Ray Pride

I'm usually offended only by movies that are truly awful and misguided. Then there's the rare case where a film that truly makes my skin crawl has hit me in such a personal way that takes me a few months or even years to understand why. Bernard Rose's "ivansxtc.," which I first saw as projected video at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000, was one of those movies. Rose sold the picture and himself as the future of movies originated on and distributed through video, and I was at the end of my rope. But it's a movie that's stayed with me, particularly Danny Huston's performance as a failing Hollywood agent, a dying man, at the end of a L.A. dark-dusk-of-the soul life. Huston's character confronts his imminent death by lung cancer in an embodiment drenched with denial and magical thinking, and it redeems the various clichés collated about actors, Hollywood, cocaine and self-loathing. It's much more than maudlin self-pity: It's an unwavering portrait of a particular kind of pain, a specific sort of blindness that is the essence of contemporary male self-pity. Based on a short story by Tolstoy.

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