A Killer Read

I had a Season-One-of-Project Runway experience with Christine Vachon's new memoir A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond. That is to say, I sat down with the book on the evening I bought it and read every page until I was finished, at around 3:30am. Granted, A Killer Life is hardly A Suitable Boy, and nor is Christine Vachon aiming to be Marcel Proust, so gobbling this book in one go is hardly a feat of readerly stamina. Rather, it's a testament to the absorbing way in which Vachon—the co-founder, leading shepherd, and most public face of Killer Films—conveys two decades' worth of professional experience as well as her own forthright, principled, occasionally abrasive, utterly unprecious view of what matters in a movie, and of how the American independent film scene should and does operate (which, predictably enough, amount to two very different things).

Vachon, working with a co-writer named Austin Bunn, shows the same helpful and lucid grasp of her book's audience that she has demonstrated in her stewardship and remarkably successful marketing of 32 feature films since 1991; she presumes the film literacy of her readers without pandering, but also without any alienating veils of insider posturing or untranslated industryspeak. As proud as she obviously is of her work, she doesn't expect the titles of her films to speak for themselves, even though several of them do: if the Killer Films imprimatur doesn't mean much to you, consider the phenomenal track-record contained within Vachon's 15-year portfolio, including not just some of the most seminal films of contemporary queer cinema (Go Fish, I Shot Andy Warhol, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and all of Todd Haynes' films) but also some white-hot provocations (Larry Clark's Kids, Todd Solondz's Happiness), one midsized commercial breakthrough (Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo), and one late-career effort by a canonized auteur (Robert Altman's The Company).

These films don't get equal airtime in Vachon's account, and in a few cases, such as Hedwig and The Company, I was eager to hear a little more about the mechanics and vicissitudes of working with a floridly ambitious tyro like John Cameron Mitchell or a notoriously free-form marionette like Altman, whose films hardly radiate the queer angles and empathies that mark so many of Vachon's projects. Still, notwithstanding the inevitable omissions, Vachon is a frank and generous raconteur, and though the book is clearly being marketed as a "tell-all," she isn't being coy in asserting that her overriding interest is in clarifying the tough, frugal, extremely heterogeneous, but artistically rewarding tasks of being an artist-friendly independent film producer. She knows that even many film aficionados have a shakier grasp on a producer's duties than they do on other behind-the-scenes work, and this is for a reason:

"With every other credit in a film, you know exactly what it means; the production designer on Camp did exactly the same job as the production designer on Cold Mountain. But 'producer' is a catchall. In the morning, I could be talking to David Schwimmer about potential parts in our movies, because he got into the business to be De Niro, not 'Ross' from Friends. By the afternoon, I might be negotiating with a big composer's agent to do the score for One Hour Photo (and when he laughs at what we can afford to pay, we spin the Rolodex and go elsewhere). By the afternoon, I could be on a plane up to Toronto to support Glenn Close on set, who is having a hard time with her character and is nervous about working with a whip-smart but slightly overwhelmed director."

That last allusion is surely to Rose Troche's interesting but oddly stifled movie The Safety of Objects, which apparently tested through the roof but gained zero traction on the critical or commercial markets. Though Vachon tends to be terse about these sorts of misfires, probably because it's impossible to say for certain why The Grey Zone or Storytelling passed with nary a blip, she doesn't skew the book too grossly toward her roundest successes. You leave with a candid sense of why Kids was a horrendous shoot, despite yielding a satisfying product; of where and how A Home at the End of the World got unlatched from newbie director Michael Mayer's vision for the project, though Vachon seems as surprised as anyone that she wavered in this case on her usual policy of staunch director advocacy; of how a promising script with generous development momentum like The Shaggs, a story about folk-singing sisters that was intended as Kirsten Dunst's next project just as Spider-Man hit, suddenly gets scuttled despite every good intention; of how the unnamed but transparently designated Crime + Punishment in Suburbia unraveled into Killer's largest lapse in collective judgment.

To a naïve outsider like me, who has logged zero hours on a film-set or in a production office, one of the most valuable lessons built into A Killer Life is just how fine the line can be between triumph and fiasco; even the most unified artistic visions have often survived the kind of peril and disagreement that one tends to imagine as the exclusive property of flops and vanity projects. Vachon spends a good deal of time, for example, illuminating the disastrous corporate takeover of Far from Heaven, which was briefly indentured to its bond company. Vachon, who would later accept her first Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature for this movie, couldn't even access its bank account for several days and was routinely shamed by bookkeepers and insurance types for failing to regulate the budget. The Boys Don't Cry set was riven by several fractious confrontations between Ivy League director Kimberly Peirce and linchpin star Hilary Swank over their very different reads on Brandon Teena, and though Killer managed to trump a competing project at 20th-Cenutry Fox (which ultimately quashed its own movie and distributed Boys Don't Cry through its Fox Searchlight speciality division), karma is now biting back fiercely as Vachon's Infamous is trotting into limited release as the "other" Truman Capote movie:

"With Boys Don't Cry, I never spent a second thinking about what Fox Searchlight and [star/producer] Drew Barrymore were feeling when we scooped them, rendering their project irrelevant. We had the upper hand. Now I know what they were feeling: That sense that your passion and dedication isn't always enough. That the world is chaotic and you can't control everything. It's a lesson I have to keep relearning."

A Killer Life brims with enough production anecdotes that fans of Vachon's movies are assured of a good time. The book doesn't really promise an intimate glimpse of Vachon herself, though her persona emerges in ways that are both intended and not. It's refreshing to read a movieland memoir by someone as intellectually inclined as Vachon, who name-drops Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" essay and speaks with fondness about her training in semioitics at Brown, but is just as transparently mad about movies. At the same time, she can be a tad uncouth and susceptible to hubris: it's a little dismaying to hear her cop to some gladhanding praise of Agnieszka Holland in a business meeting, expressing love for Holland's Washington Square even though she hasn't actually seen it, which she says "doesn't matter"—probably true from a brokerage and etiquette standpoint, but discordant, surely, with the proud cinephilia Vachon elsewhere professes. This blend of bracing honesty and curt impolitesse crops up in a few more personal anecdotes, too, as in Vachon's memory of the endless funerals for victims of AIDS that she attended in the 1980s. One of these was the burial of her friend and temporary mentor Bill Sherwood (Parting Glances):

"I can't really recall Bill Sherwood's funeral because I attended so many around the same time. It reminds me of an observation in John Weir's book The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, set in the mid to late 1980s, about how all the memorial services became indistinct because all these gay men were kind of the same: they all liked show tunes, they all liked going to brunch, they all liked to talk on the phone. Since few of them were from New York, you'd attend a memorial service in the Village someplace—where the family didn't show—and you'd be like, Is this Larry's, or is this Robert's? Or Bill's?"

Is it sentimental of me to want a heroic artist like Vachon, a paragon in her field and a tremendous burr in the straight-boy oligopoly of most Hollywood production, to sound a little less tetchy or unmoved on a subject like this? It's immaterial, really, to the provenance of her book, and maybe it's why this kind of autobiographical element becomes increasingly scarce as the book proceeds: Vachon really walks the walk in asking to be judged on her work. In the same spirit, she doesn't exactly hold back from characterizing colleagues and Hollywoodland acquaintances in whatever better or worse countenance they have presented to her—Cate Blanchett, Steven Soderbergh, and, surprisingly, Jerry Bruckheimer will be proud of their depictions, Jeff Bridges and Sandy Powell rather less so, and Julianne Moore is something of a split decision—but all of them appear for the value and nature of their involvements with Killer Films, not to gussy up the book with gratuitous star cameos and salacious whispers. Even the requisite anecdote about Julia Roberts is evocative and germane (she expressed interest in the Harper Lee role in Infamous before pregnancy ruled her ineligible).

The best-showcased supporting roles in A Killer Life are filled not by celebrities but by executives, agents, directors, and producing partners, who interpolate their own memories of working with Killer and helming their own projects as satisfying aperitifs between Vachon's chapters. (Killer co-partner Pam Koffler writes an especially tasty one about screening Mrs. Harris for the real Jean Harris and The Notorious Bettie Page for Bettie herself.) Anyone who thinks they will enjoy A Killer Life almost certainly will. Anyone who is skeptical about learning anything practical from this book should be nicely surprised, though Vachon's earlier volume, Shooting to Kill, is probably a more helpful nitty-gritty primer for aspiring producers who are just getting started. A Killer Life offers generous and earnest points of entry for film students, cineastes, starfuckers, and anyone interested in the complex sociologies of an industry as obviously personal and political as independent film production. Vachon is proud of the fact that her brave, thorny, and unlikely movies tend to split their viewers into devotés and detractors, but A Killer Life may wind up doing something very un-Killer: that is, making all of its readers feel equally invited and equally well rewarded.

Picked Flick #39: The Hours

The Hours, both Michael Cunningham's novel and Stephen Daldry's film, continue to frustrate and upset me, in ways that are at this point indistinguishable from fascination. Sometimes that fascination is purer, more awed. At other times, both the book and the movie emanate a powerful mediocrity, a distinct aroma of cliché, of unmet ambitions. I often furrow my brow at the relentless lyricism of Cunningham's prose, which, in this book as in others, strives rather arduously for showy, synesthetic images where more modest narration would happily suffice. He writes as though with each paragraph he hopes to secure our vote, some badge of our readerly devotion, even though the heady conceptions of his books sometimes trip over all the stylistic filigrees. And yet, Cunningham broaches subjects and themes that are difficult to articulate, or even to acknowledge, and he is capable of real astuteness in how he treats them: the ways in which death can feel impolite, just as caretaking can be officious and desperate; the worrying, thin line between liking someone enormously and loving them merely adequately, and how a shift from one to the other can be more painful than any dislike or hatred; the ways in which people look to art, especially books and music and movies, for telepathic prompts for their own life-choices.

The movie version of The Hours shares the arresting ambitions and the psychological acuity of the book, as well as its prosaic and vaguely elitist excesses. To my mind, in recent popular cinema, American Beauty is the movie's closest cousin, both of them built atop scripts that can seem courageously lucid and dismayingly glib within single scenes or transitions, both directed in a glossy, theatrical, actor-friendly style that serves and also sabotages the material by playing up the artifice. You can hold your ear up to American Beauty or The Hours and hear a worrying howl from deep within the upper bourgeoisie, demanding and deserving to be taken seriously, but you can also somehow hear the production teams slapping their own backs about the casts they've hooked, the certainty of prizes, the Big Issues they broach. However, while the moods and structures of American Beauty, for all of its technical audacity, feel smaller and more market-tested as the years go by, The Hours totally engrosses me. I keep sitting before it, open-minded, sometimes open-mouthed. It becomes clearer, for one thing, that the movie has darkened the book considerably. Disapproval of Richard Brown's esoteric, self-obsessed novel is more general. Vanessa Bell is more unhinged, almost repulsed, by the ravenous loneliness of her sister Virginia Woolf. Laura Brown already intends suicide as she drops her son with an indifferent neighbor. Clarissa Vaughan lets slip a major, unwitting insult to her daughter, and instead of nursing a fond, fumbling reminiscence with Louis Waters on her comfy living room couch, she erupts and nearly dissolves in her cold kitchen, where the light is the color of frost, the faucets detonate for no reason, and Louis looks on, agitated and annoyed, from practically a mile away across the countertop. This last scene is my favorite in the movie: its scary unraveling of Meryl Streep, usually so composed and sometimes to a fault, encapsulates the wholly credible and almost lymphatic unease beneath the film's mannered language, the roiling score, the sometimes precious match-cuts.

I suppose it's no mystery that such a disciple of modern film actresses as myself would get swept up in this movie. I have been known to listen to the Kidman-Moore-Streep commentary track on the DVD while I clean or cook. Still, The Hours collects so many disparate, exciting actors into such a range of parts that it's almost hard to get a bead on the performances: secondary players like Miranda Richardson and Eileen Atkins grow more interesting over time; my regard for all three star turns cycles up and down; and character approaches that click well in one scene, or against one particular co-star, feel subtly wrong in or against another. In some ways, the movie cuts more to the point of Cunningham's novel than his own prose really can: the whole piece activates such complex, elliptical relationships among notions of acting, essence, ritual, privilege, performance, gender, art, sex, and death that it somehow deepens the themes to see the bodies, scrutinize the faces, smell the money, feel the flatness of the screen. A major concern of The Hours is the ambivalence of love, the working out of conflicted emotions over time, even over generations. Fitting, then, that I keep wrestling with this book and this movie, frowning at their shortcuts and platitudes, hooking onto their sublime moments, assigning both texts in course after course, wondering where our attachments to art really come from, how fraught they can be with disapproval as well as wonder. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2002 Miramax Films and Paramount Pictures.

Another Day of Reckoning...

...for fans of Julianne Moore. After several non-starters in a row (even if I enjoyed The Forgotten more than most), Juli has another seeming stinkeroo coming down the pike today. It's called Freedomland, it's a two-hour movie culled from a 586-page novel (uh-oh), and the New York Times is already calling it "an early candidate for worst film of the year." Its MetaCritic score is burbling at a low 38—equal to Yours, Mine & Ours, and mere points ahead of Big Momma's House 2 and Underworld: Evolution. Note that even in this production still, Edie Falco and Samuel L. Jackson appear to be consoling Julianne about how bad the movie is, or maybe just about how bad her wig is.

But am I going? Yes. Love make you crazy. Julianne, I hope you're feeling me.

Picked Flick #63: Magnolia

One of my favorite moments at the movies happens when the lights go down and, whether through electronics or pulleys or some other device, the margins of the screen are adjusted to suit the aspect ratio of the film. This instant, disappointingly pre-empted whenever the screen is sized before our arrival, is most titillating when the panels or curtains keep moving, moving, moving past the point of expectation, exhilarating the still-blank screen with the pure, implied scope of what is about to come. Like it was yesterday, I remember the side-panels at Magnolia parting so widely they almost didn't quit, as though making room for a locomotive or a stampede or a Biblical exodus.

Hurl a stone in a contemporary movieplex and you're bound to hit some screen where a passel or fleet of Los Angelenos fumble their way toward self-consciousness, corraled by the freeways into smaller and smaller circles until we realize that they all already know each other. But Magnolia, in contrast to most of these movies, barely bothers to fix its locale as a worldly place, a place of real, waking lives. Magnolia, as wide and colorful as someone's bursting imagination, knocks its fluorescent scenes of kilowatted personal crises against one another, lighting faces so brightly that they pool with black shadows even bigger than personality, listing and tracking through hallways and suites and offices and conference rooms until the movie feels like a series of aftershocks. But they aren't tectonic aftershocks. They are psychic reverberations, prodigious ones, even in a movie whose off-kilter score, outsized characters, and rudimentary plot conflicts abolish any sense of realism. Is it too much to say the film derealizes psychology, even as it spelunks straight downward into its grottiest crevices—fathers who menace their daughters, sons who abjure their fathers, women trying to scale some terrible epiphanies just as they are dawning? Somehow, Anderson's baton-twirling virtuosity with his camera evaporates even more irony than it introduces, since the characters are, almost universally, experiencing their lives just as floridly as the film portrays them. Jason Robards' canker of angry loneliness, Julianne Moore's centrifugal self-dispersal, April Grace's surgical defrocking of Tom Cruise's panther pride (where is she now, when we most need her?), Jeremy Blackman's suffocation within his absorbent genius, Melinda Dillon's bitter medicine—these are all delectably reckless acting turns, a fine vintage of supporting performances packed into one robust buffet. But there's an idea inside all of this rococo reaching, because at least as I experience the movie, its tragic aspirations only work because of how, in the film's relentlessly forward and sideways velocity, all of the most extreme emotional states get windshield-wipered by all the other ones. No one's breakdown stands in much relief from anyone else's, and California, America, the now, they all become a pop-art collage of interchangeable secrets and miseries—the source, too, of all the vividness and life in the movie, so we're never less than thankful for them. Anderson doesn't add these figures into any polemical sum, just one film's picture of the way things are, possessed of rather less variety than the sprawling cast and shifting style imply. Amidst all of this, the song (you know) and the frogs (you know) feel much less incongruous than the movie's two hints of connection: a stammering policeman's date with an addict and, even more miraculously, a relay of awkward telephone calls that succeeds against all odds at locating the person it seeks. Amazingly, John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman, two congenital over-actors, have finally found this least likely of movies in which to rein it all in and offer compelling, affecting snapshots of the normal. Threshold of revelation!

It's the nature of the beast that Magnolia teeters too far in some directions: young Stanley's soliloquy of protest is one too many, and a bit much for the mouth of a babe; Reilly's procedural mishap with his gun just sits inert on the screen, haphazardly slung together; and William H. Macy's scenes are aggravatingly garish in text and image. But who cares, compared to all the goodies tucked around the movie in unexpected cracks and corners: Cleo King's insolence and Felicity Huffman's observant invisibility, a great performance from some invisible actress who convinces Frank T.J. Mackey to contact his father, the hilarious production design of the What Do Kids Know? quiz show, the comic-book blue of Tom Cruise's black hair, Macy being dogged by the same truncated pop song, the epidemic rash of dissolves into Robards' poisoned lungs, the sound of toads hitting pavement, the wry question "Do you still want the peanut butter, cigarettes, and bread?", and every single cut that joins a symmetrical shot with some violence against balance, often a chiaroscuro close-up pushing against the edge of that wide, wide frame. I liked Anderson's Boogie Nights but have been blithely indifferent to any impulse to re-see it; I savored the sound and technique of Punch-Drunk Love, but I admit to having craved a more populated party; I have owned Hard Eight on second-hand VHS for almost five years and still haven't popped it in. But Magnolia seduces, pulls, lures me in, time and again, as though it has some gravitational pull. Flamboyant characters make their way through a world that is and isn't ours, and I can't stop watching. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Happy Birthday: Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore is 45 today, and we should all be feeling blessed and jubilant, effervescing on behalf of America's greatest living film actress. (Top 5, easy.)

However, generous soul that I am, I invite you to celebrate this august occasion not here but over at The Film Experience, which is the internet's true Julianne Moore headquarters. On behalf of his sainted Juli, Nathaniel has made it through, among other things, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie. C'est l'amour, n'est-ce pas?

(P.S. Not-so-generous soul that I am, I wrote the blurb at TFE, since Nathaniel's on vacation. Hurry back, FilmBitch!)

Picked Flick #74: Vanya on 42nd Street

As though synthesizing my last two choices, here is another filmed play that filters the antiquarian through the lens of the contemporary, or else vice versa, and it stars the modern American cinema's pre-eminent Woman Who Lies to Herself in one of her most exquisite performances.

Nonetheless, even a Julianne Moore disciple can't start a write-up of Vanya on 42nd Street with a nod to Julianne, or even to Louis Malle, whose movie this is, or even to André Gregory, whose minimalist workshop production of Uncle Vanya is the subject of this loving, sublimely attentive film. If you're talking Vanya on 42nd Street you have to start with Chekhov, a playwright so very resistant to screen treatment and so very easy to misconstrue in areas of tone, delivery, and intent. The infamous question of how Chekhov could possibly have considered plays like Uncle Vanya to be comedies is the task of a talented troupe to unravel, a rare feat to which this film makes us so thrillingly privy. Translated by David Mamet with economic brilliance, Chekhov's play achieves such concise pscyhological insight with so sure and light a hand that it can almost make you blush, and yet for all of the characters' many endowments—Dr. Astrov's charisma and his ethical grasp of nature, Sonya's work ethic and sad-eyed resilience, Yelena's exquisite beauty and stunning indolence, Vanya's sour wit and impatience with pretense—they are none of them much armed with a capacity for change. As the script transcribes an arc from one domestic arrangement to a different and notably smaller one, nearly all of the characters' hopes and plans continue to exceed their grasp, almost by definition. "Comedy" thus appears to name their steady commitment to ideals they can't well afford or attain, and their rueful awareness of this very dilemma, to which, in private moments and with the right ears to bend, almost all of them confess.

Capturing such a delicate lacework of feeling and compromise is difficult enough, but Malle does more than document a stirring production. He subtly tailors a form of Chekhovian direction that alights just as softly but lucidly on its subjects. From the piquant prologue of the actors' arrivals and chitchats, Vanya gorgeously idles into its own opening lines with a simple cut and a gliding camera move; the effect is similar to how Bergman introduces his Magic Flute, and the emotional rewards that follow are comparably rich. Cinematographer Declan Quinn, refining his own techniques in line with the scrupulous actors, adduces the angles and auras of each face with total perfection, carrying Astrov from hardy to dissipated or Sonya from plain to luminous in no time at all. The seeds of his smart, observational cinematography in Leaving Las Vegas, Monsoon Wedding, and In America are already flourishing here, not least in how he incorporates the darkened theater itself into his compositions, choosing exactly when and to what extent each character emerges from absolute shadow. These camera regimens indicate just how cinematic this Vanya is despite its unfussy, unfurnished groundedness in theatrical art. Close-ups, gingerly inserts, and other privileged views of the actors do as much to convey the characters as their trained vocal precision and consummate faith in their material. "No, one would not describe this family as happy," confesses Moore's Yelena, but has this actress ever laughed so much and with such fine degrees of implication in any other film? Her chuckling, abrupt admission that she would have enjoyed marrying a younger man is a sublime Chekhovian moment, as is Larry Pine's garrulous, principled, but self-absorbed defense of the Russian forest. Another glory is Wallace Shawn's deft application of his unique, adenoidal delivery to a killjoy character who nonetheless requires our sympathy, even though he has no obvious claim on it. Shawn finds and defends those claims, working as seamlessly as everything else in the film—except, of course, when Malle or Gregory wants us to notice and consider the seams, the determinate environment, the historical and cultural distance that suddenly feels so much less distant. In a year whose other breakout movies (Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, Natural Born Killers) were such virtuosic plunges into wild aesthetic surfaces, Vanya on 42nd Street is, in the words of Pablo Neruda, as bright as a lamp, as simple as a ring, remote and candid. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #89: Psycho

Seriously. That Psycho. I remind the reader that this list prioritizes pleasure and personal association over "pure" aesthetic credentials, though even on that grounds, Gus Van Sant's floridly punctilious remake of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous movie has nothing to be embarrassed about. The whole exercise, a quite brilliant gambit, speaks as no other movie I can think of to the paradox of how exactitude and imitation invariably call attention to deviance and asymmetry. That's a Hitchcockian idea in itself—a sort of formal apotheosis of what Jimmy Stewart's character learns in Vertigo—but it also places the movie expertly into a landscape of queer camp and performativity that includes Andy Warhol's star portraits and soup cans, Judith Butler's queer explications of gender as ideological theater, the entire history of drag, and queer cinema's own abiding interest in the citation and subversive reinhabiting of classic texts. The same questions that Velvet Goldmine poses to Citizen Kane, that All About My Mother and another upcoming Picked Flick pose to All About Eve, that Derek Jarman posed to Shakespeare and Marlowe, and that Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho posed to the Henry plays are succinctly crystallized in this pop-art diorama of Psycho's once revolutionary and now ubiquitous twists and turns.

With the possible exception of Last Days, this is also my favorite Van Sant movie, capitalizing on his own frigid detachment and his hyperinvestment in self-conscious form. It's a fond time capsule of American movies circa 1998, when Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Anne Heche, William H. Macy, Viggo Mortensen, Robert Forster, and Philip Baker Hall were either hot new names or recently, happily returned to our attentions. In Christopher Doyle's fluorescent, go-for-broke lighting and Beatrix Aruña Pasztor's equally daring costume choices, it's one of the best and least expected transplants of Hong Kong style into a credible American idiom. Heche, shopping for used cars in a green/orange print dress, color-matched sunglasses, a tangerine parasol, and a punky platinum dye-job, is not far from, say, Carina Lau's killer look in Days of Being Wild—and this is but one of the multiple, unimprovable accents in and around her stunningly inspired riff on Marion Crane. With one of the hardest acting tasks—Vaughn's adequate but thankless work is in its own league as far as that goes—Heche is best in show by a highway mile, reminding us of how much she deserves to have a career like Cate Blanchett's got. Moore, oddly uncomfortable in her shoes (is she having one of her "funny feet" problems?), is still a sharp and merciful switch-in for Vera Miles. Mortensen, Heche, and Van Sant conspire to make the adulterous foundation of the story all the more tawdry and plausibly scofflaw, and Danny Elfman has a superb time sharpening the blades on what might be the cinema's most durable, age-proof score. Inserts of rolling clouds and lounging nudes are just stupid, frankly, but the real secret is that Van Sant's Psycho is its own movie, through and through. Sure it lives inside a formidable shadow, but it casts one of its own, too: eccentric, intellectual, invigorating. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

My Own Time-Out Film Guide

With all the family complications and struggles of late, I can't say it was the most vacation-like vacation or birthday-like birthday I ever experienced, though I'm still glad I got to spend the time at home. In order to seize a little pure-bred R&R out of my four-day weekend, y'all know what I did. After all, my bus trip did have a layover in NYC. Sorry to all NYC buddies I didn't call, but this was sort of a spur-of-the-moment, moment-of-solitude kind of thing.

Thanks to everyone who left messages, by the way... and if you sent flowers, not only to me but to my mother, and you know who you are, you are not only an immortal god-type person, but you'll be hearing from me soon!

Forty Shades of Blue B+
The first and easily the best of the three movies I saw, Forty Shades makes good enough on its Sundance victory even though it's got nothing that Junebug doesn't do better, and a bit more humbly. Still, this is moody, evocative work, and it's one of those European-feeling American indies like Birth or The Yards that work well throughout but really congeal at a few key sequences, more than earning the film's keep in those electric moments. One of these is the outdoor party for legendary music producer Alan (Rip Torn) that precipitates the whole film, carrying back to town his distant son Michael (Darren Burrows, once of Northern Exposure) and introducing Michael for the first time to Alan's beautiful, much-younger, and Russian bride, Laura (Dina Korzun). No, Laura is not a mail-order bride per se. Yes, Rip Torn boozes and objectifies her, but there are many more unexpected notes to his character. Yes, the film rather overdoes the chromatic conceit of its title, coming across as overly schematized whenever we, say, duck into a swimming pool for no narrative or even atmospheric reason. But there's some real charge to the acting, the sound-mixing, and many of the images, and the vibrantly miscegenated Memphis music scene—blending country, hip-hop, R&B, gospel, and orchestral influences—is as unexpected and piquant as the movie it undergirds.

Good Night, and Good Luck. C+
Speaking of overly schematized, George Clooney's glassy and handsome but disappointingly thin Good Night, and Good Luck. lapses into many of the sins that it purports to indict. Its view of human character is harshly one-dimensional: you'll have no trouble divvying out the good folks from the baddies, a chasm which the film further broadens by denying the villains an opportunity for real, flesh-and-blood characterization—i.e., it's even easier to hate Joe McCarthy when he's a flickering projection on a screen instead of a palpably present human being. The interpolated footage from Murrow's broadcasts and McCarthy's rebuttals are a valuable cultural repository, but they perform a lion's share of the film's argument on its own behalf, with amazingly little in the way of editorial embellishment, historical context, or psychological revelation. Production values like the shining black & white photography and the silken jazz numbers by Dianne Reeves can't be disputed from a technical standpoint, but their pertinence to the film's message is pretty arbitrary, and the whole thing looks like a souped-up memorial ad for Edward R. Murrow, burnished and tailored for knowing, self-congratulatory consumption by ticket-buyers who may not realize that we're not thinking any harder than Joe McCarthy did, that we're omitting human as well as political complexity. The alternative, compelling but quite dangerous, is that we simply don't care about the film's one-dimensionality, since it unabashedly provides images and liberal talking-points that recent cinema has sorely lacked. But, aside from its impressive aesthetic surface and some good moments from those actors who can handle period (pretty much everyone except Clooney and Downey), it's dismayingly dismissable.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio D+
And now, speaking of overly schematized and an uneven grasp of period, Prize Winner is guaranteed to outlive the affections of even those audiences who go in rooting for it. Who are basically fans of star Julianne Moore (duh) or writer-director Jane Anderson, whose ambiguously "feminist" work as a screenwriter and filmmaker I have often enjoyed for its casual irreverence (Normal, If These Walls Could Talk 2) or for its outright blinding and jubilant irreverence (The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom). This film, however, requires mere minutes to set up basic dichotomies from which it never strays or builds—Evelyn Ryan, a chipper mother of ten, was inventive and resilient, though you still wouldn't wish her life on anyone; Kelly Ryan, her alcoholic spendthrift of a husband, isn't a 100% villain, just a 120-proof sadsack and a 1-man pity-party. After 10 or 15 minutes of this, the film stalls amid a litany of commercial jingles which, I must say, seldom make the case for Evelyn's genius, and the interchangeable children and paper-thin production design do nothing to sustain or expand our interest. You can see what Julianne is doing—proving that she can smile and chuckle through almost an entire picture, though she seems most comfortable with her best and darkest lines, like "There isn't enough gas in the world to get me all the places I want to go," or "I don't need you to make me happy, Kelly, I just need you to leave me alone when I am." Brava, Julianne: anyone who's paying attention knew you could do it. And anyone who's alleging that Evelyn Ryan, Cathy Whitaker, or Laura Brown have all that much in common is not to be trusted. Still, like the movie, the performance exists to make a larger and fairly detachable point, not to compel our belief on its own terms. 'Tis pity she's mediocre. And I'm sad to say that mere toleration for what you're watching and hearing becomes an issue after a while.

P.S. I've gotta take my laptop to the shop to get the battery replaced and the CD/DVD drive repaired. Don't think I've forgotten about you if you don't see more posts right away. (I've no idea how long this will take.)