Ray Pride

How the heck does an average moviegoer keep up with movie choices?

It's been more than a decade since I've kept up with movies by scouring the listings, seeing what's cheap at the Logan or hiding out at the Davis or on the biggest possible screen, like River East 21, figuring what evenings were free, if a double feature would be double the fun, keeping tabs of what friend enjoyed going to which kinds of movies.

It's a privilege, being a movie reviewer. Film festivals like Sundance and Toronto are enormous cornucopias, where you can choose a dozen or three movies that suit your own interests and the likely tastes of your readers. Smaller, regional festivals, like in Vancouver and Thessaloniki, Greece, and Buenos Aires can show how movies are loved or reviled in other cultures. Plus the regular weekly gig: there's a potential of ten or fifteen movies being previewed during the day week in and week out. It's all information, and it never stops. Some reviewers try to be completists, seeing everything. (Roger Ebert, aren't your eyes tired?) Seeing movies in a small, comfortable, private screening room, projected by a tenacious and devoted entrepreneur, is also something to value, despite the smells of vile lunches, the guys who yo-yo the thermostat up and down during screens from chilly to toasty, and the intermittent gales of weirdly inappropriate I-got-the-joke-yuk-yuk laughter.

Eleven movies open for at least a week's run this Friday. "Manito," which I saw most of at Sundance, seemed to be a sweet, earnest portrait of an ethnic enclave. "Hollywood Homicide" made me laugh at its wacky moments; there's more in my interview with avid raconteur Ron Shelton. A Hindi film that not even the Internet Movie Database knows anything about. Plus "28 Days Later," Danny Boyle's chiller about a SARS-like virus depopulating the planet, has sneak previews.

People are always apologizing for asking me about movies, which I have no problem with. I love them, and when a movie's rotten, I'm in love with lost potential: it's easier to learn from a flubbed film than from one that seems perfect. I'm terrible at coming up with lists. "What have you seen that's good lately?" makes me want to say, "Don't you read the paper?" But I never do. Once we get to talking about what makes some movie tick, especially one that I don't get at all, like "The Royal Tenenbaums," it's the best kind of feeling. I've started asking my own questions: are you part of that unquantified, supposedly burgeoning audience that's not comprised of boys and men under 25? Do you see three in a month in a theater? Five? Or are you one of those popcorn-and-red-wine tripleheader DVD evening people? Or someone who watches everything every made by a director in a fell swoop of a weekend?

The answers always surprise me. But so does that list of new releases now that the sun's out and finally, June, we're no longer the Wintry City. How many niches are out there, I have to wonder. Sometimes it seems there's more screens than there is art. A month of small, average movies? No fun. A couple of the films opening are veterans of the festival circuit; unlike next week's "Whale Rider" and Aki Kaurismaki's brilliantly deadpan "The Man Without a Past" at the end of the month, they haven't been audience favorite award winners.

To my dismay, several colleagues liked "Respiro," (pictured) an Italian sun-sea-and-madwoman melodrama by Emanuele Crialese. One went so far as to esteem it as "sui generis," as something they had not seen before. Let's see: experienced actress (Valerio Golino) goes photogenically mad against the killingly rich azure of a fish-filled sea on an island near western Sicily; colorful urchin boys swear and tease and taunt each other, alternately half-naked or naked as they pull pranks and grow concerned as mom's acting out (and acting) becomes less and less explicable. The story could be timeless; the clichés certainly are. A haunting final image is attenuated to the point that it seems the whole point of the film being distributed, if not being made. (Or the occasional nudity of comely signorina Golino.)

"Sweet Sixteen" from socially conscious English director Ken Loach is a far calmer spectacle: a chance to witness a young actor who holds the screen as fixedly as weather. Martin Compston stars as Liam, a pimply, lithe force of nature, a Scot boy not quite sixteen who falls into increasingly clever and dangerous crime schemes in order to provide for his mother, who'll be released from jail in time for his sixteenth birthday. She took the fall for her boyfriend, who continues to deal drugs along with Liam's mean-spirited grandfather.

Like in Loach's earlier working-class dramas "Riff-Raff" and "Raining Stones," the profane-yet-comic never-despairing dialogue is subtitled. (Not every iteration of "feck" and "fecking" makes it onto print.) It's a sad story, but exhilarating, and it never turns didactic, as Loach's lesser work tends to do. Paul Laverty, who wrote Loach's memorable "My Name is Joe," simply lays out the facts: bad place, bad time, few choices, charismatic boy, there but for the grace of... Liam's future is uncertain; Compston's, you have to hope, will be onscreen. Like the best movies, Loach and Laverty gently, confidently lead us toward feeling instead of simply holding an opinion.

"Respiro" and "Sweet Sixteen" open Friday at Landmark Century.

(2003-06-11)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Critics, unlike audiences, are prone to fearing the line between sentiment and sentimentality, tending to dwell on the question, when does a film have heart and when it is shamelessly plucking the heartstrings?
(2003-06-04)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-06-04)

The day the clown cried
Andrew Jarecki met an angry clown and decided it would make a nice short documentary.
(2003-06-04)

Renaissance mannerism
In "A Decade Under the Influence," writer-director-raconteur Paul Schrader notes that after the 1960s, the studio system was "a decaying whorehouse that had to be assaulted." But now the accountants are running the whorehouse.
(2003-06-04)

Tip of the Week
(2003-05-28)

Short Runs
(2003-05-28)

Cool work
(2003-05-28)

Sloppy firsts
(2003-05-28)

Short Runs
(2003-05-21)

The Woo of art
(2003-05-21)

Spin control
(2003-05-21)

Summer Film 2003
(2003-05-21)

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