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

This week's column forecasts stormy weather for The Weather Man; feels the pain of The Legend of Zorro; finds Uma Thurman in her Prime; wonders Where the Truth Lies; and considers Anand Tucker's lavish attention to Clare Danes' terpsichorean tootsies in Shopgirl. Plus, in DVD 5-4-3-2-1, horrors Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist; Francois Ozon's cinema-savvy death of a marriage, 5x2; and Criterion's revised release of Clouzot's Wages of Fear and a first edition of Jean-Pierre Melville's post-noir masterpiece, Le Samourai.

About Spritz

..Pride, Unprejudiced: ..The Blog

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The Weatherman (*) is the kind of sheepish misfit that should be relegated, not released.

After About Schmidt and American Beauty, you'd think middle-aged directors or producers or executives making movies about midlife crises could kick it up a notch. But, working in the closest equivalent Hollywood will likely ever produce to Gaspar Noe's brackish, bilious I Stand Alone, The Weather Man is an overproduced horror. Nicolas Cage plays Dave Spritz, a socially stunted, foul-mouthed, irredeemably dense Chicago television weatherman-fundamentally, a prompter-reading weather monkey and marvel of magical thinking who's also a miserable, shiftless, directionless, amoral coward. Spritz, recently divorced, with his ex-wife (Hope Davis) starting a life with another man, predictably embarrasses two teen children he's as distant from as he is from his father, Robert Spritzel, a prize-winning novelist who's played as a Starman-like oddity by Michael Caine. (Screenwriter Steven Conrad scores Bernard Malamud's 1967 Pulitzer Prize for the "The Fixer" on behalf of our Robert.)

It's the second movie in recent weeks where Cage power-walks his way through a fusillade of patter. In the equally logorrheic Lord of War, Cage, winningly, breathlessly, played an antihero; here, he's dully, exasperatingly, stuck with an on-the-nose voiceover that is neither naturalistic nor novelistic. With the right script, Cage is an actor who can find an asshole's inner dork with his eyes closed, but for its wearisome duration, The Weather Man is satisfied with being deeply unpleasant. I don't believe in the character or his alleged conflicts or, indeed, anything he does for a single bat of Cage's long lashes. David's less than zero: he's still on the page. The Weather Man seems to aim for truth through satire - as in its precious, cynical final scene, which it does not earn-but the filmmakers mistake the unpleasant for frankness. The most notable feature is cinematographer Phedon Papamichael's lustrous Chicago (except for a curiously less-than-photogenic Millennium Park scene).

Caine indicates Robert as a baffled anal retentive, seemingly in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disinhibition rather than a plausible, prize-winning novelist. Caine adopts a weird, wobbly, pursed-mouth accent, hailing from somewhere near Northern Oscar, I'd wager. Robert drags David along as he shuffles through increasingly dark diagnoses. (You could number them on a scratchy chalkboard: "Da-vid. I have to go to my doctor." "Da-vid. It's a biopsy." "Da-vid. It's malignant." "Da-vid. You have lessons to learn." "Da-vid. I'd like to thank the Academy." You know the drill.)

An insistent pedophilia subplot is dwelt upon to creepy extreme, as Dave's son is exploited by a woozily predatory drug counselor (Gil Bellows), and the camera exploits a young actor's proud, undeveloped barechestedness. The leering tone of the boy's near-seduction suggests a succession of failures in the editing room, and the blandness of its delivery is at odds with the fatally charged material. Of course, Danger Dan lives directly adjacent to the El tracks, and a train clatters prettily past on another occasion of Dave's stupidity, when he smashes the predator in the face repeatedly, blooding his knuckles.

Most of the characters get at least one extended marble-mouth of distasteful swearing. "You're a real blue-ribbon fuck," even in Hope Davis' precise enunciation, grates. "That's why I lacked enthusiasm when your cock was in my mouth!" blurted in front of a young girl is a treat, too. (For a movie that is blunt yet incisive about the pain of being a teenager whose parents split, you're better checking out Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale.)

The actors' delivery is often oddly comatose if not narcotized, making an exchange like this even more vulgar: one teenaged girl says that another one's "a bitch." "She's a little c--t." (Beat.) I hate that c--t. (Beat.) I'd like to burn her." The round young daughter also has several scenes that go on and on about her being teased for her "camel-toe," which Robert, in patronizing daddy mode, explains to Dave as "the crease of her vagina discernible through her clothing." (Fuck! Spritzel must've been a writer!)

If you get Michael Caine in his late years for your movie, why would you not grace him with lines like "Mike said he tried to suck him off. What is this sucking and chucking rocks about? What is this sucking and chucking and sucking of fucking? What is this shit?" The answer, my friend, is repeated in the dialogue and probably the trailer: "It's just wind. It blows all over the place."

Director Gore Verbinski has made The Mexican, The Ring, and now he's doing up two sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean. Two big howling successes. But The Weather Man is to Gore Verbinski and Pirates what Heaven's Gate was to Michael Cimino and The Deer Hunter: a dark misfire afforded to a money-spinning director.

I like most of The Mexican. The Ring works. Pirates of the Caribbean is great fun. The Weather Man? Baby, it's cold inside.

Zorro vs. Dieboldo

Not every movie is for everyone: it's the great work of art that manages to be something to most people. With all the niches, what movie will most audiences go to this weekend? The Legend of Zorro, (*) a movie that was made for some large, amorphous audience that does not include me. While it's intriguing that the opening scene is about Zorro battling voter fraud during California's 1850s referendum on statehood-is he battling El Dieboldo?-what follows is mostly pained, strained action carpentry and lowbrow comic collisions, plus an unpleasant child at the center of what seven years ago was a snappy romance between sweet-smiling Antonio Banderas and smug beauty Catherine Zeta-Jones. The train sequence toward the end goes on and on, but it's the cleverest showcase for director Martin Campbell's action chops. (Campbell's last film was 2003's crap Beyond Borders; up next is the Daniel Craig-starring Bond entry, Casino Royale.)

Think shrink: Prime

After writer-director Ben Younger's testosterone-fest Boiler Room, starring Vin Diesel, Ben Affleck and Giovanni Ribisi played Sundance 2000, a New York magazine profile suggested a more sensitive soul resided within, a trained politico who at 21 managed a political campaign, and then turned to movies with a gridwork of New York stories in his head. His second feature, the nicely detailed, often hilarious, oft-sexy seriocomedy Prime, (** ½) is a story where Lisa, a controlling Jewish mother (Meryl Streep), is willing to cross all ethical boundaries after she realizes that Rafi Gardet, her 37-year-old Shiksa divorcee patient (Uma Thurman) who's dating a 23-year-old is in fact dating her son, David (Ben Greenberg).

Coming from the son of a therapist, which Younger is, it's a swell, knowing high-concept set-up alongside the notion that both David and Rafi are at their sexual prime at their respective ages. Younger also excels at using New York locations to give a sense of the city and its streets by day and by night, employing a slightly dark, grainy look reminiscent of some of the New York-set greats of the 1970s. The story's essentially irresolvable, leading to expected bittersweet complications, and Lisa's transgressions, while often hilarious in Streep's hands, are unthinkable in the real world. But Younger's experience of New York life and Jewish-Gentile conflicts, while parallel with decades of Woody Allen comedies, are appealing in their own way, and there's a wooly wit in both his dialogue and performance choices. (And of course, the May-September male-female equation is neatly reversed from the get-go.) And can we just jot down that Uma Thurman is radiant, funny and needs to work a hell of a lot more?

Malice in Egoyanland: Where the Truth Lies

Atom Egoyan's first feature since the heartfelt intricacies of Ararat (2002) draws a murder mystery patterned after elements of the public lives of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in the 1950s from a novel of the same name by Rupert "Pina Colada Song" Holmes. The punning, paradoxical title is assuredly Egoyanesque: Where The Truth Lies? (**) The narrative flits between the 1950s and the 1970s. Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth) were once the nation's most popular comedy team, but something went wrong after one of their charity telethons-a young woman is found dead in the bath of their hotel suite-and the pair breaks up, the case never truly solved. An ambitious celebrity journalist, Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) gets a contract to write a book from Vince's perspective, but she has her own obsessions: the night of the final telethon, she was one of the youngsters brought back to health by their charity, and she remains obsessed with Lanny. Lohman, discomfortingly, plays both child and sexual woman in the film; while she's miscast as the lissome betrayer, she fits neatly into Egoyan's other young, vengeful female characters. The 45-year-old Canadian auteur remains fixed on weaving familiar leitmotifs as well as allusions to other artworks; such as the despoliation of young women by substantially older men; the betrayal of trust at a vulnerable age; the adoption and demolition of personae; trees as symbols of continuity; the oddity of air travel; the patterning of chance; the prominent inclusion of classic texts.

Allusions here include a memorably trippy "Alice in Wonderland" moment where a bright-voiced young woman performs Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" to an audience of children at a charity clinic and a clue that suggests a solution to a murder in a way that only Salvador Dali could love. While the movie's sexual scenes-Lanny gleefully bumping a publicist from behind in an extended tableau shot being the one most cited for the original NC-17 rating, the movie is more luxe than lurid, except, perhaps the moment when the young thrush in Alice in Wonderland garb lifts her lips from Lohman's loins, her mouth impressively glazed with the most viscous of vaginal juices. 108m.

Agony of Danes' feet: Shopgirl

A bittersweet sliver adapted from Steve Martin's novella of the same name, Shopgirl (***) is genteel melodrama. Director Anand Tucker's first shot has a keen inexorability, the widescreen frame floating into a close-up of Clare Danes' extravagant features-full nose, glistening eyes, lipsticked lips-butch as all get-out in some shots, unaccountably vulnerable in others. Tucker announces: this whirlpool we are pulled toward will take others down, too. As photographed by versatile, sophisticated cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (A History of Violence), there are several horizontal renditions of Los Angeles, from the Silver Lake of Mirabelle Buttersfield, Danes' pickup-driving Saks shopgirl dependant upon anti-depressants; the moneyed enclaves of the wealthy, older Ray Porter (Martin), who pursues her without sharing his sense of limited boundaries; and the public-space effusions of giddy young Jeremy (Jason Schwartzmann), a foot-in-mouth twentysomething stencil artist. Genteel comic melodrama throughout, it's an interesting follow-up for the director of the sweeping Hilary and Jackie. Martin's script is quietly witty in all its particulars, and while its age-challenged central romance means the story is not always about Mirabelle but also Ray's inevitable indignities as he wriggles and clumsily connives and compartmentalizes. But the filmmakers worship Danes like Ray might contemplate Mirabelle - a plush object, smooth skinned, limber, incomprehensible, desirable. Under L.A. streetlights as Mirabelle drives crosstown behind bookish glasses, her eyes are smashingly green; her tears when she impulsively goes off her meds because she feels happy are wrenching; and Tucker and Suschitzky apportion more than thirty sequences of camera-caress upon Mirabelle/Danes' calves and bare feet. (No complaint here: it's just the most blatant refrain in the movie.) There are overly earnest Barber-esque swells to Barrington Pheloung's swamp of a score but three broody songs by Mark Kozalek are apt.

DVD 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

5 - Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

"Yeah, I killed my mama." In a twentieth anniversary edition, John McNaughton's debut, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (MPI Media Group, $25) (****), remains one of the steeliest of horror movies and one that will drive the cartoons and cobwebs out of any Halloween viewer's imagination. Its portrait of now-gentrified areas of 1985 Chicago make an ideal setting for the bleak, unapologetic documentary-style cruelty. Few films have been so worthy of damnation. McNaughton supervised the high-definition transfer; deleted scenes and director commentary are included, as well as a new 52-minute making-of and a half-hour portrait of Henry Lee Lucas, whose alleged exploits inspired Richard Fire's spare script.

4 - Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

Other horrors: Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (Wanrer, $25) (** ½), Paul Schrader's film school footnote, originally shot as Exorcist: The Beginning, then reshot under that title by uberhack Renny Harlin, using the same lead actor, Stellan Skarsgard, as well as the same cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, is a little more than a curiosity and not quite a thrill. (It may be a different situation if you've seen the Harlin edition, which I haven't and likely never will.) Working in a restrained widescreen style that in its quieter moments seems distantly inspired by his great muse, Robert Bresson, Schrader's minimalism is hushed where his producers wanted something louder, bloodier, less thoughtful. The intensity of some of the spiritual moments makes up for essentially unfinished special effects and some poor acting: a sustained close-up of a suffering face can be a redemptive moment. The extras include deleted scenes and a commentary by Schrader, which, reportedly, keeps the gloves on, as he's content that his movie was eventually completed rather than recut by Harlin or anyone else.

3 - 5x2

In nine features, including the memorably sinister See the Sea (1997), 2001's memory-and-loss gem Under the Sand, and the glossy musical goof of 8 Women (2002), Francois Ozon has shown himself quietly proficient in every endeavor. Even when a stab at outrage like 1998's Sitcom doesn't congeal or the Fassbinder homage (from a play by the late German director) of Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) is too cold for most viewers, Ozon's work is never less intelligent and always a little perverse in its view of sexuality. It wouldn't be right to call the 37-year-old director an intellectual, but his directorial skills-performance, open yet precise framing, a sense of pace, a knack for ellipsis-and his prolific output, suggest the kind of intelligence that has seen a director like Claude Chabrol through 57 features to date. 5x2 ($30) (***) is essentially five short films telling a single story. Ozon and his usual co-writer, the novelist Emmanuelle Bernheim (who shares credit on Swimming Pool and Under the Sand) trace a marriage from end to beginning, from divorce to happy meeting. It's been done, notably in Harold Pinter's Betrayal, but the quiet, intelligent synthesis that Ozon attempts is to tell each moment of the characters' relationship in a different, appropriate style drawn from film history. The opening segment, in which the divorce of Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stephane Freiss) turns into a hotel room exchange that turns into dark, punishing sex, is, appropriately, modeled after Ingmar Bergman: astringent, clinically framed, with spare decors and built from snapped recriminations and self-hating tears. By the end, there's the exchange of first glances at an Italian resort by the sea. "On my set," Ozon's joked, "we're starting with Bergman, we'll end with Lelouch." Reportedly, there was once a subtitle to the film, "Or How To Live With Someone Else," an amusing idea, as we don't see how they live together, only their moments of greatest emotion-meeting, childbirth, marriage, divorce. There's a lot of dangerous talk about the idea of infidelity, suggesting it's an unnatural state for man, or an unnatural one for Ozon's protagonist, who hints at other feelings. Closer, of course, is a recent movie of steely ellipsis and brimstone retribution, but Ozon seems to adopt a more neutral stance, striving for a more enigmatic mood, a more suggestive sense of how we live apart even when we live together.

2 - Wages of Fear

Criterion updates its 1999 edition of H.-G. Clouzot's tense classic of mercenaries transporting explosives across an unforgiving landscape, Wages of Fear (Criterion, $40) (****), while retaining spine number 36. A second disk not in the original release includes a 2004 documentary, "Henri-Georges Clouzot: An Enlightened Tyrant," and "Censorsed, an analysis of the cuts made in the 1955 US release.

1 - Le samourai

Nouvelle noirist Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 steely masterpiece of psychological detachment, Le Samourai (Criterion, $30), theatrically reissued in 1996, is finally on US DVD. Melville's movies are hushed, deadpan abstractions of space and gesture, and his blunt, efficient cutting of shootout scenes are among the glories of precise, elegant filmmaking. Men with hats. Men with guns. In Le Samourai, Alain Delon, perhaps that day's handsomest man on earth, swaddled in an immense trenchcoat, hiding deep blue pools of blankness under the brim of a fedora, stares out into the Parisian drizzle through a rain-blurred windshield, inserting keys from a ring until he finds the one that fits. It may be one of my 25 favorite films. Melville was alternately sentimental and unsentimental: "I don't know what will be left of me fifty years from now," he told interviewer Rui Nogueira in 1970. "I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and cinema probably won't even exist anymore. I estimate the disappearance of cinema... around the year 2020, so in fifty years there will be nothing but television. [I'll] be happy if I have one line devoted to me in the Great Universal Encyclopedia of the Cinema... I'm not ambitious, I don't want to be something; I have always been what I am, I haven't become anything; but I have always had this feeling that ambition in one's work is an absolutely justifiable thing." Extras include archival interviews with Melville and his actors, improved English subtitles and essays by David Thomson and John Woo, as well as excerpts from Nogueira's book-length interview.

October 31 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride