Washington Post contributorJohn Anderson isn’t suggesting that today’s Nic Cage has become a kind of pod-person replica of his former self, as I did earlier today, but his 3.22 article, readable now, comes close.

“It seems the unavoidable conclusion that Cage, once held up as an example of the intrepid artistic impulse, has become something of the poster boy for blind ambition, cynical role selection, questionable judgment and, worst of all, humorlessness: He glowers, he hunches, he looks meaningfully into the distance without it meaning anything at all.

“If Cage were replaced tomorrow by Ben Stiller, we’d get all of the above plus a couple of laughs. Instead, we have an actor who used to be able to do something remarkable — overcome a lack of native charm by embracing his inner outsider, creating affectionate portraits of unlikely heroes, and soldiering on despite a seemingly unmerciful universe. It may not pay as well. But that’s a Nic Cage we could use.”

I’ve attended several all-media screenings in New York since arriving last November, and I’ve been stopped several times by security goons telling me that no cameras are allowed. If a publicist is standing nearby they’ll override the apes and I’ll get in with my camera (which I always carry in my bag or around my neck), but without a publicist I’ll be kept out. We all understand piracy concerns and want to comply, but goons insisting on no cameras have to offer to hold them in plastic bags with a claim ticket, as I’ve seen them do at dozens of screenings in Los Angeles. It’s a very simple system. If they won’t hold onto cameras (or, more to the point, if movie distributors won’t pay extra for the goons to do this), then they’re doing nothing but creating trouble. Please think this through, distribs, and try to be more considerate. Almost every journalist carries a camera these days. This isn’t 1954 or 1984 or 2004, even.

Whenever I’m walking up a subway staircase during rush hour, I look up and see a resigned throng. Bobbing heads, rounded shoulders, slow and steady like turtles. A lonely crowd trudging along in “mass man” formation. I want to run up the steps like a Marine with F. Lee Ermey barking cadence, but you can only go with the flow in Union Square. Bounding up a staircase two steps at a time is great for the spirit; walking like a coal miner one step at a time achieves an opposite effect.

Updated: Former Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Willman has written a fascinating account of Wednesday night’s confrontation at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre between Bound for Glory‘s David Carradine, Ronny Cox and Haskell Wexler. I posted a brief description of this yesterday (along with an mp3 file). Willman’s version is better. Note: I’ve just pasted the article below the photo.

(l. to r.) Bound for Glory costar Ronny Cox, moderator Kevin Thomas, star David Carradine

Bound for Hell, or Glory, at the Cinematheque by Chris Willman

Today at 3:35pm

Not since I saw Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner go at each other in an excellent production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a couple of years ago have I experienced a night of live theater quite as riveting as the three-way cage match between David Carradine, Haskell Wexler, and the audience the other night following an American Cinematheque screening. I keep alluding to what a nerve-wracking, weird and wonderful night this was, and I’ve gotten asked to go into detail about how the proceedings unfolded, or unraveled. This is going to be way more exhaustive than most of you will want. But for the few who really wanted to hear about the whole thing, by request, here goes…

If there’s anything that doesn’t exactly seem to scream “fireworks!,” it’d be a panel discussion about the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, which at this date probably counts as one of the less remembered works of the late, great Hal Ashby. As much as I love Ashby, I’d never seen it, and I have a hard time forcing myself to watch slow-moving two-and-a-half hour movies unless I’ve committed myself to a seat in front of a big screen. So I just barely dragged myself out of the house for the 30-mile drive to the Aero. I knew there’d be a discussion afterward with Carradine, but my plan was to skip out on it and go from there to a late show of Watchmen in Westwood. (Two two-and-a-half-hour movies in a row, you say? Well, that’s just the kind of tough guy I am.) But, imperfect as Glory is, it does a fantastic job of plunging you into the (previous) Depression, and it’s so utterly and engagingly human that I feel like washing its taste out of my mouth with a comic-book extravaganza would be opening myself up to eternal damnation. So I stay for the discussion, and narrowly avert what might have been one of the great regrets of my life.

I should say that there has already been some weirdness during the screening itself. During a scene where a radio guy reminds Guthrie that he’s not allowed to sing any controversial or topical material on his program, somebody very loudly exclaims, “I hate guys like that!” It gets a big laugh from the audience. But soon the same guy is keeping up with a line of patter, which I can’t make out because he’s on the other side of the auditorium. As you’d expect in a repertory screening, very quickly there are cineastes yelling at the rube to shut the hell up, and some kind of verbal altercation seems to ensue for about a minute. Of course, as soon as the lights come up, Carradine is walking down the aisle with his acoustic guitar, already going off on some kind of rant before he gets to the stage, and everyone realizes he was the one providing live commentary for his movie. (As the late noir character actor Lawrence Tierney once drunkenly did, in this same theater, in a night that is beloved in Cinematheque lore.) At this point I sense people in the audience feeling embarrassed to realize that The Star Of The Show had been shouted down like a common heckler, though some of these sympathies are about to diminish…

The screening is part of a “Kevin Thomas’ Favorite Films” series, hosted by the former (and occasionally still) L.A. Times film critic, who I knew back in my own Times days. I don’t know what Kevin has been like as a moderator on the other nights, but during the ensuing 70 or 75 chaotic minutes, he seems to go into shock and utters all of about 50 words. The first nine of them being: “I understand Ronny Cox is in the audience tonight?” Indeed, Carradine’s costar, Cox, has shown up just to see the film, and, so bidden, walks toward the stage–joining another surprise guest, Haskell Wexler, one of the half-dozen or so most revered living cinematographers, and an Oscar winner for the movie. Carradine and Cox warmly embrace, the former enthusing about how he couldn’t have gotten through without the latter as his partner, and the lovefest begins!

Or the monologue, actually. For the first 20 minutes or so, Carradine does 98% of the talking–hell, maybe 99%–and it’s entertaining as all-get-out, in a had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way. As the star goes on with his anecdotes, Cox is probably thinking he could have stayed in his original seat, and Wexler keeps slinking further down in his chair, as those of us who know this particular d.p. does not suffer fools gladly wonder what kind of storm clouds might be forming in his head. Wexler, who actually knew Woody Guthrie, does pipe up to say how wonderful a sign of change it was that Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen got to sing the full, controversial version of “This Land is Your Land” at the White House recently, which prompts Carradine to sing his own version of the tune, with the aid of some lyrical assists from the crowd. He talks about how Barbara Hershey convinced him to call his agent; about how Richard Dreyfuss was originally cast as Guthrie, but a salary dispute got in the way, and he was able to talk his way into the role by convincing producers that “I AM Woody Guthrie!” He took on this bravado despite the fact that, by his own admission, “the only thing I knew about Woody Guthrie when I was cast was that he wrote ‘Goodnight Irene.'” The punchline to this remark is supposed to be “I was wrong,” but Wexler, thinking Carradine doesn’t realize the mistake, perks up and steps on the actor’s joke, half-disgustedly interrupting, “No, Leadbelly wrote it.” Anyway, so far, so benign.

Then the subject of unions arises… and everything goes gonzo, never to return. Carradine says that these are different times from the 1930s and unions no longer serve the purpose they once did, or words to that effect. Cox, who has barely said a word up until now, starts shaking his head and says, “That doesn’t sound like Woody Guthrie to me!” Carradine starts trying to explain himself, when a woman in the back starts shrieking at him about how nothing about unions’ importance has changed. Carradine starts shouting back, which might’ve been okay if he wasn’t yelling right into the microphone, and it doesn’t sound pretty. The woman doesn’t let up, either, so for about two minutes both of them are going at it at once. She’s the more obnoxious one, but because he’s five times as loud, he’s coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up while others angrily holler “Let her speak!” A couple guys in my vicinity start shouting “Let’s hear from Haskell Wexler !” About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this–one of them, almost unnoticed, being Cox, who makes the smoothest getaway of all time.

At this point, Carradine reminds me of poor Tucker Carlson, standing in front of that conservative PAC a few weeks ago, realizing that, in defending the New York Times, he has lost the sympathies of his audience to the hecklers, desperately trying to backpedal. A woman in the front row, who we will later learn is Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber, stands up, turns around, and twice yells that the union shouter should be thrown out. But no, Carradine says, dissent is great. “You’re not one of the people!” shouts the lady. “I am one of the people!” Carradine shouts back, saying that he’s had to cut back on the groceries he buys for his family, and because of SAG’s actions, he can’t get work. “I AM NOT A RICH PERSON!” he growls, seemingly genuinely enraged as well as just loud for the first time. He talks about how it’s a problem when workers in Tennessee making Toyotas make $10 an hour while GM workers in Detroit make $60 an hour–which makes Union Lady even more outraged, naturally. Carradine says that everything we know is out the window in this economy and every aspect of what we’re willing to pay or be paid in our daily lives has to be up for renegotiation. It’s actually a good, lucid point, or would be if he had any control over his tone. Someone yells “Let her have the mike!” So Carradine half-heartedly tosses the mike into the audience–bonking a woman in the front row in the head! Ironically, the woman he bonks is the Cinematheque’s Gerber, who’d just been defending him moments earlier. This may count as some weird karma for her, but fortunately for Carradine, she’s probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge.

The head-strike was an accident, but a groan goes up from the audience, because I think some people think he deliberately intended to lash out at the crowd, as opposed to just having really shitty aim. Suddenly it strikes me that it would only take one more bit of weirdness for things to get completely out of hand. It’s a holy cow, anything could happen right now kind of pregnant moment. Fortunately, there is slightly more confusion than hostility afoot, so no brawl ensues. Union Lady and her entourage finally take their leave, with Carradine shouting after her that he loves her, even though he knows she hates him.

There’s a moment of calm. Since the presumptive moderator is just sitting there, smirking and stunned, an audience member takes it upon himself to shout out a question about the cinematography. Who knew this would be a more dangerous subject than unions? Wexler talks about color desaturation (“You’ll notice the movie gets more colorful when we get to California”) and gives some technical specs. Carradine breaks in and starts talking about crane shots and suitcase cameras. Wexler, visibly irritated, goes back to the specs. And this is the point at which Carradine really kind of goes off the rails, albeit it in a subdued, passive-aggressive kind of way. He uses the line–which he repeats at least two or three more times–about how Wexler “got an Academy Award for ruining my movie.” You can feel the audience sort of collectively holding its breath as Carradine says the film “looks like it was shot through a glass of milk.” When he explains what he wished the look of the film had been, which is grittier, again, it’s a lucid point, but the way he’s making it is either tone-deaf or just evil.

Then he tells the story of how Ashby, the director, hated the look of the film, too, and was insisting on firing Wexler during the making of the film. I’m pretty sure I hear gasps go up at this point. Carradine says he talked Ashby out of firing him, “because if you fire somebody, they just go out in the parking lot and steal your hubcaps.” I’m pretty sure that’s a metaphor, but the audience doesn’t know what to do with this image other than to nervously titter. There will be a lot more of that–oh, yes, there will.

(It’s now, about 20 minutes from the end, that I come out of my own Kevin Thomas-like state of shock and realize that I should have been recording this whole fracas on my iPhone recorder app. So the remainder of these quotes are verbatim…)

Naturally, Wexler is enraged by Carradine’s story. So he retorts: “I didn’t know that I was going to be confronted with a story which I don’t think is necessarily a public story. But since it is public, I have to say something. Hal Ashby sent somebody to fire me, and he said, you’re fired, okay? And then after I heard that and got the message, I went to Hal and I said ‘Hal, just take a minute and STOP SNIFFING THAT STUFF UP YOUR NOSE!’ And if David will tell me there wasn’t heavy duty doping on that film, and that that wasn’t the comradeship he was talking about… When I showed up the next day, I went to work, and I was the UNFIRED director of photography. Now, that’s the goddamned truth!”

Carradine (drolly): “Okay. I don’t think that changes my story at all. Except that Haskell is a little down on people who snort cocaine.” That gets a good, nervous audience laugh. He goes on to tell a story about visiting Ashby’s mammoth trailer, and picking up a copy of the L.A. Times, which he hadn’t seen during many weeks of location shooting . “Underneath it there were about six lines of cocaine. … Hal was looking at me and I said ‘Hal, do you do a lot of this stuff?’ And he said ‘As much as I can get.’ And I said ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ and I left the trailer. Because it’s not my thing. And yes, Hal was a great user of cocaine. It does not change the fact that he was… ” He goes for the superlatives. “Quentin Tarantino doesn’t beat Hal Ashby, and he’s one of my favorite directors. Quentin is incredible. And he’s a big cocaine freak, too!” Okay, you want to talk about nervous laughter… (Just for the record, and to cover my ass. I’m not sure you can tell for 100% certain from the tape whether Carradine says the present-tense “He’s a….” or, possibly, the past-tense “He was a…” But I digress.) Carradine continues: “But Hal was a fucking genius. I don’t like anybody to put him down and say the drugs got in the way or anything else, because they didn’t get in the way. They got in the way of him living longer, but they did not get in the way of his movies. There is not one movie he made that you cannot say it’s one of the best fucking movies that has ever been made…”

He continued: “Hal was a fucking genius.” Okay, we get that part. “And so is this guy! I happen to disagree with the way he felt about Bound for Glory, about the look. And it was beautiful, but it was not what I wanted. I wasn’t the boss, right? … This guy was out there working his fucking ass off, there’s no doubt about it, right? And he wasn’t doing exactly what I would have asked him to do. I would have said, turn up the contrast, show the grit under the fingernails, don’t make any beauty about it, make it fucking ugly. And you know what, if he’d done what I told him to do, he would probably have not gotten his Academy Award, because it wouldn’t have been pretty. So maybe he was right and I was wrong…Somebody will talk to me about Haskell and I’ll say ‘Oh yeah, he’s the guy who got an Academy Award for ruining my picture.’ It’s one of my favorite lines, and it gets a laugh. And then I see the picture and I just forget all that. Because the picture is just so fuckin’ great. That’s the thing that’s amazing to me, is a collaboration between a director and a cameraman and a star who absolutely disagree with each other on almost everything, and yet they make a movie that will be a permanent fucking classic. Is that okay. Haskell?”

Long pause. Wexler: “I just want to say that after Bound for Glory I made three or four pictures with Hal Ashby.”

Carradine: “And I didn’t get to make one!” At last, we all agree, and can laugh together! (Even though Wexler’s not laughing.) Hooray!

The harmony is short-lived. Carradine talks about how the homeless camps they set up for the film were “livable” and attracted people from out of state who actually resided in these tents for a time. Wexler makes faces at the audience, suggesting that everything Carradine is saying is cuckoo. (He also made a coke-snorting motion at one point, though I can’t remember when. It might have been when Carradine said that an entire day’s worth of work was unusable because too much dust in the Dust Bowl scenes made the shots impenetrably murky, which Wexler was not buying at all.) Setting the stage for the next battle, Carradine waxes enthusiastic over the use of a hidden “suitcase camera” that allowed the crew to get great takes of the extras in the camp scenes, unaware that they were being filmed. This is when Wexler really begins to take offense again, thinking that Carradine is trying to give the camera operators credit for his work.

Carradine: “We had this incredible guy… Do you remember the name of the guy that was the handheld camera guy, that used the suitcase camera?”

Wexler (rising to righteous indignation): “Do I remember it? How do you think it got in this film, David? Who do you think planned it? Who did the shots? Look it, David, you fuckin’…”

Carradine: “I’m not talking about credit, I’m just asking for the guy’s name.”

“Wait a second, David…”

“What did I do? I just asked for the guy’s name.”

“Do they know what a director of photography does… ” Wexler goes on to list all the collaborative relationships a cinematographer has with other crew key members. “Hearing David with his explanations about all these cameras and the suitcase camera… Where the hell did you get all this expertise?”

Carradine (drolly): “Uh, I was there. My only question was, what’s the name of that guy who operated the suitcase camera?

“YOU WERE IN THE TRAILER TILL YOU GOT CALLED OUT!”

“Do you know it?”

“I didn’t come here for combat,” Wexler announces, deliberately, “but I also didn’t come out here to be demeaned for what my contribution to that film is.”

“Okay, anyway, since he doesn’t know the name of the guy,” Carradine goes on, getting a dig in, “he had a suitcase that had a camera in it and he could push it and make it go… ” Haskell buries his face in his hands as Carradine goes on a bit more about the glories of the suddenly contentious suitcase camera, which was so brilliantly operated by whatsisname.

Wexler: “I’m gonna give up now. First of all, half the shots in [those scenes] were not from the suitcase…”

Carradine: “Half of ’em!”

Wexler: “David, I don’t know if I can take any more of this bull.”

There is a very pregnant silence. Then Carradine picks up his guitar and starts into a long rendition of Bound for Glory’s title song, urging the audience to join in. There is a bare minimum of singing and clapping, but the audience is a little too stunned, if not alienated, for a “Kumbaya” moment.

Carradine starts packing up his guitar, a process that mysteriously seems to go on for minutes as the actor tries to put a more gracious cap on the evening. “We never agreed, we’re sort of like enemies, but the fact is, I know his fuckin’ talent, and I know his drive and insistence on making the movie the way it was that got him his Academy Award…. I wish that I’d been able to work with you again. The fact that we don’t get along has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever. I got along great with your kid! I’m honored to be here. And anybody else that ever wants to do an event for Bound for Glory, I’ll be there.”

And I’m pretty sure Wexler and Cox won’t.

Just in time to send everyone home, Kevin Thomas finds his voice: “I must say, I’ve got some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking.” It’s an arch comment, but it has some truth to it. As the audience stands to regain its collective existential bearings, Wexler turns to Carradine and says, “I knew you would not disappoint,” and (incredibly, after the passions that have just transpired) they briefly hug.

Outside on Montana Ave., clusters of attendees form. Metaphorically, or maybe literally, I think we’re all just trying to pat down the hair that’s been standing on end for the last hour. “Between the aggressive panelists and audience and a moderator who wouldn’t stop anything, it was a perfect storm,” announces one guy, gratefully, I think.

One stranger I catch up with on the corner says he found the entire experience to be a deeply uncomfortable immersion in unalloyed anxiety,; his friend counters that it was an exhilarating look past the usual curtain of Hollywood bullshit. Me, I have to go with… both. Either way, I suspect the 40 or 50 of us who stuck it out, like survivors of some massive accident, will be invisibly bonded in forever hereafter experiencing reality through a slightly different, somehow more knowing prism than the untraumatized loved ones to whom we return.

A bizarre metamorphosis has settled in with Nic Cage over the last three years. There is less and less about his onscreen manner or behavior which one would call “sane” if one were to encounter it in real life. His rigid, feet-in-cement, lunatic-asylum personality in Knowing confirms this, I’m afraid. Cage’s characters have become so loco-weed that he seems to have crossed into cuckoo-land in his actual life.

Which makes him seem not quite of this earth. I’m not trying to insult or degrade the guy. I’m saying there’s a beyond-Klaatu qualty to the men Cage has portrayed in The Wicker Man, Ghost Rider, the National Treasure movies, Bangkok Dangerous and Knowing. It’s like some virus has gotten into his system, like a pod was placed next to his bed in ’05 or ’06 and another life form took over.

Cage, of course, has always played guys who were eccentric or vaguely wackazoid in some way. It’s what I’ve always loved about him. Leaving Las Vegas, Matchstick Men, Vampire’s Kiss, Adaptation, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Con Air, Bringing Out The Dead, 8MM, Snake Eyes, Face/Off — these were films in which Cage played curious nutters but conveyed at the same time that he had a passing acquaintance with off-screen sanity, or at least the manner and behavior of a relatively “normal” guy. As committed as Cage has always been to the reality of the character, you believed he was performing a part.

No longer. Now a Nic Cage movie means you’re in for less of what narrative movies tend to do (a mixture of acting, story, pacing and atrmosphere) and more of an alternate-reality trip in the form of a behavioral study of a guy who’s become a kind of stone-faced alien zombie trying to pretend like he’s human and doing a half-decent job of it, but with the zombie part getting more and more determined to run the show. That’s what’s been happening since The Wicker Man. Tell me I’m wrong.

“There’s a moral and an ethical aspect to this, as well. And I think that’s what has gotten everybody so fired up. But I think the most important thing that we can do is make sure that we put in a bunch of financial regulatory mechanisms to prevent companies like an AIG holding the rest of us hostage. Because that’s… that’s the real problem.

“The problem is not just what’s happened over the last six months. The problem is what was happening for years, where people were able to take huge, excessive risks with other people’s money, putting the entire financial system at risk — and there were no checks, there were no balances, there was nobody overseeing the process.

“And so what we’re going to be moving very aggressively on — even as we try to fix the current mess — is make sure that before somebody makes a bad bet you say, hold on, you can’t do that.”

Here’s a complete transcript of the Obama-Leno conversation.

The Hurt Locker “is the best overall film Kathryn Bigelow has ever made,” says HitFlix’s Drew McWeeny, “and it manages to fit neatly into the voice she’s already established as a filmmaker while hopefully also opening new doors for her as well. It’s basically about three volatile personalities put into some very tight quarters, and [then sent] into life-or-death situations over and over and over. And that’s pretty much it

“And I’m not being dismissive or reductive, either. I think the film works really well precisely because they don’t try to build up some phony narrative arc to hang the whole thing on. The film is very slice-of-life, very observational. And that’s precisely why it plays into Bigelow’s strengths. When you look at Point Break or, more directly, Strange Days, she’s very good at dropping the viewer right into the middle of an action sequence. Experiential action is hard to pull off, and I’m convinced that most of the shaky-cam stuff that gets released is someone’s attempt to do the same thing.

But The Hurt Locker delivers on a level that’s “about more than just handheld camerawork,” he says. “Instead, it’s about hooking the viewer in a way that synchs their pulse to the pulse of the scene, that causes real adrenaline spikes in the audience. Bigelow’s a strong enough filmmaker at this point that she exerts absolute control in sequence after sequence. And she never falls back on the standard devices of tension like a bomb counter-ticking down to zero or the red wire/green wire nonsense.

“These characters are professionals, great at what they do, and the tension comes from the fact that the bomb-makers are also pretty damn good at what they do. Each fresh challenge is a puzzle to be solved, and Jeremy Renner‘s Sgt. James thrives on the idea that he is the one person suited to do the work. And like any junkie, he has to push himself further and further to get the same high as the film progresses, to the point where he’s putting everyone else in harm’s way, and that escalation is what drives the film’s forward momentum.”

“It’s the perfect marriage between Bourne and United 93. Political as can be, but built like an action thriller.” — a comment from a smart, seasoned guy from the trenches who happened to catch Paul Greengrass‘s Green Zone (Universal) about a month ago. He’s obviously more receptive to it than that AICN guy who caught it in New Jersey the other night, and was haltingly positive — i.e., “a good film but drink a lot of coffee first!”

I hate the fact that the original title of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, has been discarded because…let me guess, some dumb-asses were focus-grouped and they said it’s too weird or precious-sounding? Nonetheless, it has a beautiful ring.

As directed by Cary Fukunaga, Sin Nombre “is more than just an immigration drama. Think City of God on the road and you’ve got the idea. In some ways [it] examines a society as corrupt and destructive as the one in Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorrah. But Fukunaga does it in a way that manages to be real and dramatically intense at the same time.” — from Marshall Fine‘s review, posted today.

The video was shot and cut by Jamie Stuart.

Knowing (Summit, 3.20) has been selling itself as a spooky mind-bender about forecasting the spooky future, and about horrible pre-ordained catastrophes waiting to happen. It holds to this pattern for the first 40 minutes or so, but it gradually devolves into another worldwide destruction orgy on a doofusy Roland Emmerich level. On top of being an idiotic alien-visitation movie with kids being on the alien wavelength and adults being too consumed by their conventional blah blah. Don’t get me started. Well, I’ve already started, haven’t I?

Knowing is complete exploitation crap. Simplistically written, lurching from one tingly shock moment to the next, operating in total defiance of any semblance of rational human behavior. It will burn your soul and leave you poisoned. It will give you hives between your ass cheeks. And it will make you laugh at the end. Derisively, of course. That’s what the crowd at the 42nd Street Regal plex was doing the other night as the credits began to roll. Waves of giddy “what a piece of shit!” laughter rolling across the aisles. An hour earlier the world had just learned about the passing of Natasha Richardson. What a contrast. Good God.

Knowing‘s strongest characteristic is that it’s clearly in love (or in lust, I should say) with the idea of flaming mass destruction, or certainly its CG equivalent. It pants and salivates and attains a state of horndog tumescence over burning flesh and decimating cities and people shrieking and hugging each other before the end comes. That’s why I called it Doomsday Porn.

This is due to director Alex Proyas, of course — a quarter-of-an-inch-deep, visual-for-visual’s-sake CG whore who…I don’t know what precisely happened so I shouldn’t speculate. But Knowing feels as if Proyas and the producers said to themselves, “You know what? To hell with the precognition numerology stuff. Let’s just blow shit up and burn people alive and throw in some spooky aliens and…you know, go to town on that level. We’re making this film for people who read supermarket tabloids so what does it matter if it’s more or less nonsensical?”

.

The screenplay is by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White and Stuart Hazeldine. If I were these guys I’d put on a pair of dark glasses and a fishing hat with the brim pulled down. Better yet, I’d fly down to Belize and stay there for two or three weeks until the smoke clears.

But I have to admit that Proyas does a bang-up job with the rainy plane-crash scene. Awesome choreography and hand-held photography, directed and coordinated in a first-rate fashion. it’s almost worth paying to see Knowing for this scene alone. But it also convinced me that Proyas has a bone-on for depicting people screaming for dear life as their flesh is roasting and they stagger around before flopping down dead in the gasoline-soaked mud. Kew-wuhl!

This is the end of Proyas. He’s crossed over into hell with this movie. When you think of him henceforth, think of him running through a raging forest fire as he carries his digital camera, his clothes and flesh consumed in ghastly orange agony as the animals of the forest — squirrels and rabbits and antlered deer — suffer the same fate. Proyas screams and bellows and begs God to forgive him, but God, having seen I, Robot, refuses.

I have a reaction to Cage’s performance, of course, but I’d rather run it as a stand-alone.

For most viewers, I suspect, Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity will be talked about as a corporate mindgame confection — not a “thriller” per se (there’s only one sequence in which the tension is seriously cranked up) but a movie that is truly expert at delivering a series of dry little fake-outs and doing quick little leap-frogs over your expectations. I had a seriously pleasurable time watching it — don’t get me wrong. It’s an amazingly sharp and sophisticated and well-honed thing. As far this sort of adult international chess-game tends to play, it’s quite delicious.

The issue, for me and for potential viewers who have similar tastes and attention spans, is that the serious pleasure happened the second time I saw it. The first time? Not as much.

The problem, I confess, was more mine than Gilroy’s. I’m just not smart enough, you see, to get or enjoy all the twists and curve balls and keep the whole equation proportionately focused and sussed. Slow guy that I am, it was just too much work. Not all the time or even for much of the running time. I’m not a complete moron. But every so often I felt a bit burdened and blurry of mind. I felt overly fucked with, to put a point on it. “Wait a minute, is this…wait, is that what’s going on? I guess so, okay. But then why….?”

Unlike, I should add, my brilliant ex-wife Maggie, who had no trouble keeping up, and unlike the Einstein-level N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, who had the audacity to write in his review this morning that Duplicity “ends more or less as you always suspected it would.” (What?). A good mystery flick (or more precisely a good what-the-fuck-is-going-on? movie) is supposed to work on a dog-race principle. The audience is the dog pack and the stuff you’re trying to figure out is the artificial rabbit. The rabbit is always supposed to be just ahead of the dogs, but never so far ahead so that they lose hope and start to give up.

Put simply, my first Duplicity experience made me feel like the dumb dog sitting in the back row in math class in seventh grade. I haven’t felt that way in a long time. Because I was, in fact, that dumb kid, and it took me years to get past that image of myself as a guy who would never get good grades or go to a good college, who would never be very good at sports, who would never drive a slick car or get to disrobe those wonderfully busty blonde girls who always hung out with the jocks.

Duplicity director-write Tony Gilroy shooting next to Rome’s Pantheon

I was always good in high-school English and history and art class and gym (and smoking in the parking lot with my friends), but I despised math and chemistry. Most of the time I wanted to draw or look out the window. It was a miserable time in my life. So thank you, Tony Gilroy, for helping me to re-experience that sense of isolation and rage, that feeling of hell and futility.

I’ve since learned to be constructive with my comprehension problems. After my first encounter with Duplicity, I went back and read the script (which I had been too lazy to read all the way through when I was sent a copy last year) and talked it over with five or six critic friends, and all but one element (i.e., the scripted discussion between Clive Owen and Julia Roberts) began to come into focus. So the second time was cool. I liked it, I mean.

The undercurrent of Duplicity is about the difficulty of establishing genuine trust between lovers, and it was on this level that I connected with it the most fully. This can be a real-deal challenge in life, offering up one’s emotional underbelly, and it’s particularly well suited to a kind of love story (or lust story) in which a man and a woman who are very much alike and get what each other is about can’t quite let their guard down. Because each time they do, they run into an awful put-of-the-stomach feeling based on a suspicion that they’ve been played.

The tension in the Roberts-Owen relationship (if you want to read about the plot, read Scott’s review) is that the dialogue is magnificent, nimble and quick, and yet relaxed and convivial. But the basic vibe is cynical and guarded and defined by anxiety. The offshoot is that you, the movie-watcher, don’t really trust these two either, even when it appears that they’ve resolved matters. They’re a good-looking pair, but a long way from establishing that Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller vibe in Brief Encounter.

Paul Giamatti, Tony Gilroy

And with Roberts, as I’ve said before, I just don’t believe there’s a chance of any kind of peace with her. She’s not an actress as much as a presence and a personality who gets hired to be in movies. And deep down, I suspect, she’s only into herself, her security, her portfolio, her kids, her vacation hideaway, her private perimeter. She’s a fighter, a pistolero, an alley cat, a bullshit-buster, a Roger Friedman disser. She’s magnetic and fascinating, but I don’t think you want to ever fall in love with a woman like this. I’m not sure you’d even want to sleep with her. Even that might involve too much risk and melodrama.

You know what? Here comes a quasi-spoiler, which I feel is necessary to help the dummies out there.

The thing that everyone will talk about after seeing it is that Roberts-Owen have a particular conversation four times, each line repeated just so, line for line. There’s the original time plus three other times (including a rehearsal scene). because, this being a film about corporate espionage, they’re certain they’re being taped. What they say is immaterial; the repetition is all. Except it’s a pain in the ass.

Here comes the quasi-spoiler, which is based, I’ll admit, on a possibly flawed recollection. Ready?

The first time we see “the conversation,” in midtown Manhattan, they’re acting it because they know they’re being taped. The second time, in Rome, is the real thing: the two of them actually having this conversation for the first time after they reconnect for the first time since Dubai. The third time is when Duke (Dennis O’Hare) and another guy plays a recording of that Manhattan conversation that we saw in the beginning of the film. And the fourth time we hear it is in the wrapup, when they’re rehearsing the chat in Roberts’ New York apartment, unaware they’re being taped, rehearsing for the encounter that we first see near the beginning of the film. There — I’ve said enough.

More than anything else, I loved Paul Giamatti‘s feisty, highly-cranked CEO with an ego the size of a super-cruiser. When he’s on and in a half-decent film, the man is pure pleasure. So the price of your Duplicity ticket price is more than worth it for him alone.

But Gilroy, I think, got too caught up in his three-card monte game and keeping ahead of the people in the audience who are always trying to guess what will happen or where the plot will ultimately go . I’m not saying he outsmarted himself exactly, but he uncertainly outsmarted me. At least to the extent that Duplicity sometimes makes your brain feel like it’s being pulled in two or three directions, like turkish taffy. On top of which it’s…how to say it? Duplicity is not emotionally untrustworthy as it doesn’t really try for emotional trust in the first place by the act of casting Roberts, who, I believe, is first, last and always a misery-dispensing harridan.

I suspect it’s going to do well with the Maggie Wells and Tony Scotts of the world, but most of the public out there is, I suspect, on my intelligence level, which means that Duplicity may run into trouble starting with the second weekend. But I’m delighted that there are guys like Gilroy who write delightfully smart movies. It’s just that this time I loved the effort more than the execution.