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

May 5, 2004

Heart attacked

With the second weekend drop-off for 13 Going On 30, I wonder what sort of romantic comedy will be the next breakthrough with audiences — it wasn’t Laws of Attraction, and I still don’t know what kind of oddity the perversely cast New York Minute will turn out to be.

Despite resemblances to many, many movies that have come before, I still like Gary Winick’s studio debut. Are Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo sublimely dorky together? Or am I just a sucker for photogenic dorkiness on screen?

In a suburban house on her thirteenth birthday in 1987, little Jenna Rink dreams of a life in New York, culled from the pages of her favorite magazine, a post-teen rag called Poise. Someday, she hopes, she’ll be like one of the slick’s headlines: “30, and flirty and thriving." A little bit of wishing dust, a bump of the head, and she wakes up in modern-day Manhattan, an editor of the very same Poise. And it’s just like high school, except with car service.

Garner plays the grown-up Jenna with a 13-year-old’s gangly, adolescent mayhem in her Alias-toned body. Jenna acts out like a confused but eager puppy for whom the world is made up only things to chase, air to leap up and down in. But her co-workers think she’s mad: it turns out the grown-up Jenna is a cruel, shallow, selfish person nothing like the eager one now inhabiting her body. She meets up again with her best male friend from next door, Matt Flamhaff, a geeky kid photographer who’s grown up to be Mark Ruffalo. He remembers her meanness, even if Jenna doesn’t.

The weird premise has dark undercurrents, but what matters mostly is the charm of the performances and the marshaling of dimples, including the invaluable Judy Greer as her cynical best friend and co-worker and Andy Serkis (yes, Gollum) as their editor. Get past that prevailing critical canard, the “it’s not groundbreaking” insistence on novelty, and it’s a delight.

Take, for instance, a musical number that’s shot in an exceptionally casual fashion, when Jenna incites a bored room of jaded New Yorkers into dancing to a dumb song from their youth. Director Gary Winick doesn’t push it as far as he might, but the moment’s tingly. (Much like her first glimpse of her adult shoe closet or when she inhales a second pina colada too many.)

13 Going On 30 is the seventh feature from the 43-year-old director, coming right after Tadpole – “this film I did that did well at Sundance.” He’s a producer as well, with the company he heads, InDigEnt responsible for such movies as Pieces of April and Wim Wenders’ upcoming Land of Plenty.

“I was offered a lot of romantic comedies and I was wanting to do a Hollywood film, but feeling that if I could do a romantic comedy that was about something, I could do a better job,” the stop-and-start
talker tells me. “It really wasn’t the body-switching that appealed to me, but that it was about a character who desperately wanted something that she thought would make her happy, and getting it, realizes that’s not the person she wants, thanks to the conceit of the movie, she gets a chance to do it over again.

“I’d like to take any film that I do,” he continues, “and elevate it with honesty and emotions and relationships. Nils Mueller [his friend and screenwriter of Tadpole] who I work with all the time got to
rewrite it in a way that I hope heightens that. I think Revolution [Studios, the producers were] a little afraid that, uh-oh, I was going to turn this into kind of an art film, and my response to that is, ‘You couldn’t turn this [story] into an art film even if you tried!’”

He didn’t know Garner's work. “They sent me a couple of tapes of Alias and… I kind of didn’t get that show. Ethan Hawke, who I did two films with at InDiGent, but I was never able to follow them all the way through except the one he was in,” Winick, always quick to share credit, says. “Clearly, she’s a great dramatic actress,” he enthuses, but I didn’t know if she was a comedic actress, that was totally a leap of faith. There was a mutual friend of ours who also said she was funny, which doesn’t mean you’re a comic genius, but… Once Ellen told me that and once I met [Jennifer], and we laughed a little bit, I’m like, ‘Great, this is gonna be a great thing.’”

The contortions of the plot settle nicely (despite a resemblance to the contrivances of the baleful The Butterfly Effect). “When Nils came up the wishing dust, that was a big whew. I mean, look, Billy
Wilder says ‘Every film starts with a coincidence.’ This one starts with a huge coincidence! The nice thing is that the actual bones of the movie were in place. Thirteen gets her wish, finds out she doesn’t like who she is and gets to go back and do it over again. The plots are easy on these kinds of films, because it’s the same plot in every movie!” He laughs.

He wanted Ruffalo to commit without reading the script. “He was ready to do a romantic lead and of course he couldn’t be Cary Grant because [his character] is Matt Flamhaff” (seen as a chubby teenager called “The Beaver”).

Robert Zemeckis’ customary cameraman, Don Burgess, gives the New York exteriors an admirable polish, unlike the mini-DV murk depicting the great locations in Tadpole. Winick also says he had the trust of studio head Joe Roth after successful previews, and was allowed to reshoot the beginning and ending to strengthen the story. “I shot for another nine days,” he says, a luxury lifelong New Yorker Woody Allen once had but no longer is offered.

“I know, see, I’m the new Wood —“ He stops himself from saying even one more word, with the biggest grin.

We laugh. “Or not!”

Riverrun Past Adam

The beauty of sadness: a rare thing in movies nowadays.

In Young Adam, David Mackenzie’s lush, pained adaptation of Scottish Beat author Alexander Trocchi’s 1953 novel, Ewan Macgregor plays Joe, a Glasgow writer who’s chucked his typewriter into the drink, abandoned his devoted girlfriend (Emily Mortimer) and given himself over to a rough life. There’s cruelty in his eyes. He keeps yap shut, taking physical work on a coal barge in the city’s River Clyde. It’s run by Les (blustery, stolid Peter Mullan), whose wife Ella (the great Tilda Swinton, squintily simmering) is soon his newest creation.

The movie got an NC-17 for its intensity, if not its sexual explicitness, and it’s one of the most daring, richest, most astute, most compelling portraits of psychological abuse and emotionally sadomasochistic bonds in relationships in ages. It’s oddly timeless, with Trocchi’s tragic 1950s existentialist despair seeming utterly contemporary about the human need to connect.

All the characters in touch, but they’re still lonely despite human contact. “Sex coming out of that,” Mackenzie concurs, “You know why they’re doing it. They’re reaching out for a tiny bit of warmth that’s available.”

They’re not modern-day fantasists. People can hide inside their loneliness today. Media, pornography, any number of pursuits that aren’t about skin-to-skin. It seems quaint, almost, that these characters who are lonely, are making contact. Even Les has got his mates at the pub. What’s the difference between then and now, how people deal with their loneliness, I wonder? “C. S. Lewis said we read to know we’re not alone,” the fiercely articulate Swinton says. “Which is interesting, in relation to Joe, the artist, the writer, throwing his typewriter into the canal and kind of giving up, giving up the idea of reaching out. He goes for loneliness, in a way, doesn’t he?”

There are people who choose to be isolated, I agree, to secret themselves from the world. Whether you grew up an only child, or there was a tragedy, and for years someone mourns for too long. It’s fascinating that Ella, when she starts defining and confining things once Les is out of picture. Suddenly it’s “we” will do this; “we” will do that. There’s a definition. Joe doesn’t react, really, other than shutting himself off from the passion they’d shared as an illicit couple. “What we’ve often talked about is the threesome, as it were, they’re engaged in, from early on, that’s the deal they’re into,” Mackenzie says. “And then when Les leaves, the landscape changes and it becomes something different. Because Ella needs at least one man to run that barge, to work that barge —“ He laughs. “She needs to grab on and make sure that now Les is gone, that Joe stays. She goes about it the wrong way, making her plans. We always talked about the idea that they’re walking a tightrope, having the adulterous affair. Then when that’s over and they’re just having a relationship, she starts putting
her feet on the ground and reaching out —“

Swinton interjects, “Even further than that, my contention is always that you only really ever get found out if you want to be, whether consciously or unconsciously. She arranges it, Les finding it. And at
that point, as David says, it’s blown. Because the triangle doesn’t work anymore.”

“But it’s interesting, the search for definition,” Mackenzie continues. “I’ve often done that, we seek to define ourselves. We’re always trying to define and redefine. That’s when we start getting in trouble. When we’re floating in an undefined space, you’re closer to being, in some way, a receptacle for some kind of truth. It seems that when you start boxing yourself in, trouble starts occurring.”

It seems a constant, there’s something clandestine, when it no longer has to be hidden, you become less attractive, you’re not bringing the taboo, you’re just the regular person, the candidate to be a mate. “A very different game, isn’t it?” Mackenzie says, cards close to his chest.

“I think it has as much to do, though, with the idea of articulacy and inarticulacy,” Swinton says. “So we can see that what Joe is looking for, however unconsciously it may be, is some kind of inarticulacy. He throws his intellect into the canal, he throws fiction along with it and he goes looking for something authentic. And he kind of buries himself in the physical world, in labor and life and in this physical relationship with this extraordinarily inarticulate woman with whom he doesn’t speak at all. The more they talk to one another, the more she talks to him, the more the gilt comes off the gingerbread. Because inarticulacy is actually what he’s in it for. She’s in it for a different reason. She’s not looking for the same thing. But I love that idea, just reframing what you were saying, the second things become articulated, not just defined, but actually articulated, literally, and told, they can actually disappear.”

Say something aloud, put a name to it, the magic is gone. “Yeah,” she says. “It always amused me in the story when after they’ve had the first encounter by the canal-side that Joe starts talking about [Les] discovering that body. And Joe has probably said a grand total of, say, six sentences to her in the course of the film. She says, “You’ve done enough talking for one night!”” They both laugh.

“Yeah, yeah,” Swinton says. “Sex is another way of having a conversation.”

[I hope to post more of my conversation with Mackenzie and Swinton soon.]

Holy in One

Jim “Our Lord and Savior” Caviezel follows his role in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ with another role that calls upon him to excel as a gape-mouthed gawper. Plus it’s about golf! Playing Bobby Jones, a real-life golfer who never turned pro—of course, you will hear the line, “Money will ruin sports someday”—and who founded the Augusta National Golf Club (attacked in recent years by the New York Times for its exclusionary membership policy).

The movie’s producers describe the real life Jones this way: “A dashing smile. Impeccable integrity. Unrivalled intensity. Legendary wit and intelligence. An epic passion for life, born out of adversity.” And in writer-director Rowdy “Road House” Herrington’s hands? Jones—Caviezel, that is—is a limp noodle with a brow seemingly furrowed by gastric distress, and for most of the picture, hair in a red-dyed bowl cut, parted in the middle, making him look like he’s auditioning to be a replacement Shemp for a
Stooges movie. Plus it’s about golf! Herrington does not succeed in making the pursuit seem interesting, except in the fleeting, modest hints (in the mouths of disapproving characters) that it is an excuse for business deals to be made out in the wide open under the sky where no one but the deal-makers can be heard.

Ho Schooling

The strangest kind of movie to find a way to describe is one that you really, really like, that you're really, really rooting for, that somehow never rises above a scene-to-scene success. Such is Mean Girls, the verbally sparkling and sociologically apt teen-envy comedy that's Tina Fey’s first produced script for the big screen. Freaky Friday (2003) director Mark Waters -- whose brother, Daniel Waters, wrote Heathers, one of the progenitors of the ever-popular genre, still gets the most good bad taste out of PG-13 boundaries. Try not to let anyone let you in on one inspired sight gag that comes out of nowhere, that took the teen preview audience at my preview's breath away and had them gasping for five minutes. Lindsay Lohan plays a home-schooled student who transfers to Chicago suburban North Shore High School, and has to decipher the tribal rites of her new jungle. Love, liquor, life: it's all there, with an embrace of multiethnic and multicultural realities that's at once lightly jokey but also a big sloppy kiss. And forget the rotten coming attractions: for once someone's saved a worth of mirth for the movie itself. With Fey, Lacey Chabert, Rachel McAdams, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler.

Far From Home Economics

Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2003 The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) is a lovely study in rainy ambiguity. Partaking of the same beauty as mystically-minded Russian directors like Andrei Tarkovsky,
Zvyagintsev's patient and puzzling fable of sons, fathers, legacy, landscape is an avatar of a rebirth of a kind of arthouse cinema that seemed to have died away. Yet while its visual and thematic vocabularies resemble movies that have come before, its post-Soviet anomie, its coiled performances, strikingly featured faces, sound design and choices of music make it an utterly contemporary gem of
cinema.

Legs Wide Open

(Choses secretes) French filmmaker Jean-Claude Brisseau’s films (such as Sound and Fury) tend to the subterranean, dramatizing eruptions of desire in ordinary life. Secret Things, Cahiers du Cinema’s 2002 film of the year, is no exception, a fierce little fable, sweetly stylized and hardly realistic, about sexuality, gender, power, and office politics. Two women definitely not of privilege--a stripper (Coralie Revel) and a bartender (Sabrina Seyvecou)— wile their youth and sexuality into increasingly intense sex-‘n’-manipulation and soon, in competition with a sexual shark in the bank where they both work, into an almost-operatic, post-Eyes Wide Shut costumed orgy. Dark, funny,
willing to tempt becoming risible, sexy and blunt, Secret Things is elegant and naughty at once. Allegorical overtones? (Check.) A cocked snoot at upper-class decadence? (Check.) A frighteningly confident, damp, subjective, lush, nutty eyeful? (Check!) Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl) seems a mad, indigestible essayist by comparison.

Living Daylights

(Io Non Ha Paura) Gabriele Salvatore's lyrical dead-of-summer thriller, I'm Not Scared, from a boy's point-of-view in an Italian rural village is dead-on terrific. Without resorting to voice-over, a recurrent tic
of movies following the inner lives of children, Salvatore suggests childhood as a time where the coming of awareness costs dearly. Ten-year-old Michele (the gifted Giuseppe Cristiano) and his small sister while away the end of a deceptively picturesque season, and the beauty of Italo Petriccione's cinematography suggests more than the surface metaphor of childhood’s end, something eternal that grows more burnished in memory. The look's not nostalgic, but instead one that aches with the sensation that something is coming to an end. That something is innocence, when Michele discovers a boy his own cowering in a pit near an abandoned farm, a captive who takes him for his "guardian angel." How can Michele tell his recently returned father about his strange new friend who fears sunlight and raccoons? And how would he face it if papa were one of the bad guys? Memorable in its own right, I’m Not Scared is also a lovely rendition of Niccolò Ammaniti's taut page-turner of a novel, keeping honorably to the point-of-view of Michelle, and the insistent, strings-heavy score by Ezio Bosso and Pepo Scherman is more affecting than one would might expect.

Love Lost

Finally! A 2004 release that’s less accomplished than Lana’s Rain! One of the first releases from Edward R. Pressman and John Schmidt’s low-budget digital-video initiative, ContentFilm, Robert
Parigi’s Love Object is more intellectual than smart, attempting to satirize a thing or two about obsession, objectification and pornography but primarily wallowing in disgust. Kenneth (blank-eyed
Desmond Harrington) is a loner technical writer who fixates on a “life-like” sex doll he orders on the internet, then confuses her with newly hired assistant Lisa (Melissa Sagemiller, resembling a healthier Gwyneth Paltrow). In the movie’s press notes, Parigi invokes a number of smart notions about the solitary male mind, but the results on screen grow increasingly repellent rather than insightful. There’s too little distance from the loathsome behavior and nasty bits of torture. Early DePalma it ain’t, nor Polanski’s The Tenant, or even Donald Cammell’s The Demon Seed, which Parigi’s press kit cites and whose movie could stand being more like. Better luck, one hopes, with the next ContentFilm entry, David Gordon Green’s Undertow, slated for later this year.

Blazing Addled

With less than a day to digest Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, I still not sure if it’s a terrific portrait of disorientation or a genuinely good movie and an inventive work of brutal grace. Denzel Washington is Creasy, a troubled mercenary who’s turned to being a bodyguard. Shot on location in Mexico City, it’s an unceasing eyeful. Coming from the producer of such hyper-stylized movies as Brazil and Fight Club, you could also say it takes place in central Milchan City (as in Arnon). Creasy’s current assignment is to prevent the potential kidnapping of 10-year-old Pita (Dakota Fanning), the daughter of a Mexican heir (Marc Anthony) and American wife Radha Mitchell. He seems to have one friend,
former colleague Christopher Walken.

Washington plays Creasy as a man whose stare could dry up a bottle of Jack Daniels; Walken is his usual invaluable, inexpressible self, haunted and hilarious, and Fanning, as the child in jeopardy, has a smile filled with little chopped up teeth like five miles of bad road lit up by ten miles of bright light. I’d just been re-reading Jonathan Rosenbaum on prolific experimentalist Raul Ruiz in his new collection, and it was genuinely odd to consider than Scott seems to be trafficking in similarly inventive states of perplexity and beauty in this violent story of revenge and Hollywood-style redemption. For instance, there’s a consistent play with the style of subtitles that’s one more inventive complication. Man on Fire (itself a remake of a feature made from an Italian novel by Milchan in 1987) at the very least has the conviction of its blurriness and bleariness and jumpiness. Decadence or subversion? The same question was bandied about regarding Fight Club and it’s valid here, too, particularly with how Scott & Co. redefine grime and some of the inventive mayhem Creasy visits on his victims. Give me a few days. With Giancarlo Giannini, Rachel Ticotin.

Arthur Theory

Free monthly Arthur has boasted a lot of interesting writing in recent issues, and number ten, out in several cities now, has a terrific interview of Guy Maddin by Kristine McKenna. In a few weeks, you’ll be able to download a low-res PDF of the issue at their site. In the meantime, check out issue nine.

- Email Ray Pride