Heights director Chris Terrio isn't afraid of Virginia Woolf

July 10, 2005|Dressed in a New York uniform of black-on-black and in town for a cup of coffee to discuss his feature debut, the Big Apple roundelay Heights, Chris Terrio is slight and slightly nervous. Modeled loosely after Shakespeare's "Macbeth", the film is defiantly literary in its approach to metaphors and doppelgängers–something that makes sense when one considers Mr. Terrio's background as a Harvard and Cambridge-bred English scholar who turned his attentions away from academia's air-conditioned Ivory Tower to toil in the boiler room of cinema and its attendant indignities of PR tours and ink-stained wretches. When I met Mr. Terrio, I was so exhausted I had prepared mainly by watching his film a second time an hour before getting in the car and hunting down a stray, orphan quote attributed to a "Chris Terrio" commenting on Cambridge by way of Harvard. I wasn't at all certain that they were one and the same person, but deadlines and borderline depression being what they are, I was ready to make an ass of myself. The happy discovery, of course, is that Mr. Terrio is delightful: self-effacing, smart, and still-vital in the way of a young filmmaker not yet soured on his profession and his peers–who hasn't learned that it's become all but verboten in the modern mediascape to admit to loving Lars von Trier and hating the low bestial tingle-moments that lace crap like Cinderella Man, and to have something passionate to say about culture, such as it is fresh into the twenty-first century.

June 12, 2005|I met Greg Harrison on a sunny Colorado day. Lanky and stylish, if a little over-dressed for the temperature in black pinstripe-on-pinstripe, his appearance betrayed a man who's been living out of a suitcase and looking at the indistinguishable insides of hotels. In town to pimp November, his sophomore follow-up to Groove, Mr. Harrison has surprising heroes and an interesting story of how he got into the business; a shame that his film is an empty experiment in styles and homages that tend to titillate the festival audience–where November has found its momentum–but infuriate or bore the wider audience to which the picture now aspires. It looks great, but it's a gimmick stretched just barely long enough to fit the "feature" description. Mr. Harrison seems like a smart guy with a good, healthy respect for the history of alternative cinema. Here's hoping his next project is up to his speed.

June 5, 2005|There's perhaps no better illustration of the generation gap between Chinese persons who've grown up in the United States and their immigrant parents than sitting down at a table in the conference area of Denver's Hotel Monaco with Joan Chen, crowned the "Chinese Elizabeth Taylor" at the tender age of 14, and Alice Wu, the young former software engineer making her writing/directing debut with the lesbian ethnic sitcom Saving Face. Resplendent at 44, Ms. Chen has a deliberate way of speaking that's almost as intimidating as the fact that she never once met my eyes, while Ms. Wu, talking fast, using her hands, addressed me in a way forthright, almost aggressive. I felt admonished more than once by Ms. Chen as she talked about the creative arts as essentially selfish, and I felt challenged a time or two out of the blue by the irrepressible Ms. Wu, who chose to take adversarial positions on a few occasions where there wasn't any kind of natural polarity. Two different ways of approaching conversation, both instantly recognizable from my own experiences with a Chinese mother and father and the women with whom they would occasionally set me up before I did the near-unthinkable and married a white girl. Blonde, too. You could hear the screams back in Nanking–and Cape Cod, come to think of it.

April 3, 2005|I caught a late-night screening of Nimród Antal's Kontroll during the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival that was packed thanks to buzz that had been spreading ever since the film was honoured with the 23rd Prix de la Jeunesse in the Un certain regard category at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Alive with ideas and images, Kontroll combines western sensibilities and a peculiar Eastern Bloc social awareness–a little bit of surrealism and a little bit of Jungian archetype-building. It alone has the potential to rejuvenate a Hungarian film industry made moribund by the fall of the Iron Curtain, and it was written and directed by a California boy who moved to Hungary at the age of 17.

February 6, 2005|I misled Dan Harris. I didn't mean to, but had I meant to, it would've been with the best of intentions. This is how it went down:

I met the young Mr. Harris on the promenade of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts one autumn-touched evening last October. We shook hands and I took note of how furtive he looked–too small in a plain jacket, particularly for the wunderkind who, under the good graces of director Bryan Singer, has found himself as the screenwriter of not only X2, but also Singer's upcoming reimaginings of Logan's Run and Superman. He earned this luck in part based on the strength of his screenplay for Imaginary Heroes, now freshly-produced and opening wide as his hyphenate debut. Mr. Harris had, unfortunately, read my capsule review of Imaginary Heroes preparatory to meeting me (he confessed that he reads his press), and after we found a seat in an abandoned open air café, he thought it prudent to tell me so while sprinkling the rest of our conversation with evidence that he'd all but memorized the piece.

January 23, 2005|Niels Mueller is part of a graduating class at Tufts that includes Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria, and his collaborator on Tadpole, director Gary Winick, and he may have trumped them all in terms of size of splash with The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Financed in part by Alfonso Cuarón, Leonardo DiCaprio, and USC film-school buddy Alexander Payne and starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, Mueller's hyphenate debut was invited to show at the Cannes Film Festival and is now trickling into theatres across the nation, at the tail end of one of the most contentious election years in recent memory. Although The Assassination of Richard Nixon doesn't pack the emotional punch of Taxi Driver, the film to which it has invited the most (and not at all unfavourable) comparisons, Mueller has a good eye for composition, a good ear for dialogue (particularly in a small cameo tour de force from Michael Wincott), and a good head for the topical project. After a quick chat about the state of modern film criticism, Mr. Mueller, sounding an awful lot like Alexander Payne over the telephone, spoke at length on the subject of his first feature.