Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Strange days afoot here at the Labs. Things are changing. Getting complicated. Knowles knows some of it, but not all of it, and I’ll try and keep it that way until I can tell all of you. Hell, even I don’t quite have a handle on all of what’s going on, but I can tell you this... time is becoming tighter and tighter, and if I’m going to keep current, I’m going to have to get faster about this.
Today, I want to look at four films that I saw in recent days, each of them very different. Two of them are, I think, a fairly great films, among the year’s finest. One is unfairly maligned, if slight, the victim of release date shuffle. And the last... well... read on, baby...
AUTO FOCUS
So we’re hanging out the other night and my girlfriend turns to me and asks, sweet as can be, “Do you have any porno movies?”
I don’t know what the right answer to that question is. I mean, I’m a guy. I’m in working order. Of course, the answer is yes. Nothing excessive. I haven’t had to hire extra storage space to deal with my porn stash. It’s just a few DVDs. But like every guy, I’ve got one.
And you... the one who just said, “Not me”? You do, too. You just don’t want to admit it. Go ahead, though. I’m not going to judge you for it. It’s normal. It’s natural. It’s just one of those things.
That’s the mantra that Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) clings to as he rides his own obsessions all the way into oblivion over the course of Paul Schrader’s blistering, brilliant slice-of-lowlife. “I’m normal.” It’s the glue that holds together Michael Gerbosi’s wonderful screenplay, loosely adapted from Robert Graysmith’s nonfiction book THE MURDER OF BOB CRANE. “I’m normal.”
And, in his way, he is.
When we meet Crane at the start of the film, he’s on his way up. Slowly. He’s got a morning show on the radio in LA. He’s a drummer, fond of jazz more than anything, and he’s trying to establish himself as an actor. Crane’s got a certain smarmy charm, and the way Kinnear inhabits the role with authority from the very first scene is an announcement. This film works because of several perfect matches of talent and task, Kinnear’s casting being one of the key ones. His first gig that got him attention, TALK SOUP, was one of those vehicles where it doesn’t matter what the show is about. It was Kinnear that made it interesting. It was a chance for him to mug mercilessly for a half hour at a time. He’s got that same perfect Slimy Game Show Host thing that Crane did, and when he moved into movies, many were skeptical that he had anything of substance to offer. His work in AS GOOD AS IT GETS was promising, and he easily steals MYSTERY MEN in his all-too-brief appearance. NURSE BETTY might well be my favorite work of his to date. There’s a great early scene where he meets Betty at a party and he manages to completely engage her without shattering her delusion, never aware of what he’s doing. He plays what he believes is a game, and Kinnear took that potentially cheesy moment and turned it into a window into this guy. It’s wonderful work.
And now, here he is, staring this nightmare image of himself square in the face. He plays the glib, charming guy who dug himself into a role that everyone knew, the guy who wants to break out and be something more. He’s been there. He’s faced those same decisions. That part of Bob Crane, he’s got down cold, and it allows him to focus on bringing the other side of Bob Crane to vivid, disturbing life. It allows him to play a role of greater nuance and range than anything he’s done so far, and to make it look easy. Kinnear doesn’t really look like Bob Crane, but 20 minutes into this movie, I didn’t remember what Bob Crane looked like. This guy I was watching was all the Bob Crane I knew. He’s flawed, sure, but he’s not a bad guy at all. In fact, it’s easy to see why people are drawn to him. Kinnear turns the charisma up all the way in the first part of the film. This is a guy who explodes as a television star, and who realizes full well how to enjoy all the possible benefits that entails. He’s having fun.
Then comes John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe). Then comes the video equipment. And then comes the kink.
One of the things the movie does so expertly is trace how something goes from being an interest to a hobby to a fetish to an addiction. It’s a very meticulously charted slide, and Schrader is the perfect choice as director here. He doesn’t use this material to titillate, and he also doesn’t judge Bob Crane. Instead, he simply observes. The film is exquisitely shot by Fred Murphy (FIVE CORNERS, THE DEAD, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES), and the camera is an unblinking eye here. As is fitting with a film that deals with a visual fetish, this movie seems to be primarily concerned with capturing those ugly little moments, blemishes and all. It isn’t a glamorous movie, and it’s never shot to be beautiful or polished. Instead, there’s a very subtle evolution of film stocks over the course of the movie, a degradation from the bright clean look of the ‘60s to the seedy grain of the ‘70s and on into an almost garish video feel. It’s subtle, though. It works on you. It gets to you as you watch. By the time Bob Crane is flopping around in his agent’s office like a fish on the deck of a boat, gasping for work, desperate, going under, the film is just unspeakably ugly to look at. It affects you because you feel like you want to scrape this whole world off, shower up, get clean again. You can feel the horror of Bob Crane’s final days, and you can understand the feeling of drowning in your own career, of being pulled under by the weight of any addiction. This is a more human view of that drop into the abyss than REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, and because it’s not something that has been demonized to the extent that drugs have, this addiction is more disturbing. It’s something that sneaks up on Crane, even as it sneaks up on the viewer.
The interplay between Kinnear and Dafoe is crucial to this movie either working or not. Schrader could get everything else right, but if we didn’t understand the particular friendship between these two men, then none of the rest of the film would fall into place. Thankfully, Schrader’s already proven to have a strong rapport with Dafoe (LIGHT SLEEPER), and he manages to wring something really wonderful out of Kinnear. The result is sad and creepy and understandable while being totally alien. Carpenter... or Carpy, as Crane calls him... isn’t just some bug-eyed loony, easy to write off. Dafoe invests him with a soul, however damaged it is.
Carpy knows that it’s Crane who attracts the girls. Sure, Carpy catches his fair share of the tail, but it’s Crane who is pulling them in. Carpy’s picking up table scraps, leftovers. And after a while, it’s not even about whether or not Carpy’s getting laid. He doesn’t get off until Crane does. He comes to depend on Crane as part of his sexual bag of tricks. Is he gay? Is he in love with Crane? Schrader refuses to give you something that easy to think about or react to. Instead, he demonstrates how the sexual pathology of these two guys gets so wrapped up, so co-mingled, that it’s hard to say precisely what part of their routine is actually turning them on. Sure, they both repeat “A day without sex is a day wasted” as their battle cry, but that cry becomes more and more dispassionate as the days wear on. One gets the feeling that a day without sex would be a blessing after a while.
The film has Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski listed as producers, and the press notes talk about how they helped screenwriter Michael Gerbosi shape his material, and I have no doubt they were valuable collaborators. What Gerbosi’s done, though, is trump them at their own game. They are best known for their work in writing quirky biopics. They broke through with ED WOOD, a genuinely great piece of work, then followed it up with THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT and MAN ON THE MOON. They seemed to fall victim to the law of diminishing returns, as their work became more predictable in how it dealt with the subjects at hand. MAN ON THE MOON is a film of surfaces, telling us and showing us nothing that was new. AUTO FOCUS, on the other hand, erases the public face of Bob Crane from our minds once and for all. We get a glimpse of the production of HOGAN’S HEROES, complete with a dream sequence in which Col. Klink (Kurt Fuller) and Sgt. Schultz (Lyle Kanouse) gangbang Sigrid Valdis (Maria Bello), Klink’s onscreen secretary and Crane’s offscreen girlfriend. Crane’s first marriage to Anne (Rita Wilson) dissolves, and he’s genuinely wounded by it. He believes himself to be a good man, a good family man, and the fact that he likes to play the drums in strip clubs after work or that he likes to take nudie photos and keep them in the garage... that shouldn’t change things. We see Crane doing dinner theater and shooting SUPERDAD, but his career is beside the point. We only see it so that we can understand the impact that his sexual appetites had on the rest of his life.
There’s one misstep in the film that is so jarring that it took me out of the film completely for a moment. At one point, Carpy and Crane are watching a tape of a woman giving Crane oral sex. When Schrader cuts to the screen, there’s a pixillated box over the sex. It’s the only such moment in the film. We see plenty of nudity and contact in the rest of the movie, too. For some reason, Schrader felt he had to include a moment that he couldn’t show, then pixillating it. This is taking place in the ‘70s, though, well before the introduction of that technique. It’s not just wrong dramatically, it’s wrong for the period. When the rest of the look of the film is so meticulously attuned to the period, why do something so glaringly out of place? There were a million other ways to show what was happening. It seems odd to harp on one shot, except in this case, it stands out because of how informed almost every other choice in the film is.
AUTO FOCUS is not an easy film to like, but it’s a great film, and it deserves your attention. Despite the nature of the material, Schrader’s made this film compulsively watchable. You can’t take your eyes off it for a moment. As you find yourself drawn into the moral whirlpool that the filmmakers have created, you may get some small sense of what it felt like for Crane as he found himself dragged under, again and again, until his own tragic end.
ONE HOUR PHOTO
Mark Romanek has made a film of uncommon delicacy here, a stylized masterpiece that features one of the finest performances in the long career of Robin Williams. Despite being sold as a thriller, this is something far deeper than that, a cold and sterile poem about a very twisted soul, the madman behind the friendly eyes of the guy at the store who knows your name. Maybe it’s the kid at the video store or someone at the post office or the guy who does your copying. You see them often enough, you start to exchange pleasantries. You find new things to chat about. You get a little window into their life, and they get a glimpse into yours.
What if he liked what he saw so much that he wanted it to be his? What if it was so important to him that he’d hurt anyone who ruined it?
Romanek wrote and directed this film, and it’s as a double-threat that he impresses. The script dares to shake convention in the way it’s constructed, in the way we find ourselves drawn into the world of Sy Parrish, “Sy The Photo Guy.” Romanek doesn’t want to create a monster or a villain here, and he also isn’t trying to garner cheap or easy sympathy for Sy. Instead, he paints him with enough shades of gray that even after the film’s final image, I don’t know what I want for Sy, or what I think of him. I know this... ONE HOUR PHOTO lives under your skin after you walk out of the theater, and it grows the more you live with it. The real depth of Romanek’s accomplishment as a director may not be fully appreciated upon the film’s release, but I’m confident that this film will endure. It’s as strong an announcement as a director as Spike Jonze made with BEING JOHN MALKOVICH or Fincher made with SE7EN. Romanek may have made one film before this, but it's ONE HOUR PHOTO that will put him on the map. The strength of Romanek’s script, and the clarity with which he built his characters, allows him room to focus fully on the film’s visual plan. This is the second work of undeniable art by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, whose work on FIGHT CLUB was just staggering. That’s a flashy film, though, as is fitting. It’s appropriate because of how manic and schizophrenic that film’s subject matter is. Here, Romanek’s after something totally different, and he has created a subdued but powerful palette that turns the entire frame into a comment on the state of Sy’s mental health. Production designer Tom Foden (THE CELL) has done a spectacular job of creating spaces in this film. The home of the Yorkins, the apartment of Sy, and, of course, the SavMart where Sy works the photo lab. These are remarkable externalizations of what’s going on inside these people. This is a film in which everything counts. The look, the score, the use of color. It’s all got a purpose behind it. Romanek’s a keenly intelligent and human filmmaker, something that distinguishes him from many of his music video peers. He has a flawless understanding of composition, and his love of photography and his knowledge of what makes a photograph compelling and seductive informs Sy’s world in a very specific way. Based on the strength of this one film, I can predict with confidence that Romanek’s career is going to be one of note as long as he remains true to the muse that steered him here.
And then there’s Robin Williams. Let me just say... Mrs. Doubtfire and Patch Adams are dead.
And it’s a beautiful thing to behold.
I’m a big fan of Robin as a serious actor. I consider THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP to be an overlooked gem, and I was always fond of MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON and GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM. I’ll be the first to admit, though, that much of his work on film is simply insufferable. As much as DEAD POETS SOCIETY works because of the sure hand of Peter Weir or THE FISHER KING works because of the divine alchemy he achieved with Terry Gilliam and the rest of that cast, he often found himself adrift in movies, rudderless, out of control and over the top. Here, he’s handed himself over completely to Romanek’s vision, and he’s vanished into this character. He seems to be made of bleached cookie dough. He’s soft and vaguely spoiled. There’s something about him, something in the way he moves and deals with people, something in his eyes, perhaps, that says he’s disconnected... broken. He dresses for camoflauge, invisible except in those moments when he’s bringing the color out in an image or when he’s setting the contrast. He experiences the lives of others as he brings these moments to vivid life, captured in the prints he produces.
The family he fixates on the most is made up of Will Yorkin (Michael Vartan), his wife Nina (Connie Nielsen), and their son Jake (Dylan Smith). Yet even here, don’t walk into this expecting some easy Hollywood slasher film about a guy terrorizing a family. That’s not this movie. Romanek’s got a totally different agenda, and it’s the slow, methodical revelation of what he’s after that makes the film such a delight. Nielsen is incandescent here. She’s a stunning actress, and I loved her work in GLADIATOR, but even knowing it was her, I didn’t recognize her here at all. She’s transformed completely, and the work she does is marked by a certain quiet mixture of anger and sorrow that makes her beauty and her few moments of joy even more piercing. Vartan is also very good, especially toward the end of the film, when Romanek finally gives him some key moments to play. Again... he doesn’t want to paint anyone as an easy bad guy, as the one single focus of blame. He may be telling an impressionistic tale, ripe with symbolic composition and characterization, but he also makes his points by creating real people who we care about, who we can identify with. I can’t imagine we’re going to see a more controlled or confident debut film from a director this year.
I have to make special mention of my favorite thing about the film, something I wasn’t anticipating as I walked in. The score by Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek, who worked together on RUN LOLA RUN and THE PRINCESS & THE WARRIOR, is a phenomenal piece of work. As much as the work by Williams or Romanek, it is the score that sets the mood of this film, that dares us to keep up with the complicated emotional shifts the film makes. Like Clint Mansell or Craig Armstrong, these guys are pushing film scores into new and exciting sonic directions. For a film to engage all of my senses the way this one did, it takes a talented group of artists all working at the top of their craft. ONE HOUR PHOTO is a powerful work of art, and easily one of the most exciting moments I’ve had in a theater in 2002.
KNOCKAROUND GUYS
It’s a shame when films end up on a shelf and it’s not because of quality, but because of timing and the market and other reasons. It’s a shame because no matter what, films get the stink of the shelf on them. Whispers inevitably begin. There must be a reason, people say, and it must be the film’s fault.
Brian Koppelman and David Levien are a writing team who recently solved THE RUNAWAY JURY for Warner Bros., finally getting that long-languishing Grisham adaptation a greenlight. They also wrote John Dahl's film ROUNDERS a few years back. When they directed their new ensemble drama KNOCKAROUND GUYS, they thought it was set for a 2001 release. Instead, it’s been one of those MIA movies, and it’s already played in some international markets. Right now, people seem to think New Line’s going to dump it to play up the Vin Diesel connection, and I can see how they could make a little coin by doing that. It’s not a Vin Diesel film, per se, but you could certainly sell it as one.
You’d be doing a disservice to the charms the film does possess, though, and you’d risk pissing off the audience. If there’s any star in the film, it’s Barry Pepper, and that may be one of the key strikes against the film. He’s not the character we’re drawn to as we watch, but that’s who we’re supposed to be paying attention to. In a way, it’s the same problem that ROUNDERS had.
Like many writers, Koppelman and Levien fall in love with their supporting characters. Matty Demaret (Pepper) is the indisputable lead. The film starts with him as a child, and builds to a situation in which he is forced to revisit a choice he made all those years ago, a choice which marked him in the eyes of his father Benny “Chains” (Dennis Hopper) and Teddy (John Malkovich). Matty’s grown up wanting to prove himself to his father, needing to get past that moment of weakness. The whole film hinges on whether or not he can step up when it counts, but it’s the thing that least interested me about Matty and his friends. Chris Scarpa (Andrew Davoli) is another son of a wiseguy who’s been held back in a subservient role his whole life, and who dreams of proving himself somehow. Seth Green is Johnny Marbles, a known trouble magnet and a friend of Matty’s. He’s got a drug problem in his past (maybe) and his reputation keeps him from being able to work for Matty’s father. Finally, there’s Taylor Reese (Vin Diesel), the most competent and together of the four guys. Taylor’s so adept at the thug life that it begs the question: what’s holding him back? Matty, Marbles, and Scarpa all have giant flaws that have led to their frustrations, but Taylor seems like he’s slumming for no good reason. Diesel’s commanding in the role, but he overpowers sequences as a result.
Matty’s given a chance, and he brings his friends in on it. He is asked to transport some money, and he gets Marbles to do it on his plane. A quick stop to refuel leaves the money missing and the four friends up shit creek. They end up tracking a couple of stupid stoner kids and crossing paths with the local law in the person of the local sheriff (Tom Noonan). Ordered to get the money back or face the business end of a gun, the four friends have to stand up as a crew and get what’s theirs.
This is a small film. This is not “the coolest movie of the year.” This is not some big pumped-up star vehicle. It’s a character piece, an ensemble film. The film’s first half has an energy to it that I like. Seth Green is the stand-out as far as I’m concerned. He manages to give Marbles a number of fine touches that made me invest in him and fear for his eventual fate. Diesel has the best scene in the movie, a bar fight that is both funny and brutal. Still, it seems unbalanced for me to enjoy these supporting characters so much more than the leads.
By holding the film for as long as they have, New Line may well have poisoned the perception of the film, but it deserves to be given its shot. Contributions from collaborators like Clint Mansell (who composed the score) and Tom Richmond (the cinematographer) give the film a hell of a polish, and the moments that Koppelman and Levien get right are really nice. Even if this isn’t a complete movie, it’s far better than the complete mess that it was rumored to be.
THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE
Robert Evans says this isn’t a documentary.
He says it is a performance piece.
Let’s examine the film itself to see if his claim holds water. The directors of the film are Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, who previously directed the wonderful documentary ON THE ROPES. One of the highlights of the Ebert Overlooked Film Festival for me this spring was meeting Tyrene Manson, one of the boxers profiled in that film. It’s an unflinching, honest movie that tells a deeply human story.
Aesthetically, it couldn’t be any more different from THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, which is narrated by Robert Evans himself. A few years back, the books-on-tape version of Evans’s autobiography of the same title became a cult item in Hollywood. People were smitten by the insane, smarmy ramblings of Evans, the way he wrapped his stories in hipster lingo and a distorted lens of self-importance. That’s not to suggest that Evans isn’t important. Anyone who has any understanding of what made the ‘70s such an exciting and important era in film has to acknowledge the role that Evans played in some of the classics of that decade. He took risks, and he let some major artists take risks. He lived the fantasy, and when he flew too close to the sun, his Icarus wings melted, and he went into a free-fall that lasted all the way through the ‘80s. It’s only in recent years that Evans has managed to rehabilitate his image and actually put himself back in the game. A recent stroke sidelined him again, but it seems that Evans is the Hollywood producer equivalent of Freddy Kruger or Michael Myers; you can put him down for a moment, and you can slow him down, but nothing can kill him.
The opening of the film is a quote from Evans, written in elegant script over a black screen: “There are three sides to every story... your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.” If you can accept that thesis statement, then you are set for a great, enjoyable ride through the charmed life of one of the last great showmen. They don’t make producers like this anymore, guys who were part of the show, bigger than the show even. Evans was a media celebrity on par with Selznick. He knew the power of mythmaking and took full advantage of relationships with guys like Peter Bart (the publisher of VARIETY now, but a young journalist just making his rep at that point) and he smelled change on the wind at just the right time. He greenlit films that were in tune with the way the country itself was changing, films that stand today as a record of the incredible turmoil of America in the Vietnam era. There are very few studio heads of any era who would have given the go-ahead to films like HAROLD & MAUDE and THE GODFATHER and MEDIUM COOL and LOVE STORY and SORCERER and dozens more.
And the way he tells it, everything started with a dip in a pool one afternoon in Beverly Hills.
The thing that makes the film more than a documentary is the way it’s been built. That voice of his, that hypnotic growl, is the sound of the whole movie. He’s just talking, just shooting the shit, just telling a few stories. Highlights. A rock skipping across the surface of his life. This is the greatest hits version of his book, his story as he’s fleshed it out in interviews and profiles. It’s constructed from photographs from his life, but they’re not simply shown static on the screen. Foreground and background elements have been separated and they’re set in motion against each other. Pans and zooms and all sorts of camera moves are built into the pictures. When reading the book, there is mention of the early onscreen work Evans does in films like MAN OF 1,000 FACES and THE SUN ALSO RISES, and it’s great to be able to just cut to that footage here. Moments from some of the best and worst movies Evans was ever involved in are dropped in at the perfect moments. There’s a recurring image of a slow crawl through the house that Evans has called home on and off since his heyday at Paramount. This particular image is used a few too many times, I think, without ever really adding anything to our initial impressions.
Still, you see this movie for the stories, and Evans doesn’t disappoint. You’ll be quoting him for days after you see the movie, and I’d say this is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand what made the ‘70s special, and what made Evans great. There’s a great bit of film involving Dustin Hoffman that plays out over the film’s closing credits, so make sure you stay seated. It’s one of the highlights of the film. It’s worth waiting for.
And in the end, I’d say Evans is right. This isn’t a conventional documentary. Burstein and Morgen haven’t gotten any new truth out of Evans. He had his patter down well before he met them. He’s told these stories a million times, and he’s a shameless performer, fully aware of the impact of his language. He weilds words with precision and a dry, mordant wit that makes the film genuinely hilarious for much of its running time. Even the most potentially maudlin of moments is tempered by Evans with his dark sense of self-deprecating self-promotion.
No matter what this is, it’s entertaining as hell, and it’s a great tutorial on a time and place that continues to fascinate me as a film fan even today. No matter how familiar some of these stories are, I’ve never seen or heard them performed like this, and I found the film to be electric, deeply interesting. Here’s hoping it casts the same spell on you.
That’s it for this morning. Tomorrow, I’ve got a look at a few films from the Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy fest at The Egyptian, as well as my reviews of TADPOLE and BIGGIE & TUPAC. I’m also gearing up for a new weekly DVD column that should be loads of fun. For now, though...
"Moriarty" out.
