Also this issue:

Jack's Back
The caustic About Schmidt showcases Jack Nicholson’s greatest performance in decades.
-Sam Adams

Straight to the Points
The Two Towers cuts to the chase.
-Sam Adams

Gunga Din
Gangs of New York is an epic so noisy you can't hear a thing.
-Sam Adams

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Life, art and fantasy get jumbled up in Adaptation.
-Cindy Fuchs

December 19-25, 2002

screen picks

by Sam Adams

Contempt / Sunset Boulevard ($39.95/$24.99 DVD) Is Adaptation, as the Village Voice would have it, "the smartest movie of the year"? Well, maybe -- if it's the only movie you've seen. Like Being John Malkovich, the Jonze-Kaufman gang's previous salvo, Adaptation cons its audience into feeling like they're in on an exceedingly obvious joke. Even if it's told with energy and flair, it's still a one-liner. (I went back to see it a second time, and went from mildly amused to disappointed when I realized I'd caught every nuance the first time, which isn't that hard when a movie is all surface.) As with BJM, Adaptation's fans seem woefully ignorant of what's gone before -- either that, or they're just hungry for the po-mo equivalent of a popcorn flick. Adaptation may be savvy enough to offer up a serial killer named "The Deconstructionist," but there's precious little deconstruction going on. You need something to deconstruct first.

Luckily, context is just around the corner. Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 Contempt, recently committed to double DVD, is as blatant as Adaptation in its picking-apart of cinematic convention, but Contempt recognizes a reality outside the world of movies (even while allowing that reality is never seen on screen without passing through filters). In a 20-minute sequence that falls in the middle of the movie, aspiring screenwriter Paul (Michel Piccoli) and his girlfriend, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), engage in a domestic dispute, walking through the rooms of their Italian apartment. Though Fritz Lang, who plays a German director (named, of course, Fritz Lang) in the film, famously comments that Cinemascope is "only good for snakes and funerals," legendary cameraman Raoul Coutard uses the widescreen to separate Bardot and Piccoli, most notably in one shot where the camera tracks from left to right and back, moving from Bardot on one end to Piccoli on the other, and always passing a lamp in the middle which turns on and off at random. The film, Godard's first (and last) experiment with a larger budget and known stars, was a compromised entity from the start, but it works the compromises into the plot, most famously in the opening scene, where Godard responded to the producers' demand that he include shots of a naked Bardot by inserting an opening scene where the lovers lie unamorously in bed and discuss how odd it is that you can go to the movies and see a woman's naked ass.

Contempt isn't Godard's most cohesive movie, and it shows traces of the knee-jerk anti-Hollywoodism that smeared last year's In Praise of Love: Jack Palance's headstrong producer (whose name is an amalgam of the movie's real-life financiers) is so ludicrously crass he's not even a caricature: He's like a prick with legs (which might explain Palance's stiff delivery). And Camille's abrupt decision that she has "contempt" for her husband is so arbitrary (in timing, if not in sentiment) that it's tantamount to misogyny. Godard never again tried to subvert the system; after chasing off paparazzi for three months, he must have decided he was better off all the way outside the system.

Criterion's disc comes with a host of alternate viewpoints, from critic Robert Stam's commentary (a little too heavy on grand themes, and skimpy on the close analysis) to a fascinating filmed conversation between Godard and Lang conducted in 1967. Though it's called "The Dinosaur

and the Baby," it's Lang who seems to have the fresher viewpoint, his faith in the audience still strong.

Sunset Boulevard, of course, dates from pre-postmodern times, which means Billy Wilder has to work his insights into the narrative rather than extraneously commenting on it. But that doesn't prevent the film's acid wit from piercing through. On one level, Wilder's gothic satire is a game played with the audience, a fact that becomes devilishly clear in its last few minutes: First, we find out that the movie's narrator has been regaling us from beyond the grave, and then dethroned silent movie vamp Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) threatens to swallow the camera, even the theater, whole, engulfing the lens in a final shot that's both horror-movie hyperbole and an assault on the fourth wall. Like Godard, Wilder drafts movie industries and their real-life histories into his story: Though Erich von Stroheim isn't playing "Erich von Stroheim," he's a Prussian silent film visionary whose career was ruined by the flop of a Norma Desmond vehicle, just as the final nail in Stroheim's cinematic coffin was the failure of the Swanson-starring Queen Kelly. Hedda Hopper and Buster Keaton turn up as themselves, and Cecil B. DeMille has a substantial role as well (for which he was apparently handsomely paid). Sunset Boulevard attacks the movie industry, not film itself, but there's something inevitable about the process of decay it suggests, enough so that it's impossible to conceive a way of making films that doesn't steal their creators' souls. What's at stake isn't self-conscious flimflammery, but the whole idea that emotions can be captured on (and by) film. For all its chicanery, that's several layers deeper than Adaptation dares to go.

Sundance Shorts All Day (Sat., Dec. 21, 6 a.m.-Sun., Dec. 22, 6 a.m., Sundance Channel) With the holiday season in full swing, movies tend to creep toward the three-hour mark, but who has 179 minutes for The Two Towers or 168 for Gangs of New York when there's shopping to be done and holiday-party hangovers to be weathered? Better to take in your entertainment in short doses and wait for the multiplex crowds to subside. (A little bit of insider info for you: Two Towers will still be playing in January.) Whether it's a brief respite from belated tree-trimming or a more edifying equivalent of a televised yule log, Sundance Channel's 24-hour shorts showcase offers an opportunity to catch up on art, the short form.

Unfortunately, the shorts are arranged alphabetically, which means you'll have to get up with the chickens to catch the funny, even sweet Anna is Being Stalked (toward the end of the 6-8 a.m. block), in which an inept albino stalker pursues an irritated (but never really threatened) woman. 10 a.m. brings the intriguingly titled Blixa Bargeld Stole My Cowboy Boots, while just after noon comes new work from the ever-provocative Jay Rosenblatt. Sometime before 4 p.m. comes a trio of noteworthy H's: Guy Maddin's edit-intensive quasi-Eisenstein melodrama, The Heart of the World; Ari Gold's Helicopter, which chronicles his reaction to his mother's death (in the helicopter crash that killed legendary rock promoter Bill Graham) with a variety of varyingly successful techniques; and Emily Hubley's Her Grandmother's Gift, feminist historical criticism from the Hedwig and the Angry Inch animator. Hubley returns in the 10 p.m. slot with the lyrical autobiography Pigeon Within; the two-hour block is bookended by the nifty Palíndromo, which tells its story backwards, and local filmmaker Shanti Thakur's Seven Hours to Burn. And somewhere in the 8-10 p.m. block is Naked Pavement, a profile of photographer Spencer Tunick. From About a Girl to Zen and the Art of Landscaping, it's 24 hours of TV without a trace of It's a Wonderful Life. (Which, incidentally, screens at the Prince on the 23rd.)