jeffrey m. anderson Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With the writer's strike in full swing, I thought I'd pay tribute to a few of the writers who currently have films in theaters. Quite frankly, you really have to admire some of them. Take Allison Burnett, who adapted Feast of Love (2 screens) as well as this year's earlier Resurrecting the Champ. Burnett received very little love for either movie, but consider how hard it must have been to cut down a novel and expand a newspaper article at the same time? It makes my head spin. It's also quite impressive that Burnett was able to work again after his earlier script was turned into the universally panned film Autumn in New York (2000). But the thing that impressed me most of all about Burnett is his first produced script, Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight (1992), a vehicle for "Z" level action star Don 'The Dragon' Wilson. This is from a guy who studied playwriting and has published a novel. I can only imagine what it must be like to sit down and actually write something like that. Do you tape the paycheck on the wall next to your desk and keep staring at it? Good for Burnett that he made it out of that hole.

Then there's The Simpsons Movie (96 screens), which has at least eleven credited writers, and possibly more who added material without credit. Among them we have David Mirkin, who directed one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures, Heartbreakers (2001), and James L. Brooks, who won an armload of Oscars for Terms of Endearment (1983). Most of the others are from TV, and I'd like to think they wrote this movie the way they might have written a half-hour episode: by sitting around a big table and throwing out ideas and laughing a lot. Those writer rooms are usually decorated with stuffed animals and novelty items, as well as plates of donuts and other snacks -- perhaps some kind of air freshener as well. It makes me all warm just thinking about it.

Writing in the New York Times a few years back, A.O. Scott mourned the absence of total disasters in the movies. A lack of disasters meant that people weren't really putting themselves on the line, and by turns, that safeguard also results in a lack of real masterworks. Pauline Kael once wrote a review of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 entitled "Hail, Folly." She praised "huge, visionary epics" of "mad" directors, like D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Erich von Stroheim's Greed, Abel Gance's Napoleon, Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible trilogy (left unfinished after Part II), and Francis Ford Coppola's then as-yet-unfinished Apocalypse Now. "The calamity of movie history is not the follies that get made, but the follies that don't get made," she said.

A conversation arose in the screening room the other day about the sorry state of young, romantic performers in movies today and the overwhelming blandness slathered across our movie screens. Pretty, plastic, chiseled faces smile at one another and sometimes kiss, and their efforts leave everyone cold. Critics and audiences often use the word "chemistry" to describe these encounters; either the characters have it or they don't. Strangely, there's really no way to tell if it's even there until the movie is finished. You can put two actors in a room together, or screen test them, but none of it comes together until the audience becomes a factor.

One reason most movie couples have been so bland lately is the ever-increasing control that studios are demanding of their product. Every aspect of filmmaking must be regulated and stabilized, and so, to make the most of their romantic stories, these same studio people very simply cast the most beautiful actors they can find. Beautiful people sometimes explode on the movie screen with lots of personality and star power, but just as often, they don't, looking more like polished statues without so much as a heartbeat. James Dean was very handsome, but he had a surprising element, a kind of unpredictability, as well as world-heavy sadness. But James Franco, who played Dean in a TV biopic, has only the looks. As shown in his most recent film, Spider-Man 3 (151 screens), where there should be passion and danger and excitement, there's only grooming. At times I honestly can't tell the difference between him and Paul Walker.

This week, instead of grousing about the state of cinema, let's celebrate the continued existence of the good little films that could.

I haven't yet seen Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, but I am greatly looking forward to it, mostly because those two polar opposites of Chicago film criticism, the worldly, intelligent Jonathan Rosenbaum and the popular Roger Ebert, both called it a masterpiece. Running nearly three hours, it chronicles the final couple of days in the title character's life; he feels ill, calls an ambulance and fails to convince anyone that he's actually dying. It currently has a deathlock on two screens with a weekend gross of $354 (yes, that's right -- three hundred and fifty-four dollars) and a total gross of about $41,000.

I've already raved in this space about Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest film, Three Times, which could be his most universal work to date. Broken down into three segments, it tells the story of three romances in three different eras; the same actors, Chang Chen and Shu Qi, play the couple in each. Even if the second two segments somehow fall short, the first segment, set in 1966, is easily Hou's most delicate, emotional work. Three Times is on three screens, enjoyed a weekend gross of about $3,000 and has grossed $81,000.