to truncate the chattel run before she’s sold away in Dubai. Why the concern? It’s the renegade daughter of an incumbent president who has his own scrapes with sexual misconduct. There are touches suggesting various past administrations, but mostly it winds up as a hardly-veiled commentary on the choices to be made in this election year. The white-slavery gimmick moves toward something scarier: a chilly, cynical take on the venality of those who command power. Spartan is an aggressive, tenacious little cocklebur of a picture. “How ‘bout that?” as Mamet would say. With Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Tia Texada.

Swimming Lessons

Moving into April, I’ll have reports from FilmExchange, Winnipeg’s all-Canadian film festival,
as well as from Images of the 21st Century, the weeklong documentary festival starting Monday in Thessaloniki, Greece. I’ll also be starting a new series about the great movies, beginning with Jean Renoir’s marvelous masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, just out on Criterion DVD.

Forever Young

Greendale is a splendid example of an older man sent to do a young filmmaker's work. Neil Young uses the simplest and also the most advanced tools to build a self-enclosed narrative world and offer up a hearteningly pissed-off commentary on the mucked-up world around us. Something so oddball and so personal, in fact, Young's characters--old, young, female, male, in the remote fictive California hamlet of "Greendale" -- all sing in Young's voice. It's haunting, and within its 80 or so minutes of dancing grain and powerful music, some kind of masterpiece (or headache, depending on your taste for this sort of one-man karaoke). It's not for everyone, but those who tumble into Young’s allusive, passionately political fable are in for an adventure. I’ve got a long interview with Neil Young in Cinema Scope 19, which is out in a couple of weeks, and you can find a shorter version here.

Fever scream

A burlesque of the sort I almost never enjoy, Larry Blamire’s no-budget The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (in “Skeletorama! New Screen Wonder of the Age!) is both inert and insanely intent, a spot-on recreation of the noted talents of the untalented Ed Wood, Jr. A black-and-white, shot-on-DV spoof of hapless 1950s camp relics, it’s an outrageous effort. My favorite exchange? “Can you tell us the way to the old Taylor place?” “Sure thing, Mister. Stay on this road here. Past Dead Man’s Curve, you’ll come to an old fence called the Devil’s Fence. From there, go on foot until you come to a valley called The Cathedral of Lost Souls. Smack in the center is what they call Forgetful Milkman’s Quadrangle. Stay right on the Path of Staring Skulls and you come to a place called Death’s Clearing. It’s right there. You can’t miss it.” And if you like that sort of patter, maybe you shouldn’t miss The Lost Skeleton. Aliens in shabby costumes, lousy line readings and clunky compositions ensue. The three-minute-or-so trailer on the Sony website is a frenetic bit of fun; it may be the best demonstration of the filmmakers’ imagination.

You reckon?

Scottish filmmaker Paul McGuigan, who was last represented on these shores by the Irvine Welsh
adaptation The Acid House (and directed the upcoming Josh Hartnett-starring Wicker Park) takes a trip in another direction with this vivid imagining of 14th century life, drawn from Barry Unsworth’s novel “Morality Play.” The drama doesn’t congeal, but the widescreen effort is lovely to look at, with much scenery to be chewed by the estimable likes of Brian Cox and Vincent Cassel. Paul Bettany is particularly good as a priest on the run with a secret; Willem Dafoe gets to be all actory as the actor who’s just inherited troupe, including some half-clad gymnastics that seem drawn from his decades of work with New York’s Wooster Group. Still, there’s much sourness about the Plague, grave robbing and child molestation and murder by the rich and powerful. With Ewen Bremner, Gina McKee.

- Email Ray Pride