Ray Pride

Sometimes you lose yourself in movies and other times you look longingly, lingeringly at the softly lighted exit signs on either side of the screen.

Gangster spoofs, gangsta riffs, a middle-aged man/woman/gay man/lesbian comes out/has a midlife crisis/determines their true need. Film festivals seldom fail to offer a few surprises or outrages or outright discoveries, but much of what we call American independent moviemaking stinks less of ambition, mad folly and visual poetry that no one else could have discerned, than of ambition and vanity. (Sometimes it feels like the pages of screenwriting how-to books are being flipped repeatedly in your face.) That's one of the reasons I've been a persistent defender of baby-faced young wild man Harmony Korine, writer-for-hire on Larry Clark's "Kids" and writer-director of "Gummo" and "julien donkey-boy." Korine's been accused of a being a careerist, of seeking the role of bad boy, but I can't knock someone who knowingly discourses on the most important art and avant-garde directors like Fassbinder, Godard and Herzog (and even Buster Keaton), and more importantly, their films. The Sundance Channel's ongoing monthly "Conversations in World Cinema" series, which has produced edifying installments with Jane Campion, Atom Egoyan, Mike Leigh and Claire Denis, turns in July to Korine. Film Society of Lincoln Center director Richard Pena is an enthusiastic interlocutor, drawing out the unrepentant purveyor of "mistake-ism." Most notable for followers of Korine's darkly hilarious Harmonic vaudevilles is his notorious, unfinished "Fight" film. He insists it wasn't a spoof-"I can't goof," he insists-but admits that when he started the project, "I was really delusional," in his conception of a movie that would be "a cross between Buster Keaton and a snuff film." Korine's young; more to come.

There's an argument among some movie observers, and no doubt, executives and producers, about whether the goal of large-scale films today is to sell you an experience, or the idea of an experience. Rather than delivering forceful, unexpected drama, it may be enough to pre-sell the sort of thrill you are to take away, a sturdy notion to carry throughout your anticipation and watching of the work. One of the greatest advertising graphics of the 1980s suffered serious dissonance with the movie that audiences actually saw. John Milius made a what-if-the-Commies-took-over movie called "Red Dawn," and while crackerjack in its own crackpot way, the poster is superb: a bucolic small town nestled amid hill and valley, seen at distance, at dawn, with paratroopers dusting the stretches of the sky and one-sheet. (No such image appears in Milius' harangue.) Watching the first trailer for "Pearl Harbor," the World War II romantic epic being cobbled together even now by Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and the penny-pinchers at Disney, I was in awe of the scene set by a minute or so of footage. We see a few idealized glimpses of activity at dawn near Christmas in the apple-cheeked Hawaiian environs around Pearl Harbor: wash hung out to dry; Sunday papers being read; lovers dipping beneath the surf; tiny girls with fairy wings dancing slow-motion past a period Santa cut-out; a kid on the mound about to throw a baseball. Then the low drone and haze of bombers cutting across the land toward the military installation, blotting the sky, wings emerging from beneath the camera, daubed with the Japanese markings of the red rising sun. It's a brilliant, elegiac montage, a thrilling icon to sell the picture. Then bombs burst. Then Ben Affleck is on screen. Ben Affleck is yelling and firing a gun. Ben Affleck is acting mad. Then I am bored. Then Cuba Gooding Jr. is yelling and firing a gun. End of trailer. End of attention span. But that first, rustic portion of "Pearl Harbor," shorn of melodrama and head-spinningly fast cutting, at least, should be an astonishment.

"Conversations in World Cinema: Harmony Korine" premieres on the Sundance Channel, July 13, and also runs on July 16, 22, 26 and 31. "Pearl Harbor" opens Memorial Day 2001. (2000-07-06)

Also by Ray Pride

RIDERS ON THE STORM
Big, billowing studio epics usually don't get called "a piece of craft" nowadays; it's a different "c" word we've gotten used to applying.
(2000-06-29)

MADE FOR WALKING
Solnit's story is wry and seductive, threading in Virginia Woolf, poets Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara in Manhattan, the near-comic struggles to think through problems on foot as performed by Kierkegard and Rousseau.
(2000-06-29)

WAR IS MEL
"The Patriot," directed by Roland Emmerich from a script by "Saving Private Ryan"'s Robert Rodat, is a robust, powerful melodrama that blooms under Gibson's accustomed tortured presence.
(2000-06-22)

Eyeball Kicks
Bjork has her virtues.
(2000-06-15)

I Forgive Michael Bay
(2000-06-08)

KUNG FLU
(2000-05-25)

GRACE NOTES
(2000-05-25)

RESTAURANTO
(2000-05-25)

WOODY OF THE DESERT
(2000-05-18)

WHO'S THE KING?
(2000-05-11)

EYEBALL KICKS
(2000-05-04)

PIECES OF TIME
(2000-05-04)

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