Friday, 24 March 2000

WEEKEND PREVIEW

"Romeo must die here on earth, whatever it takes!!!" Now, THIS is a movie that I want to see! Leelee Sobieski kicks Jet Li's butt when he tries to molest her in her father's costume shop! Chris Klein hooks up with Marla Sokoloff for "The Practice: The Next Generation." Great stuff!

Unfortunately, I haven't seen a single one of the three big wide-release movies of this week. You want to read my list of excuses? Didn't think so. I do wonder what Fox and Sony were thinking, releasing two teen pictures the same week. Even with very different attitudes (drama vs. comedy), they simply have to cannibalize one another. And if either or both doesn't hold up to muster, the group that saw the loser the first night will definitely keep the other group from a second night at the movies this weekend. Just this advice to teenage boys interested in teenage bra straps ... go for the drama.

Box Office Extra will appear here after noon e.s.t.

Also, look for my Academy Awards picks in this weekend's special edition of News By The Numbers.

THE GOOD: Well, you can now add me to the Mike Figgis fan club. I was a straggler, I must admit. Much as I appreciated the performances by Nic Cage and Elisabeth Shue, I was not a big Leaving Las Vegas fan. I felt the pain, but so what? Despite one of my favorite all-time moments in movies ("You shot me in the foot."), I was one of those people who ripped Internal Affairs. And though it made it clear that Mike Figgis was always going to be worth watching, I still don't connect with Stormy Monday. And most recently, One Night Stand was an interesting blend of stuff, but didn't take me anywhere that I really felt compelled to be. (Though again, the image of John Calley looking over Robert Downey Jr.'s deathbed was one of the most powerful movie images, because of the subtext, I have ever seen.)

And then, Mike Figgis threw out the map and started rolling purely on instinct. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Miss Julie and Time Code are all Mike Figgis movies, make no mistake. They are all rich in pain, deception, self-deception (even more) and life's surface distractions. Those distractions always include stunningly beautiful women and almost always some form of ingestible mood altering material. But beyond embracing Figgis' themes, all three films bend the form of filmmaking as we know it to Mike's sense of his own art. The melange of The Loss of Sexual Innocence tried to hold together to some narrative, but ultimately served (for me) as a series of pieces in the human psychosexual puzzle. And just as people are physiologically attracted to specific other people for reasons hidden deep in the back of their souls, watching that movie, different audience members connect with different moments and completely disconnect from others. Miss Julie was the most theatrical piece Figgis has done, shot on one set with a clearly interior exterior (seen only briefly). But again, Figgis pushed the form. He shot an entire movie handheld. He turned the boundaries of a single set into a cage that the actors and the audience couldn't escape. He made Strindberg sexy. Again, not for everyone. But quite brilliant.

When Time Code premiered at the Yahoo! Internet Life Online Film Festival this Wednesday, press was told quite specifically that they would not be allowed and then, those of us who were let in were told that we had to hold our reviews at the behest of Sony, the company releasing the film. And so I shall. But not before making a couple of points.

Figgis is a genius. Any question I ever had about the man's work is now completely gone. Reel.com's Jeffrey Wells, who I am pretty sure is paying zero attention to the embargo, said to me while we were talking about the film, "Why do you have to do one of those Dave Poland Eyes Wide Shut intellectual things?" And my response comes from Popeye: "I yam what I yam." Figgis quotes McLuhan's "Form is function" quote at some point in the film and in classic Figgis style, mocks himself while doing it. But in the case of Time Code, it is true. Figgis gives us four frames of real-time digital video, all shot in one take on one day last November. Four frames through the entire film. 26 characters for just over 90 minutes of their lives on one intense day in Los Angeles.

The film focuses most centrally on a love parallelogram with rotating objects of desire. The four people in that group are Saffron Burrows, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Salma Hayek and Stellan Skarsgard. But it also speaks to Hollywood. And it also speaks to money. And it also speaks to gamesmanship. And it also speaks to desperation. And sex. Yes, always great sex in a Figgis film. And as usual, no one tends to walk away happy despite all the passion they put into each amorous encounter.

But, I am not going to review the film here today. I do want to write about the form some more though. The film is shot digitally and though it still doesn't feel like film, every woman in the movie looked as good as they ever have when lit for "real" movies. I would have to have a conversation with Mr. Figgis to determine whether he was intentionally helping himself and the medium in that way when casting. You simply cannot shoot Salma Hayek from an angle that doesn't make her look like God's favorite estrogen elixir. Saffron Burrows looks great. Jeanne Tripplehorn seems to get more beautiful the more she scowls worry lines into her face and reddens her eyes with tears. As far as I could tell, there wasn't a single woman in the movie whose looks were not exceptional in one way or another. They were hidden behind glasses or funny hats or age, but the female cast of this film was like your best day at a local femme hangout. Fresh and beautiful for as many reasons as there were women.

As for the four frames, I gather that the DVD will allow you to pick a frame at any time to give full focus to -kind of self-editing the picture. And that will be great as a game and as a way of studying the film. But it misses the experience of the movie. The work now is loaded with multi-tasking. We work on our computers with the TV on, answering our cell phones while we drive, watching DVDs with multiple soundtracks, etc., etc. Time Code is the ultimate multi-tasking experience. It's not a game of "you are the editor." It is life in this time and it is digital overload at the same time. And the genius of Figgis is that he not only figures out how to make the puzzle work, but he turns this non-traditional form into the best of the traditional one at many different moments of the film. And it's not an intellectual exercise in those moments. In any other movie, a make-out scene between two great looking real-life-heterosexual-as-far-as-we-know actresses would be all anyone could talk about. In Figgis' world, there is so much stuff in the other three frames -- not designed to upstage the necking, but real -- that even us pig-like men have to give part of our attention to what else is happening. The medium is the movie. If you discard the medium, there is no real reason for making the movie the way Figgis did. Besides, we already kind of saw that movie. It was called Slacker.

Anyway, I'm eating up an entire column here in praise of a movie that's not going to sweep the nation, that is going to become a cult film, that is an epic moment in the evolution of film (and like all epic moments, no one could honestly tell you how it will affect the landscape, only that it will). Time Code is not a subtextural film like Eyes Wide Shut, don't get me wrong. The people get their sex. Tiny Salma Hayek gets up on a speaker so big Stellan can slink off those panties right before our eyes. But it is an intellectual film. One rich enough to demand multiple viewings, in a theater, until the four-frame and digital shock wears off and you let your brain take over the work and your heart take over the experience. I can't wait to see it again. And when I do - that's when I will give it a real review. With a movie like this, 1271 words is just a passing reference.

"More Y!I.L. Fest And Less Honesty"