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

Longer looks at Silver City, The Last Shot, When Will I Be Loved, and quick takes on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Shaun of the Dead, Bush's Brain, A Dirty Shame, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, as well as a lot of profanity.

The Gambler

James Toback is one of the great, unfinished madmen, made legend by his good friend, critic David Thomson, who ages ago offered up a hagiography of the writer-director's "rogue charm... a character escaped from Dostoevsky." Toback's had troubles with gambling as well as completion: despite all the big talk and vast aspirations of the near-60-year-old director, his career has been spasmodic, even his best movies a feverish mix of inspiration and desperation.

Neve Campbell is the pert femme fatale at the center of Toback's latest goof on the equation of love, sex and power. It's one more Toback movie that could be called The Pickup Artist, but the title applies to Campbell's Vera instead of a male lead. Some of the dialogue is flat, but at its best--and there is some great talk in this movie-the language crackles with intellectual and sexual intensity. Toback and cinematographer Larry McConkey capture a loopy crackpot street energy, their widescreen Steadicam capturing what it's like to walk down the streets in Manhattan.

Toback seems energized by this swirling style, claiming to have shot When Will I Be Loved in a mere eleven days. From a rich family, Vera is a knowing portrait of why a smart woman who comes from privilege ought not be underestimated. (She's a not uncommon, very New York City creation.)

Vera's exploitative boyfriend (Fred Weller, at his most ratlike and disgusting) is working up a termite riff on the low morals of Indecent Proposal, hooking Vera up with Berlusconi-like media magnate Count Tomaso Lupo (Dominic Chianese). It could all be very foolish, but things feel right from early on, such as an encounter between Campbell andToback, playing "Professor Hassan al-Ibrahim Ben Rabinowitz," in which two players size each other up in a very adult fashion.

Campbell, with her so-cute kitty-cat voice, relishes her dialogue: "I'm just not looking for any mentors who want something sexual from me" and later outbursts like "Get away from me or I will fucking destroy you!" Vera's sly, and Toback, as ever in awe of skirt and in thrall to threats, gives Campbell a naughty showcase as a self-possessed viper. Who knew the race-and-sex obsessed adrenaline junkie wanted to be a girl?

A Dirty Game

You know who you are, you lovers of "motherfucker." You like Scarface because of the profanity, admit it, it's part of the rush of listening to a Scorsese movie: it's the fucking language! (You know who you are.)

C'mon, even if it doesn't make you laugh out loud, isn't it a rude delight to hear an actor like Tony Shalhoub work his verbal gifts around a tossed-off "He wanted to take skin from my ass cheeks and put it on my face. I beat that cocksucker to death with his own chair"?

Such are the modest rewards of The Last Shot, a foul-mouthed grownup comedy by Jeff Nathanson. Nathanson's been a successful screenwriter-for-hire for most of a decade, working on poppy fare like Rush Hour and most recently, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. (He also wrote for the short-lived, but funny TV series "Bakersfield P.D.) Nathanson makes his directorial debut with this modestly scaled effort, which you should see in the most crowded theater you can. I had the mixed fortune of seeing this dark, dark, scabrous, profane concoction with only a handful of reviewers who didn't seem into Nathanson's cheekiness. (You could have heard a light-up pen drop.)

But with the right crowd in the mood for its farcical turns, The Last Shot might be a jaw-dropping succession of laughs. (Or maybe not; it's no Get Shorty.) Joe Devine (Alec Baldwin) is an aging hotshot FBI agent who's not the brain he thinks he is, transferred from Denver to Dallas on the way to nowhere. Based on a story of a real-life sting, chronicled in a 1996 Details magazine article, the convoluted 1989-set comedy complications find Devine posing as a producer of a movie in order to frame Tareyton-puffing gangster Tommy Sanz (Tony Shalhoub).

First, he needs a script, which he finds in Los Angeles the hands of beneath-desperate would-be writer-director Steven Schats. Matthew Broderick, bearded, is at his whiny-mealiest, and it's almost as painful as watching Rupert Pupkin's unflappable calm in The King of Comedy when Schats blathers about his "vision." There are a few elements clouding that vision, which include the fact that a screenplay called "Arizona," set in the Grand Canyon and along the Colorado River, would have to be shot in Providence, Rhode Island. (For the sake of the jokes, you let pass the characters' willingness to go along with the most insane reversals.)

Devine, of course, gets caught up in Schats' passion for his shitty script, as does an actress played by Toni Collette, whose mid-dinner discussion of drug test urine samples is a highlight. In other small roles, Tim Blake Nelson is on hand as Schats' brother, a Bonanza reenactor who co-wrote "Arizona," Buck Henry as his agent, and Ray Liotta as Devine's FBI superior (and brother). Calista Flockhart seems to be having the most fun, her role consisting mostly of tirades involving how she wants to slaughter the barking dogs in the kennel next door or iterations on the words "fuck," "fucking" and "motherfucker." To wit: "Shut the fuck, fucking up!"

Nathanson cites Carl Reiner and Robert Klane's little-remembered Where's Poppa? (1970) as a major influence on the welter of invective, which has a rare piquancy in a twenty-first century studio movie. (In Poppa, Carl's son Rob Reiner became the first actor to say the word "cocksucker" in an American movie.) Nathanson's not Mamet; he writes in a multitude of voices, and while I have my quibbles with The Last Shot, at least it made me laugh, which I cannot say of State & Main.

Maybe I just admire arias of invective. Here's how Flockhart, playing Schats' manic girlfriend, says goodbye to her beau when he won't cast her as the lead of his movie, shrieking in the middle of a Providence street, telling him she's going into porn: "Okay! I'm going home, Steven, to do porno, I'm gonna get gangbanged, I'm gonna get gangbanged in Woodland Hills!" (She brings an especial fury to the lines.) And an unhinged agent played by Joan Cusack in a meeting with FBI agents describing what it would take to get her over a desk? (As well as "You want to eat lunch off my ass? I thought you were kosher.")

And of course, there's Baldwin's steely calm when Broderick asks,. Did you marry someone "in the business?" and he replies, "Now why would I marry a whore?"

Or as Toni Collette puts it, volunteering in a restaurant to provide an impromptu urine sample in a wineglass near the end of this Disney picture, "The fucking movie people can have all the steaming piss they want!"

Silvered Mirror

Something gets handed to everybody in Silver City, and it's invariably toxic: waste, money, rumors, hate, sex, love.

John Sayles' fifteenth feature hits and misses, but mostly it keeps hitting. The opening scene implies that the movie is going to be about politics, and not as it turns out to be, about how every choice is personal. A gubernatorial campaign commercial is being shot against a line of mountains, for Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), a tongue-tied child of privilege whose father Jud (Michael Murphy) is a U.S. Senator. With political advantage thrust upon him, and with a history of DUIs, Dickie is superficially a caricature of the sitting President. He's "a draft dodger, a mama's boy and a dimwit" who uses the word "wrongdoer" the way George W. Bush uses "evildoers." (The only overt reference to Bush is when it's pointed out that Pilager rides horses, but Texas rancher Bush doesn't.) The scene is choreographed by Richard Dreyfuss playing Chuck Raven, a Karl Rove-like toad, and Dreyfuss relishes the role. A body washes up. "You don't reel it in and you don't let it get away," Raven sagely notes.

It's the first layer of an Altmanesque mosaic but as in many Sayles movies, the script turns into a buffet of polemic. Where Altman often settles for caricature, a playful softball of an observation, Sayles uses political caricature as bait to reel you in for a dozen or more subplots and topics that make him fume, including corporate pollution, money's destruction of the political system, contempt replacing noblesse oblige, exploitation of migrant workers, and in the most piquant scenes, how sex just fucks everybody up.

Sayles wanted the movie to be released at this very moment. A calendar page places the narrative the week of October 28, 2004 until Day of the Dead: or right bang up against Election Day. In this parallel universe, the Pilager campaign's concerned the body might somehow be a message from the other side. Enter neo-noir investigator Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston, late writer-director John Huston's son), a glib man-mountain with a quick smile and an impossible mass of black curls. Huston's quirky performance is uncommonly sweet and nuanced: playing an alternative weekly journalist whose career crashed and burned before he stumbled into being an investigator, he is a man who can charm, who can pretend he is buffaloed, who can be buffaloed. Chameleonic, and fatuous at the proper public moments, you see how Danny can fly and fall. Huston had a side role in the forgettable Spanish Fly and was memorably self-loathing in the dark ivansxtc., but here he is nothing less than wonderful.

Silver City is shot in a sun-damaged palette and a clean, offhanded framing style by 78-year-old former Chicagoan, Haskell Wexler (who also shot Sayles' Matewan (1987), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) and 1999's Limbo), the veteran cinematographer's first movie in three years. But the look's never the thing with Sayles. Closer to his heart, the soon-to-be-54-year-old director's script is filled with glorious talk. Expository, backtracking, double-crossing, speechifying prose: "She takes the broom, leaves the dustpan, story of my life"; "Them?" someone asks when the object is unclear. "Them that run the whole deal." (Sort of like Ring Lardner's "'Shut up,' he explained.")

A growling, wizened sheriff observes of a "Juan Doe"-"He's got that crossed-the-border-jammed-in-a-car-trunk look about him"; and later, of another unfortunate, "He's got that wanted-for-questioning, shot-while-resisting-arrest kind of look about him." Billy Zane as a callow lobbyist, "Power's a locomotive, babe."

An aged industrialist, Wes Benteen, played by Kristofferson: "Americans don't have the patience for underdogs they used to." Kristofferson's Benteen, gray-haired, gray-faced and inhaling mountain-stream-clear vodka at a buffet, wants away from Danny. He asks, "You a winner, son?" Danny brightens. "I like to think so." "Good boy," he says, walking away from a man he holds in direst contempt.

Four times, Sayles indulges a screenwriter's device that he's usually above - having a character speak their final thought in a scene after everyone else has vamoosed-but there's a fragrant moment of self-realization when a woman realizes of Danny, "He was the love of my life."

There's a raft of other characters, including Tim Roth as the editor of a political website, who once owned the paper that Danny's incaution bankrupted a few years earlier, and Thora Birch is a gem as a skeptical young reporter. Daryl Hannah plays wastrel Pilager sister Maddy, and we meet her in flowing yet skimpy clothes, practicing archery in her back yard. "I'm being investigated. I could do worse," she tells Danny after taking him into her confidence. "My whole life is a fucking grudge. I've just been taking up space and emptying out my trust fund." She's a smoky marvel in her scenes.

Maddy betrays Danny in a couple of ways, but on the way out, her son asks him for advise on how to find someone on the Internet. He pauses, leans in, generous to the many faults of his soul. (Another loving, lasting Sayles touch.) They meet again. They double take, but speak. "Sorry about last night," she says, a charmer pierced with a lifetime's self-knowledge, "I get disgusted with myself and take it out on other people." It doesn't sound like the repeated verbiage of an analysand, but hard-won quicksand. She uses that knowledge to charm even while confessing a vein of malice, aggressive-aggressive to the end.

Silver City is not a feat of paranoid precision like the late Alan Pakula's The Parallax View, but it does have a nasty, nasty final shot that is either deeply cynical or horrifyingly just.

Religious Sex

Goin' sexing: John Waters' A Dirty Shame, is a good-hearted NC-17 compilation of far more sexual practices than you probably really want to know about, and don't even ask about David Hasselhoff. Tracy Ullman plays a repressed Baltimore housewife, who keeps daughter Selma Blair, with "criminally enlarged" breasts locked in the shed out back, like an id that wants only to dance for her fans like "Fat Fuck Frank." A concussion shifts her libido into overdrive, introducing her to a world of obsessives who are disciples to tow-truck driver and sex evangelist Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville). Despite its wall-to-wall talk about sex, with not a dram of shame in sight, A Dirty Shame is an endearing goof, in the usual haphazardly lit and framed Waters style, and it's a wonder a division of Time-Warner made the movie. There's no way on earth anyone could honestly have ever imagined this movie getting a rating other than an NC-17, and for any of the producers to say otherwise is just disingenuous publicity-mongering. Better to let Waters' thoroughbred lexicon of safe but peculiar sex festishes speak for itself, and expressions like "cooter" and "sneezing in the cabbage" ring far and wide.

Zomromcom

Fortunately, director Edgar Wright and co-writer/star Simon Pegg were the first to coin "zomcom" for their "romantic comedy with zombies": it's an easy cliché, but a good one, to slap upside the cheekily cheery Shaun of the Dead the smartest slab of comic wise-assery in an age. With some of the deadpan of Mike Judge's Office Space and a little of the elevated dumbness of Anchorman. Shaun of the Dead's North London-set story of love gone wrong and gore gone right amid bloodthirsty undead is genuinely funny. While Wright is no Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson in the pantheon of splatter, but the verbal timing's swell and Instead of George Romero's mall, we get zombies-with expressions "like a drunk who's lost a bet"--running amok at the boys' local, the Winchester Pub, to be met with the mighty fury of a cricket bat or two.

Bright Lights

Rick McKay likes Broadway: as director, writer, editor and producer of the anecdotal documentary, Broadway: The Golden Age by the Legends Who Were There, he oughta. Working for over five years, McKay interviewed over 100 Broadway veterans of the past four decades, and he worries them over his key fascination: What brought you to the theater? What made you know that this was the hard road for you? There's no greater point made in this likeably, intermittently joyous tribute, but the dozens of faces and voices are filled with love for the heart of their art, and there's the occasional brassy gem like this from the mouth of director Hal Prince: "The more you know, the less you know, and I would know."

Dirty Work

Joseph Mealey and Michael Paradies Shoob's brisk, low-budget documentary, Bush's Brain, based on veteran Texas reporters James Moore and Wayne Slater's book of the same name (and subtitled "How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential") is another valuable, contrarian examination of power in our country today, the sort of skeptical work that has all but disappeared from mainstream, so-called liberal media. Karl Rove's dark arts are alluded to in newspaper articles, but almost admiringly, presenting him as a nimble political genius as opposed to a man whose "junkyard dog approach to politics" makes the late Lee Atwater look like a sweetie-pie. (Journalist Moore calls Rove "co-president" and asserts the "mark of Rove" is on everything the White House does.) The blunt litany of ruthless behavior starts with Rove's high school years in Texas years, and gets more appalling as it proceeds. Many dirty tricks are alleged, not all of which are proved. Rove has called himself a "convenient myth," but his impact on politics is not. As a litany of Rove's "greatest hits"-in the Tony Soprano sense-Bush's Brain matters. It's Karl Rove's gutter, we just have to reap the results of his dirty works. The final ten minutes of this sturdy, small movie, regrettably, veer off topic, attempting to link the death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq to Rove's misdeeds. (On a distribution note, this one of UK entrepreneur Hamish Hamilton's Tartan Films' first theatrical releases in the U.S., partnering with several smaller companies to bring up to forty films a year to the screen and DVDs.)

Polymathic Pile-on

Dripping with philosophical conundrums, both in its storytelling and its many spoken asides, Mamori Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a sequel to 1995's Ghost in the Shell is a dour treat. At times, it doesn't seem to make a lick of sense, and there's a temporal track-back late in the tale that seems like the projectionist just slipped a reel. It's 2032. Robots run planet Earth, and everyone seems to be some combination of flesh and vinyl and electrical wiring, and sometimes soul. Batou's a robot detective who still clings to his human past, and he's obsessed with the Major, a character lost in Oshii's original. A series of murders are being hushed up, humans killed by "Gynoids" made by a company called Locus Solus (in the pile-on of cultural references, that happens to be the name of an eccentric and polymathic novel by Raymond Roussel). While the story's essentially unfathomable, and the subtitles are fast-and-furious, there's a lovely basset hound (modeled after Oshii's own) romping in and out the story, and the post-Blade Runner cities and machines of the cities are swoonfully imagined by production designer Tanada Yohei. Kawai Kenji's intense, often lovely score, is a plus.

Dex Ex Machina

The whole notion of Kerry Conran's perky pastiche of a 1940s parallel movie universe in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow made my fillings ache at first hearing. Filmed entirely against blue and green screens, Jude Law, playing Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan, would have to save his world, while putting up with ex-girlfriend and girl reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), while still carrying a flame for Capt. Francesca "Franky" Cook (Angelina Jolie in an eye patch and with an English accent) while relying on the gee-whiz gimcracks fabricated by sidekick Dex Dearborn (Giovanni Ribisi). (Yes, there is a Dex ex Machina moment late in the game.) Ah, but from the first frames of this potential folly, there is inspiration, and joy, and daring, and derring-do to spare in this conflation of all of yesterday's tomorrows. Flint, Michigan native Conran, working with his brother, is a landmark in the future of computer-generated imagery, and for the most part, a lot of fun without wholly descending into the cramp called camp. (Well, there are rousing lines like "I spent six months in a Manchurian slave camp because of you!"; "Okay, I'm a liar, but I don't exaggerate"; and "Alert the amphibious squadron!") His sleekly imagined 1939 is pulpy delight, and one can only hope enough viewers make Conran a marketable commodity, whose future work will take fewer years to confect. (There's a hint of artist Bruce McCall's retrofuturism in some of the designs, and I say "Bully!" to that.)

September 28, 2004

- Email Ray Pride