Screening Gotham: April 7-9, 2006

–I have no idea what to tell you about Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s new film 4 (right), which opens today at Cinema Village for your general exhilaration, puzzlement and frustration. Probably more famous for its troubled backstory—co-written by famed Muscovite novelist Vladimir Sorokin, shot over four years on a shoestring budget and subsequently banned in Russia for its relentlessly bleak portrayal of peasant life—than its aesthetic magnitude, 4 nevertheless reveals a talent to watch. Khrzhanovsky’s off-by-this-much mise en scene and meandering narrative bring to mind Lucretia Martel haunted by the Soviet ghost; the camerawork loosens as the film rumbles along, fusing the sound of industrial wreckage to a handheld camera on loan from the Dardennes. Then there are the doll faces made from chewed bread, the roaming pack of four dogs, random quartets of trucks and ribald peasant women who take turns drinking and stripping. That you have never seen anything like it is kind of a given; whether that is a good or bad thing is totally up to you.
–Speaking of distinct backstories, Amos Gitai’s latest, Free Zone, is the first Israeli film ever shot in Jordan. It is also the Natalie-Portman-crying film to end all Natalie-Portman-crying films, with the soon-to-be-shorn starlet the subject of the single longest sob take in the history of cinema. That said, she is quite good as an American on the outs with her in-laws and subsequently thrown into a road trip with a single-minded Israeli woman (Hana Laszlo) traveling to the commercial hub of Jordan’s “free zone.” Gitai’s flashback sequences are a thing of beauty–exquisitely directed dissolves comprising as many as eight points of view at a time—and Laszlo’s edgy work earned her Best Actress honors at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
–The Gen Art Film Festival is evidently carrying on without me this weekend, with Steve Anderson’s FUCK, Scott Glosserman’s Behind the Mask and Bruce Leddy’s Shut Up and Sing taking the screen in Chelsea. Naturally, Gen Art is picking up the drink tab at the film’s respective afterparties, so call that cheap date you have been meaning to plow since your last payday and get to work.

'Lucky Number Slevin': Noir Goes Cute

For a while there, Lucky Number Slevin looked doomed. The bravura discomfiture of its prologue trips on an eventual binge of quirk-for-quirk’s-sake, star Josh Hartnett smirks through nearly the entire first act wearing nothing but a towel, and even Ben Kingsley suffers the indignity of a vaguely Brooklyn Hebrew accent more clumsily calibrated than an old Corvair. Before the slow, successive unfolding of the twists that redeem it, Slevin‘s hybrid of noir, screwball comedy and gangster picture comes within minutes of choking to death on its own smugness.

At least they tried: Liu and Hartnett bring the sensitivity in Lucky Number Slevin (Photos: The Weinstein Company)
That said, Slevin‘s redemption is rich, rewarding viewers with gambits tidy enough to recall the rush of films like The Third Man and The Usual Suspects. Both represent direct, powerful influences for writer Jason Smilovic and director Paul McGuigan, who team up here for the story of Slevin (Hartnett), a young man snagged in a case of mistaken identity that indentures him to warring crime lords The Rabbi (Kingsley) and The Boss (Morgan Freeman). Elsewhere in the mix, the assassin Goodkat (Bruce Willis) slips through the shadows in a mysterious, stoic quest for revenge, and Lucy Liu appears as the girl next door (literally) whose involvement with Slevin plants her in harm’s way.
The conventions surprise nobody: The gangsters yield all the conspicuously wise, hard-boiled observations their authority implies; Liu’s vulnerability feeds her lilting cynicism; a police detective (Stanley Tucci) bristles at Slevin’s ostensibly unwitting interference with his investigation; and Willis’s wraith-like hit man springs up everywhere without warning or announcement, never more effectively than in an opening sequence where he establishes the film’s backstory for a stranger at an airport. Of course, no one is just a “stranger” in noir, and the violence that follows–too tortuous and ultimately too climactic to detail here–bleeds into Slevin‘s flawed but inspired threads of love, death and revenge.
By the same token, like its contemporary Brick, Slevin is noir once- or perhaps even twice-removed from its deepest genre roots. Liu jumped to Smilovic and McGuigan’s defense when we recently spoke about the story’s eagerness to experiment with tradition. “To be honest with you, I think that both guys are very original and unique people,” Liu said. “And just like most of the artists I know, I don’t think anyone tries to come in and reinvent anything. They just come in with their vision and their thoughts and they do what they want with it. You know what I mean? I don’t think anyone thinks, ‘This persons’s trying to reinvent himself in this particular thing.’ It’s just another facet of who they are.”
And hooray for facets–when they are smooth. Liu herself is especially underserved in the filmmakers’ schema, with her and Hartnett’s interminable meet-cute interlude collapsing under what feels like hours’ worth of exposition. The way McGuigan tells it, a script as complex as Smilovic’s required him to find the scene’s spontaneity in Liu’s physicality. “When I saw (Liu) in rehearsals doing what she was doing,” McGuigan told The Reeler, “I was like, ‘We’ve got to capture this–we’ve got to capture this incredible spirit this girl has.’ We had to redesign sets and relight everything so she could go wherever she liked and just let her go free. That is when you do your job well: when you can see that and you observe it and you go, ‘OK, I’ve got to capture this,’ rather than saying, ‘Oh, can you be really funny again? Can you be bubbly again?’ I mean, that would be the worst direction you could ever give. So we just let them go. And then Josh, therefore, will react to her rather than react to me.”
Hartnett really does neither, however, until the end of the film. His death-defying resolve resonates in ways that his earlier, smart-ass posturing cannot, and he looks painfully out of place in his towel and slippers during his lengthy introduction to Liu. The overheated irony of Hasidic Jewish thugs and stoogy black enforcers somehow neutralizes Hartnett even more. Not until Smilovic and McGuigan show Slevin‘s cards is he so much as two-dimensional, and only in the film’s final 15 minutes does Hartnett brandish chops that come close to standing up to talents like Kingsley, Freeman and the particularly fine, brooding Willis.
It remains to be seen if Hartnett will earn his leading-man cred, but at least he says the right things. “As I’ve gotten older,” he told me, “I’ve started to see the value of complex and really well-written, fully-developed characters, and working with great directors who will help you kind of get through that. And working with great actors, obviously, if you can get there–if you can find those people. Now I choose a little bit more carefully. I’ve got a couple of movies I’ve done in the last couple of years that just have better characters. And when you find better characters, you do better work.”

Ben Kingsley, Slevin‘s source of seething rage and lousy accents
In theory, anyhow–at least it worked for Kingsley and Freeman, who share one remarkable scene as titanic archnemeses at the end of their respective roads. Kingsley recalled to journalists at the film’s New York premiere how nobly he and his colleague regarded each other, and how the set adopted a reverential hush as they prepared to shoot. McGuigan acknowledged the scene’s challenge, confessing a somewhat reactive change to the aproach he had taken on the rest of the film.
“Usually when you’re directing you’re trying to go about a scene, and the first few takes may not be what you’re looking for,” he said. “That’s when you really DO direct, whereas this one, straight off the bat, these guys were raising your game up so high that you actually have to start directing them in a more positive way, if that makes any sense. ‘Yeah, that was great, but … ‘ The positive nature of it. But the worst thing you could ever do to actors like those guys–or any actor–is to say, ‘Yeah, that was really great, but can you do it again?’ Because that’s not directing. That’s just hoping the shit will stick if you throw enough of it. That’s not directing to me. You have to keep correcting yourself and thinking, this is really good, but how do I make it better? How do I make it the scene I want to make it? And these guys look at you like they want you to do your job. They’re there for you, you know?”
Without them, Lucky Number Slevin may have sunk, and judging from his conceptions of the film’s best and worst scenes, McGuigan obviously did the best he could with what he had. For all of its angular complexity, Slevin is about frailty; as their criminal swagger melts into an acute sense of panic and even mourning, Kingsley and Freeman emphasize that quality more powerfully than the romance and revenge subplots combined. That they saw and fulfilled the film’s promise goes a long way toward validating it; that McGuigan manages an emotional payday despite its convolution makes it an appreciably intriguing find.

'Coogan's Bluff': East Meets West at Film Forum, is Killed Instantly

Film Forum’s Don Siegel series builds its skull-cracking crescendo tonight and Thursday, with Siegel’s 1968 tandem Coogan’s Bluff and Madigan sharing a twin bill on the way to the series’ climactic Dirty Harry engagement this weekend. And while neither of the first two films mythologize their New York locations to the extreme Dirty Harry did for San Francisco, both offer gleefully cynical views of an urban counterculture that the later film would implode once and for all.
And though Madigan is probably the superior New York film in strict narrative, technical and geographical senses, Coogan’s Bluff is the selection that really must (and should) be seen to be believed. Clint Eastwood stars as Coogan, an iconoclastic deputy sheriff from Arizona who must travel to New York to extradite the fugitive Ringerman (Don Stroud) from East Harlem’s 23rd Precinct. Of course, the tactics Coogan uses to stop crime out west (deftly illustrated in an opening set piece spotlighting revisionist-cowboy-vs.-humiliated-Indian) do not translate to New York, although his resistance to authority–in this case, Lee J. Cobb’s bureaucratically browbeaten lieutenant–hardens into unbending defiance within minutes of his arrival.
Coogan travels to Bellevue, springing the acid-addled hippie Ringerman from his bed and heading to the crown of the Pan Am building for their flight back to Arizona. Alas, the captive’s screeching partners in crime steal him back following an assault on Coogan, thrusting the cop and his cowboy hat into the city on a quest for justice. The archetypes are all here, and anyone with any rough familarity with Siegel’s canon can foretell the rule-smashing lengths his hero will go to settle his score–stepping outside the mainstream as a means of salvaging it.
But the cultural breach in Coogan’s Bluff is by far the most pronounced of any Siegel film: Eastwood’s journey through New York takes him into Day-Glo Hell, the domain of hippies in thrall to songs and dances like “The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel” and sprawling apartments where Edie Sedgwick-esque trust-fund ingenues go to get wasted, laid and ultimately overdose in disgrace. Coogan’s ownership over this cohort is never really in question, as Siegel’s near-parodic indictment of their freewheeling standards plays in contrast to his protagonist’s own rebellion. Eastwood’s iconic virility is its own weapon here, to be replaced three years later (and for the remainder of his career, perhaps) with Harry Callahan’s .44 Magnum; his Coogan is the American West’s answer to James Bond, subverting a garish, feminine antiestablishment with a mainline shot of macho convention.
Anyway, what is primarily appealing here is that while his contemporaries creatively reacted to Vietnam and other political threats stemming from communism, Siegel’s cop trifecta takes it straight to the long-hairs. Madigan may emphasize their psychotic danger (what could be more terrifying, after all, than the enemy stealing our weapons?), and Dirty Harry may torture and kill them, but with Coogan’s Bluff, Siegel underscores their novelty’s spectacular uselessness in light of tradition. Its tactics may be raw, dated–even laughable–but two generations later, they are absolutely worth a closer look.

Cindy Adams Subject of Annual NYT Old-Gossip Lament

Invoking my temporary relocation “3,000 miles away from the media loop (lucky bastard),” a loyal reader sent The Reeler a link to Monday’s NY Times profile of Cindy Adams. Indeed, I would have missed Andrew Jacobs’s tongue hyperactively coating Adams with sycophantic slobber, delineating the tricks of her trade for anybody who cannot divine them from one of the gossip goddess’s six columns per week.
While Adams admits her certifiable dog-adoring dottiness (only her second such acknowledgment to The Times in, oh, 17 months), and while Jacobs emphasizes her relevance in relation to blogs (only the second such Times writer to moralize about old gossip in, oh, a year), there is some eye opening stuff here:

(Adams said,) “I hate to go out to parties and openings. I’d rather have a quiet dinner with the people who are making the news.”

Mrs. Adams, it should be said, rarely dines alone. During one recent week, she said, her dining companions included Joan Rivers, Barbara Walters, Judge Judy and an erstwhile jurist, Sol Wachtler, the former New York State Court of Appeals chief judge whose career ended with a prison term for harassing a former lover. …

“I don’t judge,” she said when asked about her close relationship to people like Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos and Dewi Sukarno, the tantrum-prone wife of the former Indonesian president. “I just report.”

Newsmakers, indeed; this would also inch us incrementally closer to understanding her late-night phone tryst with mover and shaker Matthew Modine, while her reluctance to judge accurately reflects her classic confusion over The Film Snob’s Dictionary‘s assessment of Tom Cruise and Legend. But we all know Adams is being a little disingenuous about how she brings the pain: Do not think for a minute King Kong has forgiven her for squelching his coming out party last year. Non-judgmental animal lover my ass.

'Baseball and American Culture': Opening Day at MoMA

The good news about being stuck in California this week is that I will be able to watch my beloved San Francisco Giants live on TV as they flail into their 2006 campaign. The bad news is that I am going to miss out on at least a third of MoMA’s Baseball and American Culture film series, which starts today and runs through April 30.
The program includes a dozen selections dating back to 1920, from a restored print of the Babe Ruth myth-umentary Headin’ Home to Dan Klores’s 2005 Latino player chronicle Viva Baseball. You can probably conjure most of the remaining titles without too much strain, The Jackie Robinson Story, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Natural and Field of Dreams probably being chief among them. And while clumsy entries such as A League of Their Own and Cobb apparently outclass notable omissions like The Pride of the Yankees and The Bad News Bears (and even Major League, which I know will never have an audience at any museum ever but deserves a second look anyway, if only for Dennis Haysbert’s classic turn as voodoo-obsessed slugger Pedro Cerrano: “Jesus, I like him very much, but he no help with curveball”), it is nice to see the museum dust off the Ray Milland gem It Happens Every Spring, and Aviva Kempner’s documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg never really gets old.
Not coincidentally, Terrence Rafferty has a lovely little essay about baseball and the movies over at The Times, featuring a particularly astute assessment of why Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham endures as the genre’s finest film:

This movie is about success in failure, surviving your dreams rather than about fulfilling them, which gives it an appealing, and kind of sneaky, modesty: it’s all bunts and hard slides and singles slapped through holes in the infield, and it winds up beating the swing-for-the-fences baseball epics of its era by a country mile.

The series starts tonight, featuring a Babe Ruth/Jackie Robinson-biopic double feature, to be introduced by Brooklyn Dodgers expert Carl Prince. Consider checking it out, assuming baseball’s actual opening day does not take the precedence it probably should.

Viewers, Marketers on the Defensive as 'United 93' Trailer Hits NYC Theaters

The Daily News this morning features the first of what promises to be many stories on what we might as well call the United 93 frontlash–visceral negative hype against a film about which everybody seems to have an opinion without having seen it. While I am far more preoccupied with known quantities–e.g. the film’s hacky, self-aggrandizing director Paul Greengrass–than with smacking United 93 down one month before its release, a trio of NYDN reporters hit area theaters to do the next best thing: gauge reaction to the film’s new trailer.
And, oh, the humanity:

At least one theater on the upper West Side has yanked the harrowing trailer for Universal Pictures’ upcoming United 93, saying it reduced one patron to tears.

“I personally received a couple of complaints. Some people were pretty upset,” said a manager at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 12 theater on Broadway. “We pulled the trailer last weekend.” …

“I covered my eyes. I couldn’t watch it,” said upper East Side retiree Gloria Harper, who volunteered as a Ground Zero relief worker shortly after 9/11. “I won’t see the movie. I mean we lived through it.”

The trailer, complete with heart-pounding surround sound, had a similar effect on some moviegoers at the Regal Battery Park theater – located virtually across the street from Ground Zero.

“It was disturbing. It’s always painful and brings back memories,” said Aida Sotelo, 47, a Manhattan homemaker who was working a block from the twin towers on 9/11. “It’s still hurtful to see. And it will always be too early for me.”

The piece also features a few endorsements: At least one victim’s relative invokes the film’s potential to help future generations grapple with the horror of 9/11, and no less an authority than Universal Pictures marketing director Adam Fogelson is 100 percent behind United 93‘s trailer:

“We didn’t use any footage that people haven’t seen before, and we didn’t enhance it,” he added. “It’s truly horrific. So we’re not shocked to hear that some people find it uncomfortable.”

Translation: Get over it, New York.