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

A reminder to check out Jehane Noujaim's terse, vital Control Room as it goes wider across the nation before we're deluged with pros&cons&otherwise about Michael Moore's veracity; a few notes on The Stepford Wives, Mario van Peebles' loving, conflicted Baadasssss, Jerzy Stuhr's filming of Kieslowski's script for The Big Animal, and a few words with Adrian Tomine, author of the "Optic Nerve" series, maybe the deftest, most cinematic of contemporary comics artists, whose "Scrapbook" of odds-'n'-ends just came out.

 Both Sides Now

In two weeks, the blather starts: is Michael Moore a documentarian? Is Fahrenheit 911 factual or is it exaggerated?

No, he's a polemicist and all the high dudgeon about nomenclature and taxonomy is a bore. But for now the discussion's simpler, as the highest-grossing-per-screen and best documentary of the summer so far is widening its run June 18 and 25, and there's no question when you watch it: The Control Room (****) is a documentary that elevates all the estimable conventions of cinema verite and Jehane Noujaim is a genuinely gifted filmmaker. Control Room is an exemplar of the quiet, deliberate, observant style that Pennebaker-Maysles cinema verite has always intended to achieve, is a major jump from her co-directed Startup.com. Control Room is vivid viewing, as well as necessary. (For more of what I wrote from Sundance, go here. 

Baad Power

In Baadasssss (aka "How to Get the Man's Foot Out Of Your Ass") (***) Mario van Peebles tells the story of his father's legendary (and legendarily profitable) 1971 film, an ode to revolution and the power potential of the black man, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. It's intimate and funny and dirty and passionate and kickasssss.

Who would've known? Writing, directing and starring in a movie about the making and almost-unmaking of one's energetic, contrarian, overachieving father's most notorious success sounds like a recipe for the worst sort of narcissistic disaster-particularly with the reenactment of a scene from the movie where the 13-year-old Mario loses his virginity on-screen. Instead, it's the kind of richly nuanced family story we get too seldom, and one that rips the phrase "by any means necessary" out of Spike Lee's hands. With Ossie Davis, David Alan Grier, Paul Rodriguez, and T. K. Carter as unlikely savior Bill Cosby.

Shaggy Hump Story 

With Big Animal (Duze zwierze) (***), stalwart of Polish cinema (and Decalogue co-star) Jerzy Stuhr directs and stars in a black-and-white 2000 filming of a 1973 Krystztof Kieslowski script as the protector of a newcomer to a bland small town. Big Animal is a charming fable about a truly homely two-hump camel that wanders into a village; prejudice ensues in predictable but pleasant satirical fashion. The furry ship of the desert's a plangently absurd sight anytime he hoves into view, never at home in the backwaters of Poland.

Baby, Grab Me Some Nachos 

Things I learned from watching the unnecessary remake of 1975's not-that-memorable The Stepford Wives (*): 

There's less to fear from the future of robots than from robotic comedies. 

The man behind the voice of Yoda isn't that wise at the age of 60.

 $95 million doesn't buy what it used to.

And: Any movie that runs less than 90 minutes without counting the end credits and concludes in Larry King's studio is a mess.

Frank Oz, whose last two pictures as director were 2001's The Score and 1999's Bowfinger has never been a master of tonal variation-in fact, most of his movies suffer from a professionalism verging on mere mediocrity-and there's not much memorable he's able to do with the grafting of screenwriter Paul Rudnick's campy quips onto novelist Ira Levin's science fiction conceits with a dollop of the dunderheaded, misogyny-tempting bad taste that sank 1992's Death Becomes Her.

The Stepford Wives suffers the fate of many recent troubled studio productions: out come the knives, both in terms of rotten advance word and in terms of cutting the movie down to as short a length as possible. Anyone expecting a titanic stinkbomb is disappointed as well, as whatever's wrong with the movie is buffed down to simple inconsequentiality.

While the preview print I saw was notably washed out, Nicole Kidman seems lit for drabness instead of her usual porcelain luminosity. Oz punishes her with an early close-up where she chews her way through several angry emotions that's almost as painfully extended as a similarly strenuous close-up of Renee Zellweger in Down with Love.

Kidman plays Joanna Eberhart, a high-powered network reality television executive, one of whose productions leads to a shooting spree by a cuckolded victim (Mike White, always the eager psycho). One nervous breakdown later, she and her underling husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick) move to a pristine gated community in Connecticut. A boring suburb. An unmemorable suburb. A suburb that no one behind the camera has bothered to imagine. Enter the robotic Stepford wives, led by insanely cheery Glenn Close. (Why do you want to hide the puppies whenever she wants into a scene nowadays?)

Broderick's as uncharismatic as ever, and even Christopher Walken is uncharacteristically dull as Close's husband and the man who came up with the plan to reduce powerful women to complacent bimbos.

The Stepford Wives may have been intended as a satire of something or other in its earliest stumbling toward the screen, but the result on screen doesn't have enough depth to make you understand why anyone would have spent a year or more of their lives working on the thing, except as a numbing job.

There's simply not enough content to figure out if the filmmakers think they're toying with consumerism, with misogyny, or any other worthy topic.

More catty than funny, Rudnick's dialogue has intermittent zip, particularly with one especially stereotyped gay character, but like his work with the funny Jeffrey and In & Out and the painful Marci X, the one-liners are mostly little more than soap bubbles in a stiff breeze. It's camp without sting, and notably tacky.

Oz doesn't do much with production or costume design. The wives (including Faith Hill) are uniformly dreary, like second-rate drag queens dreaming of becoming Southwestern flight attendants. You can imagine Southwestern's training being a lot like Oz's direction must be: "Be funny! NO! Be desperately funny!"

And as for horror, any half-dozen of Katie Couric's grins are scarier.

But there was one line I loved, heard offscreen as one of the Stepford husbands dispatches his wife after vigorous and very loud sex: "Baby, grab me some nachos."

Skip the movie, but pour on the cheese. Yum.

Optic Kicks

To go from the overblown to the understated, the deftest miniaturist in contemporary comics, Adrian Tomine, author of the series "Optic Nerve," and the collections "Sleepwalk" and "Summer Blonde," has a pleasing compilation of odds-and-ends out, "Scrapbook, Uncollected Work: 1990-2004" (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95). (A quote from my review of "Sleepwalk" appears on the back of its softcover edition.)

 

I'll be interviewing Tomine Thursday June 17 at an in-store event at the Lakeview Borders in Chicago. Here's a preview of what we might talk about.

The handful of people who've seen Bob Odenkirk's Melvin Goes to Dinner (*** 1/2) might recognize the art Tomine drew for its advertising materials, but he's an important storyteller in his own right.

The new book is divided into three sections-comics, illustrations, and sketchbooks-and each section, Tomine says, "gets progressively less exhaustive. I pretty much scraped the bottom of the barrel for the comics, throwing in anything I could find. For the sketchbook section, I pored over stacks and stacks of old sketchbooks, struggling to find enough material to include that wasn't embarrassingly personal or just plain bad."

 

PRIDE: Had you finished this by the time Chris Ware's volume came out? That's a pretty extensive volume of rough drafts from someone I know to be hyper-self-critical.

 

TOMINE: I think "The Acme Novelty Datebook" was published just as I was beginning work on "Scrapbook." I was already apprehensive about releasing my sketchbook material, but seeing what Chris had done made me really consider removing that whole section from the book. I just felt so inferior, especially since both books were coming out from the same publisher. But I try my best to draw inspiration from people like Chris, rather than just succumbing to m first instinct of throwing down my pens and giving up.

PRIDE: Do you stay away from looking at older material and consciously evaluating the "progress" of storytelling or drawing style?

TOMINE: I almost never go back and read my old work. I think most of the progress or evolution you might see in my writing or drawing comes naturally, not as a conscious reaction to something I've done in the past. I think I'm getting to the point where I've been drawing comics long enough that the early stuff really, genuinely seems like it was created by another person.

PRIDE: What were your greatest hesitations about showing unfinished or early material? When I think of rough drafts, I always remember that quote from Nabokov: "To show a rough draft is like opening your handkerchief and exhibiting your sputum."

TOMINE: I agree with Nabokov. I just tried my best to select the least offensive "sputum" to exhibit. I'm still not sure how this book will be received. It could just as easily increase or decrease people's appreciation of my existing work.

PRIDE: You offer up a couple of examples of stories that were abandoned after you drew one page. Has that happened often? Do you suffer that many misfires?

TOMINE: It used to happen more often in the past, but that might be due to the fact that I was a faster worker then, and I didn't feel quite so obligated to stick with a story and figure out a way to make it work. I'm mid-way through my longest story ever right now, and very frequently I'll have thoughts of giving up on it. But since it's already been published in part, I feel duty bound to stick it out.

PRIDE: I've always admired the facial expressions and body language in your panels and larger illustrations. Who's an unlikely influence the average reader might not recognize on your drawing style?

TOMINE: Charles Schulz. So much of the emotion in "Peanuts" comes from subtle facial expressions and body language.

PRIDE: It takes a lot of writers a slow, painful process to determine a productive routine-place, tools, time of day. Are you able to work to a set schedule, at the drawing table certain number of hours every day?

TOMINE: In the past year, my life has gone a little topsy-turvy, and I'm going back and forth between Berkeley and Brooklyn a lot. I'm typically such a creature of habit that, before this all began, I would've thought such an upset to my routine would be disastrous. But it seems to be working out just fine. I think it makes the drawing part a little more tricky, but I like writing in different places. I wrote most of my next issue in Brooklyn, and I actually found myself enjoying the process!

PRIDE: How soon do you hope to get the next "Optic Nerve" into readers' hands?

TOMINE: I'm going to try my best to get it out by the end of the year. But I make no promises.

 

PRIDE: Seeing you were born in 1974, have you turned 30 yet?

TOMINE: Yes, I just turned 30 this week. My girlfriend kept trying to engage me in meaningful conversation about "how it feels to be 30," and it went nowhere. I felt like I had been preparing for some existential crisis all year, and then the day just kind of came and went.

June 15 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride