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

For the July 4 weekend, a survey of the fine and the quirky, including the heartbreakingly good Before Sunset, the gratifying Spider-Man 2, the emotional Greek import Hard Goodbyes, My Father, the sweetly deranged Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, a peek into the pages of the film-themed new issue of Granta, and a stack of eight recent DVDs, including the daunting Criterion edition of Luchino Visconti's luxurious The Leopard. Plus: De-lousiest movie of the summer so far.

No slack

Before Sunset (****), Richard Linklater's sequel to 1995's Before Sunrise, written with co-stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, has, among its many modest yet grand virtues, that flabbergastingly rare thing-a generous, and I'll dare to say, perfect, ending. Roger Ebert gives away the last line of the movie at the end of his review, but I won't. (Thematically and emotionally, it's one of the sweetest and sexiest line readings in memory, an ideal culmination of the flirt and tease of the whole enterprise.)

Nine years after their meeting in Vienna, and a planned-for meeting that did not come off, Jesse (Hawke) is in Paris at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, reading from his novel about that night. Celine (Delpy) is at the back of the room, catching his eye, his smile and happily shocked eyes. The camera follows them in seventy-five minutes of simulated real time, in extended, gliding takes as they walk through falling afternoon light on the roundabout back streets of the Latin Quarter. Linklater knows there's grandeur in the smallest of shared, skittery moments. This couple that never was, with dreamy memories of their one-night stand, are different people now, older, oft-disappointed, yet despite underlying melancholy, still straining for a moment of genuine contact. They talk and talk and it's cheek-flushing stuff, hesitation followed by boldness, richly considered philosophical stuff bordering on the pretentious followed by something giddy or sexually forward. Jesse and Celine each have attachments, not least their shared fabulation of how they met, and why they never saw each other again. Before Sunset bears nods to other lovers of talk and Paris, notably Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, but this movie is all Linklater, Hawke and Delpy. I can't underestimate it. The lovely, loving final fadeout is not coy in the least: it's grand, and reminds me why I love movies. Sharp, funny, and hopeful, I can't deny that Before Sunset is a romantic masterpiece.

De-Lousy

De-sastrous. Longtime producer Irwin Winkler has turned to directing in the past decade or so, mostly with projects that foundered under the hands of directors he's worked with, such as Martin Scorsese (Night and the City). The woebegone De-lovely is homely stodge throughout, with hardly a whiff of the "champagne" of Porter's memorable life's work. De-Lovely tries to strike a balance between Porter's affairs with young men-pictured with an old-fashioned, luridly homophobic glee--and his dramatically undeveloped love for wife Linda Lee, played with alarming vapidity by Ashley Judd, who demonstrates not a lick of the radiance she had in movies like Ruby in Paradise. The idea that Porter's in love with love is affecting, believable, and, well, lovely, but it's only pronounced, not dramatized. The framing device of the script finds an aged Porter reviewing the events of his life as he's dying in 1964 as if it were a show in rehearsal, and Jonathan Pryce is his director in the afterlife. There's a danger when the esthetically lame and halt try to get into meta-narrative, or even Fosse-like intercutting. (Call it "All that Yada-Yada-Yada.") The lighting is also an insult to actors and audiences alike. You know you're bored when you start noticing that Kline's hair is sticking up in back and on the back of his hands or his untended in-need-of-a-shave nape and it's been lit to stand out. Is anyone looking through the viewfinder, folks? Among the anachronistic performers having their necromantic way with Porter's words and music are Elvis Costello, Diana Krall, Robbie Williams and the toothy likes of Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette. The script's credited to longtime Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks, which suggests it may be yet another cracked project Winkler tried-and failed-to glue together. Winkler cameos as a bored, wizened director atop a crane on the MGM backlot. As a Hollywood veteran, Winkler may have friends and favors to call in, but one thing he doesn't have is the right stuff to get behind the camera.

Webbed

We were in pain.

An old friend and I were slumped in our seats. Years ago, we'd written a few things together, and we had bonded over a lot of things when we first met, and Marvel Comics were key. So how were the first twenty minutes of Spider-Man 2 (***)? Peter Parker's a wuss. Doormat. Victim. Kinda makes you angry. Grrr! What the Sam Hill has Sam Raimi done with $200 million of Sony's money?

What's he's done is make a movie slicker, sweeter, swifter, and more Marvel-neurotic than the first one's what he's done, and without the central disgrace of Willem Dafoe's crummy Green Goblin. Alfred Molina was surely born to play many roles, but his Doc Ock is a mix of hubris and pathos that never condescends to the role of a man in thrall to a set of hydraulic appendages with machine minds of their own.

Raimi and his well-compensated team spend the money well, creating a digitally enhanced Manhattan that even poaches a swath of Chicago, staging a chase setpiece on the Manhattan elevated-which doesn't exist, except for the landscape they've incorporated from the El.

Of the romantic complications, once Parker (Tobey Maguire) gets out of his whiny, mumpy dudgeon, they're more melodramatic, and what occurs to prevent the first romantic kiss (out of costume) with MJ (Kirsten Dunst) is insanely epic: keep your eyes on the street outside and duck.

Later, there's more of MJ in distress, and of her damp dishabille, the 22-year-old Dunst says, shrugging, "It's a brown dress, it's wet, you know, I have to do some of that. Something for the 14-year-old boys. Whatever sells tickets, guys."

What also sells tickets is Raimi's prowess at assembling all the disparate story and technical elements into a movie that's a generous eyeful as well as both goofy and emotional. There's always something calculating behind his eyes, as he stops sly stories short, and the 44-year-old producer-director still maintains his paperboy-meets-Hitchcock shtick, dressing in dark suit and skinny tie when he shoots or meets the press. (The suits have gotten better over time.)

"It's a life out of balance," Raimi says, explaining Peter's trial-by-errors. He tries to give up his compulsion to be a hero at all turns, but "that road leads to such moral decay he finally has to come back to his lopsided life. Unfortunately, it's like a prison sentence to him. He learns through Mary Jane Watson that he doesn't have to go down that road alone. It's also the story of some young man who is on the road to responsibility learns the sacrifices that are necessary to be responsible. It seemed complete in a few ways."

So it's not a sequel, not a trilogy in the making? "No. I didn't think of it as a franchise, so to speak."

Raimi may be living metaphorically through Maguire's character for some time to come. "End of part one, I thought, 'I really know who Peter Parker is. But I realized I needed to do part two, because I wanted to know what happens."

Working up a story for a third movie, he says, "I find myself again incredibly curious."

Raimi makes Spider-Man sound like "Hamlet" with splash panels. "Peter Parker," he says, momentously. "I may never know who he is. Like your husband or your wife. You learn to love them with all their complexities."

But he can't cheat on Petey. "Yeah, I'm so busy working on the story for part three, I couldn't possibly think of anything else."

So why make our emotional youngster impotent for a long stretch of the movie, unable to shoot his web fluids? "I wasn't really thinking of in terms of how they usually do it [in the ample mythology], but everything's pretty much been done before. I was thinking of a great issue of Stan Lee's Spider-Man comic book and he gets the flu. It was so human to be. This superhuman's got the bug like everyone. He had to fight criminals while he had the flu. I thought this was so humanizing, like any of us who have to go to work while we're ill."

And amping the melodrama? "I think what I pitched the studio to get the job was that I didn't want to make the job about Spider-Man, but Peter Parker. I told them I would focus on the relationships. I would make it into a soap opera."

The producer of Xena: Warrior Princess says, " I love soap operas like Melrose Place. That's what Peter Parker's story always was to me."

Raimi's sadistic streak, a refined post-Stooges punch-fall-and-tumble, is a welcome component of the sequel. He grins. "I didn't go out of my way to beat up Tobey physically, but I think Bruce Campbell is better for that kind of treatment. But I did want to beat him up emotionally and make him suffer and the audience suffer." Of since-denied rumors of Maguire's bad back, Raimi jokes, "I want him to suffer. Oh, he took some those hits. "

And of making a movie in an estheticized, post-9/11 New York City? "I don't want to say that these comic book movies have anything to do with real heroics. These are simple comics with fantasy stories. They have their importance at a lower level. I'm very lucky to be an American and tell these stories. I think the value of any story of a hero is that reminds of us of the good that we can do in the world. It reminds us of what we're able to do. Myth, all the stories of old. They have us happen upon terrible conflicts and problems and if they're heroic stories, they're exhibiting characteristics they didn't know they had, to risk themselves for something greater. We're uplifted, we're reminded, 'I'm capable of that goodness, too.' They show us the way and remind us what we should be."

Begging the question, what should Raimi be, then? "If I was a nobler, kinder, more heroic person, what would I do? It's a great experience to work on a picture like this, you learn what your failings are. Having an understanding of these characters inside out enables you to direct the characters. I don't' think I'm like that noble character of Peter Parker." There's the grin again: "I admire him, though."

There's a scene after Doc Ock and Spider-Man battle in, out of and above an apocryphal Manhattan elevated line, where New Yorkers pitch in to defend a helpless Spider-man, expanding a similarly themed scene in Spider-Man. "Those scenes are similar, yes. In the first film, after those terrible murders at the World Trade Center and the great heroics that came out of those New Yorkers pitching in for each other and the concern and love that came afterwards… In the first film, I wanted to tip my hat to those great firefighters and officers. But in this moment [in Spider-Man 2], when [Peter] was resigned to his miserable fate, I wanted to give him something back. I still wanted him to suffer, but I wanted him to know that they appreciated him. He learned it's not as simple, as black and white as he thought. It's not as cold a world as he thought."

That scene is courageous in another fashion, one of the many action scenes that are almost superhuman in their intricacy. The logistics were daunting even after the experience of the first picture. "That train scene was broken into so many parts and places and it had to be assembled to make the shots. I had to have an awareness of every element in all those shots and how would shot fit with the next. I could shoot in Chicago plates of elements I would need, I would go to New York, I'd have to know how they would fit, then I would shoot of stages where people on trains would fit in front of those plates. They would be composited with those four elements. It was a jigsaw within a much larger mosaic. But I had a tremendous amount of help, a lot of artists."

Raimi's buffoonish comic camera style is a highight of several scenes, making it seem like he also felt free to be quirkier. "Quirkier? I didn't make an effort to make it more personal, I tried to get more in touch with things that I loved about Stan Lee's Spider-Man and the writers of all the stories of the past forty years."

That's the reason, he says, that there's only one bad guy. "I had such a personal story between Peter and Mary Jane and his friend Harry [that] a second villain got in the way of the story I wanted to tell."

One hump or two?

The Story of the Weeping Camel (***) is a beautiful German doc about that very thing: a sad camel in the Mongolian desert has lovely lessons to teach about love. It's the kind of movie that ordinarily would have me running for the exits, but I found myself rooted to my seat at the opening night of the documentary festival in Thessaloniki, Greece. Set in the far reaches of the Gobi Desert, Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni's touching gem draws from the techniques of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, who recreated the lives of real-life characters in movies like Nanook of the North, while also filming unstaged events. The unstaged events in Weeping Camel, a richly photographed drama about an almost vanished way of life, watch over the animals owned by a family of herders. Rich and heartbreaking, it's one more testament to the vitality of the contemporary documentary scene. Plus, those camels: funny and regal, lumbering and elegant, not self-aware, not self-critical, beasts that are so easy to anthropomorphize like exceptionally fuzzy humans.

Olympic Emotions

Hard Goodbyes: My Father (Dyskoli apoheretisimi: o babas mou) (*** ½), Penny Panayotopoulos' 2002 Greek feature is one of the rare movies to be imported from that country. Set in Athens in 1969, it's a bittersweet telling of a 10-year-old boy's coming to terms with his father's sudden death. Dad had left a note before he left that they'd watch the first moon landing together; how would he not fulfill that promise? Current Greek output includes locally oriented naughty comedies with no technique and so-serious melodramas with little storytelling verve. Panayotopoulos', who studied law and later photography and film directing in London, tells her story with subtlety and grace. From etching the middle-class life of that time, to capturing waves of emotions, she's the equal of her creation, her innocent who discovers that he can make his own stories, his own myth, his own reality.

Kit-kat barred

In Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (***), "Hello Kitty" goes to hell and back in a corporatized universe and shares the acid. The free-associative animation in Tamala, mostly in a grayed-out black-and-white palette like a well-made old-time 'zine, also takes in a little bit of the Fleischer brothers antic surrealism in their smoke-smokiest era, a touch of Lang's Metropolis, an attention to graphic design paralleled by The Triplets of Belleville, the meanness of Happy Tree Friends, the ADD of MTV, the identity fables of Philip K. Dick and the cute-cutest of anime kawaii. In fact, it's the cuteness of the characters, their hateful fates and the lovely wall-to-wall pop score than keeps a Western viewer from drowning in the convoluted, perverse, sex-and-murder strewn plot. Let's leave it at this: Cute kit-kat Tamala with the breathiest of Japanese little-girl voices is repeatedly reincarnated for the dominant corporate causes of Catty & Co., which intends to take over the entire Cat Galaxy. Or as the little squeakit puts it, "Another fuckin' day has begun." The songs are credited to "trees of Life," another name for the directorial duo. 92m. For a taste of the design collective's nuttiness-the site's in Japanese and it's lovely--sample here.

Booked

The new issue of Granta, number 86 of the English literary quarterly, has a few duds-who in the world with even a passing interest in movie lore has never seen Martin Scorsese's frantically scribbled Raging Bull storyboards? But exceptionally compelling are Thomas Keneally's vivid unfolding of how the story that became Schindler's List came to him; John Fowles' diaries over the many years of false starts that eventually led to the making of The French Lieutenant's Woman; and most of all, critic-novelist-filmmaker-video artist Chris Petit's wonderful "Germany," an essay intertwining his childhood as an Army brat in various parts of the world, how he became fixated on the German New Wave, and why he became disillusioned with directing movies.

Remote possibilities

Home Vision continues to issue series with the hopes of being a parallel Criterion-I've just written the liner notes for the upcoming Zatoichi Challenged-and a trio of little-seen movies by the blacklisted stylist Joseph Losey are among the quirky treasures. Losey's 1976 M. Klein (*** ½), with Alain Delon, is a small gem of paranoia and the fear of one's identity slipping away; the moody 1957 noir Time Without Pity (***), the first movie he made under his own name; and the bizarre and loopy 1982 La truite (**), which manages to be both stately and unhinged at the same time. An attempt at a tony sex comedy amid the moneyed classes, it's very, very silly, and the performances by Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Pierre Cassell are all over the place. Still, it's an eyeful and Richard Hartley's score has a couple of giddy, seductive melodies.

I'm sorry I missed seeing Teacher's Pet (***) on the big screen; funny and strange and idiosyncratic, it's a neat vehicle for Gary Baseman's inspired drawing style.

Miramax, which mostly releases bare bones DVDs, trotted out a few special editions this month. I haven't seen the Trainspotting disc, which seems to duplicate the Canadian Alliance-Atlantis reissues that Tower parallel imported a few years back. Two other issues are James Mangold's Copland (** ½), a self-serious attempt to use contemporary suburban New Jersey as the setting for a Western that has its lugubrious, talky charms. Writer-director Mangold joins star Sylvester Stallone, producer-partner Cathy Konrad and actor Robert Patrick for a commentary they seem to really be enjoying. Flirting With Disaster (***) looks good on DVD, but there's no David O. Russell commentary, and the outtakes and flubs, drawn from video cuts, aren't much fun. Fortunately, the movie's still memorably screwball.

The DVD of Marina Zenovich's Independent's Day (***) (Docurama), a useful window onto a few moments of Park City history, includes extended interviews with Steven Soderbergh, Neil Labute and Sydney Pollack, all informative in the context of the late '90s era when the doc was shot. Zenovich, whose persona comes off as Annie Hall-meets-Nick Broomfield, has since made two quirkier docs, the stalk-umentary Who is Bernard Tapie? and the charming assemblage of oddballs in Estonia Dreams of Eurovision!, both of which have shown on Sundance Channel. Up next: a bio of Roman Polanski.

The Leopard (****) is one of those Criterion blockbusters that you fear will wind up as the DVD-shelf equivalent of all those copies of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time that used to clutter so many coffee tables. Luchino Visconti's epic, sorrowful three-hour-plus masterpiece has been out of circulation for ages, and the three-disc edition is stuffed with… so much stuff. (Including Burt Lancaster's great central performance: "Marriage! A year of fire and forty years of ashes!") Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno supervised the restored Super Technirama high-definition transfer, which begs for the largest possible home screen to appreciate Visconti's lush visual style. Many interviews, a detailed hour-long doc, A Dying Breed: The Making of The Leopard, and the cut and dubbed 161-minute American release are among the daunting menu of extras.

July 5 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride