Author: Peter Schilling

Hot off the wire! David Thomson, one of my favorite film critics, writes in the British broadsheet The Independent of a new film on the life of Truman Capote, called Infamous. This one is based on George Plimpton’s Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Unlike Capote, Infamous details Truman’s triumphs and tragedies in writing the masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

No, wait, that is exactly what the last film was about.

So this is pretty freakin’ bizarre. Thomson claims that Infamous is far superior to Capote, a film the irascible bastard actually admires. He writes that “if you thought it was too soon for another Capote, think again!” Well, I didn’t think it was too soon, I simply didn’t think anyone would make this story ever again… it’s not as if people are clamoring to remake these silly biopics.

Infamous boasts a supreme cast, which includes Daniel Craig (the new Bond), Jeff Daniels, Peter Bogdonovich, Hope Davis, Sandra Bullock (yes, that’s not a supreme actress, but a popular one), Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rosellini and Sigourney Weaver, with relative newcomer Toby Jones playnig our favorite screechy writer (I’m only partially tongue-in-cheek as I truly adore his work). Thomson claims that Jones is Capote, whereas Phil S. Hoffman was merely a mimic. Though I liked Capote, I didn’t think P. S. Hoffman was deserving of an Oscar, or the unanimous praise. Then again, I get sick of all this mimickry.

In any case, this could make for an interesting film, a rousing success, or a case of bad timing, much like Valmont following on the heels of Dangerous Liaisons a good decade back. Right now, I don’t have any clue when this will hit the states, if it will hit our shores on the big screen, or die a quiet death and head straight to DVD. I’ll keep you posted.

Scoop and Miami Vice

Scoop, 2006. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Allen, Hugh Jackman, and Ian McShane.

Now showing in theaters around town.

Used to be that you could spot a Woody Allen fan wherever they could be found sulking. Nebbishes to an extreme, they often were seen in oversized corduroy jackets with leather patches, didn’t care that their glasses were out of touch with the trendsetters, and could be heard in the arcades and K-marts debating the merits of Stardust Memories against Manhattan with their Allen-loving friends. Too often they would steal away from their high school dances to watch Hannah and Her Sisters, marveling at their own intellectual superiority, returning home at night dreaming their dreams of New York City and how much more superior it was to lousy Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

But that’s just me. In the years since I’ve come to wish that I had gone to more dances and seen less of Zelig and Radio Days, decent films but no match for the girls I passed up because they actually enjoyed Night Ranger and St. Elmo’s Fire.

Still, there is some part of me that yearns for the old Woody Allen. I miss the guy who used to cast his muse/lover (Lasser, Keaton, Farrow) and gather his flock of fantastic supporting actors to wrestle with his humor and angst. And all this in the fantasyland of Manhattan, my personal Oz. For Manhattan in Woody Allen is so much more reasonable than Manhattan in real life.

Woody isn’t haunting New York these days, having moved his shrunken frame to the upper class apartments and country estates of London. For whatever reason, this has seemed to resuscitate him. For although Scoop is not a very original film, it is a very funny film, more enjoyable than his very good Match Point. Scoop has no weight or meaning, and doesn’t address moral and philosophical issues. It has plot fashioned from cotton candy, a cast that includes Allen doing his stand-up shtick from start to finish, and a fairly predictable ending. I loved it.

The facts: Joe Strombel (gravely-voiced Ian McShane) is an ace reporter who has just recently died. Lolling along on Charon’s barge, still baffled at his sudden demise, he meets a woman who claims to have found herself in the underworld due to poisoning. This poor lady was offed because she knew a dastardly secret: she discovered evidence that her employer, Peter Lyman, wealthy son of Lord Lyman, is the Tarot Card Killer. Lyman overheard, she had afternoon tea, now she’s dead. The math is simple.

Strombol still has his reporter’s wits about him, so he jumps into the river hoping to escape Death just long enough to get the news back to the living. Enter Sondra Pransky (Ms. Johansson), a student reporter on vacation with some friends in London. She and her girlfriend take in a magic show by Sid Waterman (Woody), aka Splendini!, and, while making Sondra disappear into his ‘dematerializer’, she comes across Strombel’s ghost. He reveals his scoop: Peter Lyman is the killer, and Sondra has to investigate. With Woody Allen in tow, they meet the dashing young Mr. Lyman (Hugh Jackman), and hijinks ensue.

And boy do they ensue. My wife loathes Woody Allen, and anyone who is of the same mind would do themselves a favor by staying away. Perhaps I’m reacting to a summer’s worth of virtually brainless fare, and am hungering for drawing rooms and jokes that equate Anthony Trollope with ‘trollop’. But I loved Allen’s shtick here, which is rolled on thick as wallpaper paste–it’s a nice reprieve from the jokes of You, Me and Dupree and the newest Pirates film, at least. I haven’t seen Allen do his thing for a good long time, and here he’s going for straight stand-up. His magic act is wonderful and spot-on (and I should know, my pop’s a magician), a combination of tics and stutters designed, like all great slight of hand, to distract.

Woody seems to have found a new muse in Scarlett Johansson, who pushes him around and exchanges rapid-fire banter without blinking an eye. Forced to act like father and daughter, they dig at one another throughout, but manage to stir up a winning chemistry that is never discomforting sexually (though my wife, without having seen the film or any preview, shouted ‘pedophile!’ when I mentioned this). Hugh Jackman is light on his feet, and the love affair between him and Scarlett could almost be the heart of a Gene Kelly musical, it’s so breezy. Allen remains perhaps the best director of women in America–in fact, he is perhaps only surpassed internationally by Almodovar.

Scoop flags a bit toward the middle, but then rights itself with a goofy ending that ties up its loose ends with magic tricks on the River Styx. There are some weird touches in the film, most notably the Diane Arbus-like characters wandering in the background, dwarves and hideously made up women. And I give kudos to a guy who wants to make his silly plots twist and turn on the word of ghosts. Hardly a masterpiece, Scoop is nonetheless a film whose maker cares about the people he’s written about, cast actors who can fill the roles with wit and energy, who’s still got his comic timing, and believes his audience has at least half a brain. The other night, that was more than enough for me.

Miami Vice, 2006. Written and directed by Michael Mann. Starring Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Li Gong, Luis Tosar, Naomie Harris, John Ortiz, Ciarin Hinds and Barry Shabaka Henley.

For God’s sake, this is playing everywhere…

I was never keen on Miami Vice back in the day–as mentioned above, I was too busy checking out Woody Allen to care about Crockett and Tubbs. The pastel tales of the Miami PD, not to mention that grating theme song that played everywhere, got on my nerves. I hear tell that the show had its fair share of humor and cool, that it left an influence on Miami even today, but there was always something about Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas… I think it was the fact that they both can’t act their way out of a dry cleaning bag. That’s a problem in a pair of leading men.

For whatever reason, Michael Mann has decided to resuscitate the TV show, but he’s changed the look and the style, and replaced two easily identifiable hams with two overpraised actors who are also easily identifiable hams. Sure, everyone knows Foxx and Farrell. But Foxx’s ill-deserved Oscar has sent him to the top of a heap he doesn’t deserve; Farrell is just plain lousy. Li Gong stands out as the lone actress trying desperately to give this soulless film some heart. And Michael Mann? Well, I have to wonder if ever a director has assembled such a daring collection of arresting images and visceral moments to support such a hollow plot?

Like most of Mann’s films, the facts don’t amount to a hill of beans: The film opens with Crockett and Tubbs involved in a big mess. A pair of FBI agents is brutally murdered by some kind of informer leak (I didn’t really get what was going on for all the confusion), shot to death by what appeared to be anti-tank guns in a parking lot by the Miami piers, disrupting no one (large booms and explosions are obviously the norm in South Florida). The boys go undercover to take down a giant drug cartel. They are, of course, dressed in the finest clothes, surrounded by other cops equally sharp, who stand around our heroes looking like the gangs from the novels of S. E. Hinton. Once undercover, Crockett and Tubbs meet a number of hoods with greasy hair, have the usual tough-guy standoffs, get betrayed, get smacked around, fall in love, and in the end there’s a big, Saving Private Ryan-style gunfight (spot-on sound effects, verite camera work). The pair are shown making love to their women and falling for them, which, as reliable as Chekov’s gun, means that the girls will get kidnapped and/or beaten.

Miami Vice is a gorgeous movie to look at. Mann’s cinematographer captured the sullen beauty of the Miami summers, with its endless thunderstorms creeping in from the ocean, the wide expanses of water that criminals can run and hide in like a jungle, and the highways stretching out to nowhere. But although Mann clearly seeks to make his film stand out above the rest of the usual action fare, Miami Vice isn’t worth caring about. What do the characters want from life? Is there even a society to protect? Their primary concern seems to revolve around lovemaking, shooting things, and keeping their Armani’s pressed. What is this movie if not a string of the usual cliches with a great score and top-notch costume design? But it doesn’t mean anything and moves too slow to be mindless entertainment.

Even worse, there is no chemistry whatsoever between the actors. “I trust you,” Tubbs says to Crockett, an obviously important statement since we don’t see it for ourselves. Everyone here seems to exist in a narcissistic bubble, staring ahead, looking grim, flexing their muscles as they walk.

Miami Vice is moderately entertaining–“Not as bad as I thought it would be”, my colleague admitted–but you could do better with a dozen other films in the theaters or on DVD. With its supercops and their superduds, Miami Vice says nothing about Miami, nothing about crime, nothing, even, about people. Failing all that, what’s the point?

The Conversation, 1974. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Gene Hackman, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Cindy Williams, Michael Higgins, and some of the finest character actors of the 70s: John Cazale, Frederick Forrest, Teri Garr, and Allen Garfield.

Shows Wednesday night, July 26, at 9:00pm and Sunday, August 6 at 5:00pm on Turner Classic Movies.

I was all of six years old when Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned. Too young to understand the full implications, too young not to keep pestering my mother and grandparents as they gaped at the television set, too young to do anything but make fun of the sweaty, pasty-faced fellow on the tv screen. This was Los Angeles in 1974, to me a world of Disneyland and Dodger Stadium; to my mom, no doubt it was a place where the sun was burning hot on a world that seemed to come unraveled.

So, too, was I unable to appreciate the wealth of great films that year: 1974 was a feast of paranoid filmmaking, from Chinatown to The Godfather, Part II to The Parallax View to Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated The Conversation. Granted, the innocuous Sting made more than the lot put together, but it was a great year to exercise your frustrations onscreen.

Sometimes it’s hard to for me to imagine how pervasive the Watergate scandal was back then. Nixon resigned, you may or may not recall because he was certain to be impeached, and that impeachment would likely result in a verdict of removal. Today, when we go into the details of Watergate to those who are too young to have experienced or remembered, there is often a look of bafflement: that is what got Nixon kicked out? Knowingly supporting the Watergate break-in? Add to this his secret bombings of Cambodia, the enemies list, and etc., and the youth of today probably think of the 70s as a simpler time.

Which, in a way, they were. Somewhere it is written, by David Thomson (I think–I’m not going to look it up, either), that the films of the 1970s are so deeply cynical because the nation as a whole, the movie-going audience, was at its heart optimistic. Seeing a film like The Conversation was meant to anger and inspire, to make us understand that we didn’t necessarily have to have crooks in the White House. Today, I think, we’re pretty much resigned to having crooks in the White House, men who are more than willing to lie and plunder at will. And the crimes have become so abundant that you could not make The Conversation without its seeming deeply partisan at best, or, the stuff of crackpots at worst.

But The Conversation still stirs your conscience, and it’s a sly and subtle masterpiece by a filmmaker who was in-between making two of the most highly regarded films in history. It still boggles my mind that Francis Ford Coppola followed up The Godfather with this nearly-forgotten film about a professional eavesdropper.

The facts: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman, never better) is a professional surveillance man who is hired by the Director (Robert Duvall) of a giant conglomerate to listen in on the conversation between his wife and her suitor. Harry is the consummate professional with a crack staff and eavesdropping equipment that his competitors would give their eyeteeth to possess. With a great deal of finagling, Harry is able to piece together the details of this couple’s discussion. But now, Harry is concerned: in the past, his efforts to capture a secret meeting of a union official resulted in the brutal murder of a family. A shy, retiring, and paranoid man, who never indulges his secrets to anyone, Harry slowly begins to think that his recent work might result in this pair being killed as well.

Like the aforementioned films, especially Parallax View and Chinatown, our hero ends up the victim, powerless against the forces of capitalism, Big Brother, and just plain evil. Like Jake Gittes in Chinatown (also nominated for Best Picture that year–it could have been the strongest Oscar year in history were it not for Towering Inferno), Harry slowly becomes obsessed with protecting this couple, but, like Gittes, is utterly incapable of protecting even himself. Unlike Gittes, however, Harry is a loner, who refuses to trust even his assistant, his girlfriend, and a man whose occupation is subject to spying even by his competitors. Cloaked in a gauzy trenchcoat or seen through shower curtains and glass blocks, (like the caul of his last name) Harry tries to remain at a distance, usually muttering that he’s “not responsible” for the results of his surveillance, but knowing full well that’s a lie. Eventually, in an interesting nod to Psycho, there is a brutal murder, and not the least what he expected. In the now-famous denouement, he realizes that, in spite of his extreme efforts, he, too, is under surveillance and rips his apartment to shreds looking for a bug.

Whenever I watch The Conversation, I get quite uneasy. The plot is not necessarily brilliant, and, in fact, repeated viewings show off a few of its rusty spots. But Coppola and Hackman work in tandem to give us the plight of an everyman slowly drowning in the realization that his actions, whether intended or not, have ramifications that are unpleasant to say the least, and that the world is no longer an innocent place. This, from a movie that is over thirty years old. In the day, did my mother and grandparents still think the government was capable of the high standards that seem to exist only in myth today? In a time when the government admits to bugging millions of its people, and does so with impunity, Harry’s travails seem slight. After all, the film is about murder and corporations, not terrorism and the government, about which we are supremely concerned.

So now do we look at The Conversation as nostalgia, a time when one man would still sacrifice his life and career, when his defeat was a rallying cry, when we still cared that people were bugged and destroyed by a reckless government. Or is it as earnest and silly as John Wayne’s World War II films? A relic from lost time, a lost attitude?

I still hope that, like Harry, we cannot deny responsibility forever.

The Lady Eve, 1941. Written and directed by lipstick-magnate Preston Sturges. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Hank Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette and Sturges stalwarts William Demarest, Eric Blore and Robert Greig.

Playing in Loring Park with Fat Kid Wednesdays; part of the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies.

Briefly: tonight, the Walker Art Center is bestowing us unworthies with oddball jazz and and an even more oddball movie in beautiful Loring Park at sunset. The Lady Eve, the story of Ale-brewing and snake-loving Hank Fonda’s run-in with con-lady Barb Stanwyck, is hilarious and quite sexy to boot. If you have anything else to do, you must be dead, at least from the neck up.

There are no movie theaters in Saudi Arabia. Considering that there is no booze in the Kingdom of Saud, that there are no nightclubs, that 114 degree temperatures make sports all but impossible, and the shabobs (Arabic for young men) have to resort to driving like maniacs in order to let off steam, one would think they’d have a movie theater or two. But in the early 80s, the Saudi government decided to become a bit more pious and ban theaters altogether. And that’s a shame.

This does not mean that Saudis don’t watch movies. When the ban took place, it must have been a real boon for salesmen of home theaters: the early 80s, of course, marked the dawn of video. And everyone watches video in Saudi, catches Al Jazeera (also frowned upon) through their satellites, which rust by the thousands on the flat rooftops of this desert country. Theaters are gone, but film thrives in Saudi.

My wife and I were visiting friends at their home in the Aramco Oil Company compound in Dammam. The expats there, like most everyone in the world, have an insatiable hunger for movies. Problem is, they don’t like to leave the false safety of the high-walled paradise, and are afraid of both driving conditions and the rampant terrorists walking everywhere (I’m being facetious). Public video stores are only going to serve up the most innocuous fare, and I’m guessing that anything that’s even remotely dirty is going to be censored–much like the magazines, whose advertisements of midriff-exposed women have been blacked out with a permanent marker (there’s a job for you!)

However, like the clandestine alcohol market in Aramco (garage-distilled gin, a nasty concoction called ‘Sid’, and homemade wine that leans more toward vinegar), there’s a surreptitious fellow who runs a video store out of his home, utterly illegal, probably above-radar but tolerated for the pleasure it brings the employees. It’s a strange experience: we went to go return some movies and my friend suddenly pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex and then walked right into this guy’s front door. There, on bookshelves in his living room, and across from a dirty kitchen, is the video library. He’s got all the new stuff, copied from DVD to video for those too cheap to pay the exorbitant DVD rental fee, everything but porn. An Indian guest worker took our money with utter indifference, while hovering in the shadows was his boss, an American or Englishman, slobbering over some meal and no doubt counting the rials dropping into his account.

Movies on vacation are usually numbing affairs: on the plane south from Amsterdam, fatigued beyond belief, I set down Bryson’s Brief History of Nearly Everything to watch Failure To Launch, which I didn’t realize was about freaks and prostitutes. Our friends have two amazing children, but like all kids nine and twelve, they love fare like the new Pink Panther, which was seen three times in the first week we were there, and was awful. But I managed to be a bully, forcing our kind hosts to watch Cache, which says more about terrorism than any film in recent memory. Everyone dug it, even the twelve-year-old, who we to shoo out of the room at a violent moment. There was also the documentary Control Room, about the Al Jazeera network, which Saudis keep a trained eye on, hungry for coverage of the Palestinian crisis, which boiled over while we were there.

Perhaps this is what makes this community so intriguing: you can get these movies, watch these shows, when you want, but not together. You cannot congregate and see Lagaan, as innocent a Bollywood film as you’re bound to see. Walking on the Jeddah boardwalk, you can buy pirated copies of the latest flicks (they had Superman Returns and Click) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (banned there) from a kid who can fold up his wares and bolt in a heartbeat (and did at the sight of a cop, setting up shop moments later).

According to the Arab News, there was a Saudi Film Festival playing in Jeddah while we were in-country. One of the films was in black-and-white, and dedicated to Charlie Chaplin. However, according to Muhammed Salam, the deputy manager of the Jeddah Science and Technology Center (who was sponsoring the fest), “The films are considerate of the values and traditions of Saudi Arabia. This is an impressively unique and rare collection of movies that we didn’t know about before and carries a meaningful cultural message different to the nonsense that we see on satellite TV.” Which means they’re government approved, uncritical, and probably not worth the time it takes to see them.

Not an hour from the city of Dammam is the island kingdom of Bahrain, which is where Saudis go to do the things they cannot do at home, namely drink and see movies. One expat, who dropped his family off at the airport, made a beeline to see Mission:Impossible 3 and X-Men 3 back-to-back. “Well, he certainly got his fill of sequels,” our host said. This fellow could have spent the equivalent of two bucks on a bootleg, which look as if they were shot with handheld cameras from row three, and are frequently out of synch.

So for three short weeks (the time just flew–it was an incredible trip) we did not get the pleasure of the big screen, except to watch the Germany/Argentina World Cup match on a drive-in sized screen by the Persian Gulf, while shabobs smoked sheeshas (hookahs) that smelled of sweet apple.

But a movie would be a wonderful thing to see in this desert, especially considering the nationalities present and the food: seeing an Indian film anywhere (even Minneapolis) is a joy not just for the madness that will unfold onscreen, but because you can eat piping hot pakoras with them, and drink sweet tea. As per the custom, you’d have to have a separate-but-equal (again I’m facetious) section for men and families (the families have to hide their women from the watchful eyes of shabobs), but theater balconies would probably be perfect–and who needs windows in a theater?

On the return flight, fried again from jet-lag and listless sleep, I was hungry for a movie, any movie. Or so I thought. King Kong, which I’d missed last Christmas, was so awful I couldn’t continue. Oddly enough, there was a bat-shit crazy film called from 1974 called 11 Harrowhouse, starring Charles Grodin, Candace Bergen, James Mason, John Geilgud, and Trevor Howard. Who the hell thought to show this thing, of all possible films? Awful, not available on DVD (it will probably never see the light of a laser beam), and baffling: Charles Grodin plays this kooky, swingin’-70s guy who gets involved in a jewel heist. There’s free love, stickin’ it to the man, and making funny faces out of diamonds in peanut butter. For two hours, flying over the Atlantic, I was back in time to Channel 5’s Sunday afternoon movies of my youth. The film was even grainy and hard to see. But it was better than She’s the Man.

And now I’m back: to the land where women can walk around without black robes from top to bottom, where I can have a beer before sleep, and where, sadly, there is no crisis in the middle east–we can ignore it with impunity. Or so it would seem: last night, on the big screen, I took in, with a crowd of first-responders, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

A REMINDER: In what might be the best venue yet, The Monster of Phantom Lake is playing at the late-late show–11:30pm at the Woodbury 10 Theater. Cost is a slim $4. Frankly, a late show like this would be even better served by quaffing a few, but then I’m trying to make up for three weeks of sobriety.

Sullivan’s Travels, 1941. Directed and written by the inimitable Preston Sturges. Starring Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake (who’s on the take), the great curmudgeon William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Robert Greig, Eric Blore, Porter Hall, Charles R. Moore, and Jimmy Conlin.

Playing in Loring Park with Sengalese band Daara J; part of the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies.

You cannot, in any way, shape or form, find a better thing to do tonight than see Sullivan’s Travels in Loring Park. If the rains come, head on over to the Walker and see it. Call in sick if you work. Tell your lunkheaded boyfriend to go fly a kite if he’s against classic comedies. Skip class, call the babysitter (or better yet, take the kids), walk the dogs later. This is just about the best movie you could see this summer, on the big screen, sitting on the grass while the city pulsates behind you. There’s nothing better.

Director Preston Sturges was a weirdo of the highest order: bumped around Europe by his free-loving mother, who was a friend of Isadora Duncan; wound up in the cosmetics biz where he invented a kiss-proof lipstick; wrote a smash Broadway comedy on his first try; then, as the Depression hit, turned to movies. He made a lost classic in The Power and the Glory, no relation to the excellent Graham Greene novel, whose non-linear plot was a supposed influence on Citizen Kane. Then Preston Sturges got serious and created a string of the most madcap comedies in Hollywood history, and films that blew a raspberry in the face of rigid American mores of the early 1940s.

One of which, and perhaps his best (though I personally love the lesser-admired Hail the Conquering Hero, a movie ripe for a remake), is Sullivan’s Travels. It’s the crazy story of a director, John L. Lloyd Sullivan, a depression-era filmmaker of light comedies, such as Ants in Your Pants of 1939 and Hey Hey in the Hayloft. Like many Hollywood personalities, poor Sullivan has a notion to do something of lasting worth. So he gets it into his head to make a serious film entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou (sound familiar?), to address the crushing conditions of his day. Only he grew up with a silver spoon in his piehole and has no idea what it means to be poor. So, disguised as a hobo, he hits the road to live hand to mouth and bum rides on trains.

Well, as you would expect, he gets more than he bargained for. In Sturges’ capable hands, the guy is at first followed by a coterie of reporters, doctors and filmmakers; ends up in the bedrooms of oversexed widows; and ends up wooing the fetching Veronica Lake. There’s car chases, people falling into pools, and a whole pile of slapstick to frost the confection. But somehow, Sturges is able to have his cake and eat it too: Sullivan, like Preston’s other wonderful films (the ones from 1940-44), has both gales of laughter and soft breezes of melancholy.

A Scanner Darkly, 2006. Directed and written by Richard Linklater. Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane and Winona Ryder.

From the files of street critic Guy Fresno:

It all happened so God damn long ago. Wandering through the streets of Lansing, looking for something fun, something to score other than coke, because it wasn’t a coke kind of night. We wanted to make the Crystal Cave that much more Crystal, you know, make the walls bend like they did that one night we got hold of those shrooms. Little pot, little tequila, and some shrooms, and man, I swear to you I rewrote The Crying of Lot 49 in the last three hours of my high. Right in that living room.

See, see, I was there, man. Right in that movie. I met Linklater, once, long time ago, when he was trippin’ at the University of Austin, Texas. He read my mind. Just like that, or maybe I, you know, slipped it in-between sips of coffee? Could have, could have, could have. But, look, take Slacker, take Waking Life, take this new trip, this Scanner Darkly, and I swear, with that last one, it’s mine, my life, mine. That apartment, mine. The guy with the bugs? Me. And I had a roommate who did make a silencer out of duct tape. For sixty-nine cents. Only it worked. But Linklater made it not work because, you know, it’s a lot funnier that way.

Movie’s shit cracked me up. What happens, Bob Arctor, that dope fiend, only he’s not, he’s a cop, Fred, who hates those fat bastards at Rotary Clubs. God that was funny. Dick Linklater made it funny. That’s good, ’cause as much as I love Phil K. Dick, his shit’s serious man, it gave a friend of mine an aneurism. I’m serious. He was taking a mix of meth and Nyquil, and was reading Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and he just died. You’re surprised I can remember that title, in my condition. Well, give me coffee and a slice of this meringue pie, and I’ll remember Hitler’s shoe size. Anyway, Phil Dick’ll do that to you. Blow your mind. And if you’re blowing your mind, it’ll kill. So watch yourself.

Linklater’s a genius. He’s our Shakespeare, our Bob Flaherty. Captures our world, you know. And see, I never admitted as much to you before, but that was me, there, in those rooms, with the wood paneling and picking through the ashtrays looking for one last toke.

Anyway, it was a long time ago, like I said. A bunch of us, stoners, talking about the whole wide world, looking to score. It was a lot like this movie, this Scanner Darkly, a bunch of us going crazy, flipping out from both the drugs and the whole damn paranoid world. I wish I could tell you that one of us went on to do great things, or that one of us died and we all learned a lesson, but really, it’s just like in that movie–nothing much, just one guy fried and in rehab, clean now but a moron. Another, he was busted, and he’ll see freedom again in twenty-seven years. Serving a term down in Virginia for a crime he supposedly committed in Michigan. No one sees him. They stole some books on the Tigers I mailed him a few weeks back.

Anyway, that’s it. We were just looking to score and the one guy got busted. Walking out of a 7-11, the rest of us waiting at home, me staring at the ceiling thinking of how I’d love to kick the crap out of J. D. Salinger for his silence, Busto (the rehab idiot), taking in old videotapes of the Price Is Right he hoarded. And Big Mike, he was just gone. To jail, gone forever. Busto, two years later, goes clean in order to avoid jail. Me, I just do my thing.

Linklater got it right, though this movie made me hunger for those old days more than frighten me. And I think Phil Dick wanted it to scare you. Link’s got too much love for those days, though. It’s fine, we don’t need another Drugstore Cowboy. And the animation’s a trip. You don’t need drugs anymore, you got this interpolated rotoscoping, this painting over photography. It’s cool, better than that shit Bakshi did with the original Lord of the Rings. Hmm. That’s maybe the worst thing about the life, no matter how it rocks you, no matter what parts of your body it grinds to Spam, no matter who you lose: there’s always a bit of nostalgia for the enormous lie of it all. It was beautiful when it didn’t kill you.

Road To Guantanamo, 2006. Directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross. Starring Riz Ahmed, Farhad Harun, Waqar Siddiqui, Afran Usman, Shahid Iqbal, and the actual Tipton Three, who give us their story in interviews: Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul.

Since June 29, my wife and I have been enjoying a visit with friends in Saudi Arabia. It is interesting to note that there are no movie theaters here in Saudi Arabia, ostensibly due to the fact that too much would have to be edited out from every picture: there can be no cleavage, no hugging, no drinking, no drugs, etc. But what is most concering to the Saudi government, according to most of the people I’ve spoken to, is any criticism of their government or the U.S. policy, which skip along hand in hand. Even if there were theaters in Saudi, you can bet that Road To Guantanamo would not be around to rile up a public whose collective anger is simmering at a low boil.

Here in the Arabian Peninsula, cultures are in collision, from the Westerners working for the oil industry to the guest workers in for little pay to clean the houses of the wealthy, to the Saudis themselves, all of whom are too complex to try and shoehorn into a category. Here, you meet people like Fearful Sam, a resident of Aramco, the Saudi/American oil company. Sam is a man who, when asked if he likes it in Saudi, says that he loves it and proceeds to relate, for twenty nonstop minutes, how he never leaves the city-sized compound because ‘they’ hate people like him and want to cut his head off.

We Americans all feel this way, I think, to a degree: the weeks and months prior to departure were filled with concerned friends, family and strangers–liberals and conservatives–expressing sober concern for my life and safety on this trip. I, too, had trepidations. But after barely a week in the Middle East, these concerns have become secondary. My utter ignorance of the world is what concerns me today.

You won’t get a taste of the Middle East by watching a film. I saw Road to Guantanamo a few weeks ago and was outraged, went home, and by the end of the day it’s lessons were simply another bon-bon in the box of my intellectual chocolate sampler. I consider myself learned, read Harpers, visit the Guthrie, the museums, and don’t know squat about the Middle East. To this dilettante, this awful subject quickly gets boring, it never ends.

But here, in Saudi, you get the world in your face every day, moment after moment: children play soccer and cricket while Saudi jets fly over; the war in Israel over the captured soldier is in every breath, nearly as prevalent and soul-sickening for the locals as 9/11 was for us; the attacks on the U.S., Spain and Britain were simply more devastation in a now half-century skirmish, The Great War for Civilization, as Robert Fisk calls it.

The Road to Guantanamo is a harrowing film at times, a damning account of three innocents who were swallowed alive by the machinery of our “war” against terrorism. From a purely aesthetic perspective, Road is a good movie, but nonetheless a film with a trio of actors at its center playing the Tipton Three with very little emotional range. I don’t doubt director Michael Winterbottom’s intentions aren’t anything but noble, but all he’s done is take the story and recreate it onscreen with as much verisimilitude as he can. The result is an oddly distant movie, whose scenes of torture are strangely unaffecting at times, and, worse, confusing and at times veering out of context. The film has been criticized for not making any attempt at understanding some of the American guards at Guantanamo, but my chief complaint is that we really don’t come to understand the three poor kids whose lives were stolen for two long years.

The facts: Just a week after September 11, 2001, young Asif, all of nineteen years old, travels from Tipton, England to Pakistan to meet with a girl his mother has deemed worthy of him to marry. Asif asks his friend Ruhel to come and be his best man. Ruhel agrees, and brings along some other pals, Shafiq and Monir. These are three typical teenage goofballs–eager to eat, to talk, and share their passionate ideas with one another. While praying at a mosque, an Imam there suggests that all good Muslims should go to Afghanistan to give aid to the people whose lives have been disrupted by the war there. Along with a cousin, Zahid, they travel to Afghanistan to help.

From there, a series of horrific events meet them: they are stuck in a village, helping no one and getting deathly ill; being whisked supposedly back to Pakistan but instead right into the heart of Taliban territory; their group is split up, and Monir vanishes, forever.

Worst of all, however, and the crux of the story: the three boys from England are captured by Northern Alliance troops, detained, beaten, questioned, and finally sent to Guantanamo Bay for two years.

The Road to Guantanamo has no plot to speak of, really: as I said, it’s simply an often confusing exact reenactment of what the Tipton Three tell us. Like United 93, this is an outstanding account of events that we can only imagine–and, like that movie, I ask, to what end? Is it, like the Coney Island Hurrican Recreations, simply to ‘take us there!’? Well, that’s an impossibility. We’ll be squeamish for two hours, then go home and hope and pray for an end to the Bush Administration or send our checks to Amnesty International at most. Don’t ask me what I want instead, because I don’t know the answer. As far as the film is concerned, The Road To Guantanamo would have been more powerful with up close interviews with the them, and let my imagination roam–it is still more potent than Winterbottom’s recreations.

You could do no wrong in bookending a depressing day with viewings of both United 93 and Road to Guantanamo–these stories tell us how different people are affected by our so-called war on terror. In the interviews with the Tipton Three, you see that their experience as they relate it do not reflect on their faces–in fact, there’s a certain peace to them, a resignation of fate, a sad acceptance that, in the words of one of the men, “the world’s not a nice place”. Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul all stare straight at the camera, as if trying to see something in us that will help them to understand their ordeal, and it’s wrenching. Has their faith helped them heal? Has it helped them to forgive? Or will they carry an anger with them for the rest of their lives?

It is striking to drive down the manic streets of Dammam and Khubar and suddenly hear the call to prayer resonate from a mosque, and then another, off by a few seconds, from another, and then more, until the skies are filled. Then the stores shuttering, the people praying. Spirited discussions erupt in the cafes and foule shops for any westerner eager to listen. There is anger here, no doubt, but there is also a sense of calm, of trying to get to the bottom of generations of conflict, of a hunger for peace, and not necessarily a peace through conquest as one might expect. The Tipton Three have been through a wringer so distant from our own experiences that nothing can compare. When I saw The Road to Guantanamo, I knew about this tragedy from a distance nearly equal to this planet and the dark side of Mars. Now that I’m in Saudi, trying to figure out my place in the politicial firmament, this is what amazes me: these three young men’s capacity for forgiveness, relief, resignation to their God’s will.

Superman Returns, 2006. Directed by Bryan Singer, written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. Starring a cast of undead that includes Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, the usually inspired Kevin Spacey, Frank Langella, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Sam Huntington, and, briefly, Eva Marie Saint and the disembodied voice of Marlon Brando.

What a movie this new Superman could have been: our caped hero’s starship landing in the deserts of Gaza, in war torn Darfur, in the slums of Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro, where some impoverished family raises the boy to right the wrongs of his people. This Superman would find food for the starving, try to see what his x-ray vision could do for the AIDS epidemic, maybe pull the rotting hulks of nuclear warheads from the bottom of the Baltic.

Of course, Superman is only summer popcorn fare, so it’s also a cheap thrill to see the guy pull heroics like, say, single-handedly lift an island the size of Cuba out of the water and hurl it into space. This actually happens. Unfortunately, this Superman also manages to take on the role of a somewhat misguided Christ figure, standing as if on the cross while hanging above the skies. The poor fellow–all he can hear are the cries of the world, begging for a savior!

Somewhere in the glistening halls of the major movie studios, shiny, overly manicured people with lots and lots of income sat around trying to figure out yet another summer blockbuster. Naturally, they turned to the comic books, whose adaptations have become commonplace each and every summer. This year, one of these hacks got it through their head to make this new Superman movie, which is itself not so strange as it was a popular comic, and a successful movie over twenty five years ago. What is strange is that some faceless executive or fanboy director got it through their money-addled head to not only reproduce, for a quarter of the picture, Richard Donner’s utterly mediocre original, with Christopher Reeve. And then, someone decided that it was high time the comic book movie set aside much of the action, focus instead on the intense relationship between Lois Lane and Superman, and in the process make him a figure of almost religious significance.

Freaky. I take that back–freaky would have been the original choice, Nick Cage, mixing in with his earnest crusader a bit of his Peggy Sue Got Married shtick to go with his Oscar-winning drunk, tough guy from The Rock, and maybe even his hang-dog look from Adaptation. No, Superman Returns falls as hard as a Superhero with a stiletto of Kryptonite in his gut.

Superman Returns is long. It is tedious. It is filled with a cast of some of the most bland actors on the planet, including, at its center, a hero so woefully dull that he succeeds in making the tragic Christopher Reeve seem like a beacon of charisma. Kevin Spacey, unbelievably, is unfunny, going through the motions on the way to financing some theater production or art-house flick. Parker Posey is wasted in a role that demands that she do nothing more than whine, and I have to say I’ve seen her whine more professionally in other films. Frank Langella keeps his voice low, bizarre considering he’s supposed to be the boisterous editor of the Daily Planet, not a head librarian. There are other characters, but they, too, are filled with actors and actresses who can hope and pray for roles in syndicated television or Midwestern dinner theater.

There is little plot, and what exists is virtually the same as Richard Donner’s much more spirited original (and let me add that this film also succeeds in making a prime hack like Donner come off as a genius.) In this film, Superman has been gone for five years, off to examine a chunk of the planet that has been discovered floating around in space. He’s a curious boy, eager to see if Krypton holds any secrets about his past. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor (Spacey), has been sprung from prison by a wealthy dowager, a woman he seduced and who dies right off the bat. With her inheritance, Luther quickly invades our hero’s private space, venturing north to roam about the Fortress of Solitude, that great crystal palace where you can find footage of Marlon Brando earning a million dollars for ten minutes–and obviously proving that Brando is burning in hell, forced to see this footage again and again. Luther discovers that the magic crystals from Superman’s home world can be tossed into the drink and make new land! So he takes a handful of dagger-sized pieces and heads back to Gotham (Metropolis? I can’t recall and don’t really care). And what do you suppose he’ll do? Something nefarious, and something involving kryptonite and the end of the world.

And therein lies the inherent problem with Superman: he’s a square, so powerful only kryptonite can stop him, and unless you’re blessed with imaginative screenwriters, the story’s dull. Superman can quite literally do anything, anywhere. He can save kittens from trees, women from mashers, car bombers from roadside cafes, presidents from lying… I guess there are some things even he can’t do. My point is that there’s little surprise in a Superman plot, unless of course you manage to bring some heavies from his home planet, as they did to mild success in the second entry of the original, some twenty years ago. Without that, you have worthless bad guys unable to do anything without the green rock. Unlike Batman, say, who has actual skills (as opposed to powers that vanish with the elements), Superman is either super or he’s a dud. So he’s a normal man on an island of Kryptonite? Well, how is it this beefy guy can’t beat aged Lex Luthor, with or without superpowers? Does it matter? No… because Luthor’s plan, which lacks any wit or irony, is foiled, easily, in ways that only serve to augment Superman’s newfound status as religious icon.

Bryan Singer goes through all the motions: he hauls our hero back to the Daily Planet, where Jimmy Olson wears his bow-tie and is played by a kid who would probably make you ask for a refund at a high school play. Then comes Kate Bosworth, as Lois Lane, a blank slate compared to the madwoman who played her in the original.

Even more confounding, the frustrated romance between Lois and Superman is what drives this film. Superman pines for Lois, who now has a lover, played by James Marsden, who is also the father of their son and another dim bulb. He’s jealous, but supportive. There are long talks between them about her feelings for Superman. Superman, as usual, flies around watching and listening, and pining. Many more references are made to his being a savior, and we get the same scene from the 70s film with Superman carrying the girl around New York City, making us feel like we too can fly. Later, there are more references to Superman’s near-divinity. And then many, many references. We see him in pain hovering above the earth, and later, Superman ends up in the ER, in a scene so embarrassing I still cringe.

Director Bryan Singer obviously looks at Superman as literature of the highest order, and treats it as such. We’re supposed to not only root for the guy, as we did in Spiderman, but worship him as well. But he’s no underdog, and its no longer even a thrill to see the man flying. Richard Donner had a much better sense of Superman’s speed with the crappy effects of ’78. Here, a scene with a crashing plane is tossed in for good measure and it’s utterly lifeless, leaving me wishing Bugs Bunny were on board to use the old air brake joke. At the end of the scene, in which our hero brings the crashing plane down to a ballfield, ends with a joke about how air travel is still safer statistically–a joke told verbatim by Chris Reeve. As are the credits and score. What’s missing is the fun.

It’s difficult to say what went wrong, because everything is wrong in this muddled film, which commits the cardinal sin of being tedious.

Ages ago, the Comics Code Authority did an number on the industry, doing their level best to ‘clean’ it up. They succeeded only in paving the way for uptight squares like Superman to thrive. While the Authority eventually relaxed, in the vacuum it created, superheroes thrived. As the world becomes more complex, we seem to be turning to these simpleminded stories: we’ve seem to have fallen in love with these people (men, usually) who typically don’t work for their abilities, instead getting bitten or mutated or tossed here from other planets. They fight criminals that are nothing like any in real life, in cities that look like fantasies from 1946. The Daily Planet is virtually all white, the cities the same. Here we are today, in an age of CGI, and comic book flicks are so devoid of reality you wonder what their real purpose is (or rather, to what is their purpose real). Is it to keep us in the dark? A simple diversion? There’s nothing wrong with diversions, but Superman tries to take a high road, just as X-Men did, the result being that they’re ostensibly supposed to make you think, and entertain, and ultimately, in Superman, failing miserably to do both. In the press kits, Singer makes many mentions of his love for Donner’s Superman, but he forgets how well that super hero fit into the 70s–Superman was the total square in an era of long-hairs and wide collars, gaping at the new phone booths, rolling his eyes at the hip girl Lois, and trying to fit in, succeeding because he could fly without a hit of acid. Perhaps Singer wants his Superman to do what the last one could not: take us to a time back before the 70s, before 9/11, when evil geniuses like Lex Luthor were easy to destroy, and there truly was Truth, Justice and the American Way. Which didn’t include Iraq, or any other messy truth.