On the Margins
by Thor Klippert

James Toback's Harvard Man didn't seem to get a very wide release, which is kind of a shame. Like most Toback films, it's a bit of a shaggy-dog story, with a major plot element that comes out of absolutely nowhere and becomes indispensible shortly after. Adrian Grenier plays a college basketball star who's dating a mob princess (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and has an emergency need for some quick cash. Guess who helps him out?

Things get complicated, and soon involve: a limping bookie played by Eric Stolz, a philosophy professor played very nicely by Chasing Amy's Joey Lauren Adams, Al Franken playing himself, and fifteen thousand milligrams of pure LSD, resulting in some especially vivid hallucinogenic imagery. This is all very entertaining and unusual. It's nice to see Toback working with a decent budget, and the editing is very interesting: many of the dialogue sequences are filmed entirely in master shots, jump-cutting between takes instead of cutting away to alternate angles. The technique is off-putting at first (I initially thought there were extensive splices in the print I was watching) but eventually establishes a properly off-kilter rhythm.

And Buffy fans will not want to miss the opening titles....

Being a movie lover and living in the San Francisco Bay Area are not mutually exclusive states. It sometimes seems to me that every third movie I see contains some representation of the place I make my home, filtered through an outsider's eyes. I'm sure it's much the same (if not more so) for New Yorkers, and that they feel as relieved as I do when their city is presented as something more than a rich people's playground or a tourist attraction.

Finn Taylor's Cherish is set primarily in the SF I know, south of Market, off of the hills. If you make enough money or have the right friends maybe you even live there, in one of those iconic Victorians or overpriced condos - but it's more likely that, like Robin Tunney's character in the film, you reside across the Bay in Oakland, Berkeley, or Emeryville, and commute. I think the last time I saw the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) in a movie was Predator 2, and that wasn't even the real BART. Taylor, working on a shoestring, of course had no choice but to use the real trains, and the real side streets of the real cities, and may very well have conceived his film with that in mind.

The same model appears to apply to the soundtrack, which consists largely of the sort of played-out '80s hits that dominate AM radio. Armed with these cheap music clearances, Taylor has discovered a previously uninvestigated pop genre: the Stalker Song (think Hall & Oates' "Private Eyes"), and built a major subplot around it.

The story concerns an office worker (Tunney) who is wrongly accused of vehicular homicide, and must find the real killer while being confined to house arrest. Taylor balances a taste for fanciful camera tricks with a sense for when to sit back and let his actors work. Tunney, who previously caught my eye in The Craft and then lost it again with End of Days, is terrific in the lead, and Tim Blake Nelson, looking utterly soul-sick, proves his wholesale theft of O Brother, Where Art Thou? was no fluke. Nora Dunn also scores nicely. To tell more would ruin the many surprises the film has in store.

Roman Coppola's CQ (read, "Seek You") couldn't be set further from the Bay Area, but its heritage is clear. The central character, an intense but inarticulate film editor played by Jeremy Davies, reminds me more than a bit of George Lucas, who started as an editor and whose first film, the Bay Area-shot THX-1138, was produced by Francis Coppola, the director's father. Coincidence? The futuristic car chase in the film-within-the-film seems a direct quotation, down to the lights mounted on the bottom edges of the car - there's even a tunnel, and a climactic escape to the surface. Having seen this film so shortly after Attack of the Clones, I may be reading more into this than is actually there, but CQ fills me with pre-nostalgia for the endangered art of Film Making, and ambivalence for the dark digital path Lucas now treads.

Set in 1969, and telling the story of the young editor's involvement in the production of a cheesy exploitation film modelled on Barbarella, CQ revels in Film - shooting it, cutting it, holding frames up to the light. It wears its bluescreen fringe proudly. Even the tacky spaceship miniatures possess an impact, a coolness, a presence that CGI has yet to achieve. Will we ever see something like it (or THX-1138, for that matter) again?

There's more to CQ than technical discussion - the period is flawlessly evoked without resorting to endless pop-culture references, there's a gorgeous original soundtrack and a pair of stellar supporting performances from Coppola père regulars Dean Stockwell and Giancarlo Giannini. Coppola relative Jason Schwartzman (as a young genius director apparently modelled on Vampire Circus's Robert Young) veers dangerously close to Austin Powers territory, and Gérard Depardieu should fire his English coach. But those are really my only complaints.

I saw Rin Tarô's Metropolis and Jan Svnakmajer's Little Otik on successive nights, and Michel Gondry's Human Nature shortly after. They're all basically about the same thing: adults who desire children so desperately they build them from scratch, only to lose sight of the best interests of the resulting entity.

In Little Otik, Svankmajer continues to favor live actors over his trademark stop-animation. Viewers anxious to see his latest manipulation of raw meat and found objects have a good half-hour wait here. The fairy tale story is about a couple who, desperate for a child, adopts a tree stump that reminds them of a baby. Things go bad when the tree stump magically comes to life and begins to devour anything and everything that comes in contact with it. Visually, it appears Svankmajer has a new fascination: the evocative properties of various fluids, mostly shot in real time. I can't articulate it, but he's definitely on to something - you may never look at a bowl of soup the same way again.

In Metropolis (not to be confused, only compared, with Fritz Lang's silent classic) Japanese animator Rin Tarô adapts an Osamu Tezuka comic book, presenting a sumptuously detailed (if stylistically familiar) retro-jazz-age future world of skyscrapers, domestic robots, luxury airships, and class struggle. The primary appeal of all this is the production's extremely faithful translation of the legendary Tezuka's distinctive cartooning style- the rounded, simple forms and bright colors counterpoint the fairly bleak story and should come as a breath of fresh air to Anime fans numbed by the severe, angular designs that have come to dominate most Japanese animation.

Storywise, the picture is pretty basic: mysterious princess figure pursued by villainous authorities and defended by resourceful young hero, countdown to apocalypse, the girl is the key to everything, ya ya. Standout elements include the villain's illegitimate son who, in his anger and jealousy, is more inhuman than the androids he pursues; as well as the thrilling climactic use of Ray Charles' "I Can't Stop Loving You."

Human Nature is, of course, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's follow-up to Being John Malkovich. To my mind it's every bit as clever and maybe even smarter, occupying that film's same surreal world. Tim Robbins plays an insecure psychologist whose reaction to every animal impulse is to control it; Patricia Arquette is a nature writer who suppresses her own considerable animal qualities out of loneliness and self-loathing.

The pair aren't exactly a match made in heaven, but they function reasonably well together until they meet a feral man, played by Notting Hill's memorable Welshman Rhys Ifans, whom they promptly treat as a surrogate child: for Robbins, an opportunity to mold a completely civilized man from square one; for Arquette, her best shot at a genuine soulmate.

I'm simplifying things greatly here: the film is wild and wide-ranging and packed with original imagery. Arquette is particularly amazing and sexy in a "who knew?" sort of way that I will leave viewers to discover on their own.

©2002 Thor Klippert
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