In my 9.11.15 review of Michael Moore‘s Where To Invade Next I called it “an amusing, alpha-wavey but factual love letter to the kind of European Democratic socialism that Bernie Sanders has been espousing for years. And it’s funny and illuminating and engaging in an alpha, up-with-people sense. It’s basically an argument in favor of ‘we’ values and policies over the ‘me and mine’ theology that lies of the heart of the American dream.”

Prior to my second viewing of Moore’s film, which happened a week ago at West Hollywood’s Sundance Cinemas, Moore stood up and acknowledged that some portions of Where To Invade Next are going to prompt people to say “no way,” and that he expects conservatives to claim that it presents a slanted view of things. So he urged the audience to check out a forthcoming fact sheet on his website that will help them argue with their conservative friends. 

Except the sheet won’t be posted until sometime in December so I badgered marketing consultant Ryan Werner into giving me an advance look at a few rough portions of it. Ryan sent them along last Sunday. Hang on to the URL for this piece until the film comes out.

Amy Seimetz has been kicking around as an indie-level director-writer-actress for a good seven or eight years, but before seeing Upstream Color at last January’s Sundance Film Festival I hadn’t paid much attention, to be honest. Seimetz says very little in Shane Carruth‘s film, but sometimes (or should I say often?) a certain mystique arises when an actor holds back and just settles in and the camera just stares. On top of which Seimetz looks a bit like Juliette Binoche in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is a roundabout way of saying she’s obliquely hot.

Amy Seimetz in Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color.

So naturally I wanted to speak with her about Sun Don’t Shine, a dark-toned drama she wrote and directed. It opens on 4.26. Here’s the mp3. I had this idea of Seimetz being a kind of reflection of her Upstream Color character, someone a little vague and imprecise, a woman of few words, etc. So it was a slight surprise to speak with this friendly, fully confessional, almost bubbly-sounding voice on the other end.

Seimetz mentioned that she was going through some “really rough” personal struggles during the shooting of Upstream Color and that maybe some of that came through.

The clip below was shot by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson during the 2013 South by Southwest Festival. I’m having trouble paying attention to what’s being said because I’m so fascinated by that construction-site backround. A covered chain-link fence, tractors, tools. Where the hell are they doing this interview, in someone’s back yard in some nondescript Austin neighborhood?

From the Sun Don’t Shine press notes: “[The film] follows Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and her boyfriend Leo (Kentucker Audley) on a tense and mysterious road trip through the desolate yet hauntingly beautiful landscape of central Florida. From the outset, the purpose of their journey is unclear, and the motivations behind their heated altercations and shady errands are hazy, but sporadic moments of tenderness illuminate the loving bond between the two that exists underneath their overt tensions.

“As the couple travels up the Gulf Coast past an endless panorama of mangrove fields, trailer parks, and cookie-cutter housing developments, the disturbing details of their excursion gradually begin to emerge, revealing Crystal’s sinister past and the couple’s troubling future.”

I was late to Mike Leigh‘s Another Year, missing showings at both the Cannes and Toronto film festivals. But I finally caught up with it a week ago, and now I know it will be fairly intolerable if Lesley Manville, who plays a sad and scattered and increasingly desperate single in Leigh’s masterful film, doesn’t end up as one of the five Best Actress nominees this year. It really is one of those hot-button performances that can’t be shrugged off.

Another Year star Lesley Manville at Manhattan’s Regency hotel — Tuesday, 10.5.10, 10:20 am

By the end of this expansive but absorbing film Manville’s sadness just floors you. She’s Eleanor Rigby with a wine buzz, and you just know from the get-go that her character, Mary, is probably headed for a sad denoument. We’ve all been trained like dogs to expect that “a character with a problem” will be given a shot at repairing that problem sometime late in the second act or early in the third. Not this time.

Another Year is less of a solitary character study than a family ensemble piece. The central characters or anchors, so to speak, are a 50ish couple, Tim and Gerri (Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen), who are friendly with Mary, a divorcee with an occasional susceptibility for fantasy and delusion, and invite her by for brunches and whatnot. (She and Gerri work in the same clinic) There are three other characters who pop in and out, but Mary is the one who’s tragic and teetering, and from our perspective the film becomes almost a kind of death march for the poor woman as the realization sinks in that Mary is stuck and slipping and (God help her) probably doomed.

Mike Leigh is no softy, and Another Year, amusing and finely observed and character-rich as if frequently is, is no walk in the park. But after you’ve seen it there’s no forgetting poor Mary, or, more to the point, the brilliant Ms. Manville.

I did a little reading about Palermo over the last few weeks, knowing I’d be visiting there during my post-Cannes travels. And having yesterday spent a few hours traipsing around Palermo’s mean streets, I can now state with authority that certain travel writers and travel websites have lied through their teeth about the largely ugly and rancid nature of this city.

Entering Palermo — Friday, 5.28.10, 11:55 am.

Palermo is a Mafia rathole — a corrupt, crime-infested, economically challenged, overly-congested sprawl of mostly unattractive apartment and commercial buildings (mostly of a skanky gray, grayish-brown or dogshit-orange color) with a few historical buildings and commercial diversions to keep the tourists happy or at least diverted.

I’m sorry but my primary impressions are as follows: air-polluted, generally unkempt, vaguely smelly, over-populated, too many buses and scooters, overstuffed garbage bins — a festival of clutter and crap. Certainly not what anyone would call “clean” or “well-maintained.”

Are there tiny little pockets of beauty and cultivation here and there? I’ve read about them and I’m sure they exist (I’m sitting in a very pleasant air-conditioned hotel lobby five blocks from the harbor), but much or most of Palermo feels like some kind of hot and humid third–world nightmare that you can’t escape from fast enough.

The various mafia corruptions are probably the main reason why Palermo feels like a “favela” out of Fernando Meirelles‘ City of God.

Napoli, Italy’s other urban armpit, is also crime-infested, and it looks, feels and smells the same way. The influence of the Cosa Nostra is not good for tourism because the guys who’ve profited from what’s happened in these cities are clearly opposed to civic enhancement when it interferes with stuffing their own pockets.

Wikipedia’s Palermo page says the following: “The main topic of the contemporary age is the struggle against Mafia and bandits like Salvatore Giuliano, who controlled the neighboring area of Montelepri. The Italian State had to share effective control, economic as well as the administrative, of the territory with the Mafiosi families.

“The so-called ‘sack of Palermo‘ is one of the major visible faces of this problem. The term is used to indicate the wildcat, unregulated speculations that filled the city with brutalist apartment buildings. The reduced importance of agriculture in the Sicilian economy had led to a massive migration to the cities, especially Palermo, which swelled in size.

“Instead of rebuilding the city center the town was thrown into a frantic expansion towards the north, where practically a new town was built. The regulatory plan for the expansion was largely ignored. New parts of town appeared almost out of nowhere, but without parks, schools, public buildings, proper roads and the other amenities that characterise a modern city.

“The Mafia played a huge role in this process, which was an important element in the Mafia’s transition from a mostly rural phenomenon into a modern criminal organisation. The Mafia took advantage of corrupt city officials (a former mayor of Palermo, Vito Ciancimino, has been condemned for his bribery with Mafiosi) and protection coming from the Italian central government itself.

“The historic city center is still partly in ruins, the traffic is horrific, and poverty is widespread. Being the city in which the Italian Mafia historically had its main interests, it has also been the place of several recent well-publicized murders. Situated on one of the most beautiful promontories of the Mediterranean, Palermo is anyway an important trading and business centre and the seat of a University frequented by many students coming from Islamic countries, as its relationships with Muslim world were never ceased.”

I saw The Cove last night at a special celebrity-attended screening, and I’m now officially and emotionally among the ranks of the persuaded and the blown-away. It’s easily one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and without question my choice for the best documentary of 2009 so far. It’s this year’s Man on Wire — almost certain to keep playing and gathering steam all through the year and into Oscar season.

You don’t come out of The Cove simply saying “really good movie!” (although you do). You come out The Cove wanting to fly the next day to Taiji, Japan, in order to kick some Japanese dolphin-slaughtering ass. You come out furious and moved and converted and dug in.

No one should get the idea that The Cove is primarily a classroom-lecture piece and an eco-activist movie, although it is obviously those things in a political undertow sense. Because it’s first and foremost a very well-made, thoroughly watchable murder-mystery — a gripping and entertaining sit by any standard. (Unless you happen to be, you know, an idiot.) That’s right — murder. As in seawater turning pink and then blood red.

Anyone who’s ever watched the various Flipper entertainments (the two early ’60s movies, the ‘ mid ’60s TV series, the 1996 feature with Elijah Wood) or has visited any kind of Sea World amusement park needs to see it especially. And no wimping out (or allowing the girlfriend/wife to steer you away from it). Stand up, man up and buy a ticket when it opens on 7.31.

The Cove is essentially about the exploring and exposing of a grisly annual slaughter of 2500 dolphins that happens each September in Taiji. It’s also a kind of love sonnet about dolphins — their immense intelligence, friendliness to humans, spiritual and physical beauty, etc.

It follows that it’s also a movie about infuriating bureaucratic stupidity and mass mercury poisoning, since dolphin meat (which the Taiji slaughterers covertly sell to the world) is especially heavy with the stuff.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Richard O’Barry during last night’s post-screening q & a

Fisher Stevens, Kennedy.

And it’s finally and fundamentally a portrait of an obstinate hero and an extremely guilty-feeling older guy named Richard O’Barry, a former Flipper trainer-turned-activist.

O’Barry acknowledges time and again that he bears responsibility for the popularity of dolphins and their forced-labor imprisonment at various sea parks worldwide, since he was the guy who caught and trained the five dolphins who played Flipper on the famed TV series that ran from ’64 to ’68.

The Cove‘s central though-line is an effort by O’Barry and a team of activists to covertly film/tape the annual slaughter, which Taiji locals naturally don’t want anyone to see much less know about. Prior to The Cove‘s debut showing at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, I’m not aware that anyone outside of marine activists knew anything about it, including Japanese citizens.

The film is basically reiterates the truism that all ugly and ghastly things are caused by greed, denial and stupidity.

It’s really quite impossible to watch the finale — the footage of the mass harpooning of hundreds of dolphins that O’Barry and friends have endeavored to capture — and not clench your teeth and fists.

Team behind shooting of The Cove.

Plus the mislabelling of dolphin meat is appalling and sickening given the widespread mercury poisoning that consuming it has caused. And the continued refusal of the International Whaling Commission to classify dolphins as cetaceans (which would help to protect them from being murdered) as they grovel and kowtow before Japanese economic interests is nothing short of disgusting.

Technically The Cove is as sharply shot, cut and assembled as a piece like this could possibly be. You get a sense immediately that this is no run-of-the-mill documentary but a first-rate edge-of-the-seater, procedural and hide-and-seek paranoid thriller.

The Cove was directed by Louie Psihoyos. The exec producer is multimillionaire Jim Clark. The excellent editing is by Geoffrey Richman. The writing is by Mark Monroe. And the film was basically shepherded and sharpened into shape by Fisher Stevens.

The attendees at last night’s screening included Ben Stiller, Salt director Phillip Noyce, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Stevens, Clark, O’Barry, Griffin Dunne, Famke Janssen, Matthew Modine, Jerry Stiller and Christine Taylor.

A q & a panel happened after the screening with Clark, Stevens, Kennedy and O’Barry speaking and taking questions. Ben Stiller, who flipped for The Cove after seeing it recently at the Nantucket Film Festival, introduced the film at the very beginning. The after-party at Rouge Tomate was thrown by Peggy Siegal.

Here‘s that Dolphin Lady/Gini Kopecky-Wallace review that ran two or three weeks ago. My favorite line from her piece: “Watch crazy-brave people doing crazy-brave things and there’s no telling what other people will decide they can do.”

And here’s a link to a “get involved and do what you can” site sister site affiliated with The Cove. And here’s an ’07 story about what Hayden Panettierre did 18 months ago to try to bring attention to the Taiji slaughter.

The Film Independent, non-IFP Spirit Awards selection committee really likes Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, and not just because of the four just-announced nominations — Best Feature, Best Director and acting noms for Cate Blanchett (a sure winner) and Marcus Carl Franklin. They’ve also selected the Weinstein Co. release to receive the org’s Robert Altman Award, a pat-on-the-back group award for the director, casting director and ensemble cast.

Lisa Kudrow, Zac Braff following the reading of nominations — Tuesday, 8:28 am, 2nd floor conference room, West Hollywood’s Sofitel.

Jason Reitman‘s Juno, Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Tamara Jenkins‘ The Savages also received four noms each.

The nominations were announced by Zach Braff and Lisa Kudrow at 8 this morning at the Sofitel in West Hollywood. I was sitting in the front row, having loaded up on the free scrambled eggs, roissants, crisp bacon and good coffee a little while before. I snapped the usual photos and left hurriedly when it was over. I left my digital recorder lying on the stage….brilliant.

I’m Not There, Butterfly and Juno were nominated for Best Feature alongside Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart and Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park.

I’m Not There (duhhh) will win the Best Feature award. Todd Haynes will take the Best Director award. The Best First Feature winner is too tough call. (The nominees are 2 Days in Paris, Great World of Sound, The Lookout, Rocket Science and Vanaja.) And I don’t know from the John Cassevetes Award.

A morbidly obese, revoltingly chummy glad-handing photographer who was sitting next to me went “ohhh” when Waitress director-writer Adrienne Shelly‘s name was announced as one of the Best Screenplay nominees, so look for a possible Shelly win as a gesture of sorrow for the tragedy that befell her last year.

Either Juno‘s Diablo Cody or Before The Devil Knows Your’e Dead‘s Kelly Masterson will win the Best First Screenplay award — edge to Cody because she lives here now and knows how to work the town, and because Masterson is a New Jersey hermit.

Angelina Jolie may win the Best Actress award for A Mighty Heart (her best performance ever), but if she doesn’t win the rightful winner should be Parker Posey for Broken English.

The Best Actor competish will be between Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Savages) and Frank Langella (Starting Out in the Evening) — edge to Hoffman.

Blanchett, as noted, as the Best Supporting Female award locked. There’s no hear on any of the Best Supporting Actor nominees but young Marcus Carl Franklin might take it on the strength of the I’m Not There coattails.

It’s too hard to call the Best Documentary nominees…pass. But the Best Foreign Film contest is between Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (the best of the five nominees), Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit (possible recipient of a sympathy vote for having been fucked by the Academy and the HFPA with the language issue), and John Carney‘s Once, the little movie that could and did.

Enchanted is a huge hit with the public (a five-day gross in the mid-$50 million range) and critics alike (a 93% positive Rotten Tomatoes score), and even hard-core sourpusses need to admit it has four or five scenes that succeed beautifully. But fans are turning a blind eye to an inescapable fact. The concept (four Snow White-ish cartoon characters catapulted into 2007 New York City) is great but Bill Kelly‘s script is flimsy and hackneyed. Because of this, a film that could have been marvelous barely makes it across the finish line.

And yet several things in Enchanted do more than work nicely — they’re actually inspired.

Everyone’s delighted with a Disney film getting laughs from a satire of its cartoon- fantasy origins. Amy Adams‘ performance as Giselle is obviously spirited and faux-“adorable” (even though she’s basically giving us her Junebug character amplified with some Carol Burnett-ish skit acting). That said, somebody is going to have to explain to me how Adams’ pure-of-heart, wide-eyed amazement thing works as an Oscar-level performance. It’s a bit — she’s using the same chops in scene after scene.

There are three musical sequences that work superbly — the Central Park song- and-dance number, the apartment-cleaning sequence with the rats, pigeons and cockroaches, and the third-act masked costume-ball dance number. And the true-love kiss at the finale works perfectly — it’s exactly what we want to see happen. And the CG chipmunk (called “Pip,” partly voiced by Lima) has at least one terrific sequence, when he tries to convey the seriousness of a situation through an antic display of charades.

But the lack of internal logic, the poorly thought-out foundations, the nonsen- sical plot turns…my God! I completely bought into the lunatic whimsy of Being John Malkovich (damp muddy tunnel, Garden State Parkway ejection and all), but I felt constantly jabbed and irritated by the same thing in Enchanted.

Some filmmakers operate under the impression that making a lightweight fantasy or comedy means no heavy lifting. A fool’s philosophy! A comedy or a fantasy has to be carefully constructed upon a solid foundation and thought through to the last niggling detail as much as any thriller, drama or melodrama. Having fun with a concept and being goofy in the bargain is one thing, but crafting a truly sublime fantasy-comedy is a bitch. And Enchanted is fraught with bits and behaviors that result in one dumb pothole after another.

The key to the Giselle humor is that an impossibly sweet cartoon maiden from a storybook fantasy realm (called Andalusia) is going to be hugely confused and disoriented inside the assaultive reality of modern-day Manhattan. And yet certain terms and conditions would have to apply in both worlds. Cartoon characters drink water, eat food, clean houses, try to kill each other, rescue each other and ride horses, so there’s obviously a degree of overlap.

Cartoon Giselle doesn’t know about adult relationships or iPhones or tampons, but she would certainly know about the basics of protecting herself from a threat. If a huge cartoon boulder was to dislodge itself from a mountain top and start rolling towards the cartoon Giselle, wouldn’t she scamper out of the way to avoid being hit?

And if it rains in Andalusia, wouldn’t she naturally take cover under a tree or in a nearby cottage? And if she happens to see a large landscape painting in a castle, wouldn’t she have the ability to differentiate the painting from real-life hills and forests outside? And if she’s able to fall 25 or 30 feet from a tree into the arms of a horse-riding prince in a fantasy world, wouldn’t this ability be nullified if she falls 15 or 20 feet from an elevated billboard in the real world?

By the standards of Enchanted, the answer to all these questions is “no.”

When the flesh-and-blood Giselle climbs out of a magical Times Square manhole (a Malkovich-like portal that all the Enchanted characters — James Marsden‘s Prince Edward, Timothy Spall‘s Nathaniel, Susan Sarandon‘s wicked Queen Narissa — magically arrive through) and sees Seventh Avenue traffic speeding towards her, she does nothing — the instinct to avoid pain and save herself from injury doesn’t kick in.

And when a real-life rainfall happens and she begins to get soaked, Giselle just stands there like a turkey. When she sees a huge Manhattan billboard of a painting of a castle, she thinks it’s real and tries to get inside the castle by knocking on the painted moat gate. And when she falls backward off the elevated billboard platform (which is a good 15 or 20 feet high), she lands on top of real-life attorney Patrick Dempsey…and it’s like she’s just fallen off a step-ladder.

In short, for the first 10 or 15 minutes of her New York visit, Adams’ Giselle isn’t just an innocent — she’s also an idiot.

I understand that Enchanted is not supposed to be The Battle of Algiers. And like I said, some of the fantasy scenes are very buoyant and satisfying. But you really do have to work out a system that allows disparate worlds to reflect each other to some degree and to hang together as a unit. Just ask screenwriter Charlie Kaufman — he conjured a system for Malkovich that worked just fine.

Marsden’s Prince is a friendly boob who leaps atop a New York City MTA bus and then stabs the roof with his sword because…I don’t know. Because he thinks the bus is a threat, obviously. Maybe a kind of dragon. But what kind of dragon carries 25 or 30 perfectly safe, bored-looking people in its belly? I’m lost.

Spall’s Nathaniel arrives in Manhattan to surreptitiously do the bidding of Saran- don’s queen and poison Giselle, but has to contend with chipmunk Pip trying two or three times to alert Edward to his real agenda. But all Nathaniel does to keep Pip from blowing his cover is stuff him in his pocket or inside a glass bowl when the obvious solution would be to throw the little guy into the Hudson River or under a moving subway car — something that might really dispatch him. Attempted murder can be portrayed within the bounds of a light-hearted family flick, but the Enchanted guys were otherwise engaged.

At one point Marsden and Spall walk north out of Manhattan and get themselves a room in some kind of Harlem flophouse. The place is located next to an elevated train track, which has to be the Metro North line that runs out of Grand Central somewhere north of 110th Street. But why do they go to Harlem exactly? Why not the Lower East Side? Why not Williamsburg?

And please don’t mention the CG-dragon-on-top-of-a-building climax — a grotesque left-field addition that couldn’t be more at odds with Enchanted‘s sweet-souled essence, and is also a bald-faced copy of the Ghostbusters finale.

I’m 95% certain this was inserted into the script by producer Barry Sonnenfeld, whose industry rep and influence meant he had much greater power than director Kevin Lima, who comes from feature animation (102 Dalmations, Tarzan) and is basically small fry. Sonnenfeld loves overbearing CG sequences (the Men in Black pix, the finale of Wild Wild West), and the Enchanted finale has his paw prints all over it.

The bottom line is that apart from the animated films created by the genius-level Brad Bird and John Lasseter and a few others, family movies don’t seem to be attracting truly top-tier writers and directors. I don’t know enough players in the G-rated realm to speak with authority, but if Enchanted is any knd of indicator family flicks are largely being written and directed by B- and C-level talents. That doesn’t mean they’re modern-day Ed Wood types, but they’re obviously “not Ivy League.”

Family movies are a different kind of sandbox than regular adult films. Watching one of these godawful things is sometimes like being stuck on Devil’s Island with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The trailers for the G- and PG-rated films that were shown before last night’s 7 pm showing of Enchanted at the AMC 14 were an absolute nightmare to sit through. (The worst seemed to be College Road Trip, the new Martin Lawrence comedy.) The flawed Enchanted script tells us that Disney is a supporter of “good enough” over “needs more work.” Welcome, I suppose, to the era of Disney production chief Oren Aviv.

Jerry Seinfeld‘s Bee Movie opens a week from Friday (11.2) and nobody’s seen or said a thing about it. Except for what was said and shown at the big Cannes Film Festival promotion five and a half months ago. The first screenings aren’t happening until Tuesday, 10.30 and Wednesday, 10.31. The only thing to go on today is a softball Seinfeld profile by N.Y. Times guy David Itzkoff.

The best part of the piece explains how Seinfeld “can be affable with fans, but he doesn’t hide a certain earned arrogance. When one stunned onlooker [at a restaurant] asked for his autograph, Seinfeld said, ‘Sure’…then kept walking straight to his table.”

“While attending the United States Open tennis tournament, Seinfeld recalled, he was approached by a well-attired fan who handed him a business card and invited Seinfeld to visit his brokerage house. Both men became noticeably perplexed when the offer was declined. ‘I said, we don’t know each other. You’re a total stranger,’ Seinfeld recounted. ‘He says, but we really like you. I said, thank you so much, but this is as far as we go.'”

“Seinfeld adds: ‘This is a sophisticated guy that doesn’t understand the TV only works one way.'”

Bee Movie is about Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), a bee who’s not happy with the idea of just making honey for the rest of his life. One day he gets to leave the hive on a honeysuckle mission in Manhattan’s Central Park, and eventually runs into humans who try to swat him to death.

Barry is nearly all in at one point when he’s saved by Vanessa (Renee Zellweger), with whom he promptly falls in love. (Kind of a King Kong-Ann Darrell romance in reverse.) Then he decides to talk to her. In English, that is. Then he learns about the human honey business, and decides that humans are ripping off the bees in order to do so, and so files a lawsuit to try and prevent this.

As I wrote last May, “I like ‘silly’ if the movie really goes for it whole-hog.”

Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4) blows, according to Times Online critic Leo Lewis, delivering a three-stars-out-of-five review. Having caught the film at the Tokyo premiere, Lewis calls it “a daft, highly polished couple of hours of fantasy fun,” but that’s just a lot of blah-blah on his part. Read the damn review — Lewis has a sense of humor but he basically says it sucks stinking hairy dog balls.

“The central theme of the film is that even superheroes can have a dark side,” he writes. Whoa….mind-blower.

“There is not enough of the super-villains and they are not nearly twisted enough,” Lewis says. “But then there never is and they never are. There are digital effects galore to remind us that Sony is a high-tech company, particularly when a new super-villain, Thomas Haden Church‘s Sandman, is transformed into a living sandstorm and pulverizes bits of Manhattan.

“At one point Tobey Maguire, who plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Church, James Franco and Topher Grace square off in a four-way clash clearly designed to satisfy all tastes in hairstyle, physical build and jaw-line. The imperilled Kirsten Dunst, meanwhile, barely registers.

“And for reminders that Japan, the home of manga comics, is an increasingly powerful influence on Hollywood directors there is an unmistakable homage to the anime classic Akira.

“Perhaps, more subtly, there are ample goodies aimed head-on at the female Japanese filmgoer, the most important demographic in what has become the world√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s second biggest box office. The hunk count is disproportionately high, the babe count oddly low.

“The challenge that Spider-Man faces from the Sandman — he learns of a connection with the murder of his Uncle Ben — a mysterious black substance has turned his Spider-Man suit black. It brings forth a darker side of Parker and Spidey that nobody has seen before when he is conveniently infested with an alien parasite.

“The problem is that even Spider-Man’s ‘evil’ side is still hopelessly mild- mannered. We are shown a montage of his sub-Mr. Hyde depravities. His hair droops over one eye; he swaggers along the street; he flirts with passers-by; his girl ditches him; and he makes an ass of himself in a nightclub. In short, he behaves like a textbook drunk on any given Saturday night.

“A horrifying glimpse into the unspeakable pit of the human soul this is not.

“Also disappointing is the inability of the director, Sam Raimi, to end the romp without a fleeting shot of the American flag. The Stars and Stripes just happens to be fluttering behind Spidey as he makes his triumphal return to honor, probity and good honest fist-fighting.”

The flag thing in itself is deplorable. I’m sorry to be the among the first to say this, but Spider-Man 3 may herald the temporary end of Sam Raimi. It may take him years to recover from this. If the reviews continue in this vein, Raimi is probably going to have to walk into the Southern California desert wearing sandals and carrying a Charlton Heston Ten Commandments staff and try to find his soul again.

Boiled Down

Movie City News editor David Poland saw United 93 last night (I know because I saw and spoke to him at the screening), and he has asked two questions on his Hot Blog about it: What is it really about and who is it really about?
The answer to the first question isn’t that simple, but the answer to the second is as plain as a green apple sitting on a glass table in a nice restaurant in the late afternoon.

Director Paul Greengrass during filming of United 93

United 93 may have been made with the “idea” of it being about the heroism, selflessness and standing-up-to-terrorism valor shown by the passengers on flight #93, but honestly, actually…? The passengers in the film are mainly reacting to a realization that the hijackers are on a suicide mission and that they’re basically all dead, and so the bravest among them say “screw it, let’s do something instead of just waiting for it.”
This kicks in toward the very end, but the movie is really not about that (and thank God it isn’t) because, as Poland says, the drama is never delivered on any kind of individual character level. A kind of frantic heroism happened, an undeniable valor, but the film isn’t about that. Well, it is…but not finally.
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Director Paul Greengrass may have begun with the idea of developing a heroism-of- the-passengers story, but I think he said along the way, “Sod it…let’s just make a minute-by-minute, you-are-there, this-is-how-it-probably-felt movie from the POV of the United #93 passengers and the perspective of the professionals charged with keeping tabs on commercial plane activity…and then we’ll sort it out in the editing room.”
And yet the movie has, ironically, a big current running through it.
This current, for me, is Greengrass’s big inspiration, his brainwave. Because it’s the first two thirds of this film — the experience and the perspective of the people trying to keep tabs on what’s happening from the air control centers — that gives United 93 its intrigue and electricity.

What, then, is United 93 “about”? It’s about revisiting, recapturing, reanimating… living through the particulars. Which means that Poland will be chasing his own tail around a tree trying to find the Big Meaning…unless, of course, he breaks through all that.
The theme of United 93 is the deceptive nature of “reality” as it unfolds. The reality of what life in these particular spaces felt like, and Greengrass’s striking ability to reconstitute recent history with a feeling of gripping verisimilitude, which I regard as a kind of cinematic theme or belief system in and of itself.
In short, I believe in Paul Greengrass when he’s working at the top of his form. As far as this movie is concerned, that’s my religion and my faith. Nobody needs a high falutin’ analysis about “what it’s really about” to make it feel whole or justified, because what it’s about is its own constitution. A big resounding echo isn’t the point in a film composed of a thousand echoes of minutae.
Poland also asks who is it really about?
That’s the really interesting question, and the answer is that United 93 is about us. Then and right now. Us.

Greene Grab

Blown Away

Is Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (Universal, 4.28) a knockout, a time-stopper, a mind-blower? It sure as hell is.
You’re probably going to need to stand outside the theatre for a few minutes after it’s over and just chill…trust me. And then you’re going to want a drink, even if you don’t drink. And then talk it out with friends for an hour or so. See it with some. Don’t go alone.
Is feeling power-drilled all over again by one of the worst real-life nightmares of all time a good thing? To me, it is.

Christian Clemenson (kneeling) as Thomas Burnett in the middle of passenger huddle during last act of United 93; Cheyenne Jackson, as Mark Bingham, is standing behind with the maroon shirt and hat.

It happened, it’s real, and this film knocks your socks off because it takes you right back to that surreal morning and that feeling, that almost-afraid-to-breathe feeling, and to me, that’s partly what good films do — they lift you out of your realm and make you forget about everything but what’s on-screen.
All I know is that I was watching and taking it all in, and that the old feelings started to build and churn around and then pour back in, like a damburst. The chills and forebodings of doom were back, and this time with a closer, more comprehensive perspective.
United 93 didn’t make me “happy” but I relished it. I’m not a baby or a coward. I’m not a “too-sooner.” Show me anything that smacks of honesty and hard truth or at least skillful manipulations of same, and I’m there for firsts, seconds and thirds.
Time‘s Richard Corliss called it “unbearable and unmissable.” Mainly the latter, I’d say. As long as it’s not a cheap-ass horror film, I eat “unbearable” for breakfast.
Not one frame of this film struck me as distasteful or exploitative. It shows what needs to be shown with as much restraint as could be managed without changing the known facts.
We were told at the screening that the print shown wasn’t quite finished. It looked pretty finished to me. No obviously raw effects, nothing that screamed out, “Oops …sorry!”

United 93 director Paul Greengrass during filming on set of Pinewood Studios.

What surprised me is that two-thirds of United 93 don’t have a whole lot to do with United #93. They’re about what happened as air traffic controllers, the FAA and the military tried to monitor what was happening with American Airlines #11, United #193 and American #77 (i.e., the flights that slammed into the North Tower, the South Tower and the Pentagon, respectively). It’s about how a lot of focused dec- ent professionals tried to keep up with the horror and couldn’t.
United 93 runs about an hour and 45 minutes. It’s about 30 minutes before Flight 93 takes off, but you’re not really paying that much attention, frankly, to those doomed souls on the plane…not at first. It’s the confused folks in the control rooms who pull you in. The second plane hits about 45 minutes in, give or take, and it’s another 15 minutes — a full hour — before the hijackers, who’ve waited and eyeball- ed each other from their first-class seats and stalled, it seems to me, like nervous nellies, before finally making their move.
For me, that opening hour is classic. Greengrass has never done anything quite as good. The tension and verisimilitude surpasses his work in Bloody Sunday, and that’s saying something. Each and every bit actor, every line…every last piece of it screws you to your seat.
Those guys playing air-traffic controllers are perfect. Remember the tension in that air-traffic controller scene in the opening moments of Close Encounters of the Third Kind? It’s that tripled or quadrupled. Ben Sliney, a gray-haired office mana- ger type who was having his first day on 9/11 as national operations manager for the FAA, plays himself. Nobody, really, seems to be “acting” in this. Every bit player rules in every control-room scene in this film.

Cast of United 93 on Pinewood sound stage.

What’s so affecting is that you know what’s coming, and Greengrass just lets it come…tick, tock, tick. There’s a spellbinding moment when it all starts…when a 40ish Boston air traffic controller first realizes that American #11 is off-course and not communicating. The moment isn’t especially heightened or emphasized. It’s just this guy going, “Okay…something’s off here”
Once the hijacking on United #93 begins and the killings and screamings and all the rest of that sad melodrama kicks in, then it’s a bit more familiar, especially if you’re up on what’s known to have happened and if you saw A&E’s Flight 93 movie last January. That was an okay film. I didn’t like the family members crying and saying “I love you” to their loved ones who were calling from the plane (which felt almost icky to me), but it was all right. And yet United 93, no offense, is about two and a half to three times better.
I saw it at the first non-Time magazine press screening on Tuesday night in Santa Monica, and a woman sitting two seats away got up twice, and it’s measure of how caught up I was that I was vaguely irritated when she left the second time. How many times does this woman need to take a leak? I wondered. Or is she leaving the room to give herself a break from the tension? Either way, I was vaguely irked. (Why should I care, right? It was her business. But I didn’t want any nearby move- ment.)
The remarkable accomplishent, for me, is that I felt no sense of time while watch- ing United 93. It lasts about 105 minutes, and it could have been 40 or 50 minutes. I didn’t care, didn’t think about it. The damn thing held me, vise-gripped me. Did I have a good time? Definitely, by my standards. I haven’t sat through a pulse-poun- der like this in months, and I can’t wait to see it again.

Ben Sliney, who was having his first day as national operations manager for the FAA on 9.11.01, plays himself.

Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Mark Bingham, the gay guy who died on United #93, was one of those at last night’s screening. I spoke to him briefly, told him it’s a hell of a film. He seemed kind of choked up and needed some alone time. Chris- tian Clemenson, who plays Thomas Burnett, was also there, but he was gone in a flash as soon as the credits started rolling.
One tiny beef: The last piece of copy on the black screen says that after 9/11, “America’s war on terror had begun.” The implied statement, of course, is, “And it continues today!” That it does, but if anyone thinks that what’s happening in Iraq right now (and what may even happen with Iran…who knows?) is a blow against terror they’re very much mistaken, and that final line struck me as a bit of a rah-rah statement. I think Greengrass should have just let what happened in the film (as he chose to dramatize it) stand on its own and leave well enough alone.

Puck Everlasting

The movies that seem to grab me the most are the ones that ask us to consider the mystical, the undefined, the intangibles…the ones that say “look up, look out, look beyond…there’s more to this world than what you can own, eat, taste or feel.”
The latest film to do this kind of thing well, and frankly one of the more interesting, amusing and affecting films I’ve seen over the last few weeks (if you don’t include An Inconvenient Truth, that is), is a new documentary about a bunch of guys who love to play air hockey.
It’s called Way of the Puck — and no one anywhere has seen it, except for a handful of film festival programmers. It’ll be having its world premiere at Houston’s Worldfest Film Festival in mid to late April.

Atypical action moment in Eric D. Anderson’s Way of the Puck, meaning that 98% of it was shot in regular color video.

I’m not saying it’s wet-your-pants fantastic, but if you can imagine something as arcane as a thinking man’s air-hockey film…one that doesn’t so much focus on a stupid plastic puck getting knocked back and forth by a couple of guys leaning over a gleaming blue plastic surface as much as…well, the zen approach to this simple-ass game, keeping a light touch, concentrating hard and yet not concen- trating as much as feeling the force…this is it.
The “maker” is Eric D. Anderson, a Los Angeles-based guy who works on music videos and commercials and has spent the last two-plus years putting this doc together, partly (as you might expect) because he’s a big air hockey nut himself, but also because he sees a Great Beyond inside it…a world within a world.
“On the surface air hockey seems like a story with very low stakes,” he writes on the film’s website. “Or no stakes at all. I get a lot of this. ‘Air hockey?’ people say, nodding slowly. ‘That game from the ’70s? Hunh.’
“Air hockey isn’t the unpopular kid who gets kicked around at recess. Air hockey is the kid no one notices, including the teacher. It’s a forgotten arcade game, a kid’s game, a relic, a jobby, a diversion, a trifle…and what could be less important than that?”

But in the making of this film, says Anderson, “I discovered a passionate and intelligent community of players. These are underdogs, participating in a fringe sport. They know they are dismissed and sometimes mocked and that air hockey will proably never be accepted by the mainstream. And yet they continue to travel thousands of miles to compete against the best players in the world.”
Way of the Puck is a guy film, mostly, obviously, but a smart one. Alert, spiritual, philosophically loaded. “Small” and a little familiar in certain ways, maybe a tiny bit repetitive (and maybe a little long…just a wee bit) but within its own territory it feels solid and connected and complete.
It’s a real middle-class film about a gaggle (somehow that word feels right rather than ‘group’) of five or six American middle class guys, most of them married and either pudgy or bearded or balding (or all three) who are serious air hockey freaks, and who all happen to be quite thoughtful and intelligent.
That’s the first big revelation — air hockey doesn’t seem to be played by meatball blue-collar types but by unusually bright and creative guys. Or so this film implies.

Eric D. Anderson

These aren’t exactly rugged individualists, but guys with a certain consistency and tenacity. Not the kind of men whom anyone would call intense or magnetic or start- ling, but men with an undeniable passion and dignity. And maybe a certain sadness or resignation thrown in, marital responsibilities and the day-to-day slog being what they are.
And yet they share an obvious, unshakable, undeniable belief in air hockey as some kind of transcendent pursuit…something that sustains their spirit, gets them through the rough patches, puts a special kind of English on their existence, makes life feel whole (or at least gives it a certain weight and dimension) and worth living.
More so from the audience perspective because air hockey isn’t that recognized or celebrated…far from it…but it’s their own thing, played as it is in those little rooms, and they’re happy with that. Or happy enough.
And there’s that cool robot. A one-armed guy resembling one of those Empire droids in Attack of the Clones playing a pretty good game of defensive air hockey with very some very fast reflexes. I’ve only seen human-sized robots with arms and legs do things like walk dogs and vacuum rugs. This guy’s different. Impressive.

Robot air hockey

The point of Way of the Puck is that an air-hockey player needs to be alive and alert and in touch with something inward and flowing to get anything out of the game. More than just a fast hand and a light touch, but man…that robot.
Anderson believes that air hockey is “the culmination of 2500 years of human thought — connected to astronomy and artificial intelligence, music and missiles, comics and country + western dancing, painting and punk rock.” I don’t know if I can go that far, but Way of the Puck convinced me that air hockey amounts to something, or at least the players do.

Memory Lane

April has barely begun and the media drumbeat over the year’s two big 9/11 films, both produced with the upcoming five-year anniversary in mind, is already pretty loud.
Press screenings for United 93 are beginning this week, stories attempting to gauge the public’s interest in seeing this and other 9/11 presentations are running (the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek ran theirs on 4.7 and 4.10, respectively), and we’ll be hearing more and more about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center next month when a 20-minute reel from the 8.11 Paramount release is shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Nicolas Cage as Sgt. John McLouglin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11)

The 9/11 anniversary isn’t for another five months, of course, but I’ve been thinking about another startling event that happened in Manhattan nearly five years ago — a panel discussion on Saturday, October 6, 2001, at Alice Tully Hall called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.”
I reported on this right after it happened and I’ve mentioned it since (most recently in a WIRED item around noon on Sunday, 4.9), so why dredge it up for the third or fourth time? Because what panelist Oliver Stone said that day is, to me, still bang -on-the-head thrilling, and I’ve been wondering what’s changed in the four and a half years since…if anything?
It’s Sunday, it’s sunny outside, birds are chirping and I’m just going to run this piece again. (Most of it.) It’s a portrait of what’s been happening in this town for a long time, but the precision and candor in Stone’s rant still resonates.
Stone tried to describe the mindset and inclinations of corporate-run Hollywood as he saw it back then. Has the situation abated, remained the same, gotten worse or what? Read this through and think about it. I’m asking.
I’m repeating what I said in the WIRED item, but this sure was a long time ago, especially considering the apparent repositioning that has happened inside Stone himself, who was obviously more than a bit of a firebrand on 10.6.01 and now look at him, the director of a 9/11 pic about a couple of Port Authority guys who got buried under the fallen towers…a film that’s starting to sound, frankly, like it may be a head-in-the-sand emotional comfort blanket disguised as a rescue thriller.

Before the ’01 debate: Lumumba director Raoul Peck, essayist Bell Hicks, director Oliver Stone, New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), former Universal Pictuers chairman Tom Pollock (almost completely hidden), and HBO executive Colin Callender.

I’m not saying World Trade Center won’t be a well-crafted or emotionally affecting drama. (Alexander aside, Stone is still a top-notch filmmaker). And who knows? Maybe it will contain echos and undercurrents that will add dimension to what screenwriter Andrea Berloff believes it is (“a boy-down-a-well saga’). But read the following and tell me Stone hasn’t trimmed his sails just a tad.
“Say what you will about Oliver Stone’s political views, but he’s a master at whipping up a crowd,” I began. “This was plainly evident during a panel discussion he participated in last Saturday at New York’s Alice Tully Hall called ‘Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.’
“The same brio that has enlivened many of Stone’s politically driven films, including JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and Nixon, was in full force during the sometimes brawl-like, HBO-sponsored discussion.
“Stone’s chief nemesis during the discussion — which also included some volleys from from political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), Lumumba director Raoul Peck, and political essayist Bell Hooks — was New Line Cinema chairman and CEO Robert Shaye.
“It fell to Shaye to articulate the status-quo views of corporate Hollywood, which elicited not only the wrath of Oliver but occasional groans from the audience. Much of what Shaye said was fair and sensible, but it was no match for the sweep of Stone’s oratory, which occasionally vaulted past the concerns of the entertainment industry to include speculation on the whys and wherefores of the 9/11 disaster.

“The central issue was whether Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with a strong political undercurrent (particularly in the wake of the World Trade Center attack) was being caused by a corporate-driven aversion to anything that isn’t essentially banal or superficial, as Stone asserted, or whether the main impediment to the funding of risky and/or controversial films is ‘the tyranny of talent,’ as Shaye put it, referring to astronomical fees demanded by actors and certain high-profile directors.
“Stone launched into one of his hardest-hitting points by recalling the relatively modest financing that gave birth to Born on the Fourth of July, his Oscar-winning 1989 drama about Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic that starred Tom Cruise.
“‘We struggled to make it,’ said Stone. ‘We had fights. The picture cost $16 million, and then it went to $17 or $18 million, and we fought for that extra two million like crazy.
“‘But this was 1989 — and there’s been no significant inflation in the United States since then,’ he continued. ‘Why, in 2001, does a picture that was done very tightly in 1989…[would] that picture today cost $60 to $80 million? With the marketing costs added in, which are inflated, putting it into the $90s…advertising and television…we’re talking a $100 to $135 million event.
“‘This would no longer be a movie, but an event. And someone like Tom Pollock would say…’Born on the Fourth of July? I’m not going to make that for $130 million!’ Because [this kind of film] can’t work any more in a system that has gone bananas .’

Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall

“Stone was greeted by a passionate, sustained round of applause. Who doesn’t feel that films like Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone won a Best Director Oscar and Cruise was nominated as Best Actor, are in woefully short supply these days?
“‘And this ties in to the Arab situation,’ Stone went on. ‘Why have we gone, in a non-inflationary era, to a [place] where our corporations have become huge over the last 10, 12 years? We’ve let them go. There’s been no trust-buster around. Teddy Roosevelt is long dead. And these media corporations have conglomerated themselves into six principal fiefdoms run by barons…they’re bigger than barons. They’re kings.’
“Stone was referring to Sumner Redstone who runs Viacom, which owns Paramount; Barry Meyer of Time-Warner, which owns Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema; Rupert Murdoch of Fox Newscorp., which runs 20th Century Fox; Mel Harris of Sony Pictures; Michael Eisner, the chairman/CEO of the Walt Disney Company; and Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi, which owns Universal Pictures.”
[Note: Today’s media barons are Viacom’s Redstone, Newscorp’s Murdoch, Richard D. Parsons of Time-Warner, Sony Corp.’s chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC Universal.]
“And these six companies decide,” said Stone. “Rupert Murdoch says ‘I would not make JFK,’ or Mike Eisner says ‘I would not do a film on Martin Luther King, Oliver, [because] there’s gonna be rioting at the gates of Disneyland’…you know, this is bullshit!”

“Gales of applause greeted this one, with some scattered yelps and cries of ‘right on!’
“‘These six people have control of the world and that’s what the new world order is,’ he explained. ‘Six men are deciding what you’re seeing in film, and they own all the small companies…it’s hard to find one that’s not owned by one of these huge companies buying new companies, so it’s a dilemma. There’s a control of culture, ideas, everything.
“Now, within reason, they let [filmmakers] do certain things, and that is far better obviously than, say, the Arabs where they don’t let you do anything, and I agree it’s relative. But we are in a dilemma. We have too much order.”
“‘And I think the revolt on September 11 was about order,’ Stone went on. “It was about fuck you, fuck your order…it was an eruption of rage about this. And is it time perhaps to reconsider the world order? Is it time to wonder why the banks have joined the movie companies and all the corporations, and where this is all going?”
“Hitchens, who writes for The Nation and Vanity Fair , bridled at the use of the term ‘revolt’ and said the September 11 massacre ‘was not a revolt. It was a state-supported mass murder using civilians as missiles. It was an attack on civil society and civilization.’ This drew vigorous applause, albeit slightly more subdued.
“Shaye said, ‘I disagree with Oliver about this. I think he’s talking about an era and the studio system of 30 years ago. I will tell you, and Tom Pollock will back me up on this, that this is a tyranny of talent right now, and I don’t know what Oliver gets for directing a film, but I know what a lot of other people get, and it’s way too much. I do know that the last guys to get paid, believe it or not, are the studios that put up the money, and…’

Robert Shaye (r.), co-chairman and co-CEO of New Line Cinema (pictured with Michael Lynne (l.)

“At this last remark, Stone shuddered and flopped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as if to say, ‘Did he just say that? I give up!’ Torrents of laughter. The hall was jumping.
“‘And if there’s a tyranny, it’s a tyranny of talent,’ Shaye concluded, drawing muted sneers and guffaws.
“Pollock, who was running Universal’s movie division when Born on the Fourth of July got made, said the go-ahead happened ‘because Oliver Stone was willing to make it for no money, and Tom Cruise was willing to make it for no money. The film was successful, they made a lot of money, and so did Universal, but it would not have been made had they not done that.
“‘Controversial films can still get made,’ said Pollock, ‘but films cost what they cost because most of the people who make them want to get paid as much as they can. They want control, but there is still that trade-off of money for control. We are in an oligarchy now where the large companies control what we see…yes, Rupert Murdoch has a political agenda, but by and large Rupert Murdoch is only interested in money.
“‘The problem with the six guys running the six companies is, they want to take no risks at all,’ he concluded. ‘They want movies that entertain only, if they can be marketed. There was little room before September 11 to make political movies inside the system. There’s less room now. It isn’t that it’s not going to happen. But it is going to be harder. And to that extent, Oliver is right.’
“Shaye said that New Line Cinema ‘started out in my apartment on 14th Street. We made our way in the world. We started out with Sympathy for the Devil. Talk about political…give me a break. And you know why it made money? Because the Rolling Stones were in it, not because Jean-Luc Godard had anything particularly profound to tell the world.’ Random hoots and snorts greeted this one.

“‘It’s a little disenchanting,’ Shaye continued. ‘The truth of the matter now is, right now, that with high-definition and video and stuff like that you can make a good movie for not very much money. The great thing about the entertainment business and the movie business is that when a movie’s good, you attract people. People talk about it, the whole word-of-mouth thing…the quality of a movie is a self-fulfilling mechanism.”
“Stone jumped back in. ‘Thirty years ago, Bob said before. That’s when he got started. It was all…it was another world. [But] nobody here has answered that question why, between ’89 and 2001, everything has become so uniform…what’s basically happened in the last 10 years is that the studios have bought television stations. And why?’
“Referring to the so-called ‘syn-fin’ legislation passed under the Clinton administration a couple of years ago that allowed studios to own more TV stations, Stone asked, ‘Why did that telecommunications bill get passed at midnight? It was basically a division of the world by a few media moguls and it was a giveaway and it was done at midnight and it’s a disgusting thing. To own TV stations is the basis upon which movie companies today have to exist. And that’s changed everything. There are only so many television stations. Each one has their big build-up and that’s their base of operation.
“‘And Bob [Shaye] knows it because he sold his little movie company to Warner Bros. for more money than I could ever dream of making,” Stone continued. He acknowledged that certain high-profile directors, such as himself, are well paid for helming big-studio films. But the majors these days “don’t need a top director, they feel. Just make the movie. Because for them it’s all about marketing and about subject. That’s what they think.
“‘So there’s no ‘left’ point of view. It’s not financially interesting for them to make a movie with a director who costs more money…they’d rather go with a marginal director. It’s all about product…movie product…and it’s all about this new world order.

“‘And the Arabs have a point. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s an objection to the way the world is going. There’s a lot of hate and revolt in that state. It may continue and although the shoe may drop on the other foot the next time, the point is they’re objecting to something. And I say that we’re not dealing with that objection on this stage today. There was a breakdown in the ’90s, in the system, the world system, the world banking system…it’s the new world order, and it’s about order and control, but this control comes with a cost.
“‘One of the most banal ways for censorship to operate in America,’ Stone continued, ‘is to drive out thought by explosions of People magazines and celebrity culture and…our culture is focused on Sarah Jessica Parker and kind-of inane, superficial stuff…it just becomes the noise, the white noise of our society.”
“Turning to Pollock, Stone said, ‘I don’t want to pick on you, Tom, but you’re ignoring the banks, you’re ignoring television, you’re ignoring the size of this thing, and you’re saying this thing is okay because that’s the way of the world because capitalism will go that way.
“‘The so-called ways of capitalism are not inevitable,’ Stone exclaimed. ‘It’s changed historically. Teddy Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Franklin Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Everybody in Hollywood says, ‘Well, what can I do about it?” These six companies have taken over just like the oil companies, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong because they’re subverting political will.'”

Ales & Stouts

Is Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 (Universal, 4.28) a knockout, a time-stopper, a mind-blower? It sure as hell is. You’re probably going to need to stand outside the theatre for a few minutes after it’s over and just chill…trust me. And then you’re going to want a drink, even if you don’t drink. And then talk it out with friends for an hour or so. See it with some. Don’t go alone.

Christian Clemenson (kneeling) as Thomas Burnett in the middle of passenger huddle during last act of United 93; Cheyenne Jackson, as Mark Bingham, is standing behind with the maroon shirt and hat.

Is feeling power-drilled all over again by one of the worst real-life nightmares of all time a good thing? To me, it is. It happened, it’s real, and this film knocks your socks off because it takes you right back to that surreal morning and that feeling, that almost-afraid-to-breathe feeling, and to me, that’s partly what good films do — they lift you out of your realm and make you forget about everything but what’s on-screen.

All I know is that I was watching and taking it all in, and that the old feelings started to build and churn around and then pour back in, like a damburst. The chills and forebodings of doom were back, and this time with a closer, more comprehensive perspective.

United 93 didn’t make me “happy” but I relished it. I’m not a baby or a coward. I’m not a “too-sooner.” Show me anything that smacks of honesty and hard truth or at least skillful manipulations of same, and I’m there for firsts, seconds and thirds.

Time‘s Richard Corliss called it “unbearable and unmissable.” Mainly the latter, I’d say. As long as it’s not a cheap-ass horror film, I eat “unbearable” for breakfast.

Not one frame of this film struck me as distasteful or exploitative. It shows what needs to be shown with as much restraint as could be managed without changing the known facts.

We were told at the screening that the print shown wasn’t quite finished. It looked pretty finished to me. No obviously raw effects, nothing that screamed out, “Oops …sorry!”

United 93 director Paul Greengrass during filming on set of Pinewood Studios.

What surprised me is that two-thirds of United 93 don’t have a whole lot to do with United flight #93. They’re about what happened as air traffic controllers, the FAA and the military tried to monitor what was happening with American Airlines #11, United #193 and American #77 (i.e., the flights that slammed into the North Tower, the South Tower and the Pentagon, respectively). It’s about how a lot of focused decent professionals tried to keep up with the horror and couldn’t.

United 93 runs about an hour and 45 minutes. It waits about 30 minutes before Flight 93 takes off, but you’re not really paying that much attention, frankly, to those doomed souls on the plane…not at first. It’s the confused folks in the control rooms who pull you in. The second plane hits about 45 minutes in, give or take, and it’s another 15 minutes — a full hour — before the hijackers, who’ve waited and eyeballed each other from their first-class seats and stalled, it seems to me, like nervous nellies, before finally making their move.

For me, that opening hour is classic. Greengrass has never done anything quite as good. The tension and verisimilitude surpasses his work in Bloody Sunday, and that’s saying something. Each and every bit actor, every line…every last piece of it screws you to your seat.

Those guys playing air-traffic controllers are perfect. Remember the tension in that air-traffic controller scene in the opening moments of Close Encounters of the Third Kind? It’s that tripled or quadrupled. Ben Sliney, a gray-haired office manager type who was having his first day on 9/11 as national operations manager for the FAA, plays himself. Nobody, really, seems to be “acting” in this. Every bit player rules in every control-room scene in this film.

Cast of United 93 on Pinewood sound stage.

What’s so affecting is that you know what’s coming, and Greengrass just lets it come…tick, tock, tick. There’s a spellbinding moment when it all starts…when a 40ish Boston air traffic controller first realizes that American #11 is off-course and not communicating. The moment isn’t especially heightened or emphasized. It’s just this guy going, “Okay…something’s off here”

Once the hijacking on United #93 begins and the killings and screamings and all the rest of that sad melodrama kick in, then it’s a bit more familiar, especially if you’re up on what’s known to have happened and if you saw A&E’s Flight 93 movie last January. That was an okay film. I didn’t like the family members crying and saying “I love you” to their loved ones who were calling from the plane (which felt almost icky to me), but it was all right. And yet United 93, no offense, is about two and a half to three times better.

I saw it at the first non-Time magazine press screening on Tuesday night in Santa Monica, and a woman sitting two seats away got up twice, and it’s measure of how caught up I was that I was vaguely irritated when she left the second time. How many times does this woman need to take a leak? Or is she leaving the room to give herself a break from the tension? Either way, I was vaguely irked. (Why should I care, right? It was her business. But I didn’t want any nearby movement.)

The remarkable accomplishent, for me, is that I felt no sense of time while watching United 93. It lasts about 105 minutes, and it could have been 40 or 50 minutes. I didn’t care, didn’t think about it. The damn thing held me, vise-gripped me. Did I have a good time? Definitely, by my standards. I haven’t sat through a pulse-pounder like this in months, and I can’t wait to see it again.

Ben Sliney, who was having his first day as national operations manager for the FAA on 9.11.01, plays himself.

Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Mark Bingham, the gay guy who died on United #93, was one of those at last night’s screening. I spoke to him briefly, told him it’s a hell of a film. He seemed kind of choked up and needed some alone time. Christian Clemenson, who plays Thomas Burnett, was also there, but he was gone in a flash as soon as the credits started rolling.

One tiny beef: The last piece of copy on the black screen says that after 9/11, “America’s war on terror had begun.” The implied statement, of course, is, “And it continues today!” That it does, but if anyone thinks that what’s happening in Iraq right now (and what may even happen with Iran…who knows?) is a blow against terror they’re very much mistaken, and that final line struck me as a bit of a rah-rah statement. I think Greengrass should have just let what happened in the film (as he chose to dramatize it) stand on its own and leave well enough alone.

Puck Everlasting

The movies that seem to grab me the most are the ones that ask us to consider the mystical, the undefined, the intangibles…the ones that say “look up, look out, look beyond…there’s more to this world than what you can own, eat, taste or feel.”

The latest film to do this kind of thing well, and frankly one of the more interesting, amusing and affecting films I’ve seen over the last few weeks (if you don’t include An Inconvenient Truth, that is), is a new documentary about a bunch of guys who love to play air hockey.

It’s called Way of the Puck — and no one anywhere has seen it, except for a handful of film festival programmers. It’ll be having its world premiere at Houston’s Worldfest Film Festival in mid to late April.

Atypical action moment in Eric D. Anderson’s Way of the Puck, meaning that 98% of it was shot in regular color video.

I’m not saying it’s wet-your-pants fantastic, but if you can imagine something as arcane as a thinking man’s air-hockey film…one that doesn’t so much focus on a stupid plastic puck getting knocked back and forth by a couple of guys leaning over a gleaming blue plastic surface as much as…well, the zen approach to this simple-ass game, keeping a light touch, concentrating hard and yet not concen- trating as much as feeling the force…this is it.

The “maker” is Eric D. Anderson, a Los Angeles-based guy who works on music videos and commercials and has spent the last two-plus years putting this doc together, partly (as you might expect) because he’s a big air hockey nut himself, but also because he sees a Great Beyond inside it…a world within a world.

“On the surface air hockey seems like a story with very low stakes,” he writes on the film’s website. “Or no stakes at all. I get a lot of this. ‘Air hockey?’ people say, nodding slowly. ‘That game from the ’70s? Hunh.’

“Air hockey isn’t the unpopular kid who gets kicked around at recess. Air hockey is the kid no one notices, including the teacher. It’s a forgotten arcade game, a kid’s game, a relic, a jobby, a diversion, a trifle…and what could be less important than that?”

But in the making of this film, says Anderson, “I discovered a passionate and intelligent community of players. These are underdogs, participating in a fringe sport. They know they are dismissed and sometimes mocked and that air hockey will proably never be accepted by the mainstream. And yet they continue to travel thousands of miles to compete against the best players in the world.”
Way of the Puck is a guy film, mostly, obviously, but a smart one. Alert, spiritual, philosophically loaded. “Small” and a little familiar in certain ways, maybe a tiny bit repetitive (and maybe a little long…just a wee bit) but within its own territory it feels solid and connected and complete.

It’s a real middle-class film about a gaggle (somehow that word feels right rather than ‘group’) of five or six American middle class guys, most of them married and either pudgy or bearded or balding (or all three) who are serious air hockey freaks, and who all happen to be quite thoughtful and intelligent.

That’s the first big revelation — air hockey doesn’t seem to be played by meatball blue-collar types but by unusually bright and creative guys. Or so this film implies.

Eric D. Anderson

These aren’t exactly rugged individualists, but guys with a certain consistency and tenacity. Not the kind of men whom anyone would call intense or magnetic or start- ling, but men with an undeniable passion and dignity. And maybe a certain sadness or resignation thrown in, marital responsibilities and the day-to-day slog being what they are.

And yet they share an obvious, unshakable, undeniable belief in air hockey as some kind of transcendent pursuit…something that sustains their spirit, gets them through the rough patches, puts a special kind of English on their existence, makes life feel whole (or at least gives it a certain weight and dimension) and worth living.

More so from the audience perspective because air hockey isn’t that recognized or celebrated…far from it…but it’s their own thing, played as it is in those little rooms, and they’re happy with that. Or happy enough.

And there’s that cool robot. A one-armed guy resembling one of those Empire droids in Attack of the Clones playing a pretty good game of defensive air hockey with very some very fast reflexes. I’ve only seen human-sized robots with arms and legs do things like walk dogs and vacuum rugs. This guy’s different. Impressive.

Robot air hockey

The point of Way of the Puck is that an air-hockey player needs to be alive and alert and in touch with something inward and flowing to get anything out of the game. More than just a fast hand and a light touch, but man…that robot.

Anderson believes that air hockey is “the culmination of 2500 years of human thought — connected to astronomy and artificial intelligence, music and missiles, comics and country + western dancing, painting and punk rock.” I don’t know if I can go that far, but Way of the Puck convinced me that air hockey amounts to something, or at least the players do.

Memory Lane

April has barely begun and the media drumbeat over the year’s two big 9/11 films, both produced with the upcoming five-year anniversary in mind, is already pretty loud.

Press screenings for United 93 are beginning this week, stories attempting to gauge the public’s interest in seeing this and other 9/11 presentations are running (the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek ran theirs on 4.7 and 4.10, respectively), and we’ll be hearing more and more about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center next month when a 20-minute reel from the 8.11 Paramount release is shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Nicolas Cage as Sgt. John McLouglin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11)

The 9/11 anniversary isn’t for another five months, of course, but I’ve been thinking about another startling event that happened in Manhattan nearly five years ago — a panel discussion on Saturday, October 6, 2001, at Alice Tully Hall called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.”

I reported on this right after it happened and I’ve mentioned it since (most recently in a WIRED item around noon on Sunday, 4.9), so why dredge it up for the third or fourth time? Because what panelist Oliver Stone said that day is, to me, still bang -on-the-head thrilling, and I’ve been wondering what’s changed in the four and a half years since…if anything?

It’s Sunday, it’s sunny outside, birds are chirping and I’m just going to run this piece again. (Most of it.) It’s a portrait of what’s been happening in this town for a long time, but the precision and candor in Stone’s rant still resonates.

Stone tried to describe the mindset and inclinations of corporate-run Hollywood as he saw it back then. Has the situation abated, remained the same, gotten worse or what? Read this through and think about it. I’m asking.

I’m repeating what I said in the WIRED item, but this sure was a long time ago, especially considering the apparent repositioning that has happened inside Stone himself, who was obviously more than a bit of a firebrand on 10.6.01 and now look at him, the director of a 9/11 pic about a couple of Port Authority guys who got buried under the fallen towers…a film that’s starting to sound, frankly, like it may be a head-in-the-sand emotional comfort blanket disguised as a rescue thriller.

Before the ’01 debate: Lumumba director Raoul Peck, essayist Bell Hicks, director Oliver Stone, New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), former Universal Pictuers chairman Tom Pollock (almost completely hidden), and HBO executive Colin Callender.

I’m not saying World Trade Center won’t be a well-crafted or emotionally affecting drama. (Alexander aside, Stone is still a top-notch filmmaker). And who knows? Maybe it will contain echos and undercurrents that will add dimension to what screenwriter Andrea Berloff believes it is (“a boy-down-a-well saga’). But read the following and tell me Stone hasn’t trimmed his sails just a tad.

“Say what you will about Oliver Stone’s political views, but he’s a master at whipping up a crowd,” I began. “This was plainly evident during a panel discussion he participated in last Saturday at New York’s Alice Tully Hall called ‘Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.’

“The same brio that has enlivened many of Stone’s politically driven films, including JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and Nixon, was in full force during the sometimes brawl-like, HBO-sponsored discussion.

“Stone’s chief nemesis during the discussion — which also included some volleys from from political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), Lumumba director Raoul Peck, and political essayist Bell Hooks — was New Line Cinema chairman and CEO Robert Shaye.

“It fell to Shaye to articulate the status-quo views of corporate Hollywood, which elicited not only the wrath of Oliver but occasional groans from the audience. Much of what Shaye said was fair and sensible, but it was no match for the sweep of Stone’s oratory, which occasionally vaulted past the concerns of the entertainment industry to include speculation on the whys and wherefores of the 9/11 disaster.

“The central issue was whether Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with a strong political undercurrent (particularly in the wake of the World Trade Center attack) was being caused by a corporate-driven aversion to anything that isn’t essentially banal or superficial, as Stone asserted, or whether the main impediment to the funding of risky and/or controversial films is ‘the tyranny of talent,’ as Shaye put it, referring to astronomical fees demanded by actors and certain high-profile directors.

“Stone launched into one of his hardest-hitting points by recalling the relatively modest financing that gave birth to Born on the Fourth of July, his Oscar-winning 1989 drama about Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic that starred Tom Cruise.

“‘We struggled to make it,’ said Stone. ‘We had fights. The picture cost $16 million, and then it went to $17 or $18 million, and we fought for that extra two million like crazy.

“‘But this was 1989 — and there’s been no significant inflation in the United States since then,’ he continued. ‘Why, in 2001, does a picture that was done very tightly in 1989…[would] that picture today cost $60 to $80 million? With the marketing costs added in, which are inflated, putting it into the $90s…advertising and television…we’re talking a $100 to $135 million event.

“‘This would no longer be a movie, but an event. And someone like Tom Pollock would say…’Born on the Fourth of July? I’m not going to make that for $130 million!’ Because [this kind of film] can’t work any more in a system that has gone bananas .’

Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall

“Stone was greeted by a passionate, sustained round of applause. Who doesn’t feel that films like Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone won a Best Director Oscar and Cruise was nominated as Best Actor, are in woefully short supply these days?

“‘And this ties in to the Arab situation,’ Stone went on. ‘Why have we gone, in a non-inflationary era, to a [place] where our corporations have become huge over the last 10, 12 years? We’ve let them go. There’s been no trust-buster around. Teddy Roosevelt is long dead. And these media corporations have conglomerated themselves into six principal fiefdoms run by barons…they’re bigger than barons. They’re kings.’

“Stone was referring to Sumner Redstone who runs Viacom, which owns Paramount; Barry Meyer of Time-Warner, which owns Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema; Rupert Murdoch of Fox Newscorp., which runs 20th Century Fox; Mel Harris of Sony Pictures; Michael Eisner, the chairman/CEO of the Walt Disney Company; and Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi, which owns Universal Pictures.”

[Note: Today’s media barons are Viacom’s Redstone, Newscorp’s Murdoch, Richard D. Parsons of Time-Warner, Sony Corp.’s chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC Universal.]

“And these six companies decide,” said Stone. “Rupert Murdoch says ‘I would not make JFK,’ or Mike Eisner says ‘I would not do a film on Martin Luther King, Oliver, [because] there’s gonna be rioting at the gates of Disneyland’…you know, this is bullshit!”

“Gales of applause greeted this one, with some scattered yelps and cries of ‘right on!’
“‘These six people have control of the world and that’s what the new world order is,’ he explained. ‘Six men are deciding what you’re seeing in film, and they own all the small companies…it’s hard to find one that’s not owned by one of these huge companies buying new companies, so it’s a dilemma. There’s a control of culture, ideas, everything.

“Now, within reason, they let [filmmakers] do certain things, and that is far better obviously than, say, the Arabs where they don’t let you do anything, and I agree it’s relative. But we are in a dilemma. We have too much order.”

“‘And I think the revolt on September 11 was about order,’ Stone went on. “It was about fuck you, fuck your order…it was an eruption of rage about this. And is it time perhaps to reconsider the world order? Is it time to wonder why the banks have joined the movie companies and all the corporations, and where this is all going?”

“Hitchens, who writes for The Nation and Vanity Fair , bridled at the use of the term ‘revolt’ and said the September 11 massacre ‘was not a revolt. It was a state-supported mass murder using civilians as missiles. It was an attack on civil society and civilization.’ This drew vigorous applause, albeit slightly more subdued.

“Shaye said, ‘I disagree with Oliver about this. I think he’s talking about an era and the studio system of 30 years ago. I will tell you, and Tom Pollock will back me up on this, that this is a tyranny of talent right now, and I don’t know what Oliver gets for directing a film, but I know what a lot of other people get, and it’s way too much. I do know that the last guys to get paid, believe it or not, are the studios that put up the money, and…’

Robert Shaye (r.), co-chairman and co-CEO of New Line Cinema (pictured with Michael Lynne (l.)

“At this last remark, Stone shuddered and flopped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as if to say, ‘Did he just say that? I give up!’ Torrents of laughter. The hall was jumping.
“‘And if there’s a tyranny, it’s a tyranny of talent,’ Shaye concluded, drawing muted sneers and guffaws.

“Pollock, who was running Universal’s movie division when Born on the Fourth of July got made, said the go-ahead happened ‘because Oliver Stone was willing to make it for no money, and Tom Cruise was willing to make it for no money. The film was successful, they made a lot of money, and so did Universal, but it would not have been made had they not done that.

“‘Controversial films can still get made,’ said Pollock, ‘but films cost what they cost because most of the people who make them want to get paid as much as they can. They want control, but there is still that trade-off of money for control. We are in an oligarchy now where the large companies control what we see…yes, Rupert Murdoch has a political agenda, but by and large Rupert Murdoch is only interested in money.

“‘The problem with the six guys running the six companies is, they want to take no risks at all,’ he concluded. ‘They want movies that entertain only, if they can be marketed. There was little room before September 11 to make political movies inside the system. There’s less room now. It isn’t that it’s not going to happen. But it is going to be harder. And to that extent, Oliver is right.’

“Shaye said that New Line Cinema ‘started out in my apartment on 14th Street. We made our way in the world. We started out with Sympathy for the Devil. Talk about political…give me a break. And you know why it made money? Because the Rolling Stones were in it, not because Jean-Luc Godard had anything particularly profound to tell the world.’ Random hoots and snorts greeted this one.

“‘It’s a little disenchanting,’ Shaye continued. ‘The truth of the matter now is, right now, that with high-definition and video and stuff like that you can make a good movie for not very much money. The great thing about the entertainment business and the movie business is that when a movie’s good, you attract people. People talk about it, the whole word-of-mouth thing…the quality of a movie is a self-fulfilling mechanism.”

“Stone jumped back in. ‘Thirty years ago, Bob said before. That’s when he got started. It was all…it was another world. [But] nobody here has answered that question why, between ’89 and 2001, everything has become so uniform…what’s basically happened in the last 10 years is that the studios have bought television stations. And why?’

“Referring to the so-called ‘syn-fin’ legislation passed under the Clinton administration a couple of years ago that allowed studios to own more TV stations, Stone asked, ‘Why did that telecommunications bill get passed at midnight? It was basically a division of the world by a few media moguls and it was a giveaway and it was done at midnight and it’s a disgusting thing. To own TV stations is the basis upon which movie companies today have to exist. And that’s changed everything. There are only so many television stations. Each one has their big build-up and that’s their base of operation.

“‘And Bob [Shaye] knows it because he sold his little movie company to Warner Bros. for more money than I could ever dream of making,” Stone continued. He acknowledged that certain high-profile directors, such as himself, are well paid for helming big-studio films. But the majors these days “don’t need a top director, they feel. Just make the movie. Because for them it’s all about marketing and about subject. That’s what they think.

“‘So there’s no ‘left’ point of view. It’s not financially interesting for them to make a movie with a director who costs more money…they’d rather go with a marginal director. It’s all about product…movie product…and it’s all about this new world order.

“‘And the Arabs have a point. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s an objection to the way the world is going. There’s a lot of hate and revolt in that state. It may continue and although the shoe may drop on the other foot the next time, the point is they’re objecting to something. And I say that we’re not dealing with that objection on this stage today. There was a breakdown in the ’90s, in the system, the world system, the world banking system…it’s the new world order, and it’s about order and control, but this control comes with a cost.

“‘One of the most banal ways for censorship to operate in America,’ Stone continued, ‘is to drive out thought by explosions of People magazines and celebrity culture and…our culture is focused on Sarah Jessica Parker and kind-of inane, superficial stuff…it just becomes the noise, the white noise of our society.”

“Turning to Pollock, Stone said, ‘I don’t want to pick on you, Tom, but you’re ignoring the banks, you’re ignoring television, you’re ignoring the size of this thing, and you’re saying this thing is okay because that’s the way of the world because capitalism will go that way.

“‘The so-called ways of capitalism are not inevitable,’ Stone exclaimed. ‘It’s changed historically. Teddy Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Franklin Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Everybody in Hollywood says, ‘Well, what can I do about it?” These six companies have taken over just like the oil companies, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong because they’re subverting political will.'”

Ales & Stouts

Puck Everlasting

The movies that seem to grab me the most are the ones that ask us to consider the mystical, the undefined, the intangibles…the ones that say “look up, look out, look beyond…there’s more to this world than what you can own, eat, taste or feel.”
The latest film to do this kind of thing well, and frankly one of the more interesting, amusing and affecting films I’ve seen over the last few weeks (if you don’t include An Inconvenient Truth, that is), is a new documentary about a bunch of guys who love to play air hockey.

Atypical action moment in Eric D. Anderson’s Way of the Puck, meaning that 98% of it was shot in regular color video.

It’s called Way of the Puck — and no one anywhere has seen it, except for a handful of film festival programmers. It’ll be having its world premiere at Houston’s Worldfest Film Festival in mid to late April.
I’m not saying it’s wet-your-pants fantastic, but if you can imagine something as arcane as a thinking man’s air-hockey film…one that doesn’t so much focus on a stupid plastic puck getting knocked back and forth by a couple of guys leaning over a gleaming blue plastic surface as much as…well, the zen approach to this simple-ass game, keeping a light touch, concentrating hard and yet not concen- trating as much as feeling the force…this is it.
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The “maker” is Eric D. Anderson, a Los Angeles-based guy who works on music videos and commercials and has spent the last two-plus years putting this doc together, partly (as you might expect) because he’s a big air hockey nut himself, but also because he sees a Great Beyond inside it…a world within a world.
“On the surface air hockey seems like a story with very low stakes,” he writes on the film’s website. “Or no stakes at all. I get a lot of this. ‘Air hockey?’ people say, nodding slowly. ‘That game from the ’70s? Hunh.’
“Air hockey isn’t the unpopular kid who gets kicked around at recess.
Air hockey is the kid no one notices, including the teacher. It’s a forgotten arcade game, a kid’s game, a relic, a jobby, a diversion, a trifle…and what could be less important than that?”

But in the making of this film, says Anderson, “I discovered a passionate and intelligent community of players. These are underdogs, participating in a fringe sport. They know they are dismissed and sometimes mocked and that air hockey will proably never be accepted by the mainstream. And yet they continue to travel thousands of miles to compete against the best players in the world.”
Way of the Puck is a guy film, mostly, obviously, but a smart one. Alert, spiritual, philosophically loaded. “Small” and a little familiar in certain ways, maybe a tiny bit repetitive (and maybe a little long…just a wee bit) but within its own territory it feels solid and connected and complete.
It’s a real middle-class film about a gaggle (somehow that word feels right rather than ‘group”) of five or six American middle class guys, most of them married and either pudgy or bearded or balding (or all three) who are serious air hockey freaks, and who all happen to be quite thoughtful and intelligent.
That’s the first big revelation — air hockey doesn’t seem to be played by meatball blue-collar types but by unusually bright and creative guys. Or so this film implies.

Eric D. Anderson

These aren’t exactly rugged individualists, but guys with a certain consistency and tenacity. Not the kind of men whom anyone would call intense or magnetic or start- ling, but men with an undeniable passion and dignity. And maybe a certain sadness or resignation thrown in, marital responsibilities and the day-to-day slog being what they are.
And yet they share an obvious, unshakable, undeniable belief in air hockey as some kind of transcendent pursuit…something that sustains their spirit, gets them through the rough patches, puts a special kind of English on their existence, makes life feel whole (or at least gives it a certain weight and dimension) and worth living.
More so from the audience perspective because air hockey isn’t that recognized or celebrated…far from it…but it’s their own thing, played as it is in those little rooms, and they’re happy with that. Or happy enough.
And there’s that cool robot. A one-armed guy resembling one of those Empire droids in Attack of the Clones playing a pretty good game of defensive air hockey with very some very fast reflexes. I’ve only seen human-sized robots with arms and legs do things like walk dogs and vacuum rugs. This guy’s different. Impressive.

Robot air hockey

The point of Way of the Puck is that an air-hockey player needs to be alive and alert and in touch with something inward and flowing to get anything out of the game. More than just a fast hand and a light touch, but man…that robot.
Anderson believes that air hockey is “the culmination of 2500 years of human thought — connected to astronomy and artificial intelligence, music and missiles, comics and country + western dancing, painting and punk rock.” I don’t know if I can go that far, but Way of the Puck convinced me that air hockey amounts to something, or at least the players do.

Memory Lane

April has barely begun and the media drumbeat over the year’s two big 9/11 films, both produced with the upcoming five-year anniversary in mind, is already pretty loud.
Press screenings for United 93 are beginning this week, stories attempting to gauge the public’s interest in seeing this and other 9/11 presentations are running (the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek ran theirs on 4.7 and 4.10, respectively), and we’ll be hearing more and more about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center next month when a 20-minute reel from the 8.11 Paramount release is shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Nicolas Cage as Sgt. John McLouglin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11)

The 9/11 anniversary isn’t for another five months, of course, but I’ve been thinking about another startling event that happened in Manhattan nearly five years ago — a panel discussion on Saturday, October 6, 2001, at Alice Tully Hall called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.”
I reported on this right after it happened and I’ve mentioned it since (most recently in a WIRED item around noon on Sunday, 4.9), so why dredge it up for the third or fourth time? Because what panelist Oliver Stone said that day is, to me, still bang -on-the-head thrilling, and I’ve been wondering what’s changed in the four and a half years since…if anything?
It’s Sunday, it’s sunny outside, birds are chirping and I’m just going to run this piece again. (Most of it.) It’s a portrait of what’s been happening in this town for a long time, but the precision and candor in Stone’s rant still resonates.
Stone tried to describe the mindset and inclinations of corporate-run Hollywood as he saw it back then. Has the situation abated, remained the same, gotten worse or what? Read this through and think about it. I’m asking.
I’m repeating what I said in the WIRED item, but this sure was a long time ago, especially considering the apparent repositioning that has happened inside Stone himself, who was obviously more than a bit of a firebrand on 10.6.01 and now look at him, the director of a 9/11 pic about a couple of Port Authority guys who got buried under the fallen towers…a film that’s starting to sound, frankly, like it may be a head-in-the-sand emotional comfort blanket disguised as a rescue thriller.

Before the ’01 debate: Lumumba director Raoul Peck, essayist Bell Hicks, director Oliver Stone, New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), former Universal Pictuers chairman Tom Pollock (almost completely hidden), and HBO executive Colin Callender.

I’m not saying World Trade Center won’t be a well-crafted or emotionally affecting drama. (Alexander aside, Stone is still a top-notch filmmaker). And who knows? Maybe it will contain echos and undercurrents that will add dimension to what screenwriter Andrea Berloff believes it is (“a boy-down-a-well saga’). But read the following and tell me Stone hasn’t trimmed his sails just a tad.
“Say what you will about Oliver Stone’s political views, but he’s a master at whipping up a crowd,” I began. “This was plainly evident during a panel discussion he participated in last Saturday at New York’s Alice Tully Hall called ‘Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.’
“The same brio that has enlivened many of Stone’s politically driven films, including JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and Nixon, was in full force during the sometimes brawl-like, HBO-sponsored discussion.
“Stone’s chief nemesis during the discussion — which also included some volleys from from political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), Lumumba director Raoul Peck, and political essayist Bell Hooks — was New Line Cinema chairman and CEO Robert Shaye.
“It fell to Shaye to articulate the status-quo views of corporate Hollywood, which elicited not only the wrath of Oliver but occasional groans from the audience. Much of what Shaye said was fair and sensible, but it was no match for the sweep of Stone’s oratory, which occasionally vaulted past the concerns of the entertainment industry to include speculation on the whys and wherefores of the 9/11 disaster.

“The central issue was whether Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with a strong political undercurrent (particularly in the wake of the World Trade Center attack) was being caused by a corporate-driven aversion to anything that isn’t essentially banal or superficial, as Stone asserted, or whether the main impediment to the funding of risky and/or controversial films is ‘the tyranny of talent,’ as Shaye put it, referring to astronomical fees demanded by actors and certain high-profile directors.
“Stone launched into one of his hardest-hitting points by recalling the relatively modest financing that gave birth to Born on the Fourth of July, his Oscar-winning 1989 drama about Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic that starred Tom Cruise.
“‘We struggled to make it,’ said Stone. ‘We had fights. The picture cost $16 million, and then it went to $17 or $18 million, and we fought for that extra two million like crazy.
“‘But this was 1989 — and there’s been no significant inflation in the United States since then,’ he continued. ‘Why, in 2001, does a picture that was done very tightly in 1989…[would] that picture today cost $60 to $80 million? With the marketing costs added in, which are inflated, putting it into the $90s…advertising and television…we’re talking a $100 to $135 million event.
“‘This would no longer be a movie, but an event. And someone like Tom Pollock would say…’Born on the Fourth of July? I’m not going to make that for $130 million!’ Because [this kind of film] can’t work any more in a system that has gone bananas .’

Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall

“Stone was greeted by a passionate, sustained round of applause. Who doesn’t feel that films like Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone won a Best Director Oscar and Cruise was nominated as Best Actor, are in woefully short supply these days?
“‘And this ties in to the Arab situation,’ Stone went on. ‘Why have we gone, in a non-inflationary era, to a [place] where our corporations have become huge over the last 10, 12 years? We’ve let them go. There’s been no trust-buster around. Teddy Roosevelt is long dead. And these media corporations have conglomerated themselves into six principal fiefdoms run by barons…they’re bigger than barons. They’re kings.’
“Stone was referring to Sumner Redstone who runs Viacom, which owns Paramount; Barry Meyer of Time-Warner, which owns Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema; Rupert Murdoch of Fox Newscorp., which runs 20th Century Fox; Mel Harris of Sony Pictures; Michael Eisner, the chairman/CEO of the Walt Disney Company; and Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi, which owns Universal Pictures.”
[Note: Today’s media barons are Viacom’s Redstone, Newscorp’s Murdoch, Richard D. Parsons of Time-Warner, Sony Corp.’s chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC Universal.]
“And these six companies decide,” said Stone. “Rupert Murdoch says ‘I would not make JFK,’ or Mike Eisner says ‘I would not do a film on Martin Luther King, Oliver, [because] there’s gonna be rioting at the gates of Disneyland’…you know, this is bullshit!”

“Gales of applause greeted this one, with some scattered yelps and cries of ‘right on!’
“‘These six people have control of the world and that’s what the new world order is,’ he explained. ‘Six men are deciding what you’re seeing in film, and they own all the small companies…it’s hard to find one that’s not owned by one of these huge companies buying new companies, so it’s a dilemma. There’s a control of culture, ideas, everything.
“Now, within reason, they let [filmmakers] do certain things, and that is far better obviously than, say, the Arabs where they don’t let you do anything, and I agree it’s relative. But we are in a dilemma. We have too much order.”
“‘And I think the revolt on September 11 was about order,’ Stone went on. “It was about fuck you, fuck your order…it was an eruption of rage about this. And is it time perhaps to reconsider the world order? Is it time to wonder why the banks have joined the movie companies and all the corporations, and where this is all going?”
“Hitchens, who writes for The Nation and Vanity Fair , bridled at the use of the term ‘revolt’ and said the September 11 massacre ‘was not a revolt. It was a state-supported mass murder using civilians as missiles. It was an attack on civil society and civilization.’ This drew vigorous applause, albeit slightly more subdued.
“Shaye said, ‘I disagree with Oliver about this. I think he’s talking about an era and the studio system of 30 years ago. I will tell you, and Tom Pollock will back me up on this, that this is a tyranny of talent right now, and I don’t know what Oliver gets for directing a film, but I know what a lot of other people get, and it’s way too much. I do know that the last guys to get paid, believe it or not, are the studios that put up the money, and…’

Robert Shaye (r.), co-chairman and co-CEO of New Line Cinema (pictured with Michael Lynne (l.)

“At this last remark, Stone shuddered and flopped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as if to say, ‘Did he just say that? I give up!’ Torrents of laughter. The hall was jumping.
“‘And if there’s a tyranny, it’s a tyranny of talent,’ Shaye concluded, drawing muted sneers and guffaws.
“Pollock, who was running Universal’s movie division when Born on the Fourth of July got made, said the go-ahead happened ‘because Oliver Stone was willing to make it for no money, and Tom Cruise was willing to make it for no money. The film was successful, they made a lot of money, and so did Universal, but it would not have been made had they not done that.
“‘Controversial films can still get made,’ said Pollock, ‘but films cost what they cost because most of the people who make them want to get paid as much as they can. They want control, but there is still that trade-off of money for control. We are in an oligarchy now where the large companies control what we see…yes, Rupert Murdoch has a political agenda, but by and large Rupert Murdoch is only interested in money.
“‘The problem with the six guys running the six companies is, they want to take no risks at all,’ he concluded. ‘They want movies that entertain only, if they can be marketed. There was little room before September 11 to make political movies inside the system. There’s less room now. It isn’t that it’s not going to happen. But it is going to be harder. And to that extent, Oliver is right.’
“Shaye said that New Line Cinema ‘started out in my apartment on 14th Street. We made our way in the world. We started out with Sympathy for the Devil. Talk about political…give me a break. And you know why it made money? Because the Rolling Stones were in it, not because Jean-Luc Godard had anything particularly profound to tell the world.’ Random hoots and snorts greeted this one.

“‘It’s a little disenchanting,’ Shaye continued. ‘The truth of the matter now is, right now, that with high-definition and video and stuff like that you can make a good movie for not very much money. The great thing about the entertainment business and the movie business is that when a movie’s good, you attract people. People talk about it, the whole word-of-mouth thing…the quality of a movie is a self-fulfilling mechanism.”
“Stone jumped back in. ‘Thirty years ago, Bob said before. That’s when he got started. It was all…it was another world. [But] nobody here has answered that question why, between ’89 and 2001, everything has become so uniform…what’s basically happened in the last 10 years is that the studios have bought television stations. And why?’
“Referring to the so-called ‘syn-fin’ legislation passed under the Clinton administration a couple of years ago that allowed studios to own more TV stations, Stone asked, ‘Why did that telecommunications bill get passed at midnight? It was basically a division of the world by a few media moguls and it was a giveaway and it was done at midnight and it’s a disgusting thing. To own TV stations is the basis upon which movie companies today have to exist. And that’s changed everything. There are only so many television stations. Each one has their big build-up and that’s their base of operation.
“‘And Bob [Shaye] knows it because he sold his little movie company to Warner Bros. for more money than I could ever dream of making,” Stone continued. He acknowledged that certain high-profile directors, such as himself, are well paid for helming big-studio films. But the majors these days “don’t need a top director, they feel. Just make the movie. Because for them it’s all about marketing and about subject. That’s what they think.
“‘So there’s no ‘left’ point of view. It’s not financially interesting for them to make a movie with a director who costs more money…they’d rather go with a marginal director. It’s all about product…movie product…and it’s all about this new world order.

“‘And the Arabs have a point. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s an objection to the way the world is going. There’s a lot of hate and revolt in that state. It may continue and although the shoe may drop on the other foot the next time, the point is they’re objecting to something. And I say that we’re not dealing with that objection on this stage today. There was a breakdown in the ’90s, in the system, the world system, the world banking system…it’s the new world order, and it’s about order and control, but this control comes with a cost.
“‘One of the most banal ways for censorship to operate in America,’ Stone continued, ‘is to drive out thought by explosions of People magazines and celebrity culture and…our culture is focused on Sarah Jessica Parker and kind-of inane, superficial stuff…it just becomes the noise, the white noise of our society.”
“Turning to Pollock, Stone said, ‘I don’t want to pick on you, Tom, but you’re ignoring the banks, you’re ignoring television, you’re ignoring the size of this thing, and you’re saying this thing is okay because that’s the way of the world because capitalism will go that way.
“‘The so-called ways of capitalism are not inevitable,’ Stone exclaimed. ‘It’s changed historically. Teddy Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Franklin Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Everybody in Hollywood says, ‘Well, what can I do about it?” These six companies have taken over just like the oil companies, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong because they’re subverting political will.'”

Ales & Stouts

Obsession

The last truly exceptional hunt-for-a-serial-killer movie was David Fincher’s Se7en. And the next one, I’m fairly convinced, is going to be Fincher’s Zodiac (Paramount, 11.10).
I’m basing this on a recent read of James Vanderbilt’s script, which runs 150-plus pages. This persuades me that what I heard last week is true: Zodiac is going to be a three-hour movie, or close to it.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo in David Fincher’s Zodiac (Paramount, 11.10)

Scripts never really tell you that much, but reading Zodiac planted an idea that Fincher is again pushing the thriller boundary. Not just in the tradition of Se7en but also Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, another chasing-a-monster film that ended with something pretty startling.
Zodiac is based on two best-sellers by Robert Graysmith, “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed“, which are first-hand accounts about the hunt for the Zodiac killer who terrified the San Francisco area in 1968 and ’69.
The chief Zodiac hunters in Fincher’s film (as they were in actual life) are Gray- smith, a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist at the time (Jake Gyllenhaal), and a blunt-spoken, never-say-die San Francisco detective named Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo).
Toschi is understood to have been the real-life model that Steve McQueen based his tough-nut San Francisco detective on in the 1968 Peter Yates film Bullitt.
And of course, the Zodiac killer was the model for Andy Robinson’s psycho killer in Dirty Harry , the 1971 Don Siegel-Clint Eastwood classic…right down to the Zodiac claim about wanting to kill a busload of school children.

Zodiac is partly about the thrill and fascination of the hunt (the scores of hints and clues that pile up are more and more fascinating as the story moves along), and partly about how the complex, seemingly never-ending nature of the case makes Graysmith and Toschi start to go a bit nuts.
Is there such a thing as being too determined to stop evil? At what point do you ease up and say, “I’ve done all I can.” Is it always essential to finish what you’ve started? Should never-say-die always be the motto, even at great personal cost?
Zodiac isn’t just about sleuthing. Deep down I think it’s a metaphor piece about obsessions wherever you find them, and how the never-quit theme applies to heavily-driven creative types (novelists, painters, architects, musicians) as much as cops or cartoonists or stamp collectors or baseball-card traders.
Zodiac and Se7en have at least a couple of things in common: both are heavily focused on the bottled-up emotions and personal frustrations of their two main protagonists, and both films end on a note in which the “crime doesn’t pay” motto doesn’t exactly ring out from the belltower.

Zodiac director David Fincher during filming; laughing Gyllenhaal in b.g.

Let’s just say it: these are two catch-the-bad-guy movies in which the good guys try like hell, but they can’t quite manage to be McQueen or Eastwood in the end.
Partly because the up-and-down life of a cop generally isn’t that heroic or simple. And because Fincher would probably have trouble staying awake if somebody forced him to direct a Bullitt or a Dirty Harry.
Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker ended Se7en with a mind-blowing twist in which the killer won and the good guys lost, and in such a way that the final fate of the killer didn’t matter as much as the fact that his vision (which had a certain moral foundation) ended up being fulfilled.
The more I think about Se7en, the more certain I am that it was and is a truly brilliant cop thriller. Not just in the way the story was put together and paid off, but because it echoed a certain clouds-are-forming, it’s-all-starting-to-rot-from-within attitude…a kind of geiger-counter reading of the despair in the air in 1994 and ’95, when Se7en was made and released.

I attended a Writers Guild event last night that celebrated the 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written, and bless their hearts but the WGA voters were blind as bats for not including Se7en.
I’m not going to spill the Zodiac finale in any detail, but anyone who’s read even a little bit about the the hunt for the Zodiac killer knows the culprit was never charged or convicted, although his more ardent pursuers were convinced that he was a pudgy alcoholic and an ex-school teacher named Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992.
The script uses a substitute name instead of Allen’s. It wouldn’t be that big of a deal to mention it, but I’m trying to go lightly here.
Graysmith is the best part Gyllenhaal has ever had, and I’m including Jack Twist in this equation. If he does it right he’ll generate a lot of heat for himself, and I can’t see how he wouldn’t.
Graysmith is a very strongly written guy with a lot of struggle and frustration inside, and the pressure on him just builds and builds. The coup de grace comes at the end when Graysmith delivers a spellbinding 12-page oratory that ties up all the loose ends. (I was reminded of Simon Oakland’s this-is-what-actually-happened speech at the end of Psycho.)

Downey, Gyllenhaal

Robert Downey, Jr. has several good scenes as a Chronicle reporter named Avery. It seems at first as if he’ll be a prominent costar along with Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo, but nope. Anthony Edwards, as Toschi’s partner, has a smaller role than Downey.
Dermot Mulroney, Chloe Sevigny, Ione Skye, Donal Logue and Brian Cox have supporting roles. The IMDB says Cox plays famed San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, but my script doesn’t even have Belli in it.