(Monday, 24 September, 2001) Here's what the Cinemonkey team has to say about some recent DVD releases: Kerry Fall on A Knight's Tale; Damon Houx on Halloween 2, Scanners, and Rock and Roll High School; and D. K. Holm on The Luzhin Defence.

(Sunday, 23 September, 2001) The other day by happenstance I briefly meet screenwriter Alan Greenberg. A frequent collaborator of Werner Herzog and other international directors, for some reason Greenberg now lives in Portland, Oregon. Greenberg's IMDB page is skimpily under-researched, but it does at least list him as a director, of the documentary Land of Look Behind, a poetic profile of Rastafarians in Jamaica which he made with cinematographer Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein (Nosferatu), and originally released in 1982 (movie business labels such as "screenwriter" rarely truly describe). Greenberg has also contributed to Herzog's Heart of Glass, as both a writer and a photographer, and Fitzcarraldo (as co-screenwriter), and wrote the movie Dance Me Outside. He also writes about music occasionally for Amazon.com. Most interestingly, Greenberg wrote a screenplay about the life of Robert Johnson called Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, published in 1983. Until the script was apparently finally made in the summer of 1999, Love in Vain had the distinction of being one of the few screenplays published without being filmed. Pinter's Proust screenplay and John Collier's script derived from Paradise Lost are two others that come to mind in this small genre of publishing anomalies. I looked up the script, which the diligent Da Capo Press reprinted in 1994, and it is a finely detailed attempt to penetrate the mystery of Johnson. The book comes with additional introductions by Martin Scorsese (who at one point was going to direct the script) and Stanley Crouch, and with Alan Moore-esque notes by Greenberg annotating his researches into Johnson's mysterious life. As Nick Tosches writes in his new book on Emmett Miller, Where Dead Voices Gather, "It is not the music of Robert Johnson, but the mystery of him—the legends that grew around his vanishing and fate, a vanishing and fate that remained unsolved for more than thirty years after his death; legends involving a horrid end through evil spell or demonic possession, attributed to blacks but loved by whites—that made Robert Johnson the most mythic of bluesmen." Greenberg goes a long way in exploring that myth. With the popularity of Ghost World tangentially reviving interest in old blues recordings, perhaps we are more likely now to see the finished version of Love in Vain. Greenberg told me that Land of Look Behind is about to enjoy DVD release, presumably from Kino. By the way, Greenberg isn't the only screenwriter to make Portland home. Gill Dennis (Return to Oz, On My Own) and Mike Rich (Finding Forrester) both live here, which gives me a chance to plug my interview with Rich which appeared in Creative Screenwriting last November.

(Saturday, 22 September, 2001) As I hear Lee Greenwood's patriotic song about America, over and over again on television, often sung by Mr. Greenwood himself, I can't help recalling Henry Gibson's country western patriarch Haven Hamilton from Altman's Nashville singing "200 Years."

(Friday, 21 September, 2001) Christopher Nolan has gathered his so far complete works into one volume, Memento & Following, published by faber and faber (234 pages, $19.95, 0.571.21047.3). The book contains in chronological order, for a change, his first script for the reasonably hard to see Following, followed by the big hit Memento. Supplementary material includes an interview with Nolan and lead actor-producer Jeremy Theobald about Following, and, for Memento, parallel and conflicting memoirs by the Nolan Brothers as to how the idea for the film came up in the first place. Memento is a surprisingly readable screenplay, given its disjunctive narrative, but it's also surprisingly funny. The Nolans offer no new insight into the alleged mysteries of the movie, but that doesn't matter. I and other fans of the film maintain that there is no real mystery here; everything you need to know is contained right there in the text. The movie isn't "about" the mystery, it is about obsession and how people manipulate each other, their moods and actions highlighted by the engine being in reverse. Leonard Shelby is a man with a mission; but Following's more or less nameless protagonist is drifting through the urban landscape without any goals until a shady character gives him an obsession. Following is also well-written; I was lucky enough to see the film at the Clinton Street Theatre in Portland, Oregon recently, and it suffers only from my having seen the two films, so to speak, in reverse order; for budgetary reasons alone, Memento is more sophisticated. In a short career so far of just two films, Nolan has already evinced the obsessions and themes of a true auteur. The director is obviously drawn to variations on tales of hard men using simpletons to do their bidding, with a femme fatale thrown in as a red herring. It will be interesting to see how Nolan makes his current project, a remake of the already perfect Insomnia, his own.

(Thursday, 20 September, 2001) What is it with Film Comment and George W. Bush? The current issue arrives and there are at least two left field mentions of the man in two separate articles. The references are meant to serve up Bush as an example of obvious ridiculousness, but the jokes don't work; they're as unfunny as Joe Queenan throwing in, say, Shelley Winters at the end a list of unpleasant things. It feels arbitrary; anyone could have been inserted into that type of fill-in-the-blanks joke. On page 12, Larry Gross says that the looming writers' strike was "another example, like George W. Bush's presidency, of postmodern politics." On page 73 in the course of a review of The Man who Wasn't There, Paul Arthur writes that the film has "more reversals and plot twists than in George W. Bush's foreign policy." Witlessly citing living and controversial politicians in a movie column in this way does exactly what many reviewers complain arty directors do, tearing your attention away from the main point with visual pyrotechnics. Now, suddenly, what you're reading is a divisive political column; and obviously, from the cozy criticism, the writer assumes that the reader agrees. I once pitched a book idea to an agent (he didn't bite) called The Movie Reviewer's Manual of Style. The point of the book was that while ostensibly explaining what words such as "haunting" mean in review after review, the book would really be offering a critique of contemporary reviewing's paucity of imagination and limited vocabulary. One listing was going to address politics, and how reviewer's serve themselves and the reader better by weaving their views into the fabric of the piece rather than boldly stating their uninteresting views in what is, after all, a wholly other kind of column. Politics and film can be blended of course; just announce to the reader what you are doing. And while I'm at it, I loath the "new" design of Film Comment, which has embraced a Movieline level of ugliness. Progress isn't always good; the magazine looked better in the '80s. Now, Film Comment is the only magazine in which the subheads are bigger than the heads. Thanks to these recessive heads, you can never tell where an article actually begins. The content is not improving much either. In this issue, the new editor proudly announces digital artist Jason Salavon discussing "his version of James Cameron's Titanic; even if you hated the movie, I guarantee that you've never seen it looking like this." And what turns out to be the big deal? Salavon, in the turgid prose of Artist Statements, explains that he has presented the film as "a data set." In other words, it's just a weird, content free painting. Oh, and well worth a whole page out of a major film magazine. Surprisingly, there is no one named Salavon in the masthead to explain how this visual pabulum got into the magazine. Meanwhile, the newsy stuff at the beginning of the magazine is lame, and again makes the magazine resemble Movieline. A the DVD stuff in the back feels faked; thanks for praising The Godfather on DVD, but, um, have you actually seen the disc? And, as in the previous regime, all the writers throughout the magazine sound the same, like little James Wolcott clones. That being said, Larry Gross's article does make a very funny and intriguing point, that the badness of Hollywood movies over the last three years is "the fault of indie films." Noting that "the concept 'indie film' has given brand identification to what everyone at the studios fear most: films that are not profitable," Gross notes that in the past, when executives were uncertain and reeling, filmmakers might be able to slip art past them. But now studio chiefs "know with unprecedented clarity what to avoid." He adds that "indie films consistently perform too poorly at the box office to make anyone at the studios anything but terrified or contemptuous of following their lead." I could use a lot more of this in the pages of Film Comment and a lot less nonsense word jazz.

(Tuesday, 18 September, 2001) When I went to see Ghost World with the rest of the paying public a few weeks ago, there were two trailers on hand before the film started, and they just happened to be for the two films I have been most looking forward. The first was The Man who Wasn't There, which screens for reviewers tomorrow, but I can't go see it; and The Royal Tenenbaums. As it happens, I had occasion to read the screenplay recently, and it was interesting to have briefly visualized the decor, costumes, and settings that were suggested in the script. I found the screenplay funny and endearing, if vastly more complex than Rushmore, which may be a detriment to its successful realization. But the script conveys very much a Rushmore feel; the only problem was that I kept picturing Bill Murray in the lead, not Gene Hackman (and I hope this casting switch doesn't wreck the film that I enjoyed reading). But here is what may be a clue to the secret of the film: both previous Wes Anderson movies feature an actor named Brian Tenenbaum. In Rushmore, he was a contractor, while in Bottle Rocket he played H. Clay Murchison. The IMDB doesn't have a listing for him in The Royal Tenenbaums—yet, anyway. Here is my totally unsubstantiated theory about the genesis of the film: Brian Tenenbaum and Anderson are friends. He is the Steven Prince to Anderson's Scorsese, and this film is a cinematic exaggeration of Tenenbaum's real life experiences. Either that, or it's just a coincidence.

(Monday, 17 September, 2001) Here's what the Cinemonkey team has to say about some recent DVD releases: Damon Houx on The Howling, Scanners, and Suspiria; and D. K. Holm on Citizen Kane.

(Sunday, 16 September, 2001) Almost everyone I know spent the weekend watching disaster films. One colleague was up well into the night watching a borrowed disc of Armageddon, while another dug out a copy of the De Laurentiis King Kong, in which the twin towers figure. Now that they are gone, it's chilling how often the two buildings appear in movies and elsewhere as emblems of New York City, once almost invisibly, now by virtual of their absence strangely more there then ever. Posters of forthcoming Spiderman movie, with the towers reflected in the eyes of Spidey's mask, are starting to appear on Ebay; of the three movies with releases delayed or canceled, I have seen one. For my part, I spent some of the day re-watching Jaws. But that activity was not born solely of disastercentricity. I had just finished reading, or re-reading really, Carl Gottlieb's The Jaws Log, in its 25th anniversary edition from Newmarket Press (224 pages, $14.95, ISBN 1.55704.458.9). I enjoyed the book quite a bit when it was first published as a mass market original, and am pleased to see that many filmmakers found it a good book, too: this edition comes with numerous encomiums, from Bryan Singer to Rod Lurie, all claiming for it the honor of best "making of" book. Gottlieb updates his text with footnotes, and in one passionate note he discusses who really wrote the famous Indianapolis speech. Noting that John Milius never disagrees with anyone who claims it was he, Gottlieb carefully charts who did what when (he kept copious working notes at the time) and argues for Robert Shaw as the true author of the speech as we have it on film. Seeing it again, I am once again moved by it; but then, Jaws is one of the great American movies.

(Saturday, 15 September, 2001) Two competing obits for Kael preoccupy me. The first is David Denby's in the New Yorker. The second is Andrew Sarris's in the New York Observer. I'd been waiting for Sarris's, which turns out to be a grave, even sad account of his encounters over many years with what must have been one of the most shrewish women in New York, the Vatican of shrews. Denby, by contrast, a Paulette, trots out the usual personality profile material about her which is suppose to sound charming and independent: her noisiness at screenings, her cutting of friends who disagree with her or bore her. The genre the New Yorker handles worst is the obit, and this lengthy, almost content free article is no exception. But then, what would one expect the magazine that published her for so many years to do?

(Thursday, 13 September, 2001) One of the most disturbing stories I've been following concerns Emmanuel Levy's book on the history of Oscar. Levy is a former Variety reviewer whom I've read for years, and who now teaches in the southwest. His book Oscar Fever from Continuum, is a revision of an earlier Academy Award book, and according to an article in the Phoenix New Times, the book is rife with ridiculous, embarrassing errors. As a semi-professional writer, I live in fear of making mistakes, and do so all too often. However, the account in the Phoenix New Times describes a disaster. That Levy is now an academic is no guarantee that a book will be completely accurate, however; the ugly secret of professional writing, especially newspaper writing, is how often fact checkers and copy editors save writers from themselves. Instead, this is a story about the deterioration of fundamental book editing.

(Wednesday, 12 September, 2001)Be sure to read Damon Houx's review of the new Anchor Bay DVD release of John Landis's Schlock.

(Tuesday, 11 September, 2001) Talk to a colleague about the terrible events of the day. He had an interesting perspective: for the most part he monitored the news of the terrorist attack via radio, and felt terrible about the tragedy. But when he got home, he started to watch it on TV, and was struck by the dynamic images of vehicles colliding with architecture. These images are stunning, but none of the photographers can admit their excitement at capturing them because it would be viewed as bad taste, as somehow exploiting the events for profit. He calls such lapses in taste being "tragically incorrect." I plead with him to write up this fascinating analysis of the news, but he demurs. Perhaps this diary entry will force his hand.

(Monday, 10 September, 2001) Here's what the Cinemonkey team has to say: Kerry Fall on Home for the Holidays, and D. K. Holm on Blow and 13 Ghosts.

(Sunday, 9 September, 2001) Wake up in the morning to be confronted by a brilliant analysis of Memento in, of all places, the Oregonian, the local daily that takes as its operating assumption that all readers are eight years old. Not known for its affection for exegesis, the paper shocks me today with this highly readable article by one Michael Wilson, an author unknown to me, that reviews the new Memento DVD and tries to plume its mysteries. Wilson makes some interesting points, such as asking why Leonard has no old pix of Teddy if he has known him so long. Though the article begins with the predictable mimicry of the movie in the amnesia department, a writing trick that is epidemic at the Oregonian, soon the review settles down to an excellent examination of the move's mysteries. I am, of course, furious with Wilson, because the previous week I grappled with my own sorrowful review of the movie for the DVDJournal, and neglected to make any of the points Wilson makes. His article is premised on Wilson's watching the movie in chronological order, i.e., backwards. This is the same project one of my colleagues took on; a digital re-edit of the film, derived from the DVD, that puts the movie in strict chronological order, or at least his theory of the correct chronological order. Dubbed "The Elaborate Lie," this digital re-edit of Memento starts with the black and white motel footage and ends with the Teddy's murder. Another explication that's helpful is Andy Klein's article for Salon. But the key to the secrets of Memento may lie not on the new DVD, nor in my colleague's re-edit, but in the work of Oliver Sacks. A consultation of his book The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat reveals the piece, called "Murder," in which a young man kills his girlfriend while on PCP but doesn't remember doing it. Then, after a bike accident, his memory starts to come back. There's no anteriorgrade amnesia in the story, but the premise is similar, and may have influenced Jonathan Nolan when he conceived the original story.

(Thursday, 6 September, 2001) After a day in bed, go down to the local bar to read the new Sight and Sound. This is always an informative and depressing experience. I used to hate the magazine when Penelope Huston edited it, but since the early '90s it has been one of the best film magazines, though the field isn't all that big to begin with. These days, it has perhaps a little too much Premiere in it and not enough Film Culture, but it's reviews are the most informative outside of J. Hoberman's and Jonathan Rosenbaum's. One doesn't always agree with its reviews; in that regard, the magazine seems to carry on the short sighted nature of its previous incarnation. Nevertheless, past issues have provided a foundation for excitement about The Way of the Gun and Memento. As I am reading the magazine, I begin to overhear two guys down the bar who talking about movies. One of them is going into excruciating detail about the movie Snatch. Then he recounts a story of being at the Tiki Lounge, a local cocktail nation hangout, and asking all his gathered friends about their favorite movie. Naturally, Reservoir Dogs and It's a Wonderful Life come up. The man than begins a long disquisition on the narrative of True Romance before admitting that his favorite movie is Paint Your Wagon. I begin to feel paranoid, and wonder if they saw me reading Sight and Sound and decided to talk in this ridiculous way about movies in order to irritate me.

(Friday, 7 September, 2001) Read in Jeffrey Wells's column that Peter Bart will be reinstated as editor of Variety. This is shocking, as the charges against him seemed serious, and included faking quotes, using his position to sell a screenplay, and clearing stories with his friends before publication. But then, this is the media, and once one is among that elite crew at the top, you will never not have a job. This strikes me as something of a white wash, and note that the things Bart is accused of are far worse than anything Knowles and McWheeney were accused of doing.

(Wednesday, 5 September, 2001) A colleague alerts me to the death of Pauline Kael, and I rush to the New York Times obit. In it, I am surprised to see citation of Renata Adler's demolition job on Kael, recently reprinted in her new book Canaries in the Mineshaft, and I harbor an unsavory pleasure at the fact that Andrew Sarris outlasted her, both as a working critic and corporeally. There will be, of course, a long succession of glowing obits for Kael, but perhaps the best portrait of Kael and her cult is found in Theodore Roszak's amusing novel Flickers, in which Clarissa Swann is described thus: "There was a defensive cynicism about Claire that led her to prefer a tougher style—an emotional abrasiveness, an unsparing contention of minds."

(Tuesday, 4 September, 2001) If anyone asks me to review the forthcoming Apocalypse Now Redux DVD, I will be well prepared. The movie happened to come out at a time when I was buying a lot of magazines, and kept extensive files on movies and directors I liked. My AN folder is as fat as a tick, thicker than any book on the film, with scores of articles, many of them written well before the movie even came out. Those were the days when moviemakers went about their business in near anonymity, and covering the "disastrous" shoot was a big deal in the magazines of the time. Today, a similar film would be viewed like the victims on Survivor, with cameras intruding on every phase of the debacle. Among the prized possessions within the folder is the original 16 page credits brochure that United Artists provided with the price of the ticket. My enthusiasm for the film was not modified by the recent Redux and its hour of additional footage. In fact, I think it is a better film, finally complete, with the relationships among the crew on the boat sorted, and the trip up the river less boring as it goes along. Hence my disappointment in the anti-AN backlash now going, in which reviewers, to prove that they are not cowed by film journals and east coast reviews, complain that the French Plantation scene and the Bunny sex scene are unnecessary additions (one reviewer opined that the inclusion of the plantation scene was there just to prove that Willard wasn't a fag). Instead, I think the "new" version, which is really Coppola's, perhaps commercially motivated, attempt to get at the film he intended to make the first time, is an improvement. Now, the trip up the river, in both senses of trip, has an internal logic, as Willard and company recede back through Vietnam's history to its atavistic roots, and fall deeper into a drug induced fantasia. Meanwhile, there are two excellent books on the film that celebrate it rather than bash it, Peter Cowie's The Apocalypse Now Book (Da Capo, 212 pages, $17.50, ISBN 0.306.81046.8), and Karl French's Apocalypse Now (Bloomsbury, 300 pages, $10, ISBN 0.7475.1566.9).

(Monday, 3 September) Here are the Film at Eleven team's contributions to today's DVDJournal: Damon Houx on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and D. K. Holm on Memento.

(Sunday, 2 September) Finally caught up with the superb Ghost World Sunday afternoon, at a packed screening in the new Fox Tower theater in downtown Portland. One could tell very early that half the audience loved it while the other half didn't "get it," as a noisy couple behind me kept telling each other. Meanwhile, a colleague has dubbed Ghost World a make or break film, saying, "If you don't like Ghost World, I don't know why I know you." I was pleased to see that R. Crumb's daughter Sophie did the sketchbook drawings for the Enid character, and also to see a poster on the wall of Enid's bedroom for The World of Henry Orient, the other great teenage girl friendship movie (the third is Little Darlings. If I had a criticism, I guess it would be that the film feels slightly muted, it's a little standoffish from its characters at times, or doesn't exhaust the emotional potential of its characters' relationships. But then, perhaps Zwigoff doesn't want Ghost World to be a movie movie. The couple not "getting it" were probably unable to deal with the two central teens' dismissal of the almost everyone and every cultural artifact around them. The kids have such narrative authority you forget that they are still trying to find themselves, so to speak. Besides, their ability to peg someone's whole life and character on the basis of, say, a pair of pants, is no different than what Woody Allen does in Annie Hall (remember the Truman Capote imitator?) or what a great writer does. I am reminded of this as I read through Iain Sinclair's new novel Landor's Tower. Sinclair's amusing reductionism finds the same note of exasperation that the girls show. See as a random example the narrator's trip into the Bristol Zoo on page 191. NOTE: Don't leave Ghost World before the credits are over for fear of missing a secondary take of the Steve Buscemi fight scene.

(Saturday, 1 September, 2001) Came upon an advanced reader of Syd Field's forthcoming memoir Going to the Movies: A Personal Journey through Four Decades of Modern Film, to be published by Dell in October. I was eager to look into this book, because Mr. Field, as we all known, is the film script guru. But to say that Field's "personal journey" does not have the resonance of Martin Scorsese's is an understatement. I almost hate myself for saying this, but Mr. Field's book is not very good. I almost hate myself because Mr. Field comes across as a nice fellow with an earnest interest in movies. Mr. Field recounts his Hollywood life, as a child of the city with significant if not widely known relatives in the movie industry. Field goes from actor to reader for Wolper to teacher at Sherwood Oaks. Along the way, he explains how key movies seen at particular times changed his life. The book is plainly written and somewhat superficial in tone. All too often, Mr. Field reminds us of the impact that a movie or person had on him. "It didn't take long for me to see…" or "Watching The Searchers I became aware…" Mr. Field keeps learning things, but doesn't seem to get anything, to put it cruelly. Touted anecdotes about a young Francis Ford Coppola are actually rather impersonal, and though Field had at times enviable friendships with people such as Jean Renoir and his wife, and Sam Peckinpah while he was writing The Wild Bunch, the details are sketchy and the objects of his praise are not drawn in an interesting or vivid manner. There are also some factual errors borne of political correctness or something, such as saying that Senator Joe McCarthy's senate committee investigated Hollywood; it was Martin Dies's committee, and was much earlier in time. There is also the frankly embarrassing fact that Field the script guru has never had a script produced (the titles mentioned in the text sound terrible: Balinger, The Quest). As he recounts his exploits trying to write screenplays, you become aware that Mr. Field suffers or suffered from something a lot of aspiring writers experience, the urge to write but the lack of anything compelling to say. He seems to have no natural story sense; they don't just pop out of his head as they do with natural screenwriters. The best critique of Field's aesthetic is found in Kristin Thompson's Storytelling in the New Hollywood, from Harvard U. Press.

(Wednesday, 29 August, 2001) The new VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever guidebook for 2002 arrives and once again Cinemonkey.com fails to make the grade in the book's list of movie web sites in its final pages. Nevertheless, the book is a welcome resource, if for nothing else than its thematic lists of movies in the back. The physical format is different this year, expanding to 8"X11" in size but with the numerical loss of about 400 pages and the same number of movies stated as reviewed (24, 000) as last year. Still, the book remains the closet competitor to Maltin and its opinions are more in line with the tastes of younger readers and film buffs. Maltin is for older people looking for a tasteful, Oscar-validated cinematic experience. Compare the two books' competing reviews of Taxi Driver, for example, which Maltin's reviewer hated. A blurb on the cover claims that the Hound covers movies that Maltin ignores, but I can think of a few films in Maltin that don't appear here (such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle). There are various other improvements in the book but I wish they would put the credits at the start of the listing, not at the bottom, a la Maltin, if for no other reason than because the reviewers always write as if the credits are at the top of the review.

(Tuesday, 28 August, 2001) Much anticipated in the web community was Richard Lacayo's portrait for Time magazine of reviewers on the net. Webmasters of our acquaintance were contacted Lacayo's researchers. But when it was finally published on August 27th, the article seems to have been written for people who barely know the net exists. Mr. Lacayo is a fine movie business writer, and we've enjoyed several of his articles in the past year or so. But though this story was long by Time standards, it failed to fully explicate some of the controversy surrounding net reviewing, or give a thorough sampling of just how bad some of that material happens to be. Cursory references and quotes from Knowles and McWeeney touch on issues lightly that are in fact running gun battles in the cybersphere. It would probably take a year to round up and assess all the good movie reviewers on the web, and granted the piece wasn't just about movies, but in a forum that could make or break a fledgling critic, I wish Lacayo had known about or mentioned the hilarious "filthy critic," , the heir to Joe Bob Briggs, whose reviews are not only funny, but accurate and carefully crafted.

(Monday, 27 August, 2001) Film at Eleven friends appearing at the DVDJournal.com today include Damon Houx's review of Dressed to Kill, Kerry Fall's review of Blow Out, and D. K. Holm's review of A Place in the Sun.

(Saturday, 25 August, 2001) ) Today I finally caught with Amy Wallace's engrossing profile of Peter Bart in the September Los Angeles Monthly. It's an eagerly awaited article, particularly in light of its aftermath: Bart's leave of absence from the editorship of Variety while an investigation into his behavior is completed. In Wallace's stunning , detailed, and compulsively readable portrait, Bart is a fascinating figure whom you don't necessarily want to know, be around, or—especially—work for. Like many editors I've known, Bart aspires to being the smartest person in the room, and wants you to know it. As a consequence, he has made Variety, which I've been reading since 1971, into a must have publication, as Wallace chronicles. Among the many controversial aspects of Wallace's piece is the revelation that Bart supposedly uses his position to advance the careers of friends ("There's the way he praises friends, associates, and even his own movies without acknowledging his involvement. He'll call Richard Heller "a scrupulous New York practitioner" without noting that Heller has been his lawyer for 25 years. Ronda Gomez is "one of the town's veteran literary agents." She was also his assistant at Paramount Pictures") and allegedly to advance his own screenwriting career. What should be interesting to students of the WWW, however, is that, as someone on CHUD hinted, Wallace's charges against Bart mirror those that Ron Wells of Filmthreat.com brought against Harry Knowles and Drew McWeeney of Aint it Cook News. At the very least, Wallace indirectly raises the interesting question of just high are the journalistic standards that Knowles and Company are accused of failing.

(Friday, 24 August, 2001) Robert Cumbow's review of John Carpenter's film is of particular importance, as Cumbow has written what is so far the only critical study of the director.

(Thursday, 23 August 2001) Renata Adler's new collection of essays, Canaries in the Mineshaft (St Martin's Press, 390 pages, $26.950.312.27520.x), arrives today. Adler spent one year as a movie reviewer for the New York Times and collected those reviews into a book (A Year in the Dark but is mostly known for her essays on law and other subjects, which have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications. This book collects all those, plus a profile of G. Gordon Liddy that has gone unpublished until now. Adler's kind of a Republican Susan Sontag, not afraid to take on her colleagues. She has a notorious essay on Pauline Kael that is now also published in this volume. It is one of the most devastating critiques of a movie reviewer every published. Originally appearing in the New York Review of Books in 980 after the publication of Kael's When the Lights Go Down, the review is an explication du texte of Kael's literary habits and how they reveal the limitations of her aesthetics. In one devastating sentence, Adler writes, "The degree of physical sadism in Ms. Kael's work is. so far as I know, unique in expository prose," before going on to list hundreds of cruel, ugly, vulgar, repetitious Kaelian locutions. The review was controversial at the time because both Adler and Kael wrote for the New Yorker and Adler's apostasy was viewed as a blow against the editor, William Shawn. In fact, the review is simply the thoughts of a careful reader who has had it with the hijinks of an overrated showoff.

(Wednesday, 22 August, 2001)) Dodged the jury duty "bullet" (they settled before the trial began), and thus was in fine form to view a specially ordered DVD disc, released by Image Entertainment, of Lucille Carra's poetic documentary based on Donald Richie's book The Inland Sea. This short documentary, just under one hour, has clung to my memory since I saw it but once several years ago. The movie not only revived my interest in Richie but sparked a curiosity with his non-film books. This newfound curiosity was eventually sated easily by the recent publication of the sweeping anthology, The Donald Richie Reader, published by Stone Bridge Press (238 pages, $19.95, ISBN 1.880656.61.2). Gathering excerpts of writing from a career that spans over 50 years, the book is a fine survey of Richie's surprisingly wide interests. His book on Akira Kurosawa was the second film book I read (after Truffaut on Hitchcock), and I was too naive at the time to realize how unique it was then. Richie was very good on Kurosawa's "existential humanism," which remains to me, anyway, still the best motivating "philosophy" of a filmmaker, or at least of the great filmmakers of the '50s and early '60s. The only excerpt missing is from his early monograph on the non-Japanese director, George Stevens, which I could have used to help me get through a review of A Place in the Sun I am writing.

(Tuesday, 21 August, 2001) The new MGM DVD for The Silence of the Lambs comes out today, and it serves as a reminder that this is a near perfect film. When L.A. Confidential debuted, it was bruted about in New York City and other centers of culture as "a perfect film." They were right of course. But just as that film maintains its beauty in the mind, Silence grows more beautiful with age. It is as timeless today as it was upon its release. What I love about the film is its stylistic/thematic consistency, that Starling is presented throughout the movie navigating mazes or obstacle courses of what kind or another, symbolic of both the mystery she is solving and the career impediments of a woman in a man's institutions. Also, unlike the other two Hannibal movies so far, director Jonathan Demme maintains a consistent cinematic realism that mutes the horrific and unsavory aspects of the movie's story line. I also like the way the people move, the way Scott Glenn fusses around his desk. The MGM disc lacks the Criterion's edited audio commentary, but includes an informative hour long documentary, the original making-of doc, and about 20 deleted scenes. Reviewers usually say they are glad deleted scenes were excised, but in this case many of the scenes would have enriched the middle section of the film, making the steps of Starling toward the villain more logical. Coincidentally with the issuing of this disc and the new Hannibal disc, Reynolds and Hearn Ltd of Britain has published Daniel O'Brien's production history guide to the three films in the series, called The Hannibal Files (176 pages, $19.95, ISBN 1.903111.19.6), a good and not uncritical summary of the films' successes and failures, and which introduced me to the big clue that Hannibal gives Clarice about the identity of Buffalo Bill. He fails to notice an error however: Hannibal says that the papers won't say why he is called Buffalo Bill, but one of the first things we see Starling do is read the headlines for news accounts of Bill's activities on Crawford's bulletin board.

(Monday 20 August 2001 ) Damon Houx covers The Last Combat and Time and Tide

(Tuesday, 14 August, 2001) Some untimely thoughts on Spielberg, and A.I.. Look at his filmography as movie director: Minority Report (2002), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Amistad (1997), Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Schindler's List (1993), Jurassic Park (1993) , Hook (1991, Always (1989), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Color Purple (1985) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) (segment 2), Poltergeist (1982), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), 1941 (1979), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jaws (1975) The Sugarland Express (1974), Savage (1973), Something Evil (1972), Duel (1971). Really, are there more than three or four films here that stand out as fully realized works, as opposed to just enormously popular? One of the problems with contemporary directors, and it's not their fault, is that they don't make as many movies as a Borzage or a Hawks or Ford, so that, contrary to the odds, they don't have as many chances to make good movies. On the other hand, Spielberg has produced about 70 movies, which may reveal that his true metier is to mimic the executives whom he cozied up to early in his career. A.I. is in many ways a betrayal or refutation of the themes that have been the trademark of his earlier films, including, most of all, his moon imagery which is nothing less than the logo for his own company (!). The fluctuations in his career may also reflect different phases that he goes through. First he was the Hitchcockian suspense king, his most satisfying phase; then he was the advocate of "classic" Hollywood entertainment; then he was the man who understood kids better than anyone else; then he was the super serious Oscar whore, which made him aspire to the aesthetic of, of all people, Fred Zinnemann. These phases overlap, but that is the problem. Worst of all, however, is the use of Janusz Kaminski as his house photographer. Comparing Butler's beautiful compositions and light schemes for Jaws with the uncuttable framing of films like Schindler illustrates the true decline in his art. Another thought occurs to me: his films have declined since his divorce from Irving and his marriage to his second wife; I'd hate to think that this is the cause, but the timing is perfect. The worst thing about A.I>, however, is that it is a discomforting hybrid, not quite Kubrick, not quite Spielberg. The director must have chaffed under the imaginary demands of his mentor.

(Monday, 13 August, 2001) Film at Eleven contributions to the DVDJournal today include Damon Houx's review of Tomcats; my review of Sullivan's Travels. An earlier review of Mishima is also available.

(Sunday, 12 August, 2001) Deciding to pass a lazy non-taping Sunday watching movies, the fact that almost all the Kubrick movies are now on DVD from either MGM or Warner Home Video inspired the idea of watching them sequentially, beginning with a videotape of Fear and Desire. By the end of The Killing,the thought suddenly struck me that one of the set pieces Kubrick does best is the frustrating encounter of his protagonists with the icy calm of a bureaucrat. At the end of The Killing, Sterling Hayden is thwarted in his smuggling of the money thus of escape by two supremely polite, reasonable, but unshakable ticket clerks at the Los Angeles airport. Other famous bureaucrats who populate Kubrick's films include Keenan Wynn in Dr. Strangelove (who rather overplays the part), Barry Nelson in The Shining, and the Stars and Stripes editors in and Full Metal Jacket. The most horrific bureaucrats are the generals of Paths of Glory, who blithely send men to their death. Dr. Floyd in 2001 is the perfect embodiment of suave bureaucratic personality type, with his smooth delivery, diplomatic evasion of alternatives, and sympathetic listening. Did the Kube have a bad experience with a doorman once ? One that warped him for all time? That rendered him incapable of including a non-vile portrait of the helping classes? Which leads me to Eyes Wide Shut. Always in the market for a defense of the film, a critical statement that will compel dismissive viewers to re-see the film with a new, blinding insight, I suddenly realized that Eyes Wide Shut was his first (and only) film made from the viewpoint of one of those bureaucrats. Dr Harford in another movie would have been the gentle, rational impediment between, say, Humbert Humbert and Lolita. Instead here he is the center of the film, and Kubrick explores the life behind the front that these smooth Charons otherwise never seem to have. I wish that Portland Oregonian movie reviewer Kim Morgan had put her views of EWS into print, as her provocative, evocative analysis was one of the best defenses of the film I've ever heard. I wish the woman would commit it to paper.

(Friday, 10 August) The Others, which opens today, will probably suffer the ignominy of being more interesting for its genesis than its realization. Produced by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner as a starring vehicle for the actor's soon-to-be-ex-wife Nicole Kidman, the almost gentle ghost story will elude the viewer's concentration as he ponders the film instead as the sad overflow of a failed marriage. The Others (Los Otros), directed and written by Alejandro Amenábar and photographed in Spain, is built on a twist that canny viewers will guess about halfway through. It's the perfect low budget indie film: a small cast, a confined set. Kidman is a perplexing performer. The mystery of the film is Kidman herself. Offered up as a sex symbol in such films as Moulin Rouge, she is much more suited to old fashioned stories such as this dry, muted affair. Amenábar's earlier Open Your Eyes is currently being remade as Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky, with Penelope Cruz recreating her role.

(Monday, 6 August) Geeks will be geeks. The most exciting event in the film buff world over the weekend was not the release of Rush Hour 2, but the long, vicious running battle on the CHUD.com message board. Ostensibly about James Gunn's apparent scripting of a Dawn of the Dead remake, the thread really was about the netfeud between Patrick Sauriol of Coming Attractions.com and Harry Knowles of Aint it Cool News. Like a crowd of mutually loathing gangsters in a Tarantino film, eventually five or more threaders all had their guns turned on each other in the cyber version of a Mexican standoff. For those who didn't receive an excited call or email alerting them to this fascinating controversy, the thread started out as a discussion by CHUD honcho Nick Nunziata of Knowles's recent remarks on Gunn's merits as an adapter. Knowles posted his views on the 3rd of August, exclaiming at the very idea that James Gunn (Tromeo and Juliette, The Specials, the screenwriter for the forthcoming Scooby Doo movie) should presume to do a remake of Dawn of the Dead. Knowles's said in his attack "He takes the work of others and through an addled mind, he manages to belittle, poorly parody, overly schtick [sic] it up and completely miss the point of the original source material." Patrick Sauriol submitted his response, in which he said, in part, "I also believe this is just another reason not to trust a bloody thing Knowles has to say about film. I don't know why the man, who really is borderline illiterate and comes across in these rants like the illegitimate son of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons ("...worst remake ever!..."), even thinks he has a valid opinion about what constitutes as a good horror movie anymore after publicly sucking the dick of Blair Witch 2." This prompted Drew McWeeney, who goes by the nom de guerre Moriarty, to enter the fray. "As predictable as you say Harry is, Patrick, you're ten times worse when it comes to all things AICN." McWeeney made the claim that one correspondent using the name Harryisfat was really Ron Wells, who wrote extensively on Knowles and McWeeney last year on FilmTheat.com. Then a surprisingly calm Knowles got into the act, restating his position: "When you couple [these issues] with the idea that Romero is having trouble getting his fourth and final chapter of the original series off the ground, and a producer somewhere that retains the rights is setting off to remake, without Romero's involvement, his greatest film .... when Romero is having trouble making his new one... WELL THEN excuse me if I blow my lid a bit. This is not right." And then Wells entered the fray. The fight turned ugly. McWeeney called Sauriol a cunt, and accused Wells of lurking, while Wells noted that McWeeney claimed that Wells's article cost him some screenwriting jobs (according to some postings, McWeeney had his own version of a Scooby Doo script that Warners rejected) and the loss of a girlfriend. Wells added such charges as "Perhaps you should consider it was inappropriate ... to use your job at Dave's Laserdisc to pimp your scripts to customers in the industry. At least then you had a boss who would reprimand you for it…"neither of you seems to have learned a damned thing from the experience. Your site's a shadow of what it used to be. Harry spent his last national television appearances as a punching bag. Your integrity, such as it was, had dwindled to nothing. How do you react? YOU BLAME ME. Hey pal, don't shoot the messenger. You dug your own grave. I'm only pointing it out for the tourists." Innocent bystanders either loved the hair balls flying, or bemoaned that e-threads should be reduced to this level of shit heaving. What's probably secretly exasperating to serious web masters is that Knowles, already a millionaire thanks to an inheritance, has a television show with McWeeney in previews right now, and a book coming out in March 2002 from Warner Books which is already ranked 4,609th place on Amazon thanks to pre-orders. All this, despite the fact that the site is filled with inaccuracies, irresponsible speculation, personal attacks, and other violations of the decorum that mainstream journalism embraces (the fact that Knowles's book is multiply co-authored is telling, by the way). Not that mainstream journalism is without its scandals, such as Janet Cooke. Recently, as Salon.com reported, James Desborough of World Entertainment News Network (WENN), a British entertainment news service, resigned following revelations that he may have doctored an interview with Beatles producer George Martin, in which Martin was quoted as saying that George Harrison "knows that he is going to die soon." The case of the CHUD contretemps is less about film buffdom than the role of the internet in the exchange of information. Wells demands, rightly in my view, that Knowles follow some acceptable protocol of journalism, if only to be dependable to readers looking for factual information, but in large part to stop giving the world wide web a bad name. There will never be consensus between these enemies because they cannot agree on common ground rules. And without question the Knowles-McWeeney faction always personalize the debates. Knowles, with his reveling in the free food and trinkets, and his plane rides to meet beloved directors at screenings, represents exactly the kind of uncontrolled vulgarity that the whole closed system of Hollywood is designed to screen out. Worse, it is impossible to talk to Knowles because he just doesn't share the values of his antagonists. He seems truly not to care about accuracy, fairness, taste, calm, or thoroughness. The site began as a clearing house of reviews by people invited to advance screenings of films, but as the website took off, and Knowles became a highly visible representative of both geekdom and the world wide web, the site soured. Movies of poor quality were unduly praised in Knowles's reviews seemingly because of personal connections. For example, because AICN had a promotion going with the makers of One Night at McCool's, no advance review ran of the film, either good or bad (and a review could only have been negative, unless written by quasi-tired, moronic daily reviewers pulled out of mothballs to relieve vacationing first stringers). That the CHUD message boards tend to be better written than AICN is another measure of the general slovenliness of AICN. The fight went on so long that eventually the thread was closed for space, and resumed elsewhere, whereupon another poster, Andre Dellamorte, got into the act, writing "I don't really care if Gunn remakes Dawn of the Dead, because someone was going to have to do it one way or the other. I just wish it was done by Terry Zwigoff (esp. after seeing Ghost World)." Challenged by D_B_Cooper, Dellamorte added, "[Zwigoff] understands what anti-consumerism is. And since whomever makes it would obviously play up the whole zombie/mall consumer culture cannibalism you need someone who can make that point well, and without selling it out. Shit, if the guy who wrote the Scooby Doo script is writing it, why not have the guy who made Crumb directing it." Interesting, well-thought-out argument. Contributor Neil Bung had perhaps the best comment about the whole thing: "Ah, the internet. To trash a movie that might happen based on the fact that the writer of said movie might end up being the same guy who wrote the screenplay for a movie that mightsuck, but isn't out yet."

(Saturday, 4 August, 2001) Received the film book to the new Planet of the Apes in the mail today from Newmarket Press, the excellent publisher of lavishly aquited screenplays (176 pages, 22.95, ISBN 1.55704.486.4), and noted immediately that it lacks the "surprise" ending. I doubt if the publishers or editors deleted it because it makes no sense. Rather, assuming that the filmmakers had even come up with it by the time the volume went into production, the ending is missing in order to preserve what little surprise clings to the climax. The book has pretty pix and the sort of info that will eventually end up on the DVD, but still doesn't make the film anything less than boring. However, the volume does serve as a reminder that director Tim Burton is a child of the studio system in its present incarnation. He's never made a truly independent film, and his movies always enjoy the lavish ancillary promotion that this book represents.

(Friday, 3 August)Moderately entertaining and crowd pleasing as it is Rush Hour 2, which opened today, serves as sad testimony of the crisis most long term Hong Kong action stars face. Their crisis is simply that most of them are finally reaching some international fame in the American market but at physical ages that inhibit their ability to dazzle their new fans with the same physical pyrotechnics that won them followings in Asia. Chan is now almost 50 years old, and Jet Li, currently also staring in the much better Kiss of the Dragon, is almost 40, and has made 31 movies since 1979. Blending the rigors of filmmaking with the stress of athleticism must surely put undue strain on the body, which accelerates aging. Chan is noticeably less vigorous in Rush Hour 2, which is fine, as the slack is taken up by Chris Tucker's sometimes amusing, sometimes racist quips. But how long can these stars reign, and, as in the American film industry, where are the new action heroes waiting in the wings to take over? It's a bitter paradox that Chan and Li are only recently enjoying much deserved attention at a time when their bodies can't keep up, which has more to do with the provincialism of American audiences than their talents (though Chan's films do tend to be sloppy).

(Thursday, 2 August, 2001) I don't know of any movie reviewers who want simply to remain movie reviewers. Not that there's anything wrong with being just a movie reviewer. But in my mind, I am a playwright-screenwriter-intellectual (in my mind, I say, not in reality). And most other film writers I know have ideas for movies, aspirations to direct, and friends in the business they are tormenting for a break. But even more important, the reviewer should on occasion find out what the typical filmmaker goes through in order to leaven harsh commentary. They should get out and make movies (not in a George Christy sort of way, of course). Thus, with that in my, I agreed to appear in a film called The Would Be Senators, now being shot on digital video by filmmaker Cynthia Lopez for broadcast later this year on cable access television. It's a politcal satire about a Republican woman and Democrat man running for the Senate who fall in love and unite to run on one ticket. It's much more cynical and funny than I am making it sound, and much of the humor is, Sturges like, found in the subsidiary characters. I play one of them, Senator Smyth, the retiring senator making way for his female protégée because of some dark sexual secrets. I have about four or five scenes, and tonight I had to actually memorize lines, which proved both harder and easier than I anticipated. What happened to me is neither here nor there; what's important is that Lopez is carrying on with a whole movie, with a cast, crew, shooting schedule, and goal, and managing to stick with it. Even more important is that Lopez is a firm advocate of cable access television. "People say to me, 'why don't you go to film school?' And I say, 'Why, when I and anybody else can go down to the cable access station and avail themselves of cameras, editing time, and broadcasting virtually for free." Lopez doesn't have much truck with those who mock cable access. "Sure it can be bad. The great thing about cable access is that you have permission to be bad." And anyway, she adds, not everything on cable access is as bad as the popular imagination suggests. Lopez is spirited in her defense, which appeals to me selfishly, as the co-host of a cable access movie review show.

(Wednesday, 1 August, 2001)We're coming neigh upon Alfred Hitchcock's latest birthday, but don't expect as many books as those that came out over the last two years in light of the director's centenary. So far, I have found only one, the excellent Writing with Hitchcock, by Steven DeRosa, and published by Faber and Faber via Norton in America (334 pages, $15, ISBN 0.571.19990.9). Like a couple of other recent Hitchcock books, this one concentrates on the director's collaboration with one screenwriter, in this case John Michael Hayes, arguably the writer behind four of Hitchcock's best films from the '50s. DeRosa sympathetically parallel tracks both Hitchcock's and Hayes's careers, before, during, and after their collaboration in a highly detailed production histories of each of their movies. The book doesn't have any remarkable revelations as the one found in Steve Cohen's essay, "Rear Window: The Untold Story", published in the Columbia Film View, number 8/1, which posited the theory that Rear Window was a lot more autobiographical about Hitchcock than anyone had ever suspected, in that he based the leads on Ingrid Bergman and Robert Capa, who fascinated the director. De Rosa addresses that theory, but for the most part sets his task as sorting out who contributed what to the body of work.

(Monday, 30 July, 2001))So David Manning is mythical. This is a grave disappointment to all who followed his brief but bright career. Writing, allegedly, for the The Ridgefield Press, Manning proved to be in fact the imaginary author of made up quotes by a so far nameless employee of Columbia Pictures. Though there really is a David Manning, an old college chum of the culprit who consciously or unconsciously lent Manning's name to the dire enterprise, the electronic Manning is a fake. But such an excitable fake! As a critic, Manning was all enthusiasm and exclamation points. Manning loved Vertical Limit and Hollow Man, praised Heath Ledger in A Knights Tale as "this years hottest new star!," and called The Animal "another winner!" Newsweek magazine exposed the charade, and later it came to pass that in some TV commercials the "kids" interviewed on the street outside of a theater after having seen a movie preview were in fact studio employees shilling for their bosses. In a preemptive strike, other studios admitted similar perfidies. Columbia was wise enough not to include Manning's plugs on their recent DVD releases of The Hollow Man and Vertical Limit, but one wonders how Manning's musings might have differed from the quotes that are there, from Bill Diehl and others. Given the artificial hyperbole of all poster and ad quotes, the fact that Manning is literally non-existent seems redundant. And frankly, who believes critics in such contexts anyway? Nor do people necessarily believe endorsement-filled commercials. The public is wise enough to ignore the plugs and simply note the immediate news, that such and such a movie is about to come out, while being more subtly influenced by the images from the movie cut together by Hollywood's master manipulators. The Manning affair distracts us from the hidden persuader of movie commercials, which can create buzz out of nothing, out of hopes and implications, and mere fragments of movies, and fragments of our imaginations.

(Tuesday, 29 July, 2001) With the release in trade paperback of Scott Eyman's 's Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford from Simon and Schuster, followed by Joseph McBride's long-awaited Searching for John Ford, and Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein's anthology John Ford Made Westerns, there is a mini-renaissance of interest in Ford's career, though it doesn't seem to be inspired by anything more than a continuing interest in the director. McBride's book (St. Martin's Press, 838 pages, $40, ISBN 0.312.24232.8) is a beautifully written, highly personal, and very sympathetic account of Ford's life. Studlar's book (Indiana University Press, 312 pages, $19.95, ISBN 0.253.21414.9) is a compilation of reprinted and new essays that, like her book on Huston, spans the variety of critical responses to Ford. Perhaps one of the better essays in the book is "From Aesthete to Pappy: The Evolution of John Ford's Public Reputation," by Charles J. Maland, which charts Ford's reputation from anonymous silent western filmmaker, through a phase as a respected semi-intellectual expressionist and liberal in the 'late '30s, to popular genre filmmaker in the '50s. Using studio portraits and rating the number and content of mass magazine profiles of Ford, Maland makes the what should be obvious point that the public view of Ford changed dramatically over the years. A clue as to why appears in McBride's book, where Ford is portrayed as, at least temporarily, uncertain of his sexuality and later in his career surrounding himself with he-men types who represented how he wanted to be viewed. At the very least, this wealth of new books reveals that we are far from fully understanding Ford, even at this late date.

(Saturday, 28 July, 2001) The latest CineACTION! has arrived and the issue, dedicated to movie stars and their visible and subterranean iconography, leads off with an appreciation of Ethan Hawke by Robin Wood. Wood praises Hawke for the "vulnerability and capacity for hurt that is so central to the Hawke 'presence.'" Much the same could be said for Wood's work. Unusual among serious critics with an academic background, Wood weaves the personal into his scholarly prose, and makes bold statements coupled with humanizing confessions. Wood praises Hawke for never (yet) having prostituted himself or compromised his ideals. "I think I have been attracted to Hawke's work for personal reasons, because, on a certain level, I identify with him—I have tried to bring a certain integrity to my work as he has to his." In the end, however, does Wood's enthusiasm for Hawke convince? It doesn't matter, because there's always a delicious danger in reading a Robin Wood essay that your natural assumptions and pre-formed opinions are going to be radically shaken, that he is going to make you re-think films you had dismissed long ago. Thus his enthusiasm for Mystery Date and the recent modernized versions of Great Expectations , and Hamlet are surprising and vexing and demand that the reader engage in re-viewings (though I doubt if I will indulge Wood's partly political passion for Hawke's first novel, The Hottest State). He claims for Almereyda's Hamlet that in it Hawke vocalizes Shakespeare's poetry "as if he spoke like this every day," though actually Kyle MacLachlan is the one who surprises with his Branaghish conviction and natural delivery. But as usual with Wood, his digressions are as fascinating as the main line of the text: Wood says some iconoclastic things about David Lean ("If your notion of great art includes the waxworks at Madame Tussaud's, then you will find [Lean's Great Expectations] great art"), Shakespeare ("I don't now how it is possible today to relate to Shakespeare, or even to understand him. My own commitment is to the endlessly fascinating, endlessly confusing texts, rather than to any actual theatrical or cinematic manifestations of them"), Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (which contains "among the most ludicrous and embarrassing moments the cinema has ever foisted upon us"), Richard Linklater's The Newton Gang, "pure" cinema, and Howard Hawks. Thus, for this avid reader the essay is more interesting as an exploration of Wood's general views than a statement of Hawke's specific stature; I just wish that Wood had never succumbed to the Freudian theology, that school of "thought" that almost destroyed 20th century criticism. Wood is so psychologically astute he doesn't need to lean on that grand old fraud (I prescribe multiple readings of Frederick Crews's The Memory Wars as a purgative). As it happens, I know someone who knows, or at least knew, Ethan Hawke. Bill Fitch, now a sommelier in Manhattan, spent time with Hawke in Canada when he was filming Mystery Date. They would go on long bike rides together and philosophize. Bill Fitch, who is of a brooding and European bent, told me years later that he was surprised to see much of what he said to Hawke later showed up in the actor's dialog for Before Sunrise. This means nothing, of course, except to show how small the degrees of separation in the film world can be. The rest of CineACTION! 55 features essays on Anthony Hopkins, Jim Carrey, Hugh Grant, Hedy Lamarr, and the Marx Brothers.

(Friday, 27 July, 2001) Here at Cinemonkey.com and Film at Eleven, we're trying to figure out where to put Tim Burton in the hierarchy of helmers in our Directors Project rankings, using as the occasion for this dilemma the release today of Planet of the Apes. But the cause of our dilemma is that Planet of the Apes is so unlike a Tim Burton movie. Once upon a time, outside of the non-stop promotion of the film, back few years, in that crucial faber & faber interview book Burton on Burton, the director confessed that he cannot commit himself to a movie in which he cannot identify with the main character. As one sits in the lugubrious theater watching this film, one wonders how Burton identified with the moronic Mark Wahlberg, who comes across more simian than his antagonists (but maybe that's the point). Wahlberg plays the kind of guy most likely to beat up Burton on the playground back in Burbank. This is not to deny that Planet of the Apes bears some similarity to its Burtonian predecessors: most of Burton's movies concern themselves, as does this one, with a spurned outsider who comes to rescue a community from itself, be he Edward Scissorhands or Ichabod Crane. In this minor movie, however, Burton seems to have found himself wrapped up in the trappings of the mindless action film, a genre anathema to him. The credited screenwriters have put into Wahlberg's mouth such lines as "Don't send a monkey to do a man's job," or in the mouths of others such brilliant nuggets as this invitation to a search party: "You go that way. You go that way. The rest of you, come with me!" The vaunted make up shows conviction, but in this day and age, don't you expect make up to be superb? This special effect's only drawback is that Helena Bonham Carter, as the liberal, tolerance-preaching citizen of the ape planet, looks shockingly like Michael Jackson. Meanwhile, the film is dull when it is not preachy (but then, wasn't its antecedent?). The much-anticipated surprise ending, in which Wahlberg crash lands back on earth in Washington, D.C., is clever until you think about it (as a friend of mine joked after the screening, can you say Ape Lincoln?). Actually, little of the movie makes sense if you apply reason to it. Surely, we can demand that the movies Hollywood plies us with make fundamental sense? After this and the disaster that is A. I., Hollywood seems to be losing its grip on the fundamentals of science and time. But worse, this film does put we rabid rankers into a quandary: O Tim, we cry, what planet are you from?