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

April 12 , 2004

A big random batch of stuff, including forgetting The Alamo; noting Jonathan Caouette’s exhilarating iMovie blowout, Tarnation at Ebertfest; a few words with Nir Bergman about his heartening Broken Wings; and Richard Roeper in the new Esquire on “The Jailbait Dilemma”: how does a middle-aged film critic keep his dignity while writing the actresses in contemporary movies? “With her fake eyelashes, her aggressive lipstick, her big hair, and her curvy figure, Hilary Duff from certain angles looks as if she's 30. And divorced. And wondering if you're going to buy her a drink.”

Memento Bore Me

In a cocktail party scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), veteran action great Sam Fuller describes film as being “like a battleground.” He waves his cigar, declaring that cinema has “love, hate, action, violence, death—in one word, emotions."

John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo is a battleground, but I don’t know if it’s bloodier in front of or behind the camera. The current incarnation began as a dream project for Ron Howard: an epic three-hour awards grab, pushing the “R” rating for a war movie farther than Saving Private Ryan. If it bleeds, such logic seems to go, it’s authentic. Splatter and slaughter can be “meaningful.” But Disney reportedly had cold feet at a $135 million price tag for a movie populated almost entirely by male characters with the less-profitable, more prohibitive R rating, and passed on the movie. Howard decamped and made the acrid R-rated The Missing, and Disney set their Christmas 2003 release as a PG-13 entry directed by Hancock, a screenwriter whose The Rookie (2002) was a surprise $85-million-plus theatrical success for the studio.

Christmas passed. So many stories, the official line went, tough for a new director to keep them coherent: Hancock needs more time to edit. Several versions were tested, and the one opening this weekend probably cost Disney as much (if not more) than the original version would have, and even at only a little more than two hours running time (minus the end credits) it’s a creepy, creaky, erratic, weirdly dull movie. The anger and stained pride that came after 1836 siege of the Alamo made it a turning point in the U.S. acquisition of Texas.

Patrick Wilson’s Colonel Travis is of a piece with his eyelash-fluttering role in Angels in America, and there’s similar cartoonish casting with Billy Bob Thornton’s Davey Crockett, who, at least, has mastered a kind of bashful narcissism that’s an awful lot of fun to watch even when the point of a scene is muddied. His pained, understated drawl can channel some of the ghost of history. (Still, Thornton’s reputed fear of antique furniture ought to have served him better.)

Within five minutes, despite the efforts of talent like cinematographer Dean Semler (Dances with Wolves) and composer Carter Burwell (Fargo) whose disappointing, ragtag score hardly registers, the movie feels doomed to slowly rot. The fear of this second-rate costume pageant set in for me with the first glimpse of Dennis Quaid’s General Sam Houston, wearing a tri-corner hat, muttonchops and a sassy little Detroit love patch on his lower lip.

Back to Fuller: Where’s the emotions? The fiduciary responsibility to stockholders - to maximize the return on a flawed product - that’s on screen. Sentimental flummery, too, with much chat about the freedom-loving “Texians.” The territorial instinct is strong, we all know, even before watching a story like this one. We bring that into the darkness with us. Land and blood drive men to mayhem and madness. The Alamo means something to both Texans and Mexicans, that’s a given. (For others, the mind may wander, separating the darks from the lights, wondering if the couch ought to be closer to the windows.)

But Hancock and his collaborators don’t bring any consistently coherent perspective to the historical record. And the dialogue veers from the pop-eyed Bond-villain stuff given to Emilio Echevarria’s Mexican General Santa Ana to Houston’s drunkenly rasped, “I called you a Scottish catamite! One step down from an associate pederast!” Characters mutter under their breath at each other: “Drunken Hottentot!”

“Two-bit dandy!” It’s painful.

Exposition is doled on with a spade: “The Alamo was built by yak-yak-yak.” The Alamo is such a wan diorama, it might even peeve the battle re-enactors down San Antonio way.

However loud and contradictory Jerry Bruckheimer’s productions may be, there’s emotion and passion in his overpriced entertainments. The battle scenes have a few spatially pleasing establishing shots from a distance, but once the fray begins, the editing is frazzled, never dazzling.

Still, metaphorical weight comes from outside the movie, from today’s large-type headlines. Is there something in the zeitgeist that compels a portrait of being surrounded and going down to bloody, proud defeat in defense of homeland and principle? To inspire the next rank of soldiers to greater things?

It’s not an attractive metaphor in the historical instant, but an eye-opening one. The Alamo? How about “Fallujah”? “Dying for nothing means shit to me,” Jason Patrick’s Jim Bowie gets to say at one point, and it’s among the handful of rich moments. (The scene where Billy Bob explains why he don’t eat “taters” anymore belongs in a better movie, where its punchline would ache rather than prompt snickers.)

Can I just go ahead and say it? Forget The Alamo.

I liked Desson Thomson’s take in the Washington Post: “Warned about Crockett's legendary marksmanship, Santa Anna snorts with derision. At that moment, Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) loads his rifle, sucks a finger and holds it up to the wind. He takes careful aim at Santa Anna and squeezes the trigger.” Thomson continues, “Is Crockett's bullet going to hit that bellicose peacock? This is a delicious piece of drama, and had there been more of this kind of entertainment, you'd be reading a different review. Unfortunately, it takes an hour of slowpoke exposition to get to that scene. And although Thornton eats up the scenery throughout the movie -- it is such a kick to hear a real southern boy at work -- there's a distinct lack of excitement. You almost expect the Mexicans to yawn, pack up the musketry and head home.”

Cleaning Up After The Circus

Looking for new coming attractions, I wound up seeing the trailer for Gus van Sant’s Elephant for the first time. It’s good.

Paging “Nearly Every Man My Age On The Planet”

Lots of movie stuff in the May Esquire with Johnny Depp on the cover, including Richard Roeper on “The Jailbait Dilemma,” getting some of the blunt zing of his best columns in the Chicago Sun-Times: “I’m 44 years old, comfortable in my heterosexuality, and perfectly content with my bachelor lifestyle. Like nearly every man my age on the planet, I’ve been known to date younger women, but I’d feel like an utter fool dating an 18- or 19-year-old. Yet because of my profession, I often find myself in a dark room with a lot of other men.. in my age group watching all these movies starring all these women of high school and college age, and rare is the story that does not position them as objects of desire.” Chuck Klosterman takes a few hyperbolic shots at hyperbole-aganza Supersize Me! Kim Masters works to unravel the doings at the executive suites of Sony Pictures. And Tom Junod, one of the magazine’s best writers, had many conversations to compile “Jesus 2004: A handy guidebook based on conversations with those who know him well.” There’s a funny ad on page 88 for a new model of Cross pen called Verve; a man is seen correcting a screenplay while lounging about, which has quotation marks around every line of dialogue. Not Warner Bros. Format, buddy!

Tarnation

Jonathan Caouette’s deeply subjective whirlwind of a movie, the almost-no-budget memory marvel, Tarnation, is getting more exposure next week at Roger Ebert’s annual concordance of “overlooked” films, Ebertfest. I’ll have to see his experimental film about the filmmaker’s strange and theatrical inner life again to see if the adrenaline-and-sugar rush I felt watching its premiere at Sundance would hold. Writing about it in February, a week later, I didn’t do its mad intensity justice. But this dark and stormy family story, a couple of decades in the making by the 32-year old that rises above simple catharsis into something naive but also accomplished in its notions of catharsis, through music and memory.

Gotta Break Some Wings

"So how come you didn't ask about politics?"

This comes at the end of breakfast with 34-year-old writer-director Nir Bergman, whose tender, sorrowful Broken Wings is playing around the country. Politics seems like an obvious question to ask an Israeli filmmaker, I say.

His debut feature is political for its omissions, dealing with how a family reconstitutes itself after a sudden, senseless death without pretending to be part of the daily strife and struggle of the Middle East. To not talk about politics is an obvious political choice. "It's true," he says. "I have nothing to say to Israelis about politics. Because they know it all. Each one of us has at least two different ways of thinking about the situation."

The family tragedy in his observant drama is one of the more astute recent movies about grief and survival, a concern implicit in any film coming from that part of the world. Bergman is also good at showing the drab city streets they occupy, the cluttered apartments. My admiration for his curiosity about the lives of others was reinforced when he asked if we could meet in my neighborhood, and afterwards, I showed him the view of several cathedrals from my windows.

Over coffee, he was as serious and searching as his often-delicate movie. "We have no Zen in our lives, y'know? So how do we give our kids some Zen experience, a perspective about life [that's not about competition]. I was a bit like [the young girl who wears the titular wings] in the film. I mean, Broken Wings. is quite personal.

“[This kind of conflict] was something I went through when I was about 10 years old until I was a teenager. I couldn't really understand what it is that grownups do in this life! I had Carlos Castaneda or Ouspensky, they were like my options for escape, giving me another perspective. They don't work the same as when I was a teenager, but--"

He'd shot documentaries, but it took a long time to get his first fiction feature financed. "I guess it's hard to make films anywhere, budget-wise. I wasn't expecting anything easier. I went into stress whether the film would be made or not, and I feared it. I don't think it was hard. It was just normal. It's the way I was educated, it's hard for films to be made."

But he took the time to work with his lead actress, Orli Zilbershatz-Banai. "I did work a lot on the script with her. The mother, she's 42 years old, she lost her husband, she has four kids, she's a woman, no one touched for nine months. She has this new option, maybe, in the story. Her character was changed while rewriting the script, in the sense that she wanted the time for the character to be more vivid, to have more life. I was all the time pushing her down, saying, 'You’re tired! You keep on putting out fires, so you carry your body [slouched].' And she would say, 'I want to live, I want to have maybe this new option, I want to be glamorous, in a way. I had to say, 'It's not a Hollywood film! You're not going to have makeup in the bath.' But she rounded the character for me. When you see her on screen, she does carry herself slouchy, she is tired, but then she has these moments where you can see her potential before and after the film."

He asks me about a serial-killer thriller I'm seeing right afterwards, and he dismisses genre movies. "The truth is, I usually don't like genre films at all. I feel like I've seen this film before.

But he cites an influence a lot of thirtysomething directors bring up these days. "My favorite junk entertainment will be sports films. I could see Major League, I could see that tons of times. I don't like horror films or romantic comedies. When I was 17, the film that made me want to make films was the Robert Redford film, Ordinary People. I watched that like twenty times. I was saying the dialogue. So people could not see the film with me, I was saying the dialogue while I was watching it. I was out of my house when I was 15, I was a bit like thrown out of my house. But I had a VCR. I got some art films, cassettes. I had in my house Ordinary People, Last Tango. I had five, I remember these two. People would come to my house [because] I lived alone already.

“I guess Ordinary People touched me in such a deep way, it was like the way I was going to do a film was to want to touch people in the way I was touched as a teenager seeing this film. I don't think I can see it today. There's too much psychology in it. But I still think it's great."

- Email Ray Pride