And Then Sunday Night Fell Silent (The L Word Season 2 IM Postmortem)

Starring: jostle, aka Jocelyn, flavorpill queen and a true Lesbian Science Theater 3000 partner-in-crime; liser, aka me.

I leave our exchange fairly unadulterated (and promise to post something more substantive soon) so if you aren't familiar with the show, we doth duly apologize.

jostle: guten morgen
jostle: i just ate a sprouted bagel with.. yeast!!!
jostle: which segs nicely into a lezbo discussion
liser: or concussion
liser: Ok, basically, we're having an IM convo that wraps up Season 2 of The L Word, which we had, I think it’s safe to say, hotly anticipated
jostle: right up until we heard the new theme song
liser: exactly. someone let the fact they were getting some get in the way of taste when it came to using BETTY for the theme song
jostle: in what started to seem like every scene of every episode
liser: Betty was Where's Waldo
jostle: i think Waldo's cuter
liser: Better fashion, for sure
liser: Anyway, cheesy theme song....
liser: cheesy Season 2
jostle: yes, i think it took a little while to sink in, say about halfway through, but then we started to recognize that the show was in a serious sophomore slump.
liser: it got progressively worse the whole season
liser: we should disclose that we spent weeks before the new season began watching Season 1 on DVD. It got us through the February snow ambush and I do mean bush...
jostle: indeed
liser: so we were not inclined to acknowledge at first how crap the show got in Season 2
jostle: when the season commenced, we were all taken in by the wondrous transformation of Jenny Schechter, the sexed-up, annoying tree sprite to Jenny, the actually really hot, nearly lovable character, but that was about the only real exciting development
liser: yeah, Jenny didn't suck for about three episodes
jostle: and then she headed into a self-reflexive women's issue martyr role
jostle: i can't remember. did she adopt some Christ-like poses during those final strip scenes? it seems highly possible
liser: you know, she's a Jew so it was more like Survivor Syndrome chic than Christ at the Cross
liser: it's like being jewish is the most exotic character trait ever seen
jostle: as you said, the fetishization of judaism
liser: But you're right. it's hard to remember now, but we had higher hopes in the beginning of the season
liser: Jenny had a spine
liser: Tina was pregnant and really mad at Bette so she had a spine while Bette was eating the crow
liser: which meant that Tina wasn't just speaking in her weird, wheedling voice and Tina was!
jostle: Carmen was still almost hot
jostle: Alice wasn't pathetic
liser: and Dana was still pathetic, just like we like her!
liser: Shane was still a lothario
liser: all was as it should be
jostle: one thing that occurred to me recently is that the primary problem was that they actually wrote themselves into a corner
jostle: almost all of the characters became one-dimensional
jostle: once out of the closet, what did Dana have to offer as a character?
jostle: judging by Season 2, nothing really. just someone who was uncomfortable with sex toys
jostle: once in a relationship with Dana, Alice lost all her humor and her spine, plus any confidante to reveal another side of her personality other than the co-dependent girlfriend
liser: they'd spend the whole of two episodes on Shane's career and then drop it
jostle: yeah, what happened to the producer bitch?!
liser: and none of the characters related to each other anymore. It says a lot that neither of the two new characters had any dimensions
jostle: Carmen was never a character, more like a cardboard cut-out used to play other characters off each other. or a dj'ing vehicle
jostle: Helena began and remained a rich brat with a fetish for pregnant women
jostle: which didn't change at all when she was confronted by her mother in what should have been a somewhat climactic scene
liser: the fetish for pregnant woman is so Remedial Freud
liser: Mommy wasn't around. so...
jostle: I think they had the least well-hung cliffhanger i've ever seen
liser: i know. such dimension!
jostle: i mean, when Shane finally says i love you to Carmen--which was supposed to be huge--you have no idea why she'd even be attracted to her, nor do we ever get any kind of reaction shot from Carmen or hear anything from her!
jostle: weighty, dying father plot and all, Bette was the only one who really remained an interesting character throughout Season 2, and went somewhere
jostle: we'll have to await Season 3 to see if they just blew their wad, so to speak, in Season 1
liser: their oh-so proverbial wad
liser: what makes it so much worse now? the show was still kind of bad, but it was enormously fun to watch and to talk back to
jostle: a) less sex!
jostle: i would say Season 2 had about 75% less sex
liser: b) too many plotlines randomly abandoned
jostle: ding!
jostle: how about? no real plotlines that stuck throughout the whole season?
liser: and the star cameos were nighmarish. they were just abrupt interruptions
liser: right
jostle: c) heavyhanded treatment of ISSUES
jostle: d) introduction of another lame and/or evil straight guy
jostle: guess what ladies? they're not all bad, and it's kind of boring to imply that
liser: ruth, you speak the truth
liser: it'd be a Better use of the straight guy if he was just a hapless but supportive sidekick
liser: like the gay man in romantic comedies
jostle: eggzachary
jostle: having ruminated upon it more, i think that the loss of Marina was a big blow to Season 2
jostle: she was sort of the Yani to Shane's yang
jostle: and someone who wasn't really in the inner circle, so to speak
liser: if you're going to have more than a certain amount of main characters, it results in a superficial, soaplike treatment of all them. Better to have a limited amount and then some blatantly minor ones
liser: Marina was a perfect minor character
liser: interesting to look at and visit with but not as important so she wasn’t a competing plotline. They knew which cog she was!
jostle: the whole Season 2 played like they just hadn't really mapped it out in advance, as if there were too many cooks in the Kitchen, all being really supportive of one another's ideas in a really unhelpful, destructive way
liser: typical lezobots!
jostle: can i take this metaphor further?
liser: take it further, sister
jostle: the season two climax was all lesbian bed-death
liser: Shane:
jostle: it's interesting. once she started to downshift out of Lothario mode early Season 2...
liser: she became almost as bad as Jenny
liser: she had this big freakout when her big studio boss tried to get with her
jostle: "everybody needs something from me!"
liser: and then she went to confession
liser: and then she was doing all the drugs
jostle: oh that was the WORST
jostle: the oxycontin freakout music?!
liser: SO FUCKING BAD
jostle: her character became so unmoored they had to start playing music that whispered SHANE SHANE SHANE in the background when she was fucking just to remind us where we were
liser: (the music in general:)
liser: (wet wet wet wet)
jostle: omigoodness i almost forgot about when she brought the twins home! twins! Twins!
jostle: (twins twins twins)
liser: i forgot about dem twins
jostle: (bed-death bed-death bed-death)
liser: that's so hot!
jostle: it was like a porn soundtrack to heat things up when they really weren't building them up properly
liser: we liked Shane before because she was a little tragic but had an understated wit about it
jostle: too true.
liser: maybe moving in with Jenny was a bad influence on her
jostle: Or Season 2 just ran her through the issue wringer
jostle: “have i ever really loved anyone?”
jostle: “where am i going with my life?”
liser: “has anyone ever really loved me....for me?”
liser: and
jostle: “what's my fashion like?”
liser: “I LIKE TIES!”
jostle: “why don't i wear glasses anymore?”
liser: the thing is, i don't expect L Word to cover every issue and person in the lesbian community
liser: but i think that the L Word tries to
jostle: they do have a show to run and it ain't ELLEN
jostle: if only it were.. then it'd be funnier
jostle: (worse dancing tho)
liser: it's like a 14 year old who wants to tackle all the issues but you know like still be cool wrote this season
jostle: i think that 14 year old lives in Jenny's pink room
liser: it had an unpleasant makeshift qualiity where if it was a liittle worse we could laugh at it and it if was a little Better we could relax into just viewing as lesbian Dynasty
jostle: well put
jostle: you knew it was bad when i looked up at the clock during the cliffhanger and was sad to see only 20 min. had passed
liser: it was like being held hostage at the bad play of a friend who is going to quit acting next year and go to law school in a few years so what’s the point of sitting through it in that drafty theater that smells like old cheese?
jostle: maybe shane should just get her own spinoff, like the hair salon she never had: SHANE
liser: i'd get my hair cut there any day
liser: if you catch my drift…
jostle: oh dear
liser: will we even watch season 3?
jostle: i think we have to see if it was just a sophomore slump, to see if they can pull it back together
jostle: really the end of Season 2 left me cold, but you never know
jostle: we know they've got new writers...
liser: yeah, but that's what is weird. they always have good people connected to the show
liser: the directors list alone is nutso
liser: ernest dickerson, lisa cholodenko, etc
jostle: true
liser: yes, but the writing has a little too much Go Fish influence
jostle: INDEED
jostle: let's put our heads together and lay on the floor and talk issues
jostle: i dug Guinevere Turner’s cameos on the show tho
liser: she's a Bette-r actress than writer
liser: but i guess because she is a big old out lesbian and not uber gorgeous she ends up writing more than she acts
liser: but when she writes, lordy, the hand it is heavy
jostle: well, if Season 3 doesn't pan out Dynasty is available on DVD now
liser: we could just turn off the sound and rename the characters with L Word character names
jostle: shane= blake carrington
liser: ok, final list
liser: different ways to spice up L word sex
liser: tantric sex
jostle: i think we're in need of a friend three-way mayhaps?
jostle: Kit getting it on with a lady? mmmaybe Ivan is coming back
liser: Jenny should stay celibate from now on, though
jostle: she should at least let someone else remove her clothes once in awhile
jostle: i'm tired of the tit flash
liser: no more urine sex
jostle: HA! what WAS that???
jostle: no more shower sex
liser: ladies, in general golden showers are not so golden
liser: and on that note, my friend. i think we have put this baby out with the bathwater
jostle: baby angelica's out of here!

Gordon Willis Speaks (Purple Rose of Cairo)

Cinematographer Gordon Willis, the man behind such films as All the President’s Men, Klute, the Godfather triptych and many of Woody Allen’s finest, has become a conscientious objector.

When I mentioned Willis to the only notorious Hollywood insider whom I call my friend, he said, “A bunch of us were wondering the other night if he were still alive.” A quick IMDB search would easily have settled that score, but it also would have revealed that Willis, 74 next week, hasn’t made a film since 1997’s The Devil’s Own. Following a Cinematographers Guild breakfast screening of the The Purple Rose of Cairo last weekend, the DP shed some insight into that disappearance when he submitted to a rather lengthy question-and-answer period for his brothers and sisters.

The Guild had been kind enough to include me in their monthly Saturday morning shindig, their version of the more traditional beery union local picnic. I’ve a soft spot for unions of all sorts, and the cinematographer’s union boys are as good a lot as any. They sit on the arms of each other’s chairs, huddle close when they tell a story, regard each other with unmitigated affection, and somehow all seem alike, regardless of age and gender and race: avuncular with regional accents and bright eyes gleaming behind thick-framed glasses. They seem like family, in other words.

It’s a good scene overall, one certainly worth a temporary exodus from the briny bogs of Cape Cod, where Willis dwells these days. And you can bet the Guild nabs the finest prints possible of whatever film they screen.

Willis looked on from the back of the Tribeca Screening Room while Rose, which has aged into a lovely timelessness, ran. One of my favorite Allen flicks, it features Jeff Daniels as screen actor Gil Shepard who in turns plays Tom Baxter, the pith helmet-clad anthropologist who steps off the screen of a black-and-white Nick and Nora-style romance into the Technicolor Depression-era New Jersey movie theater to woo hapless fan Mia Farrow (who keeps her stammering to a tolerable level here). Less of a metamovie than a lovesick valentine to the transcendent power of ‘30s-era Hollywood glamour, Rose actually carries some of the same wistful contrasts as Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. But even Allen’s worst films spring more out of magic realism than the drab nihilism that Trier seems to regard as due punishment for those frivolous enough to attend movies, so Rose is infinitely lighter in its loafers — thanks in no small part to Willis’ mastery of the visual understatement.

Afterward, the cinematographer ambled to the front of the room. He has a shock of white hair and watery blue eyes, his confidence and acumen better telegraphed by the tough NYC kid posture and voice that New England hasn’t successfully erased. He speaks easily with colorful metaphors, the way almost all union guys do, whether they be ironworkers or cinematographers. Because of that, and because he’s such a compelling character, I’m including most of his comments verbatim.

---

About Purple Rose, he said, “We shot the black-and-white movie first, including the characters’ interactions with the people in the theater, and then photographed it again in color stock as it was running in the theater.

"Working with Woody is like working with your hands in your pockets. I would say how I thought something should work and then he would say how something should work and then together we would pound the dough. He shot it with Michael Keaton first and didn’t like the effect so they had to reshoot the first two weeks again. Not as many reshots as you’d think; just embarrassing for Keaton, I’d imagine. Allen has a writer’s mentality but I tried to make it difficult for him to redo things — and it was a film in which it was very hard to redo things.

"To make the black-and-white movie [within the movie], I just picked up the light pattern of '30s movies and reconstructed it. For the rest of the film, choices were made to minimize color. Everything in the movie was sets except for the theater exterior, which was in Piermont, NJ. The interior of the theater was a real porn house in Brooklyn." [Because this fact was not greeted with loud guffaws and whistles, at this point it became obvious this wasn't a typical union.]

Willis moved into the health of movies, past and present. He’s not a big fan of technology for the sake of technology, for example. “Zooms are lazy closeups. And too many people hang their hats on video assist; it’s a way to avoid too much. Video assist helps people dissociate from the scene that they are directing. Pretty soon the director will be directing all the way from his apartment.

“Coppola and Beatty got very into it. Frances used VA from his trailer and then a speaker to communicate with the actors,” he noted with a dry grin. “But I wouldn’t suck on that tube all day long. The truth is that video assist will always show you something different than what you throw on the screen. I used it for tech check and stunts only.”

Or: “Anamorphic [widescreen technology, in uber laymen terms] is in vogue right now. The smaller the indie movie, the more anamorphic. Back when I did The Paper Chase, I told Fox to do it anamorphic. Their response — and keep in mind Fox invented anamorphic — was ‘It’s not a Western.’

“Like everything else, it’s how you use the format. Any idea in this business is like poison gas in a room. I liked the use of it better in the ’70s than now.

Another cinematographer said, “Labs are laundromats now, so how you do get repeatability these days?”

Willis’ response was succinct: “I wouldn’t know; I haven’t done a movie for six years. Last time, the lab tried to help me but there was blood over all the walls. Working on The Devil’s Own I knew you get sick if you try to fix everything for everyone. [Note: According to IMDB, eight years have elapsed since The Devil’s Own was released.]

“When doing the Godfather movies, I had trouble with continuity, of course. Decades passed between making II and III, for example. I used brassy, burnt yellow a lot. The only problem with III besides it not being a very good movie is that it used a different technique. Super 185 to blow into 70 mm. I didn’t care for that, but Francis did...”

GW is very nuts and bolts. When asked how he developed as a cinematographer, he responded: "My wife was pregnant and I needed some money." You both believe him and you don’t — he’s utilitarian but clearly also believes there’s a pride in doing your job well, no matter the job.

"Who mentored me? I guess not too many people. I did what I liked. I learned from watching at first, sure. You have to learn how to cut if you’re going to learn how to shoot well. Then I pushed through what everyone else was doing and thought I should be doing, and I did what I wanted. I was very specific about what I should do. In concert, it's luck but it’s also always your attitude.

"A director would walk around for two days trying to sort out how a shot should look and I would just say in two minutes,'I think it should be this way.’ ”

Not shockingly, Willis is an enormous proponent of less is more. “I spent a lot of time on films taking things out. Art directors would get very cross with me. If something’s not going well, my impulse is to minimalize. The impulse of most people when something’s not going well is to add — too many colors, too many items on a screen, too many lights. If you’re not careful, you’re lighting the lighting. American films are overlit compared to European ones. I like closeups shadowy, in profile — which they never do these days.

"People by nature like complexity and rarely recognize the elegance of simplicity. I like simplicity. So I just do it. I figure out what you have to say in this scene and how it connects to the last and to the next and then shoot. Today it’s what I call dumpster directing. They shoot too many angles in scenes. Two problems result: 1. It tires out the actors. 2. The editor ends up making the movie, since there’s no true point of view if you shoot it every which way.

“What’s needed is simple symmetry, but everyone wants massive coverage these days because they don’t have enough confidence in their work and there are way too many cooks in the kitchen.

"My philosophy has always been that it should look easy even if it’s hard to make.“

Someone asked him about a piece of Local 644 folklore and with a mix of chagrin and some residual pride, he said:

"Yes, it’s true. I threw a camera out on the street once during the shoot. It had broke three times, and each time they fixed it just well enough to get it running again but not enough for it to not break again. It’s a common mindset. And I’m not the type to fetishize a camera. I always say that ideally, something would have French design and German make. Because then it would work.

"Finally, I just got fed up. Each time it held up production. I threw it out, yes. You can believe the next camera they sent over was perfect. Well. I like stuff that works.”

Since not enough seems to work these days, Willis is for all practical purposes retired. He seems to think the industry and the world are in such straits that he’d prefer not to be actively involved. I talked with him alone for a second afterward and he said he worries a lot about the world that his children, and all younger people, are inheriting.

Then, he seemed less gruff than sad. Sad and unfailingly kind.

Funny Ha Ha in All Its Unglamorous Glory

Funny Ha Ha’s charm sneaks up on you in the same flatfooted, backhanded way as its characters do. Grainy, not even prettily unpretty, and superficially inarticulate, it draws less directly on Cassavetes’ cinema verité than on early John Sayles films like Return of the Secaucus 7 (the 1980 inspiration for better-known, worse-for-wear The Big Chill).

Like Sayles’ early movies, which no doubt draw in turn on Cassavetes (at that, the entire genres of reality TV and Dogme 95 should be laying wreaths at his grave), Funny Ha Ha ambles along with less of an explicit agenda than with a set of circumstances, ones that 24-year-old unemployed Marnie (Waking Life animator Kate Dollenmayer) idly nudges with her long, unmanicured toe. In Secaucus 7 especially, Sayles succeeded admirably at making plausible sexual desire between characters who, though not repulsive, wouldn’t necessarily be considered attractive by audiences watching them. That’s a lost art, for sure; a lost ambition, even, in this era when “would you fuck her/him?” prevails as the most urgent casting question (Shrek aside). And it’s an art resurrected by director Andrew Bujalski, who has captured in Funny the bloodless exchanges of a certain breed of Greater Boston-based recent grads. But that’s where the comparison between Bujalski’s and Sayles’ characters, also New England-based, stops. For whereas the Secaucus guys wring their hands over ideological questions and the wisdom of their choices, Marnie and her loose network of friends are just starting to arrive at the idea that commitment of any kind is required in life — if only in terms of committing to a clear sentence.

In his review, A.O. Scott shows his old-school colors when he describes the film as "a generational statement." The movie’s “statement,” a term that may be too strident for this mumbling venture, is at once much more universal and much more specific than that. Specifically, it’s about the type of middle-class, recent grads who proliferate Neutered England. Basically nice kids (in Boston, you’re called kid until you die) who’ve got no play.

The film looks as if it were shot back in a Slacker ‘90s, when boys and girls alike donned the androgyne uniform of unflattering jeans and ripped, unironic tee shirts, but that'd be Bostonian twentysomethings in their natural habitat in any era, alas. It’s hard to imagine how these kids will get around to procreation (or doing the things required for procreation) until you realize that they’re infinitely patient with each other as they’re all, at least, similarly socially retahded. They slouch; they’re post-ironic enough that they apologize endlessly if even a little presumptuousness creeps into their tone; they barely meet each other’s eyes; and though you suspect their alma maters weren’t community colleges, they’re hard-pressed to formulate a direct thought or request, especially if it trespasses into the world of emotions or, God forbid, carnality. (In an NPR interview, Bujalski acknowledges that all the ums, likes and you knows that his nonprofessional cast utter all like you know pretty much derive verbatim from the script).

In any other film, for example, Alex, Marnie’s unrequited love, would be the hopeless sadsack rather than the glib Lothario who dances (awkwardly) in the face of Marnie’s wistful affections. He’s got small, shifty eyes, wears white sneakers with his jeans, and mumbles rather than fumbles once he gets a girl out on her porch in the middle of the night. If you know what I mean. Watching all these characters stumble around their desires is as excruciating as watching your seventh grade math teacher (the one in a short-sleeved button-down and a pen protector) putting the mack on a girl.

But that’s the charm of the film. There isn’t a soundtrack. There are no clever pop culture references. There are no montages. There are no big showdowns. There’s nothing, in fact, to mitigate the excruciating self-consciousness of one’s 20s, which is typically aggrandized without measure in both American and European cinema alike. In Marnie’s features and body, for example, you can glimpse an inkling of a woman who may one day be beautiful, but right now is inchoate and hopelessly floppy, a female equivalent to Linklater’s Wiley Wiggins. When she applies for a position as a research assistant, the professor who interviews her seems less stodgy than self-assured, insouciant compared to Marnie and her crew's fidgety self-consciousness. Rather than wrinkled, his features seem, well, defined. And they remind us how, for most of us in the real world (the cinema verité kind as opposed to the reality TV world), one’s 20s are actually years to fast-forward through as rapidly as possible. The weight of the world-as-oyster is actually fairly intolerable.

When watching this film at Cinema Village, I was sure it'd just look like shitty public access if seen on a TV (not that CV's screens are much better). But when I got home, it was playing on the Sundance Channel, and I settled in with a surprising degree of pleasure to watch Marnie float through a sea of bad parties and awkward encounters one more time. It makes sense, though: A lot of Funny's appeal stems from its rejection of typical filmic devices; dramatic moments that would typically escalate into either slapstick or confrontation merely devolve. At one moment, for example, while Marnie is waiting for Alex in his bedroom, she happens upon some other girl’s birth control pills. She puts them away, then fiddles with his tiny wrench to an effect that is sadly, slowly funny.

Made back in 2003 and only now hitting theaters in cities like NYC, Funny Ha Ha has taken its sweet time to gain any momentum — also like its characters — but it has finally accrued the kind of critical accolades typically only awarded European film these days. And it has a sort of European feel, in its closeups and blurred edges. Even the film’s ending, obstensibly the resolution of the film’s only dramatic conflict, is swallowed rather than spat. A welcome restraint.

House of Whack(s)

House of Wax has got to be the loopiest Doublemint commercial ever made. Starring not one but three sets of errant twins — fraternal teens, fraternal serial killers, and Paris Hilton’s (fraternal) tweens — it takes more cues from '70s slash-and-gash than the J horror inspiring the recent spate of psychological terrors (the Ring franchise, vanilla bean Boogeyman). And, lo, it’s got little in common with the 1953 Vincent Price vehicle of the same name. Except for, well, wax.

This House poises a gaggle of road-tripping teens at the wrong campsite. Enter a bone-squelching, squirting set of murders, dumber-than-dirt dialogue (like, my cell reception totally sucks, you guys!) and a lot of innuendo between future has-been Chad Michael Murray as Goofus to his scrappy-sexy twin Elisha Cuthbert’s Gallant. A tortured artist who wears an ominous mask and is ace with a blade. A goofball sidekick with the now-standard video camera. A black stud making it with a flaxen nymphette, as interpreted by Paris-Barbie Hilton. Box-office gold, in other words, for who’d resist watching that corporation-unto-herself put into, uh, bankruptcy once and for all? With no less than a pole rammed through her least vital organ, as my colleague delicately pointed out.

Which brings me to my three cents:

1. Never has a movie invited more Mystery Science 3000 narration. Best for DVD, albeit with the parental warning: To be watched in the comfort of your own snark.
2. Any Moral Majority that would have me as a member (or is that any member that would have me as its Moral Majority?) would be protesting the movie's violence-as-porn already.
3. I am convinced that the under-25 airess has submitted to botox already. Insert Paris Hilton wax joke here, dollbabies. I'm just too underwhelmed.

Dickless Jane (Klute with Just a Dash of Leaving Las Vegas)

The sudden reemergence of The Many Faces of Lady Leotard Hanoi Jane Vadim Hayden Turner Fonda (a possibly ill-advised return from retirement, the new book) has inspired me to revisit Klute (1971). In it, she portrays Bree, a stalked prostitute who balls detective Donald Sutherland and conveys her feelings clinically to her therapist as if they were co-workers rather than doctor and client. Like everything else connected to Fonda, her depiction of Bree shouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is.

Fonda never, no matter what the role, loses her clipped, boarding-school diction — which has a condescending effect though she likely intends the opposite. Somehow depicting working-class women (as in Stanley and Iris) or merely working women (as in Klute) who speak so precisely and stridently rings hollow — as if she holds these women at such bay that she is speaking of them rather than climbing inside them.

But in Klute she manages to evoke that terrible hush that creeps into a life unpopulated by real human connection in every moment. Even Sutherland seems uncharacteristically muted in her presence. In her poorly lit rooms, as she smokes dope, leafs through books, stares down her ugly walls with all the weight of one who knows that silence is threatening to extend forever, she really does relay the grimness of a woman who has accepted she’s fallen through the cracks. Who accepts that she is doing nothing to steer from the path she’s charted by default, that she’s surrendered so fully to her isolation that she luxuriates in it as if it were bathwater still warm though dirty. You believe she can tolerate no intruder save her cat entirely, and that kindness unwires her, angers her, however irrational she recognizes that fact to be.

Klute is not a terrific movie by any stretch of the imagination; it falls prey to many ‘70s movies pitfalls, including poorly built suspense (a high, female voice singing to a single piano note does not in itself conjure fear) and self-important pauses. The first time I saw that movie I’d been alone for a long, long time, though, and it felt so familar that it was as if I were kissing my own arm.

*Also, why hasn't anyone pointed out that Shue’s prostitute character in Leaving Las Vegas draws so much on Fonda’s Bree? Both women stride about with the same very middle-class, can-do assertiveness rather than brassiness, and both films deploy that oy-vey storytelling technique of the women confiding in their shrinks while jazz trumpets blare bleakly.

Ebertfest Remainders: Boys II Men (Mario Van Peebles, Jason Patric, Guy Maddin, Darrell Roodt)

Classic me to still dwell on Ebertfest eight days later, especially since I saw a bunch of Tribeca screenings last week that merit discussion. But I’ve a bit more to say before I lay it to rest, and Tribeca, well, everyone chatters about Tribeca. Much more delicious to linger in the land of Steak N Shake. I swear after this I will lay yesterday’s lunch aside.

It’s just I was struck by the presiding theme of boys transitioning to men. Mario Van Peebles, the scion of madcap Melvin (he of Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song), won me over but good when he spoke at length about childrearing at a women and film panel on which we both spoke. I like, not love, Mario’s Baadasssss!, which for sure deserved more press and population than it garnered. Its strength stemmed from dry humor and big convictions, but what struck me most about the film, focusing on how his dad (played by Mario clad in black and a sober expression) wrung out Sweet Sweet despite wildly extenuating circumstances, is where it didn’t go. As a dad, Melvin was clearly a bust in the way that many groundbreaking artists tend to be. His rampant narcissism prevented him from placing first the needs of his own children, especially Mario, whom he forced to enact a sex scene that no professional child actor would today be allowed to enact. Obviously, how Mario feels about his dad is his own business, but I couldn’t help but suspect that his unwillingness to fully strip down that cultural linchpin called his dad resulted in a certain surfaceness in his own movie. He scratches at it, but a deeper, untreated wound still lurks as the elephant in every scene.

The result of that hit-or-miss childhood, however, is that he’s a clear thinker and a really kick-ass dad. He said many things on the panel and in the question-and-answer discussion that I’m still mulling a full week later, but my favorite (besides the eminently quotable “There’s a Baldwin for every budget”) was “We have an obligation to continue the conversation that our culture begins.” It was in reaction to a parent’s expressed concern about the impact of the media on her kids. He’s right. These days, we can’t entirely monitor or censor what children, or anyone, watches. But we can make it a dialogue. A 24-7 Mystery Science Theater 3000. Mario lit up most when speaking about his kids, whom he featured in a little short he made called Baadasssss Grandkids. I wish he were my dad.

Along the same lines, Jason Patric (grandson of Jackie Gleason) surprised the hell out of me when he spoke with Ebert when After Dark, My Sweet (1990) screened. Patric’s career could be most charitably described as bumpy, and he directly addressed that fact with a frankness that seemed to take even him by surprise. Basically, he acknowledged that after Lost Boys, (which my friends and I loved loved loved at the time, and which still tickles my fancy even now), he was loathe to cash in on his teen-king status by starring in the usual spate of action movies. Likewise after the misbegotten Speed 2 (which Ebert hastened to acknowledge he liked; ah, the cheese stands alone), he didn’t jump at the offers that appeared, at least until box-office returns were counted. The result was that the clamorers became naysayers, Patric explained slowly with a low level of amusement. Or at least bemusement. His refusals were perceived as holier than thou rather than as simple no’s by La-la bigwigs, and he's been kind of blacklisted since. He still works a lot, cutting his chops in theater and the odd but well-received project. Narc, for example, was terribly underrated; everytime it plays on Showtime, it stops me in my tracks. But where he’s to go now as a Hollywood player mystifies him as much as anyone.

What occurred to me while he was talking, with a marked lack of surliness, I might add, is that Patric has a chance to accomplish something very few American male actors really achieve: transition from a boy to a man. Seriously, very few American men, whether it be in Hollywood or elsewhere, really ever step into grownup shoes. Even their features remain painfully boyish, albeit with a few smile lines and stray grey hairs, as they age. And it’s not to their advantage as artists. Youth remains impervious to all but black and white, and it’s the colors that lend art any lasting weight or intrigue. By suffering a bit, by being forced by either the powers-that-be or his own prescient unconscious to marinate on the sidelines, Patric has been granted the chance to develop into a fine actor with all the gravity and stillness of a man. It’ll be interesting to see whether the landscape of American film makes room for him. When I said as much to him at ye olde S n S, he responded that he hoped it’d work that way — while his lip inadvertently curled. But politely, I swear.

Also of note: A true Canadian, Guy Maddin, he of the movies Lynch only wishes he’d remained pure enough to make, is as mild-mannered and sweet-tempered as his films are spiky and flamboyant. That said, he did reveal in a discussion that he has a very rare neurological disorder in which, unless medicated, he experiences phantom fingers randomly prodding various parts of his body. Hear ye, hear ye: The phantom limbs of all his films doth be officially explained.

And, finally, Yesterday, one of 2004’s foreign film Oscar nominations, made me cry like a teenaged girl three weeks late. Somber, still and terrifically brave, it’s the story, relayed in a Swahili dialect, of a young, small-village mother who discovers her mostly MIA husband has infected her with HIV. When the lights came up, I was still crying, and my only consolation was that so was pretty much everyone else. Including Ebert himself, who surely had seen the film a few times if he’d decided to include it in his festival. Talk about Boys II Men, for when South African director Darrell Roodt bounded on stage and started jabbering to Ebert, “Wow, you’re crying!” I stopped in my tracks. That he was white and clownish was surprise enough. I kept waiting for his hypoglycemic-child-going-at-the-birthday-cake affect to wear away, but it didn’t. Let the record show that you cannot judge a film by its director’s cover. Because the film is, er, not to be overlooked.