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

Conversations with two writer-directors with distinctly differently comedic styles: James L. Brooks about Spangish (before its decidedly mixed critical reception) and David S. Goyer about Blade Trinity (who probably laughs at reviews). For daily updates on independent film, documentaries and foreign language movies, check Movie City Indie; for shorter film and DVD reviews and other personal commentary, please check out the Pride, Unprejudiced blogand let me know what you think at pride@moviecitynews.com.

Writing White

"Decency is sexy," James L. Brooks suggested as the tagline for Spanglish, the first of his hyperarticulate yet sprawling "dramedies" in seven years.

Sony shot him down. Still, Brooks got his way in every other respect of his $100 million-or-so new movie which, in the most central of its interleaved plots and subplots, attempts to heighten the underlying conventions of sitcom while dramatizing how two people might find a platonic kind of love out of their admiration for each others' innate goodness.

Flor (Paz Vega), a native Mexican maid who speaks no English, is hired to work in the home of the blissfully wealthy Clasky family, who have homes in Bel Air and Malibu; Adam Sandler plays John, a passive, nearly colorless man who is also extremely successful restaurateur and chef (modeled after the French Laundry's Thomas Keller, whose restaurant is copied in the film.) His wife, Deborah (Téa Leoni) has lost a longtime job as a commercial designer and is, from the first moments, a woman under the confluence of many manias, all of which point to suffocating feelings of midlife inadequacy. In each of his features, Brooks gives his best bits to the bad guys, and Deborah is among his baddest, best creations. (Reportedly, among the many re-edits close to the finish line were ones softening her from harridan to harried human.)

Deborah's lost, unable to nurture her two children (including the splendid Sarah Steele as her sweet but needy pre-teen daughter). John is Sandler at his most sheepish: watching his world hit by this tornado, while alcoholic mother-in-law Evelyn (78-year-old Cloris Leachman, a show-stopping comic and dramatic marvel) offers unlikely commentary. What have Flor and her precocious daughter Cristina gotten into? And is holding together a family more virtuous than feelings of love?

"Happiness writes white," a French novelist once observed of the essential fact that contentment is not dramatic-where's the conflict, Jim? Displaying an immense bounty of optimism toward the neurotic and the blissfully wealthy of Bel Air and Malibu, with Sandler's character less sketched than indicated, the one L.A. chef who hablas no espanol, Brooks still hopscotches from high drama to family crisis to low pratfalls (Leoni's exhausting orgasm scene transcends the PG-13 rating) to funny dialogue delivered with professional timing without suffering whiplash.

But Brooks is a notorious perfectionist, still working the final sound mix even last week, hours before his latest bout with the press. (I'd swear the print I saw still had some hiccups, and Brooks indicated as much when we spoke.) The night before, a veteran screenwriter I know visibly recoiled when I provoked him with the idea that Brooks and Wong Kar-wai work in a similar fashion, fastidious and impulsive at once, persnickety and irresponsible every day for years. "Different results," I suggested meekly, struggling to paper over the silence.

Brooks speaks quickly and confidently but with Byzantine backtracks, reevaluations and more y'knows than you'd expect. His mind seems to work in layers of evaluation and reevaluation, which is reflected in the torturous process for him of writing, shooting and editing feature films. Despite his enormous financial success as a filmmaker, but also as one of the creators of The Simpsons, the years between pictures seem a rebellion against his background as a writer and producer in another medium.

"Y'know, I try to figure that out, and each time I think I won't take as long [to make a picture]. It's so funny, I should have a better answer by this time. 'Cos I come from television, deadlines, where I do it every week. I do it every week, and sometimes I've done two shows at once. I can think of, the negative of it is the positive of it-the result of it. I tend to do research, I tend to take about a year to write a script. It tends to be that way even thought I hope it's not. A couple of times, it was raising money, it was time-consuming, too. The good thing and the bad thing when you do [movies] that infrequently, is that they become so important to you, you become so obsessed. And that's not a bad thing for a movie, for you to think, for you to serve it with that sense that isn't the whole world. It tends to happen that way anyway, things tend to get very distorted when you do a movie. Weirdly so. And you're a little rusty. There's definitely something… if you do two pictures every three years, you're pretty smooth. It's easier to get continuity of [crews] and everything. But the idea that you're rusty a little bit, has its own energy, y'know, it's own sense - 'oh God' - its sense of awe about the process keeps coming."

We both take a deep breath. Is casting as strenuous a process, as necessary to be perfectionist about? "Life gets very weird if it's not the best actor for the part. If you start getting past that, it's some form of hubris in sheep's clothing, I think."

Why shoot so many variations? "I'll try it different ways. If someone has an idea, I'll try it, no matter who. I always think-the great things that can happen when you're doing a movie, because you do prepare, so I always think, two actors and me are coming together to do a scene that day, they say it's going to be like this, I think it's going to be like this-but when something that none of us imagined happens, y'know, if you give that room to happen, that's a great day. That doesn't happen very often, but if it happens two or three times in the course of a movie, it's pretty great."

Brooks reportedly went through a difficult divorce during the years of this movie's gestation, and there are some rocky marital moments in it. "Sometimes the battle is to make it a little more personal, and sometimes the battle is to make it less personal, so you can get more objectivity," Brooks says, avoiding subjectivity. "You're looking for… What I always look for, I mean, I don't know whether this writes, or tells, or anything, but what I always look for, this, this isn't' my movie. If I work very hard, I begin to see some movie out there. Instead of having everyone look at me, to, y'know, about what the movie should be, I say, 'Hey! Look at that!' and if you get them to see it? You're all chasing something. So you're trying to build that thing out there, y'know, let's go that way. You need their contribution to that. I don't know if it's at all clear what I'm saying, but I'm always looking for that when it gets outside me, when it's not inside me. I'm always looking, it's inside me, inside me, inside me, I'm always looking for the moment when something starts to happen and it's outside me. And you can just talk to each other."

And what of his experiments with comic and dramatic tone, which some viewers find to be nicely complicated and others a ramshackle mess? "Tone is hard. Tone. Tone is tricky. Tone is up for grabs in what we do. One of the fun things in this movie was to mess round with tone, to have a picture with a lot on its mind, and get physical comedy in it. Kids always add a freshness to it. On this one, I had a great agenda about the guy character, I'd done a lot of research on the Hispanic characters. I love it if comedy reflects real life. 'Cos to me, it's more reassuring that we'll get through. Things are like always- everything in a movie is much better than what happens to us in life and everything has a happy ending. It's not a real great message to us that we'll make it with our lives, but if they're going through some of the stuff that we have to go through in our lives, and it's still academy, but they feel pain at times? Y'know, we used to do it on the shows, we have 'Simpsons' that are like that, for godssakes."

"Truthful" and "real" are Brooks' key adjectives, which he doesn't really define. "I think you have a pact with an audience on every picture, and I think that the pact in this picture is to try to be truthful and to be real. I think very early in the game, they wouldn't let you do a Hollywood ending, even if I could think of one for this. They wouldn't allow it, because they want to believe it, they want to believe the ending. The nature of the story, what is the happy ending to this? There isn't one."

But he's happy about the layering of Spanish and English, with a few small jokes that only register for those who speak Spanish (which, incidentally, Brooks does not). "If I had to put subtitles on this picture, I would have known forever that I had failed in everything I wanted to achieve in this picture. It would have been a failure to me forever." He pauses, fixes on a point in the distances. "I was so afraid of that, I was so afraid of that, because it was always, it was just written into every stage direction of the script that if, at the point, and this is the great point, you have comedy scenes playing at a certain point where the audience instead of being bothered by waiting for the translation, starts to be entertained by it. I guess my one point of pride in this picture is that one."

Type ADD

Bonkeroo like the grindhouse B-pictures I grew up with - remember Joe Dante's Roger Corman non-epic Piranha? - Blade Trinity is the kind of movie I can sit slackjawed in front of a couple of times (and by accident of screening room schedules, indeed did).

Screenwriter David S. Goyer takes over the helm of New Line's Marvel Comics franchise, which had been one of the comics concern's first out of the gate, creating a stoic, hardcase character for Wesley Snipes from a minor character in their backlog of antiheroes. Goyer's stew makes for a peculiar mix, which may not be to many grown-up tastes. In a contemporary North American city-an undisguised Vancouver with signage in English and Esperanto - Snipes' clench-jawed, tattooed mutant avenger gets baited by newcomer Parker Posey in the battle between vampires, humans and "familiars"-humans who collude. Enter a young, new crew of "Nightstalkers," humans who have their reasons, too, including unlikely action figure Ryan Reynolds (National Lampoon's Van Wilder) and Jessica Biel. Jessica Biel in oxblood leather hiphuggers, wielding an impossibly cantilevered crossbow? (Okay!)

Each Blade movie has a distinctly different feel, and Blade Trinity is a cut-and-paste amalgam of several. Still, what Blade Trinity lacks in conceptual rigor, it makes up for in throwaway mayhem. In his few scenes, Snipes is almost stone, less human than the face on a coin from a lost barbarian society. There's wisecracking comedy with Reynolds' outrageous, swear-laden dialogue, larded with a torrent of homosexual panic - yes, he calls Parker Posey an inventive oath that includes two diametrically opposed "C" - words. There's a slipshod adventure about reanimating the very first vampire; a nicely smeary urban look courtesy of cinematographer Gabriel Beristain (who also shot Blade 2) and a lot of videogame-style kung fu blow-'em-ups (the vampires "ash," or explode into crunchy embers with a squeal or a howl).

Goyer, a trim, compact, goateed man with "full sleeve" tattoos running from just above his wrist to points unseen, calls this "the real world." "The second Blade was so underground and so insular, it didn't even have any humans. I thought the fun moments in the first Blade were when he interacted with or spilled over into the real world. I wanted to make this whole movie like this."

With intermittent obscenity. He grins when he admits that those "jokes came out of Ryan and I getting drunk a bunch of nights and embellishing the script during production."

He got it past the notoriously finicky Snipes. "Well, There was some humor in the first Blade. Wesley had script approval, so we couldn't have moved forward without him signing off on it. He was clearly playing the straight man in the film."

Goyer also goes meta. To explain their mission, one of the Nighthunters passes a Marvel comic to a grimacing, grunting Blade. "I love the idea of Blade being a Marvel comic book," Goyer enthuses, "doing a series of movies, and then Blade holding a Tomb of Dracula comic book, [invoking two well-known comics artists] it's just such a weird Alan Moore-Grant Morrison moment."

As the writer of the Batman Returns script currently shooting under Christopher Nolan's firm hand, Goyer also felt ready to get behind the camera. "Guillermo [del Toro] and [Stephen] Norrington both said, 'I think you're ready for this, go for it.' Guillermo had some doubts. When we first started Blade [Del Toro] was a protégé of James Cameron and he was calling Cameron when he embarked on his first action setpiece for Blade 2. So I placed a call to Guillermo when we did our first action setpiece." A hiccup's-length pause, and he continues, "Maybe it's hubris, but if I'm too plagued with doubt I shouldn't be directing it."

It's too tempting not to ask about the tattoos poking from beneath his shirtsleeves. "I've got a story," he says, of course. "The first tattoo I got, when I sold my first script, was a play on words from a poem I like, 'Not drowning but waving.' That's what it's supposed to say. It's up here" - he indicates his upper arm" - a Stevie Smith poem. When I take off the bandage, the guy had misspelled 'drowning.' It says, 'drowing,' 'not drowing but waving.' I went back to the tattoo shop and I showed him, the guy said, 'Hey, I'm a tattoo artist, I can't spell,' and I said, 'Yeah, but I'm a writer, and I have a spelling error tattooed on my body!'" The head guy offered Goyer a new tattoo. "But I kept it. They lamely put the little 'n' above," he says, displaying it, "like a teacher correcting a school paper. After a couple of years, I just said, screw it. It keeps me real, and reminds me not to take myself too seriously."

December 18, 2004

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