Tim Burton "Sweeney Todd" (2007)

SYNOPSIS: Johnny Depp and Tim Burton join forces again in a big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's award-winning musical thriller "Sweeney Todd." Depp stars in the title role as a man unjustly sent to prison who vows revenge, not only for that cruel punishment, but for the devastating consequences of what happened to his wife and daughter. When he returns to reopen his barber shop, Sweeney Todd becomes the Demon Barber of Fleet Street who "shaved the heads of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard from again." Joining Depp is Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney's amorous accomplice, who creates diabolical meat pies. The cast also includes Alan Rickman, who portrays the evil Judge Turpin, who sends Sweeney to prison and Timothy Spall as the Judge's wicked associate Beadle Bamford and Sacha Baron Cohen is a rival barber, the flamboyant Signor Adolfo Pirelli.

***

Laszlo Kovacs R.I.P.

Laszlo Kovacs, 74; cinematographer shot key New Hollywood films such as 'Easy Rider'.

Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born cinematographer who found international fame after treating the American landscape as a character in the landmark 1969 movie "Easy Rider," has died. He was 74.

Kovacs, a former Budapest film student who arrived in the United States as a political refugee in 1957, died in his sleep Sunday at his Beverly Hills home, said his wife, Audrey.

His work on "Paper Moon" was considered a masterpiece of black-and-white photography.

He also put his stamp on such notable movies as "Five Easy Pieces" and "Shampoo."

"I think he's one of the great cameramen of the New Hollywood era," said director Peter Bogdanovich, who worked with Kovacs on six films, including "Targets" (Bogdanovich's first feature film), "What's Up, Doc?," "Paper Moon," "At Long Last Love," "Nickelodeon" and "Mask."

"I worked with him more than any other photographer, which speaks for itself," Bogdanovich told The Times on Monday. "He was just reliable. He could make things look gritty as we did on 'Paper Moon' or very glamorous like we did with [Barbra] Streisand in 'Doc.' " He could fall into any style."

Most recently, Kovacs shot "Torn From the Flag," a feature documentary about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The film incorporates some of the footage that he and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, a Budapest film school graduate, photographed before fleeing the country and arriving in the United States.

"Laszlo Kovacs was in the vanguard of American cinematography in the late '60s and early '70s, and he helped change the look of American cinema," said James Chressanthis, a fellow member of the American Society of Cinematographers, who is making a documentary about Kovacs and Zsigmond called "Laszlo & Vilmos."

"Before that era, there was great cinematography but many, if not most, American films were studio-bound, and Laszlo's success was in taking movies out of the studio and on the road and into real situations. His ability to do that, along with others, changed cinema forever."

Chressanthis, who interviewed Kovacs on camera as recently as two weeks ago for his documentary, said the cinematographer was known for his "inventiveness, the ability to improvise on location, his portraiture of actors in terms of lighting and his compositional ability."

"He filmed many, many beautiful films, but my personal favorite is 'Paper Moon,' which is an absolute masterpiece of black-and-white cinematography."

Kovacs had been in America for a decade and had shot a number of low-budget biker movies such as "Hells Angels on Wheels" and "The Savage Seven" when Dennis Hopper asked him to shoot his film "Easy Rider," a portrait of America that starred Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson.

"I didn't want to do it," Kovacs told the Albuquerque Journal in 2006. "We did so many motorcycle movies; they're all the same: They come into town, they destroy the town, and at sunset they ride away."

But this time, with Hopper, things looked different.

As Hopper acted out the story of two motorcyclists searching for America, Kovacs said: "I was fascinated by the aspect of two young men and I had a chance to put in this third person — this landscape, this character. When he finished, we were all very quiet. I finally said, 'When do we start?' "

In a statement to The Times on Monday, Hopper said Kovacs "was the greatest telephoto operator that I have ever seen and I could never have made 'Easy Rider' without him."

Director Bob Rafelson, who used Kovacs as cinematographer on "Five Easy Pieces" and "The King of Marvin Gardens," said one of the things that he liked about him was that "he was willing and happy to change the rules of filmmaking that were the convention at the studios."

"What made him a brilliant artist most for me was he could film air like nobody I had ever seen," Rafelson said. "There's something palpable about the air that somehow or other he could make visible on film: You could sense the density of the air, the small particles of color in the air, that were invisible to the eye. And therefore you had a feeling of environment and atmosphere like in very few films I have ever seen before or since."

In a career that spanned five decades and more than 70 feature films, Kovacs' credits also include "New York, New York," "The Last Waltz," "Frances," "Ghostbusters," "Multiplicity," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "Miss Congeniality."

In 2002, Kovacs received the American Society of Cinematographers' Lifetime Achievement Award.

Born May 14, 1933, on a farm near a village about 60 miles from Budapest, Kovacs was an early movie fan — he watched films on the weekend in a makeshift cinema in the school auditorium.

"The whole room was dark except for this white frame," he told the Albuquerque Journal in 2006. "And through this window, I could see the world."

In 1952, he was accepted into the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest. He was in his final year in 1956 when a revolt against the communist regime broke out. He and Zsigmond documented the historic event with a borrowed 35-millimeter camera and film from the school, hiding the camera in a shopping bag with a hole for the lens.

"We saw the Russian tanks driving back and forth and shooting indiscriminately," he said in the 2006 interview. "People were jumping into doorways. We just looked at each other and said, 'Let's go.' Wherever we heard gunfire, that's where we went."

Armed with about 30,000 feet of film hidden in potato sacks, Kovacs and Zsigmond fled across the Austria-Hungary border, which was patrolled by armed Russian solders. They arrived in the United States as political refugees in early 1957.

Kovacs is survived by Audrey, his wife of 23 years; his daughters Julianna and Nadia; and a granddaughter.

Services are pending.

***

"Bashing" (2006)

Japan can be a pretty harmonious place, unless you're out of tune by appearance, personality or the model of cell phone you bring to school. Then you start to learn the meaning of the large Japanese vocabulary for exclusion, including ijime (usually translated as "bullying") and murahachibu (social ostracism -- literally, "cast out of the village"). Foreigners often encounter at least mild forms of this -- the seat beside you that stays empty on a crowded train, the neighbor who never returns your greeting -- but it is Japanese themselves who usually bear the full brunt, as Japanese filmmakers have noted again and again.

They often portray schools, especially, as snake pits of merciless bullying, including viciously creative varieties that could give CIA interrogators pointers. Exaggeration for dramatic effect? Certainly, but in most of these films, the perpetrators are finally brought up short. Lives may be shattered or lost, but justice prevails.

Masahiro Kobayashi offers no such assurance in "Bashing," a sparely told, emotionally walloping film suggested by the real-life experiences of a Japanese woman who was on a self-styled volunteer mission in Iraq when she was captured by insurgents, held hostage and finally released unharmed. Back home, she was widely criticized by the media and public for going to Iraq in the first place, as well as for causing trouble for her rescuers and embarrassment for the nation.

Screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last year, "Bashing" represents a breakthrough for Kobayashi, who also won invitations to Cannes for "Kaizokuban -- Bootleg Film (Bootleg Film)" in 1998, "Koroshi (Film Noir)" in 2002, and "Aruku, Hito (Man Walking on Snow)" in 2001. A veteran scriptwriter with nearly 500 TV credits, Kobayashi has had a harder time establishing himself as a major director here than in France. Critics were not always kind to his -- at times -- labored attempts to channel his beloved French auteurs, while audiences mostly stayed away. "Bashing," however, has enjoyed what, for a Kobayashi film, is a flood of media attention, and is still drawing crowds a month after its opening at Image Forum in Shibuya.

It deserves this attention not so much for the originality of its stripped-down aesthetic -- Kobayashi is once again channeling, this time the Dardennes brothers ("L'Enfant," "Rosetta") -- as its unsparing look at what might be called the Japanese way of ostracism, carried to its ultimate extreme.

His heroine, Yuko (Fusako Urabe), is first seen after she has returned from her ordeal to her home in a bleak industrial town on the coast somewhere in Hokkaido. When she arrives for work as a hotel maid, none of her colleagues acknowledge her greeting and she works her shift in total silence. Then her boss (Teruyuki Kagawa) tells her she's been fired. She's "disturbing the atmosphere of the workplace," he says.

Her real crime, we see as the story progresses and more people around her make themselves brutally clear, is that, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reason (i.e. trying to help distant foreigners), she brought shame on herself, her family and her community. Every encounter -- with a trio of bullies who surround her in a convenience store parking lot, with a former boyfriend who demands a meeting, with married acquaintances she encounters on the street -- drives home her utter isolation, the utter lack of anything resembling sympathy for her ordeal or recognition of her simple humanity.

It is not enough for her tormentors to abuse her physically and mentally; they must assert their moral superiority to this arrogant woman, who either ignored or never learned the first rules of living in what is still a village society: Go along to get along and never stand out from the crowd.

She finds no refuge at home, where harassing e-mails and phone calls follow her and her factory worker father (Ryuzo Tanaka) and part-timer mother resent her. They are, according to the laws of society, guilty as charged for raising such a thoughtless, irresponsible daughter. Their punishment is also severe, and Yuko's father is less able to withstand it. His reaction -- let's leave it vague -- precipitates Yuko's final decision: Should she stay and fight it out, surrender to despair or return to the only place where she ever felt truly human?

Fusako Urabe, who also appeared in Kobayashi's "Aruku, Hito" and "Flic" plays Yuko with a clenched, headlong intensity. She pumps her gaily colored mountain bike through the gray streets as though battling through a fog of hatred and contempt. At the same time, Urabe exposes the bleeding wounds beneath the defiant, closed-off exterior. Her look of fierce bitterness and resentment, after hearing a cutting remark or the latest bad news, has a raw, unmediated quality that is rare. Far more actresses would opt for a sympathy-grabbing sob over her nakedly revealing scowl.

"Bashing" is the sort of grim, unrelenting film that the entire Japanese industry is trying strenuously not to make. What the public wants, nearly everyone says now, is tear-wrenching, heartwarming drama, preferably with a touch of fantasy or a sprinkling of CG fairy dust, which makes "Bashing" so refreshing: It shames the devil and tells the truth.

(Photo: Fusako Urabe in "Bashing" (C) 2006 MONKEY TOWN PRODUCTIONS)

***

Bruno Dumont "Flandres (Flanders)"

Intriguing return to form... Flandres.

By Peter Bradshaw

First published: Friday July 6, 2007 in The Guardian

Ten years ago, the French director Bruno Dumont embarked on a film-making career that shocked, disorientated, provoked and divided opinion. La Vie de Jésus, in 1997, was a study of disaffected young white men in the provincial northern France in which Dumont grew up. It was about the ferocious racial tension between one of these and the Arab man who appears to be a rival for his girlfriend. It contains what I still think is the coldest and most brutal sex scene I have ever seen that is not actually supposed to be a rape. Two years later, he produced his bizarre masterpiece, portentously named L'Humanité: a bad dream presented in the form of a realist, procedural thriller. It was about the murder of a young girl in the same remote French badlands, and was jeered at for being self-important by many when it was unveiled at Cannes - though I found it deeply disturbing.

After this, Dumont just lost me. And he lost almost everyone else, too, with his empty and boorish adventure in the Californian desert, Twentynine Palms (2003), a piece of semi-improvised gibberish topped off with some obligatory sexual violence, contrived in the cause of keeping it real. Dumont appeared to have entirely abandoned the compelling visual sense and native idiom that made his first two films so gripping. Now he has returned to his home turf with a strange, atmospheric, violent parable about our current military adventures.
Flanders has the same strange realist-dream aspect of L'Humanité, and is set in the same beautifully shot countryside, populated by glowering locals, giving the movie a kind of Deliverance feel, yet with no outsiders to persecute. Demester (Samuel Boidin) is a heavy-set, saturnine guy who works on a farm, though whether he owns it or his family owns it is one of many details never explained. He has a very casual relationship with his girlfriend Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux): they have regular, joyless al fresco sex by the hedgerows, but one night in the pub she is upset by Demester casually denying, in front of her, that they are a couple. Barbe goes off with a complete stranger, Blondel (Henri Cretel), and has sex with him. The complicating factor is that Blondel and Demester have been called up to fight in a war overseas. They are to be comrades together in a terrifying battle situation, in which the inhuman brutality they show to civilian insurgents rebounds on them many times over: a nightmare that unfolds in parallel with lonely Barbe's emotional breakdown at home.

Which war, though? Afghanistan? Iraq? It's never clear. Dumont's war scenes are shot in Tunisia, whose landscape looks slightly more exotic than either country. And why are these men being called up? Is it an alternative reality picture of France, a France as mired in the Middle Eastern war as Britain or America - in fact, so mired that conscription is necessary? Or perhaps a vision of a not-too-distant future in which all EU countries will become drawn into the contest? It could, conversely, be a metaphor for white France and its tension with the Arab communities - an elaboration, or externalisation, of the same race war that Dumont described in La Vie de Jésus.

There are more intriguing things that do not quite make real-world sense: when Demester, Blondel and the other men arrive in that unnamed far-off country, they walk through what appears to be a trench. A trench? Surely, trenches are not used in modern warfare in the Middle East? Could this detail resonate with the title, a suggestion that the film is about a new Flanders field, a Flanders field of the mind, a world war fought just as hard on the home front by civilians as well as those in uniform? It certainly never looks like a war movie in the traditional mould. In their numbness and alienation, the war scenes do not feel that much different from the home front, despite the horrible violence, the gunfire, the explosions, and the digitally created smudges of oil fires on the horizon; not dissimilar, in fact, to Sam Mendes' Gulf War movie Jarhead.

Flanders is vulnerable to the same criticisms levelled at Dumont's previous films, that his unhurried directorial emphasis produces a bovine slowness on the faces of his actors and that the pace is ponderous. However, the movie undoubtedly shows a great deal of the power of which Dumont was capable in his first two films. It's a return to form. He attacks his subject, and he attacks us, head-on, and he is one of the very few directors, of any nationality or genre, to challenge the realist tyranny of cinema: the unexamined consensus that cinema - where it does not label itself as fantastical or surreal - has to reproduce what is thought to be the real world. Flanders looks as if it is about Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet it is not, and fascinatingly, may not be about war at all, but is rather a meditation or hallucination on the subject of male sexual aggression, tricked out in military costume. Like Dumont's best work, it echoes uneasily in the mind.

***

Xan Brooks interviews Bruno Dumont

The man with two brains.

First published: Friday June 29, 2007 in The Guardian.

Why is a director with a reputation for uncompromisingly intense movies so desperate for Tom Cruise's telephone number? Xan Brooks unravels the enigmatic Bruno Dumont.

Bruno Dumont is not a popular film-maker and it is all my fault. Or, to put it more accurately, it is the fault of a UK media that is conspiring to block his route to the general public. Journalists don't trumpet his films as loudly as they might. Distributors won't release them as widely as they could. As for the TV schedulers, they'd prefer to stuff the primetime slots with all manner of cookery and property shows. "The people follow what the media say," Dumont says. "So if you said that Bruno Dumont is fantastic, it follows that more people would go to see my films." He sucks gloomily on his cigarette. "I have no wish to remain on the sidelines. I have no wish to make films that are only seen by bohemians in London and Paris."

From the outside it doesn't seem like such a bad life. Dumont's stark, metaphysical pictures have earned him a lofty reputation. He is seen as the successor to Pasolini and Bresson; a spiritual cousin to the likes of Michael Haneke or the Dardennes brothers. At the age of 49 he even looks the part: a sternly handsome intellectual, with an ashtray at his elbow and a head full of abstracts. Yet it is Dumont's fate to be embraced as a darling of the French art-house at a time when the domestic industry is struggling to hang on to its audience. The ghetto is shrinking and Dumont is looking further afield.

We discuss his latest film, Flanders, which charts the experience of a group of farmers sent to fight in an unnamed desert war. This is a film of two halves, both physically and thematically. The first section dominated by brutish, perfunctory sex, and the second by brutish, perfunctory violence. The bulk of the first half plays out in the dank expanses of Dumont's native northern France. The majority of the second half takes place in the arid mountains of Tunisia. The director points out that the first terrain is vegetative and the second is mineral, and that both are of paramount importance. "The starting point of this film was landscape," he says solemnly. "It is the main character. Everything else is secondary. The other characters come out of the landscape and are defined by it. That is why I use non-professional actors, because they can only be themselves."

Dumont acknowledges that many viewers will naturally see the film as a veiled comment on the war in Iraq. Yet this was really only the starting point. "I'm using the war as an object for meditation. The film is really a love story and love stories are always wars. There is no difference between two countries fighting over a piece of land and two men fighting over a woman." He nods thoughtfully and reaches for his cigarette.

Dumont was born in Bailleul, a small town near Lille where he still lives today. As a child he recalls accompanying his doctor father on his rounds of the outlying farms, staring out through the glass at the impoverished rural communities that he would later put on screen. In his 20s and 30s he led a strange, split existence; shooting corporate videos by day and teaching philosophy by night.

"I liked doing both of those jobs," he says. "Philosophy can be too much about navel-gazing, so the videos were a good balance. Of course they were publicity films, so I had orders from above. I had to assign these products with a value they frequently did not have. I had to lie and I was paid to lie. And yet all this time the philosophy was teaching me the need for truth. So there was a tension there; this process at arriving at the truth through lies."

The videos also taught him to love machinery: "Every day I was filming machinery, trying to make it look beautiful." Working with actors, he adds, is really no different from working with machines.

Naturally Dumont's harsh, unblinking brand of cinema has a tendency to split an audience. When his breakthrough picture, L'Humanité, won the jury prize at the 1999 Cannes film festival it was booed lustily in certain quarters of the gallery. His follow-up - the American-set art movie Twentyninepalms - was savaged by most reviewers as a portentous and self-indulgent mess. Until now, I had assumed that he must secretly enjoy stirring up such violently differing responses, perhaps regarding it as some artistic badge of honour. "No, no," he says. "It is an enigma that really disturbs me. Obviously, I want my films to do well. I really want people to like them."

He now admits that he got it wrong on Twentyninepalms. He should have edited it more tightly and cut out the epilogue. But the experience has not scared him away from making American films. On the contrary, he would dearly like to give it another shot.

"You see," he says, tapping another cigarette from the packet. "I feel I have a political duty to reach out to the general public. I want to make films that the people want to see. So if the people want to see Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise, then it is really my job to incorporate them into my films."

At this point I feel I could use a cigarette myself. I'm trying to picture Tom Cruise in a Bruno Dumont film - perhaps being informed that he is just a machine and that the real star of the movie is a mineral landscape. I just don't see him going for it. Maybe Dumont is joking. "No," he says. "I'm serious."

Does he not think that Cruise - and all the movie-star baggage he inevitably brings with him - might not be antithetical to the type of films Dumont is intent on making? "No, because what I'm looking for in Tom Cruise is his skill as an actor, not the fact of him being Tom Cruise. The problem is not Tom Cruise. The problem is the system that won't let me speak to him." He's actually been trying to speak to Tom Cruise? Dumont nods earnestly. "Yes. I've been trying to get a meeting with Tom Cruise for five years, and they won't let me see him. They're really putting a spanner in the works."

I can't quite make him out. His films are so gloriously uncompromising, driven by such clear-eyed intensity. And yet the man himself seems to be at a creative crossroads, unsure which way to turn. He wants to stay put in Bailleul but he is sick of sitting on the sidelines. He prefers to work with non-professional actors but is prepared to make a concession and cast Johnny Depp.

He talks about his artistic influences and admits he has actually always been more inspired by painting than cinema: impressionism, abstract expressionism, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Still, there are some contemporary directors that he admires, and he namechecks Lars von Trier, Ken Loach and Jacques Rivette. Any American film-makers? "Um," he says. "Ummm ... David Lynch?" I suspect Dumont's own films might not be as portable and populist as he would like them to be. They would almost certainly be less interesting if they were.

Dumont stubs out his last cigarette of the hour and gets up to shake hands. "Maybe you have a telephone number for Tom Cruise," he says. "Maybe you can get me Tom Cruise's number." Again, I think he's joking, but then again, he may well be serious. The man is not an obvious comic.

· Flanders opens on July 6

***

Richard Shepard's "The Hunting Party" (2007) [Trailer]

Power lunch with Jerry Bruckheimer

Dressing for meetings in Los Angeles is a tricky business. Hollywood producers and studio executives prefer casual clothes, so the suit-wearing English journalist often resembles an undertaker at a disco.

Dressing down, though, carries the risk that the other person will be in more formal attire. So before my lunch with Jerry Bruckheimer I have a decision to make. After much deliberation, I compromise on a shirt and tie with a casual jacket and trousers.

I am the first to arrive at the Buffalo Club, an upscale Santa Monica restaurant a few blocks from the ocean. A few minutes after I am shown to an outside table on the patio, Jerry Bruckheimer strides in. The Hollywood producer is wearing a black leather jacket, an open-necked shirt and jeans. He is slim, with a closely shorn beard, and looks a decade and a half younger than his 61 years. We greet each other and he sits down.

”I see you dressed up,” he says.

I vow never again to wear a tie in Los Angeles and we begin a discussion about his current projects. He has been dividing his time between Washington, where he is filming the sequel to National Treasure, and an editing room in Los Angeles, overseeing the final cut of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

The previous instalment, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, made more than $1bn worldwide, becoming the third-highest-grossing film ever. At the time of our lunch, expectations are high for part three, At World’s End, but as a Hollywood veteran of almost 30 years, Bruckheimer is used to the pressure.

He grew up in Detroit and studied psychology at university, getting a job in an advertising agency mailroom when he graduated. He went on to produce television commercials, working with, among others, the director Ridley Scott. Then in 1971, after winning awards for his ads, he was asked to come to Hollywood to work on a film.

I ask Bruckheimer if producing movies was always his goal. ”I was always looking to be entertained,” he says, in a quiet voice. ”We lead such full lives and a lot of us don’t lead very pleasant lives and don’t like what we do. I assume you like what you do?” Most of the time, I say. ”Right, well, we’re fortunate. My dad worked his whole life as a salesman and that wasn’t what he really wanted to do. He looked forward to two weeks vacation every year and he used to say to me: ’Whatever you do, make sure you do something you really like so you don’t just have your vacation to look forward to.’ And I love movies.”

The waiter arrives to take our order and Bruckheimer asks about the specials. It’s an unusually windy day and the gusts are getting stronger, rattling the canopy above our heads, so we have to speak up to be heard. We both choose the tomato and tortilla soup, after Bruckheimer establishes that it has been made without cream. For his main course, he chooses halibut, substituting spinach for potatoes. I opt for the striped bass.

After arriving in Hollywood, he ”bounced from one movie to another” before meeting Don Simpson, who became his production partner. Bruckheimer is calm and focused, whereas Simpson was fiery and erratic. But they shared a love of film and became friends, with Bruckheimer moving into Simpson’s house when he and his first wife separated.

Flashdance was the first Bruckheimer-Simpson collaboration and was followed by a string of hit movies that brought the action genre to a mainstream audience. Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into an international star, while Beverly Hills Cop launched the career of Eddie Murphy.

The Bruckheimer-Simpson films were huge commercial successes and set the tone for much of the Hollywood output that followed over the next two decades. I ask him if he thought their work changed the industry. ”We weren’t trying to be trailblazers. We just gravitated towards the things that we loved that felt unique and fresh.

”Top Gun is no different from Pirates of the Caribbean - in fact they’re very similar because both movies were working in genres that were dead. Fighter pilot movies had all failed and pirate movies had been dead for a long time. We approached them from a different angle.”

While the duo had similar aesthetic tastes, their personal lives were pulling in opposite directions, with Simpson developing an appetite for excessive living. ”He worked hard when he had to, but... he disappeared sometimes,” says Bruckheimer.

In 1996, midway through the shooting of The Rock, Simpson died of a massive drug overdose. Bruckheimer is quiet for a moment when I ask how the death affected him. ”It was tragic and painful. Like losing a brother.”

He found solace in his work, and, if anything, became more prolific as a solo producer when he started his own company. ”I finished The Rock on my own and it became a huge success, so that gave me a little confidence.” Con-Air, Armageddon and Enemy of the State followed, and were among the biggest commercial hits of the 1990s.

Our soup arrives - it is thick, tasty and slightly spicy, with pieces of tortilla arranged in the middle of the bowl. I ask Bruckheimer about his other business: television, into which he moved at the end of the 1990s. After being pitched CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, he knew he had a hit on his hands when he met the show’s creator, Anthony E. Zuiker. ”He had been driving a tram in Las Vegas and had this idea for a show about forensics, so the police department allowed him to go on some ride-arounds with their CSI crews.

”One day he went into a crime scene and there was a dead body on a bed. The detectives checked out the room and removed the body, leaving him in the room by himself. All of a sudden a hand comes out from under the bed... the murderer was still in the room!”

Bruckheimer took the pitch to the main US networks to see if he could get it on the air. CBS picked it up in the US and it has become the network’s biggest hit. CSI and its spin-offs, such as CSI: Miami, have been sold globally, generating an estimated $2bn dollars. The franchise has also helped propel CBS from last place in the US network rankings to top spot. ”CSI: Miami is the biggest show in the world - 60 million people watch it weekly. It’s crazy.”

CSI led to other Bruckheimer-produced television hits, notably Cold Case and Without a Trace. But despite his television success - two years ago he had 10 different shows in US prime-time slots - he has continued to produce movies, earning an estimated $5m per picture. Is it difficult to work on two different fronts?

He shrugs as if it is the easiest thing in the world. ”It’s all about the idea. I love process and the fact that these things work is gratifying.” Television and film are ”all the same, really: one you get for free and one you have to pay for”.

Hollywood is full of loud, obnoxious characters but the surprising thing about Bruckheimer is how un-Hollywood he is. He speaks softly throughout our lunch, far removed from the stereotype of a cigar-chomping, loud-mouthed producer. With wind rattling through the patio I have to lean closer to hear him.

I mention this to him. After all, don’t you have to get angry to get things done in Hollywood? ”The perception of the producer is a guy who is very bombastic, which, if you know me you know isn’t right.” A producer, he says, ”has to be watchdog. You have to say: ’no, this isn’t what we wanted to do’, or ’yes, this is fantastic, let’s incorporate it’. You try to be honest and diplomatic.”

At that moment, the wind grows stronger, violently lifting the canopy off its base. We both stop eating while waiters struggle to pull the canopy poles back to earth. ”We’re going to get blown away here,” says Bruckheimer. As if on cue, the wind dies down.

Our fish arrives. Bruckheimer says his is ”delicious”. So is mine. We move on to talk about film critics. While Bruckheimer’s work has generally found favour with audiences, reviewers have often been less than complimentary about action and adventure films. ”I’ve learned from doing this for so long not to read [the reviews]. You know in your heart what you’ve done, the kind of movie you’ve made. But the ultimate critic is the audience because they have to pay to see it. So when an audience pays nine or 10 bucks to see a movie and they don’t like it, they let you know. That’s the ultimate failure.”

Not every film he has made has struck box-office gold, yet his successes far outweigh the occasional flop. Over mint tea, I ask him how he manages to pick hits. ”I just know what I like. I have no idea what other people like.” But what you like tends to be what most other people like, I say. ”For now. I’m enjoying the wave right now and eventually it will crash. Or maybe it won’t - you never know. I was told when we made Flashdance that this only ever happens once, it will never happen again. After we made Top Gun you think you’re never going to have a picture as big as that. And then Pirates comes along.”

He is married, with a stepdaughter. Like a true Detroit native, he loves ice hockey, playing with a group of friends every Sunday night. He says he steers clear of the Hollywood party scene and has a weekend in the editing room ahead of him as he finishes the last edits of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (The movie broke box-office records in its opening week at the end of May, generating more than $400m worldwide.)

Maybe he is so prolific, I suggest, simply because he works too much. ”If you take someone who goes to work at eight, comes home at 4.30, then I’m a workaholic because I work seven days a week. But I get free time, I get a chance to play hockey, spend time with my wife and my daughter, my friends. Workaholics don’t have time for anything.”

And with that, it’s back to the job. We get up to leave and Bruckheimer puts on a pair of sunglasses. The editing room awaits and he has a blockbuster to finish.

Matthew Garrahan is the FT’s Los Angeles correspondent.

The Buffalo Club, Santa Monica

2 x mineral water

2 x soup of the day

1 x striped bass

1 x halibut

1 x mint tea

Total: $104.46

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

***

David Cronenberg "Eastern Promises" (2007)

The new thriller from director David Cronenberg reteams him with his "A History of Violence" leading man Viggo Mortensen. The film follows the mysterious and ruthless Nikolai (Mr. Mortensen), who is tied to one of London's most notorious organized crime families. His carefully maintained existence is jarred when he crosses paths with Anna (Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts), an innocent midwife trying to right a wrong, who accidentally uncovers potential evidence against the family. Now Nikolai must put into motion a harrowing chain of murder, deceit, and retribution.

Click here to watch - Eastern Promises - Trailer

Director: David Cronenberg ("A History of Violence," "Naked Lunch," "The Dead Zone")
Writer: Steven Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things")
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl

Eastern Promises will be released on September 14 2007.

***

Heathers (1989)

When a Not-So-Bad Girl Turns Very, Very Bad.

Heather is the name of choice at Westerburg High School, the name that signifies power, popularity and unlimited license to make mischief. The rules of the game are established in an early scene in Heathers [IMDb/Wikipedia], in which a trio of girls named Heather cruise the school cafeteria with a reluctant handmaiden named Veronica (Winona Ryder) in tow.

Heather is the name of choice at Westerburg High School, the name that signifies power, popularity and unlimited license to make mischief. The rules of the game are established in an early scene in ''Heathers,'' in which a trio of girls named Heather cruise the school cafeteria with a reluctant handmaiden named Veronica (Winona Ryder) in tow. They taunt some classmates, flirt with others, compliment others on their clothes. This sequence has a bright look, a buoyant style and an utterly vicious spirit, giving ''Heathers'' the air of a demonic sitcom.

''Heathers,'' a first feature directed by Michael Lehmann, is as snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited. Its originality extends well beyond the limits of ordinary high school histrionics and into the realm of the genuinely perverse. And for as long as Mr. Lehmann and the screenwriter, Daniel Waters, have the temerity to sustain the film's bracingly nasty tone, ''Heathers'' is legitimately startling. As one of the film's characters puts it, ''The extreme always seems to make an impression.''

''Heathers,'' which opens today at Loews New York Twin and other theaters, shares Veronica's misgivings about the three beautiful, bitchy Heathers (Shannen Doherty, Kim Walker and Lisanne Falk) and their collective modus operandi. Veronica, who wears a monocle as she scribbles furious little diary entries about the Heathers' exploits, doesn't much like her friends' predilection for dirty tricks, but she goes along with them out of a sense of obligation. It takes a mysterious gun-toting newcomer named J. D. (Christian Slater) to nudge Veronica into a different set of activities altogether.

The diabolical J. D., played by Mr. Slater as an exact teen-age replica of Jack Nicholson, goads Veronica into playing out her little resentments against the other girls. When the wickedest of the Heathers, Heather Chandler (Miss Walker), pushes Veronica too far, J. D. helps her get even. He suggests slipping Heather a drink laced with kitchen cleaner, and he draws upon Veronica's proven talents as a forger to craft the appropriate suicide message. ''People think just because you're beautiful and popular, life is easy and fun,'' Heather/Veronica writes. ''No one understood that I had feelings too.'' Because this note makes use of the word ''myriad,'' the teachers at Westerburg are very much impressed.

Exhilarated by this murderous prank, J. D. and Veronica raise the ante. So Westerburg's next two teen-age ''suicides'' are a pair of lame-brained football heroes against whom Veronica has a valid grudge. J. D., who likes planting appropriate props at the scenes of these crimes, leaves a bottle of mineral water this time, maintaining that in Ohio this constitutes strong evidence that the two football players were in love. It is at about this point that the gorgeous, petulant Veronica begins to wonder just what is going on.

And it's at about this point that the film loses its nerve, demanding that Veronica wake up to the awfulness of what J. D. has done. Since he has largely acted on her half-conscious wishes, this turnabout isn't entirely convincing, and it undermines the film's earlier relentlessness. ''Heathers'' finally re-establishes Veronica as a nice normal girl, but it does this at the expense of its earlier toughness. In any case, the film's hard-edged satire lasts a long while before it finally winds down.

Mr. Lehmann's spiky sensibility is evident in the film's jauntily sardonic style and in its cast of clever and attractive young actors. Miss Ryder, in particular, manages to be both stunning and sympathetic as the watchful Veronica, and she has the glamorous presence of a promising new star. Miss Walker makes the meanest Heather suitably monstrous, and Mr. Slater is effectively insinuating in a role that needn't have been so narrow. Too often, J. D.'s function is only to smirk at Veronica and egg her on.

Mr. Waters's screenplay has a devilish ear for the cliches of teen-age conversation. ''Great pate, but I have to motor if I want to be ready for that funeral,'' says Veronica to her unlistening, happily oblivious parents.

***

DOWNTOWN GIRLS: THE HOOKERS OF HONOLULU

Shot in verité style, with a poetic, street-smart narration by Brent Owens, Downtown Girls: The Hookers of Honolulu documents the experiences and insights of four male-born prostitutes working the downtown strip in Honolulu, Hawaii. The film combines candid interviews with each of the girls with hidden-camera footage of solicitations and encounters with johns in intimate, often graphic detail. Each of the hookers freely discusses her history, technique, and hope for the future; the faces of their tricks are deliberately obscured to protect the guilty.

The four Hookers of Honolulu profiled are:

"Barbie-Q" - Blonde, shapely and "aglow in the night," this fetching beauty started out tricking after high school, lured by the fast cash available to hookers here. Today, having undergone a sex-change operation in Canada that cost her nearly $10,000 (she says she could achieve orgasm six months after surgery), Barbie-Q is one of downtown's most attractive hookers, male or female, and estimates that 90% of her clients are married men. So convincing was her transformation from male to female that she even worked as an exotic dancer at a straight strip club - despite some catty co-workers attempt to undermine her business by telling customers she'd been a "he."

"Juici" - Described by Owens as a hooker "with plenty of satisfied customers," Juici had a "tough" childhood - her homeless family lived on a beach in a tent for a year. As a boy, Juici was also tormented by sexuality issues, and lied to her parents about being a transvestite. "I gave my parents a son for 18 years," she says. But I have to live my life as my life." Nowadays, Juici is a favorite among tourists and military men, many of whom pay only to watch Juici masturbate. Juici admits it's sometimes hard to make it in coventional society, but like others we meet, she hopes for a normal, domestic family life someday: "I want what everybody else wants."

"Saellah V" - A "performer extraordinaire" Saellah V (pronounced "C'est La Vie") was in third grade when she started trying on her mother's panty hose. Reluctant to go public with her cross-dressing urges in high school, "he" found "she" - the alter ego Saellah V - upon moving back to Oahu, and started performing in cross-dressing pageants. Unlike the other hookers we meet, Saellah V has no desire to have a sex-change operation: "I don't want to lose my cock - I love it." Saellah V doesn't consider herself gay, and says most clients are straight men and bisexuals. Saellah V once turned down a father and son duo for sex, saying it was too "freaky."

"Delicious" - A "kickboxing, veteran streetwalker turned college student," Delicious had an undeniable "hormonal" connection to females since high school, and wants nothing more than to raise enough money to complete the transformation into a woman. In the meantime, Delicious is well-practiced in the art of "tuck" - making the male genitals disappear. Seen rejecting several advances by men (one had too little money, another was too drunk), Delicious recalls one incident where a john attempted to have sex at knifepoint, but was thwarted by Delicious's formidable pugilist skills. Delicious' goal is to be independent, buy a home, and have a sex-change operation. Above all, Delicious wants to enjoy a straight lifestyle, "to be loved as a woman."

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER: Brent Owens first became acquainted with "The Life" of prostitution while he was a college student driving a NYC cab part-time. Owens' fascination with hookers, pimps and johns - and his uncanny ability to earn their trust - have led to six highly-rated America Undercover documentaries: Hookers at the Point (September 1996), Hookers at the Point: Going Out Again (July 1997), Pimps Up, Ho's Down (June 1998), Hookers & Johns: Trick or Treat (May 2000), Hookers at the Point: 5 Years Later (April 2002) and Atlantic City Hookers: It Ain't E-Z Being a Ho' (September 2004).

CREDITS: Directed and Produced by Brent Owens; For HBO: Supervising Producer: Nancy Abraham; Executive Producer: Sheila Nevins.

***

Charles Laughton's "Night Of The Hunter" (1955)

Robert Mitchum stars in an unforgettable role as a psychopathic preacher in relentless pursuit of two children who have their dead father's stolen fortune hidden in a doll. Shelley Winters co-stars.

In the entire history of American movies, The Night of the Hunter [IMDb; Wikipedia] stands out as the rarest and most exotic of specimens. It is, to say the least, a masterpiece--and not just because it was the only movie directed by flamboyant actor Charles Laughton or the only produced solo screenplay by the legendary critic James Agee (who also cowrote The African Queen). The truth is, nobody has ever made anything approaching its phantasmagoric, overheated style in which German expressionism, religious hysteria, fairy-tale fantasy (of the Grimm-est variety), and stalker movie are brought together in a furious boil. Like a nightmarish premonition of stalker movies to come, Night of the Hunter tells the suspenseful tale of a demented preacher (Robert Mitchum, in a performance that prefigures his memorable villain in Cape Fear), who torments a boy and his little sister--even marries their mixed-up mother (Shelley Winters)--because he's certain the kids know where their late bank-robber father hid a stash of stolen money. So dramatic, primal, and unforgettable are its images--the preacher's shadow looming over the children in their bedroom, the magical boat ride down a river whose banks teem with fantastic wildlife, those tattoos of LOVE and HATE on the unholy man's knuckles, the golden locks of a drowned woman waving in the current along with the indigenous plant life in her watery grave--that they're still haunting audiences (and filmmakers) today.

Official Trailer here [WindowsMedia, 300K].

***

Nicholas Favorite's "CHISELED" Movie Trailer [YouTube]

Ichi The Killer (2001)

Werner Herzog's "Rescue Dawn" (2007)

Based on the true story of an American pilot, Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is shot down during a top-secret mission to destroy Viet Cong strongholds in Laos at the beginning of the Vietnam War. Taken hostage, he endures unimaginable conditions at the hands of cruel captors in a makeshift POW camp.

VARIETY.COM: Helmer Werner Herzog has long delighted in smudging the line between documentary and fiction. His latest, "Rescue Dawn" (IMDb), goes an intriguing step further by dramatizing a story Herzog already told once in his 1997 docu "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," about Dieter Dengler, a fighter pilot who was shot down over Laos in 1965. Socko, kudo-worthy lead perf by Christian Bale, plot's deeply compelling account of survival and pic's obvious relevance to the war in Iraq could spell solid B.O. after its December bow. However, helmer's more passionate followers may find plainly told pic less rich in Herzogian "ecstatic truth" than usual.

In "Rescue Dawn," Herzog dispenses with any buildup, revealing how German-born Dengler, who in reality retained a thick German accent all his life, came to be a U.S. Air Force fight lieutenant. Sounding entirely American, Bale's version of Dengler at first seems more like just another cocky young recruit, keen as a blade to get up into the skies for his maiden combat flight, a top-secret bombing raid over Laos in 1965.

Before flying out, Dengler and his fellow pilots watch an authentic military information film from the period about surviving in the jungle, the exact same one mocked by Herzog's own voiceover in "Little Dieter" for its naive advice -- such as don't forget to wave at helicopters flying right above you.

Here the pilots themselves cynically heckle the info movie, but an extra irony is added that pays off beautifully at the end when some of its strategies turn out to be eminently sensible.

Once airborne, Dengler has barely dropped more than few bombs before he's shot down. Hardly injured, he survives for a night or two alone before being captured by a ragged squad of Laotian soldiers.

Helmer's script doesn't quite make the point clear here, but those who have seen "Little Dieter" will understand that Dengler's bravery in the face of innumerable threats to kill him stemmed partly from his knowledge that the Viet Cong considered him more useful alive than dead.

Even so, his captors have no qualms about torturing him. An ant's nest is tied to his face. His hands and feet tied, he's dragged by a cow across a village and nearly drowned in a shallow well. (Key shots make clear that Bale, rather than a double, seems to be enduring most of these ordeals himself.) And yet, when he's offered a chance to be released in a couple of weeks if he'll only sign a statement denouncing American imperialism (a false promise, as it turns out), he refuses. "I love America," he insists. "America gave me wings."

Finally, he ends up in a POW camp, where he meets two fellow American prisoners: gentle if somewhat broken-spirited Duane (Steve Zahn) and Gene (Jeremy Davies), who keeps insisting the war will be over soon so they shouldn't try to escape. He also meets three more sketchily limned Southeast Asians, English-speaker Y.C. (Galen Yuen), wiry Phisit (Abhijati Jusakul) and more stolid Procet (Chaiyan Chunsuttiwat).

Auds with shorter attention spans may fidget slightly during pic's long midsection in the camp, which effectively gets across the endurance test that was this experience. Dengler proves himself to be a natural leader, whose combo of unique skills (he happens to know how to unpick handcuffs) and sheer pig-headed will to survive keep his fellow prisoners' spirits up while they endure brutality from the guards and wait for the rainy season to start, when it makes more sense to escape.

Final act, however, quickens the pace and proves highly moving as Dengler and Duane, grown closer than lovers or friends could ever be, chivvy and support each other through the long march through the jungle. Meanwhile, waterborne scenes on a raft tip the hat to similar sequences in such Herzog classics as "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) and "Fitzcarraldo" (1982).

Indeed, at times Bale seems to be channeling some of the crazed intensity of the late Klaus Kinski, star of the aforementioned. Slimmed down, as is the rest of the cast (Davies looks practically skeletal), almost to the anorexic weight he achieved for "The Machinist," Bale proffers a remarkably physical perf that also shares some of Kinski's grace in motion.

Zahn, so often cast in lighter roles as a stoner goofball or just comic relief, more than holds his own against Bale, especially in his last scenes. On the thesping front, pic's one weak spot is Davies, typically twitchy, mannered and mumbling so much it's hard to make out his dialogue, although for some his addled attitude may seem to suit the period.

Otherwise, as far as establishing a sense of period goes, Herzog cleaves to a refreshing less-is-more philosophy. This may be the first Vietnam-set film in history not to feature a bar of Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones or indeed any other rock music on its soundtrack. Instead, apart from Klaus Bartle's keening original score, featuring mournful cellos and piano tones, music used includes Wagnerian opera and other classical compositions. Helmer even eschews deploying the offbeat, world-music discoveries that often make his other films so distinctive.

Indeed, pic reps arguably Herzog's most straightforward, least original film for some time, and suspicions linger that he may have seen it as a last-chance crack at making a bigger-budgeted, mainstream venture that could earn coin and backing for more unusual future projects. Having said that, this polished, cleanly made pic still packs a wrenching emotional punch and, if backed by critics and auds, could earn more for Herzog than his last 10 features put together.

Resonances with current situation in Iraq -- the deluded belief it will all be over soon, the scenes of torture that echo Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib -- are there, but not overstated. In fact, final scenes, using thousands of extras from the Thai army (Thailand was used for some locations), have an almost gung-ho, pro-soldier if not pro-military, quality, and rep the only major deviation from the story told in "Little Dieter Needs to Fly."

Craft contributions from lenser Peter Zietlinger and editor Joe Bini, both of whom worked on "Little Dieter" and are regular, career-spanning Herzog collaborators, are first rate.

Camera (color), Peter Zietlinger; editor, Joe Bini; music, Klaus Bartle; art director, Arin "Aoi" Pinijvararak; costume designer, Annie Dunn; sound, Paul Paragon; supervising sound editor, Peter Austin; stunt coordinator, Chris Carnel; visual effects producer, Chris Woods; special effects supervisor, Adam Horwath; associate producers, Adam Rosen, Robyn Klein; casting director, Eyde Belasco. Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Masters), Sept. 10, 2006. Running time: 125 MIN. (English, Vietnamese dialogue). Apple QuickTime Trailers here. Yahoo! Movie Trailers here. Wikipedia card here.

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