Adapting real life stories for the big screen is a dangerous proposition. Play too fast and loose with the truth and you stand accused of insensitivity and arrogance; remain too slavish to the facts and you might end up with a deadly dull drama. Inspired by a hit and run automobile accident with a bizarre twist, director Stuart Gordon and screenwriter John Strysik walk this tightrope with finesse, concocting an original, deadly serious, blackly-comic thriller.

Stuck begins by following the basic outline of what happened in Fort Worth, Texas, in the fall of 2001, which I've written about before. In short: a nurse, high on drugs, smashes into a homeless man, who lodges in her car's windshield. She drives home, parks in her garage, and goes to bed, leaving the man bleeding -- and stuck. The film quickly veers away from the facts of the case, though, transforming into a deeply-felt meditation on personal accountability in an age of irresponsibility. It grows more and more outrageous, nearly fishtailing out of control, before righting itself and delivering a walloping conclusion.

Mena Suvari stars as the out of control caregiver, here renamed Brandi, and Stephen Rea is her moral counterweight as the down on his luck Tom. For her part, Brandi isn't so much immoral or amoral as she is incredibly self-centered.

The second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival gets underway Thursday night. Among the dozens of films premiering for local audiences, Stuart Gordon's Stuck, inspired by real-life events that transpired in nearby Fort Worth, stands out like a sore thumb to me. The film received some good reviews when it premiered in Toronto last fall; our own Scott Weinberg called it "more of a twisted thriller than an out-and-out horror movie ... [with] a sly and simple streak of social commentary." But my interest lies in issues beyond the film itself. Namely, can fictional depictions of real-life stories affect people like secondhand smoke?

One evening in the fall of 2001, twenty-something nurse's aide Chante Mallard partied at a club, drank some alcohol, split a tab of Ecstasy, smoked some marijuana, left the club, accepted a ride from a friend, picked up her car at her friend's apartment, and climbed into her gold Chevrolet Cavalier. A few minutes later, she hit a man on a dimly-lit highway. She was a mile and a half from her house in southeast Fort Worth, Texas.

Gregory Glenn Biggs flew into her windshield head-first. Mallard headed home. Badly injured, bleeding profusely and stuck in the cracked windshield, the hapless Biggs pleaded for help. Mallard pulled into her garage, got out of her car, closed the garage door, and went to bed. Biggs died.

Most directors' first effort is NOT a huge blockbuster smash of a comedy starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn, but that's how writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber hit the scene: with Dodgeball. But based on the filmmaker's second effort, I'm guessing that Thurber took a lot of good-natured ribbing from his film-school friends and decided to snag some "indie cred" by doing a smaller movie for his second feature. That's all well and good, but it's too bad that the resulting movie -- The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- is such an inert, episodic, and familiar piece of very typical festival fare. It's as if Mr. Thurber watched six Sundance films at random, and then just copied his favorite scenes from each one.

Based on the novel of the same name by Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about the son of an infamous gangster who spends his last summer before "adult life" roaming around with two "free-spirited" pals. The year is 1983, and young Art Bechstein (Jon Foster) is at a serious crossroads. Completely opposed to his father's lifestyle, Art (reluctantly) plans to become a stockbroker in a few months' time -- but that means a few open months in which he can A) work at a chintzy discount book store, B) cast lovesick glances towards his new friend Jane (Sienna Miller), and C) become close pals with a bisexual street thug called Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard). Oh, and D) nail his slightly unhinged boss (Mena Suvari).

How many times has this happened to you? You spend the evening drinking and doing drugs, and as you precariously drive home, you hit a pedestrian, leaving him embedded in your windshield. You figure he's dead, so you leave him where he is, park the car in the garage, and hope nobody finds out.

I think we've all been there. Iconic horror filmmaker Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) made a movie based on the idea, Stuck, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and has now been acquired by Image Entertainment for U.S. release. Sister company ThinkFilm will release it theatrically next spring, and then Image will handle the DVD sales.

The film stars Mena Suvari as the driver and Stephen Rea as the victim. The story has him not quite dead after all, and understandably P.O.'ed when he realizes she's left him out in the garage, stuck to her windshield, to die. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg, who knows horror like Rosie O'Donnell knows pizza, reviewed Stuck at Toronto and said: "Backed by a pair of very fine lead performances, several colorful background players, a quick pace, and a handful of truly memorable scenes, Stuck might just be Stuart Gordon's best flick since Dagon -- or even From Beyond."

Furthermore, it's "a surprisingly smart flick that starts out slowly and gradually explodes into a darkly satisfying finale."

It's based on a true story, apparently this one, which happened in Fort Worth. But Snopes, the indispensable urban-legend-cataloging site, shows that the Fort Worth incident is by no means unique. This confirms what I've always suspected: there are a lot of really scary drivers out there.

First of all, I fully understand when the trades choose to not truck with online outlets reporting scoops based on inside sources, because more often than not, the outlet in question is relying on educated guesswork. A persistent rumor, a talkative production assistant, a secretary that noticed a big star coming in and out of the office, etc ... you know the drill. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are legitimate reportorial outlets that have strict journalistic processes and can't afford to get it wrong, and so forth -- I get all that. I have a degree in journalism. What I do not get is why Variety would be running the Mena Suvari/Hemingway casting news this morning as if I didn't report six weeks ago that Suvari told me to my face she'd been cast. And not just myself -- she used the junket for the indie film Brooklyn Rules to announce to one and all that this would be her next project and that she was completely locked in.

Let's assume that they don't just take an actor's word that they've been cast in a project -- okay, fine, but they wouldn't call the actor's representative for confirmation? And let's say they did that, and it turned out the actor spoke too soon and the deal wasn't really done -- when they finally did confirm it to their satisfaction, they don't credit the original source? Or maybe they didn't even see my story, right? Well, no, that's not credible either, because it was picked up by a number of large online outlets, including JoBlo, DarkHorizons and others. All together, the exposure we gave that story was enough that if it wasn't noticed by the trades then they are the ones who are out to lunch. What they're doing in this case is simply pretending that the online film journalism world doesn't exist, and shame on the online outlets that are reporting their story as if it's first-run news. I won't bother pointing them out, but you know the usual suspects. Will Variety have the decency to contact me about this matter and at least explain their policy?

Mena Suvari is Stuck in a really really really bad situation. She has cornrows, a difficult job as a nurse practitioner and has just hit Stephen Rea with her car. The first trailer for the Stuck thriller is being hosted on Bloody-Disgusting. It's definitely bloody and the cast happens to include some of my favorite actors -- have you ever seen Stephen Rea not play someone interesting? And I've appreciated Mena Suvari since her very brave performance as the dirty-mouthed yet inexperienced teenager in American Beauty.

Aside from Suvari's terrible imposition, the trailer shows Rea going from one horrible moment to the next. It seems like the kind of bad day that every person wishes they could sleep through. Suvari is a hard working, party girl -- a personality conundrum? -- who appears to want more responsibility at work but puts everything in jeopardy after striking Rea with her car. What happens next could mean death for Rea and a huge cover up for Suvari in order to keep her life running smoothly.

Stuck is written and directed by Stuart Gordon. -- the director who brought us Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, a far cry from his 'not for children fair.' Gordon is also responsible for Dagon and 1985's medical school experiment gone bad, Re-Animator. Stuck premiered last month at Cannes Film Festival -- its wide release date has yet to be determined.

I'm sure I don't have to explain why Alec Baldwin didn't show up at last week's roundtables for Brooklyn Rules, the 1980s mob drama that opened Friday, in which he plays a ruthless Gambino enforcer, but most of the principal cast as well as the director were on hand to discuss the film. Rules stars Freddie Prinze Jr. as a Brooklyn bum who is trying to look out for his two best friends in the neighborhood while courting Mena Suvari's character, an uptown girl who is worried about getting close to a guy who might have mob connections. The film was shot over two and a half years ago but a bad distribution deal kept it sitting on the shelf until things could be worked out for a limited release. Thanks to an actor showing up forty-five minutes late at another junket nearby, Cinematical's intrepid reporter (me) missed the first few interviewees for Rules -- director Michael Corrente was apparently a hoot -- but I was able to sneak into the roundtable room just in time for Prinze and Suvari. Below is a sampling of the numerous questions asked by all the assembled journalists and the answers, so enjoy.

Freddie Prinze Jr.


The film depends a lot on the chemistry of the three friends -- how did you work on establishing that?

FPJ: Michael was very smart -- the director, Michael -- in the regard that, during the rehearsal process, he'd start a conversation casually. He'd start a conversation casually, and be like ... this is the way Michael talks not me ... "Who's the first broad you nailed?" So I would begin to discuss the first woman that I slept with, and you'd start talking about how horrible you were, and it was like ten seconds long and she was like 'what?' and it was really embarrassing ... and then the other guys would start to chime in, and they'd crack jokes on you. Then you'd find out that it was even less with them, and ha ha ha, and then Michael would say "Now read the scene right now!" and we'd just go right into the scene with that same type of energy and that same type of vibe. That really developed a lot of the dialogue and the pace that was required for the scenes that we were gonna do. As far as chemistry, we just lucked out.

Scott and I were confined to a trailer that, I kid you not, was smaller than this table, and he would just chain-smoke and I had a really bad habit of chewing tobacco, and so the door had to be closed because it was cold and so the smoke's in there and we'd watch that one scene in True Romance with Christopher Walken, and we'd do our Walken impressions. His was much better, but my Roger Rabbit was better. And we would watch movies, and Scott and I, we just got along. I guess some of it was that he has a father in this business, I had a father in this, and the sons coming up a chip on their shoulder and then a few years later, 'I don't have a chip on my shoulder, you can just get f*cked!' and then after that it's more like 'I have a chip but I'm dealing with it ...' We both were sort of at the same age, emotionally, so it was very easy for the two of us to bond. Jerry and Mena had the nicer half of the trailer, where they had their own rooms, and it's just hard not to get along with Jerry. I don't know anyone who doesn't like him.

A B-movie Goodfellas down to its bones, Michael Corrente's new film Brooklyn Rules even begins with a 'this is where I live'-style narration in which a young man takes us through the ins and outs of his Italian-American neighborhood, giving us a guided tour of the world we're about to spend 90-odd minutes in. The difference between Scorcese's classic and this is that we're not in the 60s, but the mid-80s -- we see two people arguing over the time logistics of Back to the Future at one point -- and the main character is not a criminal per say, but is only on speaking terms with the life. Michael Turner (Freddie Prinze Jr.) is a scrapper who, we're led to believe, is putting his nascent wiseguy instincts to the most harmless possible use, cheating on tests in a pre-law program at Columbia University. It's here where he will meet Ellen, (Mena Suvari) an uptown girl who is pretty happy in her whitebread world, and will begin to feel himself pressured to choose one world or the other.

If the movie I've just described is from Mars, there's a whole other movie going on in there that's from Venus. That movie features Alec Baldwin as a cold-eyed Gambino associate -- the film is steeped in actual 80s New York mob lore, specifically the murder of boss Castellano and subsequent rise of Gotti -- and aims to be a serious and bloody mob movie. Baldwin's character, Caesar, is recruiting Michael's friend Carmine (Scott Caan) into the mob and whenever Caesar enters the picture, things take on a much darker tone, and violence is usually right around the corner. Baldwin proceeds exactly as if entire movie is focused on him -- maybe that's what they told him -- and because he's such a good actor, he drags the energy of the story towards his B-plot and inadvertently sucks the air out of the film's A-story, which is all about Michael's relationship with Ellen and his attempt to transact an amiable divorce from his old neighborhood. It's an odd problem for a film to have, but it's one that makes Brooklyn Rules fairly lopsided.

At yesterday's Brooklyn Rules press junket, Mena Suvari, who plays the uptown girl who falls in love with Freddie Prinze Jr's Brooklyn tough guy in the film, was eager to talk up her upcoming projects, including Day of the Dead. I asked her if she gets to turn into a zombie in the film, to which she replied: "No, I play a corporal in the Army and I save the day!" She also said that she worked six day weeks on gun training and did all her own stunts. She also told me that she will be in director John Irvin's (Hamburger Hill, Next of Kin) upcoming adaptation of the Hemingway novel, The Garden of Eden. Set in Spain, the story is about an expat American and his wife who both fall in love with a beautiful young woman named Marita -- the part Suvari will presumably play. "It's very deep. It's a Hemingway story, it's one of his last stories and its a very complicated piece," Suvari said. "We're shooting in Spain and it takes place in Spain and the south of France. I'm very excited about that."

I also asked Suvari about her very, very brief part as Richie Berlin in Factory Girl, and whether it was all that was left of something more substantial: "They took a couple things out, but there were so many cameos in that movie that were taken fully out ... they weren't in the movie," Suvari said. "They had me come in and shoot some extra footage that didn't go in there. Richie Berlin wasn't a huge fan of Andy Warhol, so she wasn't so much in the Factory. And I didn't really know what they were doing with it and with the character. Richie never really wanted to talk to me ... I had to dig to do my research. But she talked about how she felt like she was the only one who really cared about Edie, so they tried to play that up in the film and add a couple of things, and then they did a different route with Edie, making it more of a narrative, like when she's talking about it in the hospital, all of that was added later. They just went a different route." Stay tuned for a full Brooklyn Rules report.

Another day, another Day of the Dead. There's no doubt Zombies are hot these days with the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead and films like 28 Days Later, Land of the Dead and the upcoming 28 Weeks Later. There's also another zombie film currently making the rounds on the test screening circuit -- a remake of George Romero's Day of the Dead, directed by Steve Miner. Over at Ain't it Cool News they've posted an early review of the film based on one of those recent test screenings.

At the site, the reviewer, who goes by the moniker The Helper Monkey, gives his much considered opinion regarding the film's plot, acting and the directing talents of Steve Miner. Now, before I go on, the review at the site contains spoilers and so will this post -- so if you want to stay in the dark and experience the film's glory for yourself, don't read any further. If you just can't wait for any details on the film and don't care about reviews or spoilers then by all means read on. Really, I can quickly and easily summarize his thoughts on the film for you using his own words: "This movie sucks." Granted, that's not the most eloquent sentence ever written but it certainly does succinctly convey his feelings about the film.

Among his many complaints and problems with the film are the ludicrous story elements including the setup and the use of a "magic shotgun" with which the good guys can kill the Zombies. He also doesn't care much for the film's stars; Nick Cannon, and his reason for not eating human flesh once he's zombified (he's a vegetarian) and Mena Suvari as a very unconvincing Army second in command. As THM puts it in his review: "Again this is more of a warning than anything else. They are going to try and trick you into seeing this flaming turd. The ads are going to try and make you think this is another Dawn of the Dead. It's not."