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

May 14, 2004

A veritable buffet, including Troy, Super-Size Me, a few words about The Saddest Music in the World, what’s right with the trailer for Collateral, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s new book, the Olsen Twins’ milk mustaches, and a conversation with Peter Gilbert about his skeptical new documentary, With All Deliberate Speed.

The Passion of the Thighs

It was 3,200 years ago today, oh boy. The goofiest elision in Troy: Now I know where the phrase “kissing cousins” came from.

Brad Pitt plays Achilles in the reportedly $200-million Troy, and he’s been telling German journos that it might just set a trend for guys wearing skirts.

But there’s another “trend” the movie won’t encourage. At the very least, “Troy” reinforces a coy little don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, backdating selective discretion to the Greek empire: in the midst of
all the superhuman hell and hullabaloo, this womanizing warrior’s greatest emotional outburst is reserved for the death of his callow-faced, lank-blonde, blue-eyed, razor-cheekboned young boy
protégé, or “cousin,” as Wolfgang Petersen’s film (and David Benioff’s script) would soft-pedal a little historical shade about Achilles’ various affections.

Which is not to say that Troy is not enjoyable while not especially memorable: it’s fleet, seldom condescending, an almost-16,000 line epic poem reduced to turbo-charged essence, its terse dialogue more in the elliptical style of demotic Greek than simply studio-script scaling-down.

There’s shorthand to spare: A ten-year siege lasts less time than it would take George W. Bush to declare “Mission Accomplished,” and the geography isn’t especially straightforward, suggesting that Troy may be only a hop, skip and a steaming horde away from distant Sparta.

James Horner’s forgettable score, in some triumphant swells a little too close for comfort to Maurice Jarre’s for Lawrence of Arabia, is a disappointment. More importantly, movies like Troy rise and fall on the quality of the acting: whether it’s restrained or joyously scenery-demolishing.

For most audiences, such concerns will be trumped by the visual hunk rock, with ranks of male actors in period half-dress. First, there’s Pitt, who says he plumped for a nude scene to display the work done on his 40-year-old body, a claim also made by Denzel Washington when he bulked up for Hurricane—the last chance to a leading man to doff his kit without indulging in flabby-assed Michael Douglas-style middle-aged embarrassment. Orlando Bloom, looking far younger, far more infernally pretty-pretty than in the Lord of the Rings movies, is slightly less cowardly than in “The Odyssey.” Eric Bana’s Hector is of a piece with his work in Chopper and The Hulk: his eyes, black pools, flash as intimidatingly as the quicksilver anger that can freckle quietly across his stern features. (But is there drama in the slow burn?)

In Achilles’ first battle, almond-eyed and bird-faced behind his pewter helmet, or the many instances in which Pitt stands in profile, his aw-shucks handsomeness and slightly dazed expression seem sufficient. This is a slightly dazed hero, a man who understands duty. There is one direction, refreshingly, it seems Petersen does not have to offer Pitt: “Think of nothing.” (And that is no small thing.)

“I chose nothing. I was born and this is what I am.” Suitable words from Achilles or a reluctant star.

Diane Kruger makes an unspectacular Helen, a blonde zero; cities were burned for this? (One fleeting shot suggests, however, that Helen of Troy was the inventor of the Wonderbra.)

Brendan Gleeson’s blonde-bearded Menelaus, cuckolded husband of Helen, is like Joe Esztherhas smitten with Sharon Stone. Gleeson, God bless his bulk, is far more convincing while more ’s keening for blood than asserting his wounded pride

There are small roles that satisfy, too, such as Julie Christie as Achilles’ mom, luminous eyes, standing in luminous waters, begging him not to die before she does.

Peter O’Toole, as Priam, king of Troy, is firmest infirmity, with his gray, swept-back Irish ‘fro, his stark-staring ice-blue eyes unblinking and cowled in rheum. “You think I fear death now?” (No, and we’ll have a cigarette burning for you after this take.)

Petersen goes at a velocity he’s hardly indulged so well since Das Boot (1981): the soul is in the Steadicam. In the 1950s, studios turned to epics like these—sword ‘n’ sandal pics, they were dismissed as—but Petersen’s far too diligent a craftsman to phone it in. Roger Pratt’s cinematography is suitably sleek, without becoming George Lucas-glassy. Even when depicting digitized phalanxes of troops suitable only the for the swooning, sweeping, backward camera reveal that is CGI’s most effective trope, there’s kinetic energy. What it means, its emotional context as it’s repeated each time, is less clear.

Troy is a conclave as fiercely cordoned as a World Bank meeting. Of Achilles, “He’s going to take the beach of Troy with fifty men?” the magnificent Brian Cox, as Agamemnon, marvels. Cox is an actor who loves his job, with generous, hammy nuance.

As for the Trojan Horse, there’s a mildly Terry Gilliam-esque frisson as the sides of the contraption slough off deep in the city night and the soldiers dart to all corners like mites into shadow.

Commoners vie for the glory of gods, the remembrance of history, but fortunately, these Greek gods are silent, modern gods. No thunderbolts from Olympus. Merely plain speech, the kind that resounds in whatever historical context it is uttered, recorded, repeated, or witnessed: “War is young men dying and old men talking. You know this. Ignore the politics.”

Supersize My Ego

Morgan Spurlock’s Sundance 2004 prize-winning masochistic docu-comedy about how a month’s worth of junk food can turn your liver to “pate” has been attacked as a silly prank and as scientifically fatuous by some writers when it in fact has much more on its mind than the fact that Big Macs destroyed his libido. While the 34-year-old New York-based video producer (whose girlfriend is a vegan chef) checks in with doctors and dietitians in his thirty days of consuming only products available at McDonald’s, it’s about much, much more than that, and my eyes stung from anger as much as from
laughter in its brief, concerned duration. Super Size Me has come off as scattershot to some, but Spurlock’s brash movie raises many valuable questions about corporate responsibility, the educational system’s accountability in the plague of morbid obesity, and the simple amorality of the word “food” having “processing” attached to it in the pursuit of corporate health while consumers are sold nutrition
substitutes. He’s publishing a so-so blog about his experiences flogging the film on the dog-and-pony circuit.

In re: Discovery

Peter Gilbert, best known as cinematographer of Hoop Dreams, directs a deadline-breaking documentary, which makes it to theater screens in several cities to mark the May 17, fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education case, which mandated desegregation of U. S. schools “with all deliberate speed.” While the Topeka, Kansas case is best remembered, Gilbert goes to Farmville, Virginia and another small town in South Carolina and revisits the survivors from that era. (Notable is the late Barbara Johns, seen in archival footage, who led a protest at the age of 16 that led the Farmville Board of Education to shut down public schools for five years rather than accede to the demands of the students and their parents.) The documentary’s saving grace is a turn two-thirds of the way through, when the inspiring stories turn to the reality that economic and racial segregation persists. Gilbert also highlights discusses with contemporary students in Washington, D.C., whose belief in the Constitution and the letter of the law and justice are just as strong.

I talked to him on Monday, his first day back home in Chicago since January’s Sundance Film Festival, where he showed scenes from his work-in-progress, With All Deliberate Speed. Greenlit in October, the 47-year-old Kartemquin mainstay’s movie was done only at 6am Thursday, they day it premiered at New York’s TriBeCa Film Festival. He has only a couple days to chat up the film: Next week Gilbert’s presenting With All Deliberate Speed at the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress.

“I knew it was going to be really brutal. But at the same time…” Gilbert says, voice trailing off.

Like a summer blockbuster, they were locked into a “hard date to hit”: the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which eventually mandated desegregation of public schools.

“Doing a film on ‘Brown’ is difficult because you’re doing a film on an era. You could do a series of twenty films on every part of what went on in this case. It’s so very American, so much about our country.

“One of the hardest things is trying to do a film that isn’t totally like a Ken Burns film,” he says. “ To open it up, have real people talk to [each other]. But it’s history, so you can’t [ignore that]. Ken
Burns is not my favorite filmmaker. There are so many great stories there that you wish you could dive into.”

Financed by Discovery Channel, it’s the cable concern’s first theatrical canvas. “It’s the first time anyone’s ever done a release like this. Everything had to be done, research, finding the [interview
subjects], everything, from October to now.”

Did that have an effect on the results? “There are things in the film that make me cringe, but for the time I had, I’m happy.”

The documentary celebrates the courage of lesser-known participants in the acts of civil disobedience, including survivors of the case in Virginia and South Carolina. The co-director of Hoop Dreams says, that at first Discovery “wanted me to do this classic sort of upbeat thing about an event like this. And I was saying, if I do that, it’s a disservice to these people who risked their lives. They did a
remarkable thing. It’s fine to celebrate what they did, but you have to say [that even in 2004] there's a long way to go. I can’t give answers, that’s a different film,” he admits, saying of the movies’ final third,
about the persistence of educational segregation, particularly in terms of money allocated in various states, “you’ve got to have it be bittersweet.”

Of his choice to chronicle the lesser-known litigants, Gilbert says, “Not to belittle Linda Brown -- she went through hell, too — but Topeka was well on hits way to being integrated.” He suggests the suit could have led with another name, “but they didn’t want the Southern case to be the lead case. There were so many southern Supreme Court Justices.”

Even after fifty years, the recounted stories of bravery resound. “It’s so hard to get the idea [what the perception was] before there was TV in the South, before people were covering this stuff. No one covered what they did. They thought it was joke. To be able to make a stand like that in an isolated community, both of these towns, and do what Barbara Johns did, is so amazing to me.

“These are just incredibly smart, proud, great folks,” Gilbert says of his dozens of often-elderly interview subjects. “We can learn a lot from them.”

He learned from the current generation as well. “I also found in filming in a lot of high schools, those same [idealistic] kids who are 15, 16, they’re there. I love the fact that those kids are speaking to
a group of sixty people at the end. They’re doing it. It’s a great thing. It’s very important that people see, you start doing a small thing and sometimes small things turn into big things. The thing that
blows me away more than anything that made me want to work on this film was just the idea, why, if you were an oppressed person, why would you believe that the law would set you free? These folks seemed to believe in America even more than the Supreme Court did.”

There’s more to come from Gilbert and Discovery. “They’re creating a strand of theatrical docs. This was something I went to them with. It’s really important what they’re trying to do; they’re going from ‘Monster Garage’ to doing social issue stuff. This film might be more conservative for me than I would normally like, but I still think it’s important to get companies to change their identity.”

Everyday Anachro-Futurist Anarchy

“Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass” goes the sarcastic riposte in Depression-era The Saddest Music in the World,” “It’s all show biz.”

Outright lunacy from frame to frame, joke to joke, conceit to conceit, the latest movie by brilliantly precious Winnipeg nutjob Guy Maddin may be his most accessible, after his dreamily lurid Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary and the near-perfect short Hearts of the World. It’s a feverish snow-bound musical melodrama set in mid-Great Depression, with beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) conducting a worldwide competition for the saddest music in the world. (Typical of Maddin’s universe, she’s legless and a suitor captures her fancy—briefly—with the gift of a set of brew-filled prosthetic glass gams.) Dead sons, doubles, Mark McKinney claiming to be a Yankee Doodle Dandy through and through, Maria de Medeiros obsessing on her talkative talking tapeworm, hockey jokes, bagpipers, mariachis, African and Serbian musicians going head-to-head: just another day in Maddin’s comfy, overstuffed sofa of a brain, anachro-futurist anarchy and singular magic to boot.

Thought for Food

Things change. Here’s a piece I wrote marking the handover to new owners of a diner mainstay in my neighborhood, Leo’s Lunchroom.

Collateral

There are several startling sequences in Ali - -especially the opening where Will Smith is jogging and a cop taunts, “What are you running from?”--where Michael Mann and cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki use deep-focus HD video in a palette different from the rest of the movie. I never saw “Robbery Homicide Division,” his short-lived 2002 HD television series, but the trailer for Collateral with camerawork credited to Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, is a most auspicious piece of beauty.

Harvey is More Than a Magical Rabbit

Veteran film critic (and longtime Chicago Reader reviewer) Jonathan Rosenbaum is one of the most
invested voices in writing about movies. When there’s a subject he’s spent decades thinking on, he’s nonpareil—the legacy of Orson Welles, the urban space of Jacques Tati’s movies like Playtime the movies of his friends Jim Jarmusch and Raul Ruiz, with his playful puzzle films. The pantheon-ringing title of his new collection, “Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons” (Johns Hopkins, $35), suggests that he would be taking the likes of Harold Bloom, with some sort of embrace of Bloom’s canonical harrumphs, or perhaps a creation of categories like those of Andrew Sarris’ 1967 “The American Cinema.” While the introduction does attempt to give context for the oppositional character of the cinemas and directors in the book, such as Iranians Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Hungary’s Bela Tarr, Elaine May and Asian masters like the Taiwanese Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the volume is essentially another compendium of reviews and articles for the Reader, Film Comment and other publications (notably the WGAW’s Written By, from which a valuable piece on Elaine May is drawn).

The virtue is having the best of his immersive recent work in one place; the disadvantage is in recalling how descriptive writing sometimes needs a prescriptive balance, particularly in Rosenbaum’s persistent bugbears: the studio system, publicists, and the profit-driven movie distribution system. What makes trawling through his later collections, especially his previous jeremiad, “Movie Wars,” wearisome are the same refrains, about “the reductive canons of studio publicists” and “the mass media’s implied insult to the audience largely by kowtowing to Miramax and refusing to acknowledge any alternatives…” It’s thrilling to read his take on Rear Window as “a moral investigation,” or a roundhouse dismissal of Natural Born Killers, Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction as “comforting lies,” but soon he’s railing at the “cultural commissars” again. Rosenbaum never seems cynical, but dispirited in his quest for audiences for movies he feels speak to “the contemporary world.” There’s also a near-Masonic grid of almost-gossip and cryptic surmise throughout, but all is forgiven when he finds beauty in a movie like Taxi Driver: “T More important, the power of expressionism to turn the torments of a single consciousness into a highly stylized landscape, a universe of pain, makes this movie an oddly ravishing treatment of mental unbalance: Edvard Munch meets George Gershwin.”

Got Double Entendre?

Furthering the brand congestion in the Olsen twins’ New York Minute is a gruesome little ad on page 7 of the May 14th Entertainment Weekly. They’re all grown up, a sticky-fingered aping of a pose of Glimmer Twins Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, an Andy Warhol banana t-shirt on one of the girls’ shirts, and yes, with a set of creamy milk mustaches. Got nausea?

 

- Email Ray Pride