Erase This

‘Tape’ is an aggravating farce

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It used to be said of Truffaut that every other movie by him was worthwhile. In following the magical Waking Life with the deadly Tape, Richard Linklater upholds that tradition.

This shot-on-tape picture is set in a room at the Motor Palace Motel in Lansing, Michigan. Johnny (the ever juvenile Robert Sean Leonard), a third-rate independent filmmaker in town for the Lansing Film Festival, drives by to visit Vince (Ethan Hawke), his friend from high school, who has become a half-wrecked drug dealer.

The two men have a bone to pick: Ten years ago, Johnny injured a woman, Amy (Uma Thurman), they both knew. Amy is about to make a surprise visit to the motel, much to Johnny’s discomfort. She’s now an assistant district attorney, so if she wants legal revenge against Johnny, she’s in the position to get it.

Linklater needed a young John Malkovich, or even a Matt Dillon, to play Vince. He got the aristocratic Hawke, as spuriously working-class as the temporary tattoos on his shoulder blades. Also too well-bred is Thurman, the injured woman.

Ah, but was she injured? Is Johnny exaggerating the night in question? Has the drug-addled Vince dreamed up the tale? I hate truth games. Couldn’t we just play Scrabble?

Thurman’s Amy seems like what she is: a celebrity descending into the world of underground film. Grilled by these two men, she gets a dreamy, half-amused-half-contemptuous look, as if she were on the David Letterman show and Dave had just asked her a rude question. Linklater should have hired someone a little less glamorous. (Thurman is Mrs. Hawke; they were a package deal.)

Wouldn’t a DA–assistant or otherwise–have a professional dislike for the kind of lies flying around this dingy room? Even the most inspirationally challenged film director learns some elementary people manipulation skills. Where are Johnny’s? Also, I think your average drug dealer has enough common sense not to invite an assistant DA into a room full of marijuana smoke, no matter what presumption he might have of friendship from 10 years ago.

Linklater keeps the film from being visually claustrophobic; it’s just the acting and the material that make you yearn for fresh air. The film has a clammy, painful subject, just right for some dangerous drama. Ariel Dorfman’s frightening play Death and the Maiden offers almost identical material, for example.

Tape, however, is stifled by its iron-clad concept. For most of the script (written by Stephen Belber and based on his one-act play), Johnny is a guilty man. He’s certain of what happened that fateful night. Wouldn’t it have made more drama if he’d been too drunk and didn’t know for sure?

Tape is essentially a malformed child of Sam Shepard’s True West: the adventures of two brothers (here, best friends) gnawing at each other about their pasts. Tape may be seriously intentioned work, but it’s essentially frivolous. It’s akin to the breed of aggravating farces wherein 15 seconds of conversation would untangle the mess.

‘Tape’ opens Friday, Dec. 7, at Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, 551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa. For details, see or call 707/525-4840.

From the December 6-12, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Head Games

Hollywood hypnotist analyzes ‘Shallow Hal’

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation.

Controversy buzzes around Shallow Hal, a new movie by the oft-controversial Farrelly Brothers in which a not nice guy (Jack Black) is hypnotized into thinking that a 300-pound social worker looks like Gwyneth Paltrow. When the hypnosis wears off, the chastened fellow is forced to learn a lesson about inner beauty vs. outward appearance.

The movie is a hit, though a divisive one. Across America, people of large size have been strongly objecting to the movie’s sometimes demeaning slapstick humor–as when the fat girl jumps into a pool and displaces all the water, propelling some swim-suited kid into a tree.

But another oft-maligned segment of our society is also having a strong reaction to the film: professional hypnotists.

“I’ve been getting a lot of calls,” says hypnotist Kevin Stone. “Just today some guy calls up and says, ‘Yeah, I’m looking for a hypnotist to come to our office party and make all the guys think all the girls are good looking, just like in that movie Shallow Hal.’

“I think hypnosis may be getting a big boost from this movie–which is a plus, because most movies make hypnotists look really bad.”

An affable, somewhat mysterious-looking gentleman, Stone is known far and wide as the Hollywood Hypnotist, a somewhat ironic moniker since it is Hollywood, in part, that has given hypnotists the decidedly malevolent image that Stone is eager to reverse.

One of America’s most successful practitioners of hypnosis, Stone holds down a thriving therapy practice in Hollywood. Something of a historian, Stone has amassed a vast collection of movies dealing with hypnosis and hypnotists, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari up to more recent efforts such as Stir of Echoes (Kevin Bacon is hypnotized into seeing ghosts) and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (David Ogden Stiers turns Woody Allen into a cat burglar). Most of these cast hypnosis in a negative light.

Along comes Shallow Hal, a high profile film that Stone first approached with modest amounts of professional fear and trembling. But he was surprised by what he saw.

“It’s an interesting premise,” Stone says. “And for once–unlike in Curse of the Jade Scorpion–they utilized hypnosis in what I feel is a very positive way.”

So he likes it?

“I liked it, sure,” Stone admits. “It’s ridiculous, but it shows that hypnosis can be used to do more than, you know, make people cluck like chickens and rob banks. Which is how movies usually show hypnosis.

“If you really want to see hypnosis performed in a true, positive way,” he continues, “take a look at K-Pax. They’re doing a regression there that is absolutely accurate.”

In K-Pax, Kevin Spacey, as a mental patient claiming to be from another planet, undergoes a spooky, hypnotic regression performed by his doctor, played by Jeff Bridges. Says Stone, “The way Jeff Bridges does the hypnosis, using his voice, and the verbiage he uses, is right on! I thought it was very clean.”

According to Stone, these recent films point to a slight shift in Hollywood’s representation of hypnosis, which may in turn alter the public’s perception about what hypnosis is really capable of.

“The stuff in Shallow Hal is possible, sure, to a degree,” allows Stone. “The stuff in Jade Scorpion, not possible. K-Pax, definitely. That’s true hypnosis.”

So while Stone can expect more requests to make people think they’re seeing Gwyneth Paltrow–“I’m already getting those kinds of requests, absolutely,” he says–his hope is that fewer people will be nervous that he’ll covertly turn them into a criminal–or worse, a duck.

“Honestly,” Stone laughs, “if I had those kinds of powers, do you think I’d still be working for living?”

From the November 29-December 5, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Running on Empty

Listless ‘Spy Game’ is all over the map

By

Brad Pitt, as agent Tom Bishop, awaits death in a Chinese prison. He’ll die at exactly 8 a.m. at the hands of the punctual savages, unless his former CIA control, Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) can engineer a heroic plan to bust him out. And Muir himself only has 24 hours until retirement.

So Pitt’s in the jug, being knocked around by evil Maoists; Redford’s stuck at a table, being faced down in all-day debriefings. A little smile plays on Muir’s face as he endures impertinent questions thrown at him by a team of character actors, hand-picked for homeliness to make the weather-beaten-beyond-recognition Redford look boyish again.

In Spy Game, you have a recipe for a stalemated movie, despite any delusions of action the commercials might give. All the spying is in the flashbacks.

There are three episodes in the script by Michael Frost Becker (Cutthroat Island) and David Arata. We revisit the leads first as fellow warriors in Vietnam, right before its fall; later, we join them in Berlin during the Cold War. Last, they team up in Beirut during the worst of the fighting. In these three locales we witness the recruiting, the training, and finally, the betrayal of the young agent by the older professional.

The Beirut segment is of most interest, thanks to the location, though the Berlin sequence has Charlotte Rampling, who turns up unbilled in a too-brief bit as a lady spy. In Beirut, Pitt recruits an “asset”–a female humanitarian aid worker at a refugee camp. The soon-to-be-used woman is Catherine McCormack as Elizabeth, a Londoner with an unlikely backstory. You can call a certain kind of beauty “remote”; to judge by McCormack’s acting, she’s practically in Tierra del Fuego.

Redford’s Muir urges Pitt’s Bishop to seduce her more quickly: “twice the sex and half the foreplay,” he orders. No doubt this is a personal motto for director Tony Scott, one of the 1980s’ most elephantine hard-chargers (Top Gun, Days of Thunder, etc.). All the tricks in the bag are used here: filters, swooping camera work, helicopter worship, pixilated fast-forward and zooming–more gingerbread than a bakery. Occasionally, the film stops dead in its tracks in freeze-frame to remind us that we’re still on the clock (“2:10 p.m.”). It’s a service to anyone doubting that the movie will end eventually.

Spy Game is meant to be of the school of LeCarre. The soundtrack is loaded up with honorable schoolboys keening baroque music in a choir. Photographer Daniel Mindel does his best to coat it all in “realistic” oily, gray light.

Still, LeCarre’s work is scrupulous about history and politics. By contrast, check one sample line in Spy Game: “Hanoi had just fallen,” says a reminiscing Muir, mistaking it for Saigon in 1975. We visit a Lebanese-Palestinian refugee camp, chock-full of bloody amputees, but there’s no sense of who they are or what might have chased them there (vampires? masked wrestlers?).

Mostly, we see that the business of being CIA means mixing it up with cowardly, unreliable foreigners–some of whom selfishly put their open-air fish market right where Brad was trying to drive his car. You could get a clearer picture of the world of espionage from Harriet the Spy.

From the November 29-December 5, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Musical Maker: Petaluma filmmaker Bill Chayes pays tribute to the legendary Romero family in a new documentary.

The String Kings

Petaluma filmmaker tells story of guitar’s royal family

Four men. Four guitars. A multicultural musical phenomenon. Two passionate filmmakers. One cool movie. When Petaluma filmmaker Bill Chayes first heard of Los Romeros–the world-class foursome of classical guitarists known for decades as “the royal family of the guitar”–he knew he’d uncovered the subject of his next film.

Chayes and professional partner John Harris had already made one successful movie, the PBS documentary Divine Food: A Hundred Years in the Kosher Delicatessen Trade, and were eager to make another when Harris–a retired Berkeley cookbook publisher, author, and guitar aficionado–mentioned the Romeros.

“When John started telling me these amazing stories,” Chayes says, “the whole Romero family history, their artistic accomplishments, their place in the music world, I said, ‘John, that’s got to be a great film.'”

What got Chayes’ cinematic pulse racing was the story of Celedonio Romero, a poor Spanish guitar teacher who fled the oppression of fascist dictator Francisco Franco and ultimately won fame and fortune in America as the founder of the world’s first classical guitar quartet.

Romero and his three sons, Celin, Pepe, and Angel–all guitar virtuosos of the highest order–became a phenomenon in the early ’60s and ’70s, bringing classical music to a popular audience. The story even has a fairy-tale ending, with Celedonio–and later his three sons–being awarded an honorary knighthood by the king of Spain.

“An amazing group of people,” says Chayes, who works as a curator at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. “Very charismatic. The reason they became so popular in the ’60s was that they brought a flair to the popular stage that hadn’t been there previously. They broke the rarefied air of the classical oeuvre. They broke down the barrier.”

Though Celedonio passed away in 1996, the quartet lives on through Celin and Pepe and includes grandsons Celino and Lito. Angel, who departed the quartet to pursue his own career, is now a renowned symphony conductor. Taken together, the Romero family has produced more than a hundred records and CDs, and continue to perform on concert stages across the globe.

“The Romeros were a phenomenon,” says Chayes. “And they still are. They perform hundreds of concerts a year and are treated like rocks stars in Spain, in Asia, all around the world.”

Harris and Chayes soon learned that KPBS, a public television channel in San Diego–where the Romeros have lived since emigrating from Spain–had once been keen to produce a Romeros documentary, but the project had never made it off the wish list.

With Chayes and Harris eager to make the film, interest at KPBS rekindled, and the station struck a coproduction deal with the two filmmakers.

The most important element of the production, of course, was the Romeros themselves. Fortunately, Harris had already formed an alliance with Angel Romero, from whom the filmmaker had purchased some guitars–“Angel has one of the best guitar collections in the world,” Harris points out–and the whole family soon signed on to the project, inviting Chayes and Harris into their lives for over a year.

“If they’d turned out to be dull people,” Chayes remarks, “the film wouldn’t have worked. Happily, the Romeros are not dull people.”

“They all exude a kind of authentic Andalusian charm,” adds Harris. “This is a very physically demonstrative family. There are more men kissing each other in our movie than in any film ever made.

“As a guitar aficionado myself,” Harris continues, “it was heaven to have such prolonged contact with this family.” They describe the elaborate guitar swapping parties, guitaradas, that are a common occurrence in the Romero household, a prelude to any family business.

“For the Romeros,” says Harris, “doing a deal is a complex ritual that involves days of partying, a definite social process within the Romero family. They play each other’s guitars and pass them around, guitars costing $100,000 or more apiece!”

“That’s the way it is around their house,” agrees Chayes. “At any moment, someone might pick up a guitar and start playing this fantastic, world-class music.”

Aside from the Romeros’ own home movies, such family rituals had never been filmed until Chayes and Harris were allowed into the Romero’s home. As the film project progressed, the family of musicians grew increasingly comfortable with the film crew tagging along and began suggesting new adventures on which to bring the filmmakers.

“The film had an outline,” says Harris, “but some of the things that happened during the filming were totally unexpected. The three sons being knighted by the king of Spain was not something we knew was going to happen, until they sprang it on us.”

Likewise, a trip to Celedonio’s birthplace of Málaga, Spain–where a plaza was to be dedicated in the guitar legend’s name–was mentioned at the last minute. “That almost ended the project,” Harris admits. “At first, KPBS didn’t want to come up with the money to take the production to Spain. But we insisted. We said, ‘How can you make a film about this family and not go to Spain?'”

Ultimately, over 30 hours of film were whittled down to a spare 55 minutes. The result, Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar–which has already aired on KCBS and a handful of other public television stations–will have its national unveiling soon. The originally scheduled date of Sept. 14 was canceled due to the events of Sept. 11.

For those unwilling to wait, the film is already available in video form on the KPBS website (www.kpbs.org), as well as on www.guitarsalon.com and www.peperomero.com, and will soon be available through Amazon.com.

The finished film is as musically exhilarating as it is sweet and inspiring. While the movie does hint at the Romeros’ volatile personal quarrels–including Angel’s still painful exit from the quartet–Los Romeros keeps its focus on the family’s strengths.

“They argue,” allows Harris, “but they always come together for two things: They come together in a crisis, and they come together for music.”

Chayes is now on to his next project, also music related. The Right to Sing–which he is making with filmmaker Karen Robbins–tells the story of the political protest songs of the ’60s and will feature interviews with Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez.

As for Harris, he’d like to make another movie about the Romeros.

“I miss making the film,” he confesses with a soft laugh. “I miss them. They live in a little Spanish bubble in America. When you go into that bubble with them, you are transformed.”

From the November 29-December 5, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.