Tony Scott, dead at 68 (ABC)

This morning we reported on the tragic, seemingly senseless suicide of Top Gun director Tony Scott, who jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles after leaving detailed notes in both his car and his office of loved ones that he wanted notified of his death. (Among them, one can only assume, was Mr. Scott's brother and creative partner, Ridley Scott.)

New information emerged about this case this afternoon, shedding some light on this sad turn of events.

A source revealed to to ABC that Mr. Scott had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer; a fact that, if true, would go a long way to explain the premeditated and methodical nature of the suicide of a man who was in the middle of producing several high-profile projects, including a sequel to Prometheus and the A&E mini-series Coma.

Mr. Scott was heavily involved in cancer charities; a cause he picked up after his older brother Frank died of skin cancer in 1980.

Tony Scott (Patrick McMullan)

The body of Tony Scott, the man behind the landmark queer cinema masterpiece Top Gun, was dragged from the Los Angeles Harbor Sunday evening in San Pedro, Calif. The director/producer plunged to his death after scaling the 10-foot fence surrounding Vincent Thomas Bridge.

Mr. Scott, the British brother of Alien director Ridley Scott, had worked with his brother to produce many of his sibling's famous sci-fi hits. But he was perhaps best known for his own action movies, including Beverly Hills Cop 2, True Romance, Unstoppable and the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123.

Though the police were sparing with details surrounding the death, The Los Angeles Times reported that Mr. Scott left a suicide note in his office before driving to the bridge and jumping to his death at approximately 12:30 p.m. A passerby saw Mr. Scott's plunge and called 911.

The apparent suicide is baffling. On paper, Mr. Scott's career was on an upswing: he was slated to direct a Top Gun sequel (and in a sad twist of fate, Mr. Scott allegedly committed suicide at approximately the same time that Tom Cruise was confirmed by Naval Air Station officials to be touring their facility in Fallon, Nev., in preparation for the film); COMA, the A&E mini-series that Mr. Scott executive produced with his brother, was slated for a Labor Day release and had released a new trailer earlier that day; and the success of this summer's Alien prequel, Prometheus (which Mr. Scott also EP'd), had led to Ridley hinting to the press that another sequel was soon in the works.

Mr. Scott is survived by his wife, Donna, and twin sons, Frank and Max.

Hollywood's love affair with ’70s cinema is certainly well documented. From the Andersons (Wes and Paul Thomas) to Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, the already forgotten Duplicity), director after director has taken the styling pioneered by filmmakers like Robert Altman and Sydney Pollack and co-opted it for their own personal successes. And huzzah to that! But why, then, when it comes to plotting, do the same people that so clearly worship those seminal filmmakers disregard the actual decade they lived through?

We thought of this during the relentlessly mediocre exercise that was The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. The film, a remake of the 1974 film of a similar name (the original version spells out One Two Three; the new version has no time for such pursuits), has nothing really holding it to modern times other than the feeling of “just because.” Sure, the current economic climate is ever-present, Google is used with reckless abandon and the word “terrorist” is uttered in hushed tones, but this is a story that could have easily occurred in another decade. (We’re not history buffs or anything, but we’re pretty sure the economy sucked in 1974, too.)

So then why did director Tony Scott feel the need to update the proceedings? Call it the bias of history. Only ’70s period pieces remain locked inside the isolation of past events. Think about it: The ’50s are always a popular choice for random genre goodness (Revolutionary Road! L.A. Confidential!); ditto the ’60s, which are so overdone at this point a moratorium needs to be called (though not against Mad Men); and everyone loves the ’80s (The Wedding Singer, hello!). But since Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm were released 12 years ago, nearly all the major films set during the Me Decade—Milk, Zodiac, Summer of Sam, Frost/Nixon, American Gangster—have had an historical lean. No offense to those movies, but where is the sprawling character study—like Dazed and Confused—that just so happens to exist in the ’70s? What about the thrilling action film—like The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 could have been—without ties to Vietnam? We want ’70s films to be something other than a history lesson—something more natural and organic. Unfortunately, it looks like Mr. Scott will continue to be the fly in our revival ointment: The director is planning to update his remake of The Warriors for modern times. Can you dig it? Yeah, us neither.

The Karate Kid

News: Taraji P. Henson is joining the Jackie Chan-fronted reboot as the mother of Jaden “My dad is Will” Smith.

Prognosis: We simply love Ms. Henson (Talk to Me, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) but the new Karate Kid is like a skunk—you want to stay as far away from it as possible, or risk getting sprayed by its stench.

Total Recall

News: Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium, The Recruit) is writing the script for Columbia.

Prognosis: As is usually the case with reboots, the new film will concentrate more on the Phillip K. Dick source material, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, rather than the Arnold Schwarzenegger science-fiction classic. (Yes, classic.) Normally we’d think something like this was a good idea, but with Neal H. Moritz doing the producing—he being the mastermind behind such films as XXX: State of the Union and the Fast & Furious franchise—color us skeptical.

The Warriors

News: Warriors, come out to play! Tony Scott is planning an update of the classic film, which will move the story from New York to Los Angeles so he can do a “study of gang culture.”

Prognosis: Can you dig it? Us neither! We actually consider ourselves fans of Mr. Scott’s action bonafides, but taking a movie like The Warriors, which is so inherently ‘70s New York, and switching it to present day Los Angeles misses the point.

Scream 4

News: Kevin Williamson has started talks with Courtney Cox-Arquette and her husband David to gauge their interest in returning for another film that will ostensibly reboot the franchise.

Prognosis: As the beloved Randy (Jamie Kennedy) said in Scream 2: “Sequels sucks!” We wonder what he would think about a fourth film. Everything about another Scream seems like a bad idea, but, when you think about it, maybe that’s the point. Here’s hoping Mr. Williamson kills off whatever original cast members he can get in the first reel.

Hamlet

News: Catherine Hardwicke will direct Emile Hirsch in an updated version of Hamlet that will take place on a college campus.

Prognosis: 1997 called, it wants this news back. Modernizing Shakespeare is about twelve years too late—for references see: 10 Things I Hate About You (an update of The Taming of the Shrew), O (an update of Othello) and Romeo + Juliet (you can figure this one out). And while we’re as happy as the next person that Mr. Hirsch and Ms. Hardwicke are reuniting (Lords of Dogtown for life!), did they both forget that this movie already happened with Ethan Hawke? Just cast Julia Stiles as Ophelia (again) and get it over with.

I was going on about the way certain films and certain filmmakers (and their cinematographers) had indelibly changed the way we see the world and ourselves, just through the cumulative effect of the never-before-seen look of their work.

For me, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Peter Brook’s King Lear, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Oliver Stone’s JFK (not for the idiot conspiracy theory, but for the faster-than-the-speed-of-thought fluid film-stock-shifting look), Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and, most recently, David Gordon Green’s George Washington and All the Real Girls. (If you haven’t seen the last two, especially the former, you’ve missed something inexplicably powerful and almost mystically beautiful.)

1) The Redness of Red

Anyway, she interrupted me to say something typically smart and allusive about “the redness of reds.” She was recalling something she’d read years ago in a Jane Kramer “Letter from Europe” in The New Yorker, a reference to a Berlin director, Hartmut Bitomsky. He’d made a film called Die Röte des Rots von Technicolor ( The Redness of Reds in Technicolor) in 1972. He was lamenting the loss of the look, the vision of the world beheld by those who saw the original Technicolor films with their, well, Technicolor reds, a redness that has now seeped out of the aging prints and become a kind of cheap-rosé toxic cloud that diminished what was once the shamelessly carnal scarlet lipstick of its original industrial-strength palette.

By the way, “the redness of red” is a common buzz-phrase in the philosophy of mind, when the perennial unanswerable question is asked and analyzed: How do you know that what you see as red, your “redness of red,” is the same as my redness of red? Couldn’t my redness of red look like your blueness of blue? How can we know? This is an aspect of what’s called “the problem of the qualia.” But you knew that.)

Anyway, with the appearance and disappearance of Technicolor red, its evaporation into a metaphor for a memory, a whole way of looking at the world was invented and lost. What struck me was the power, the impact that the memory of that phrase, the redness of red, had on the filmmaker and on my friend. And the way the power can disappear, the vision can be lost.

I mean, I still love Blade Runner, but it will never have the vision-changing impact it had when I first saw it. Then, it was a sudden glimpse of the implicit future; now that it’s been incorporated into everyone’s vision, it seems more a nostalgic, almost antiquated futurism.

Sometimes we’re not even aware of the way films change the way we see things—or, as in the case of Tony Scott’s Domino, which practically nobody saw (but which I want everybody to see), the way a film captures, purely with its look, the way we look. Holds a mirror up to our distorted nature. (You can still catch it on Time Warner’s “on demand” movie channel as of this writing.)

It stars Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey, the real-life—now dead—daughter of original Manchurian Candidate actor Laurence Harvey, a wild child who went from being a runway fashion model to a white-trash bounty hunter, before—this is not in the film; it happened a few months before the widely ignored October 2005 opening—reportedly dying of an overdose in her bathtub while facing up to 10 years in prison for a federal meth-trafficking rap. (In her own way, she was keepin’ it real, no? Her death gave the film a grave retroactive credibility). Just your ordinary English girl in America.

I think most critics didn’t know what to make of Domino. (I still don’t really know myself.) There was just too much damaged information in it. Too much sleaze, from the low-rent (a Ron Jeremy type denouncing our “all porno, all the time” culture) to higher-grade classy sleaze (Christopher Walken!) to medium-grade smarmy sleaze (Mickey Rourke!) and back to low-rent “reality” sleaze (Jerry Springer!).

And I think Tony Scott has suffered somewhat from being the brother of Blade Runner’s Ridley. And, of course, for having directed the risible Top Gun. And so what Scott has been doing in his last two films— Man on Fire starred Denzel Washington in what I thought was a beautiful, melancholy take on a hired bodyguard in Mexico City, who loses, avenges and then regains the child he’s supposed to protect—just hasn’t gotten the respect it deserves.

2) The Greenness of Green

What is he doing? Well, I wouldn’t claim that he’s the only one who does it, or that every technique is his invention, or that it doesn’t partake of techniques pioneered in avant-garde TV commercials or Brazilian cinema (or that he didn’t cop a plot device from Point Break in Domino). But I would say he’s taken it to another level. Synthesized its incoherencies, taken them to the max.

He’s made films that—more than just about any mainstream films I’ve seen recently—have embedded violence and violation together in its very molecular matrix. His films seem not to be made from film stock, celluloid—rather, a creepily cellular green slime-mold emulsion, electro-slime, poison neon green. The green of Love Canal.

The colors themselves are a violation, almost an emotion. The motion itself is an act of violence 24 frames a second. All the images are as if from an illuminated manuscript of Satanic verses.

What you notice is the greenness of the green, the poison green making a mockery of the secular worship of Greenness. Then there’s what he does with movement. Nothing moves at the right speed. Images are violently sped up, violently slowed down and chopped up. Motion is violently violated, almost a metaphor for emotion violently violated. Early on in the film, Keira Knightley’s Domino says that she loves bounty hunting because “I can live the nasty and not do time for it.” Domino the film does the nasty to the time in it. Nothing proceeds at the same pace, everything is out of synch, everyone is out of their minds, and it seems to have something to do with life as we live it now—with, as Hamlet put it, the time being “out of joint.” Disjointed, disorienting.

In the introduction to his acutely observant if somewhat deranging The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Mark Dery explains that he got his title phrase from another writer, Judith A. Adams, who was describing the early twentieth-century nightscape of Coney Island, with its madly beautiful illuminated Dreamland, and the fire that consumed Dreamland, a blaze that broke out “in Hell Gate, a boat ride into the bottomless pit.”

“Pyrotechnic insanitarium”: It’s a phrase that Mr. Dery argues “perfectly captures [a] signature blend of infernal fun and mass madness, technology and pathology,” one that mirrors our contemporary condition better than any other two-word phrase I know. In the last two films of Tony Scott, Man on Fire and Domino, to use Mr. Dery’s phrase, “Dreamland is burning again.”

Some might say that in praising Tony Scott’s disjointed, disordered recent films, I’m violating the so-called Fallacy of Imitative Form, as they called it at Yale: the “fallacy” being that art shouldn’t excuse its own disorder by blaming it on the disorder of Existence.

But I think this disorder—Scott’s Disorder, let’s call it—is intentional, carefully calculated, indeed, artful. And since he uses two different gifted cinematographers on each film—Paul Cameron and Daniel Mindel—it is his responsibility. Of course, now I’m violating one of the other fallacies they warned us about in New Haven: the Intentional Fallacy, the search for the author’s intentions as the privileged reading of a work of art. Oh well, it’s all about violation, isn’t it?

When I say I prefer the commercial failure Domino to the modestly successful Man on Fire, which uses almost all the same techniques and used them earlier, it’s because Man on Fire risks being seen as a Hispanicized version of Orientalism. Risks suggesting it’s not modern life but Mexico City life that is sickeningly violent. Rather, I believe that for Man on Fire, Mexico City is a metaphor for a world on fire, for the violent insanity beneath the surface of our ostensibly more placid part of the hemisphere. In Domino, American life itself is more deeply disturbing than anything in Mexico City.

Not that Domino neglects the racial subtext of everything American. There is that weird—what degree of reality is this?—realistic “episode” of the Jerry Springer show in which one of the characters goes on with a “flow chart” to show her different ways of naming the racial fissures, fractures and fusions that have destabilized the notion of what’s “American” in the first place. She wants to bestow official recognition on categories such as “Blacktino,” “Chinegro,” “Japanic” to reflect the fracturing of unofficial identities. As if a “flow chart” can capture the flow.

And did I mention that there’s an important, underplayed Afghan plot buried in the mix? And then—and this gives Tony Scott a lot of credibility with me—he casts Tom Waits as some possibly deranged, possibly enlightened desert-dwelling prophet, “The Wanderer.”

Domino may not have been a commercial success, but it will be a cultural referent longer than many movies that make more money. It’s our flyblown, electro-slime “Wasteland.” Our Dreamland Burning.

I was going on about the way certain films and certain filmmakers (and their cinematographers) had indelibly changed the way we see the world and ourselves, just through the cumulative effect of the never-before-seen look of their work.

For me, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Peter Brook’s King Lear, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Oliver Stone’s JFK (not for the idiot conspiracy theory, but for the faster-than-the-speed-of-thought fluid film-stock-shifting look), Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and, most recently, David Gordon Green’s George Washington and All the Real Girls. (If you haven’t seen the last two, especially the former, you’ve missed something inexplicably powerful and almost mystically beautiful.)

1) The Redness of Red

Anyway, she interrupted me to say something typically smart and allusive about “the redness of reds.” She was recalling something she’d read years ago in a Jane Kramer “Letter from Europe” in The New Yorker, a reference to a Berlin director, Hartmut Bitomsky. He’d made a film called Die Röte des Rots von Technicolor (The Redness of Reds in Technicolor) in 1972. He was lamenting the loss of the look, the vision of the world beheld by those who saw the original Technicolor films with their, well, Technicolor reds, a redness that has now seeped out of the aging prints and become a kind of cheap-rosé toxic cloud that diminished what was once the shamelessly carnal scarlet lipstick of its original industrial-strength palette.

By the way, “the redness of red” is a common buzz-phrase in the philosophy of mind, when the perennial unanswerable question is asked and analyzed: How do you know that what you see as red, your “redness of red,” is the same as my redness of red? Couldn’t my redness of red look like your blueness of blue? How can we know? This is an aspect of what’s called “the problem of the qualia.” But you knew that.)

Anyway, with the appearance and disappearance of Technicolor red, its evaporation into a metaphor for a memory, a whole way of looking at the world was invented and lost. What struck me was the power, the impact that the memory of that phrase, the redness of red, had on the filmmaker and on my friend. And the way the power can disappear, the vision can be lost.

I mean, I still love Blade Runner, but it will never have the vision-changing impact it had when I first saw it. Then, it was a sudden glimpse of the implicit future; now that it’s been incorporated into everyone’s vision, it seems more a nostalgic, almost antiquated futurism.

Sometimes we’re not even aware of the way films change the way we see things—or, as in the case of Tony Scott’s Domino, which practically nobody saw (but which I want everybody to see), the way a film captures, purely with its look, the way we look. Holds a mirror up to our distorted nature. (You can still catch it on Time Warner’s “on demand” movie channel as of this writing.)

It stars Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey, the real-life—now dead—daughter of original Manchurian Candidate actor Laurence Harvey, a wild child who went from being a runway fashion model to a white-trash bounty hunter, before—this is not in the film; it happened a few months before the widely ignored October 2005 opening—reportedly dying of an overdose in her bathtub while facing up to 10 years in prison for a federal meth-trafficking rap. (In her own way, she was keepin’ it real, no? Her death gave the film a grave retroactive credibility). Just your ordinary English girl in America.

I think most critics didn’t know what to make of Domino. (I still don’t really know myself.) There was just too much damaged information in it. Too much sleaze, from the low-rent (a Ron Jeremy type denouncing our “all porno, all the time” culture) to higher-grade classy sleaze (Christopher Walken!) to medium-grade smarmy sleaze (Mickey Rourke!) and back to low-rent “reality” sleaze (Jerry Springer!).

And I think Tony Scott has suffered somewhat from being the brother of Blade Runner’s Ridley. And, of course, for having directed the risible Top Gun. And so what Scott has been doing in his last two films—Man on Fire starred Denzel Washington in what I thought was a beautiful, melancholy take on a hired bodyguard in Mexico City, who loses, avenges and then regains the child he’s supposed to protect—just hasn’t gotten the respect it deserves.

2) The Greenness of Green

What is he doing? Well, I wouldn’t claim that he’s the only one who does it, or that every technique is his invention, or that it doesn’t partake of techniques pioneered in avant-garde TV commercials or Brazilian cinema (or that he didn’t cop a plot device from Point Break in Domino). But I would say he’s taken it to another level. Synthesized its incoherencies, taken them to the max.

He’s made films that—more than just about any mainstream films I’ve seen recently—have embedded violence and violation together in its very molecular matrix. His films seem not to be made from film stock, celluloid—rather, a creepily cellular green slime-mold emulsion, electro-slime, poison neon green. The green of Love Canal.

The colors themselves are a violation, almost an emotion. The motion itself is an act of violence 24 frames a second. All the images are as if from an illuminated manuscript of Satanic verses.

What you notice is the greenness of the green, the poison green making a mockery of the secular worship of Greenness. Then there’s what he does with movement. Nothing moves at the right speed. Images are violently sped up, violently slowed down and chopped up. Motion is violently violated, almost a metaphor for emotion violently violated. Early on in the film, Keira Knightley’s Domino says that she loves bounty hunting because “I can live the nasty and not do time for it.” Domino the film does the nasty to the time in it. Nothing proceeds at the same pace, everything is out of synch, everyone is out of their minds, and it seems to have something to do with life as we live it now—with, as Hamlet put it, the time being “out of joint.” Disjointed, disorienting.

In the introduction to his acutely observant if somewhat deranging The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Mark Dery explains that he got his title phrase from another writer, Judith A. Adams, who was describing the early twentieth-century nightscape of Coney Island, with its madly beautiful illuminated Dreamland, and the fire that consumed Dreamland, a blaze that broke out “in Hell Gate, a boat ride into the bottomless pit.”

“Pyrotechnic insanitarium”: It’s a phrase that Mr. Dery argues “perfectly captures [a] signature blend of infernal fun and mass madness, technology and pathology,” one that mirrors our contemporary condition better than any other two-word phrase I know. In the last two films of Tony Scott, Man on Fire and Domino, to use Mr. Dery’s phrase, “Dreamland is burning again.”

Some might say that in praising Tony Scott’s disjointed, disordered recent films, I’m violating the so-called Fallacy of Imitative Form, as they called it at Yale: the “fallacy” being that art shouldn’t excuse its own disorder by blaming it on the disorder of Existence.

But I think this disorder—Scott’s Disorder, let’s call it—is intentional, carefully calculated, indeed, artful. And since he uses two different gifted cinematographers on each film—Paul Cameron and Daniel Mindel—it is his responsibility. Of course, now I’m violating one of the other fallacies they warned us about in New Haven: the Intentional Fallacy, the search for the author’s intentions as the privileged reading of a work of art. Oh well, it’s all about violation, isn’t it?

When I say I prefer the commercial failure Domino to the modestly successful Man on Fire, which uses almost all the same techniques and used them earlier, it’s because Man on Fire risks being seen as a Hispanicized version of Orientalism. Risks suggesting it’s not modern life but Mexico City life that is sickeningly violent. Rather, I believe that for Man on Fire, Mexico City is a metaphor for a world on fire, for the violent insanity beneath the surface of our ostensibly more placid part of the hemisphere. In Domino, American life itself is more deeply disturbing than anything in Mexico City.

Not that Domino neglects the racial subtext of everything American. There is that weird—what degree of reality is this?—realistic “episode” of the Jerry Springer show in which one of the characters goes on with a “flow chart” to show her different ways of naming the racial fissures, fractures and fusions that have destabilized the notion of what’s “American” in the first place. She wants to bestow official recognition on categories such as “Blacktino,” “Chinegro,” “Japanic” to reflect the fracturing of unofficial identities. As if a “flow chart” can capture the flow.

And did I mention that there’s an important, underplayed Afghan plot buried in the mix? And then—and this gives Tony Scott a lot of credibility with me—he casts Tom Waits as some possibly deranged, possibly enlightened desert-dwelling prophet, “The Wanderer.”

Domino may not have been a commercial success, but it will be a cultural referent longer than many movies that make more money. It’s our flyblown, electro-slime “Wasteland.” Our Dreamland Burning.

of trash we are boggled in gets replaced by … more trash! One look at the movie

ads clogging your newspaper can make you wonder if your brain is coming

derailed from your body. The Whole Ten

Yards , Johnson Family Vacation , Hellboy , Starsky and Hutch , 13 Going

On 30 , Mean Girls , and various

and sundry Kill Bill s and knockoffs

thereof-the list gets longer every time I turn the page. Who cares about The Alamo , that interminable bore that

makes Billy Bob Thornton, Dennis Quaid and Jason Patric look like the faces on

a box of Smith Brothers cough drops? I'm sure I've seen movies I have hated as

much as Dogville , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

and About Adam , but I just can't

remember what they are. Sadder still, what does it say about the state of

so-called criticism today when these movies nobody wants to see blast forth ads

full of thumbs-up-"way up"? What does it say about the public when the more

money dogs like Scooby-Doo 2 drag in

at the box office, the worse they seem to be? And the summer, when they save

the worst movies for the brain-dead, hasn't even started. I should have

listened to my mother and opened a revival house. Then I could at least go

broke in style, knowing I pleased one person-myself.

And so it is with some relief when a movie comes along

like Laws of Attraction , a slick,

lushly appointed romantic comedy which will not appeal to tattooed freaks,

violence-craving kids, prison inmates or critics desperately trying to prove

how young and hip they are, but which does provide an element of the one word

that has disappeared from the world of movies. Remember the word

"entertainment"? It went the way of Vincente Minnelli. So is Laws of Attraction a great comedy? Get

real. What was the last great comedy you saw, or the last great anything? No,

in essence, Laws of Attraction is

about only two things: (1) how pretty Julianne Moore is, and (2) how pretty

Pierce Brosnan is. O.K., it's not Billy Wilder. But compared to all of the

films I've suffered through lately about killing and war and dope fiends and

pedophiles and suicide, I'll take pretty. Pretty is good.

The two stars are battling New York divorce lawyers who

fall in love hating each other. We just saw the same plot with George Clooney

and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the godawful Coen Brothers fiasco Intolerable Cruelty , but so what?

Everything is a copy of something else these days; inspired originality is as

hard to come by as one of Mr. Brosnan's 007 Maseratis at a half-price sale. And

even with its plodding tempo and dull padding, Laws of Attraction is a better, edgier movie. The adversarial

Moore-Brosnan duo is rich, beautiful and successful, but they never go

anywhere. They do not date, or end up on Page Six. They don't seem to have any

friends or lovers or get any bang for their bucks. What is wrong with this

picture? She is Audrey Miller, a crack attorney who is not beyond framing the

husbands of her female clients to get them better settlements. Now she's up to

her Palm Pilot fighting off the toughest opponent she's ever faced in a

courtroom. He is Daniel Rafferty, new in town, smart, ruthless, a GQ cover who has never lost a case. From

their opening arguments on, it's open war in the divorce-court trenches, using

every strategy from apology to insult as they thrust and parry their way

through New York, drinking lethal Mexican cocktails, landing in bed in a moment

of horny weakness with him showing up in court dangling her panties. Two pit

bulls whose battles in one divorce trial after another become fodder for the

tabloid-news channels. Ridiculous, of course, but it's the same stuff they

print every day in the New York Post .

Things boil over with the latest boldface divorce war between two instant

celebs, a fried-brains-a-flaky designer named Serena (Parker Posey) and her

rock-star husband, Thorne (Michael Sheen), the lead singer for a group called

the Needles. Each of them is fighting over a castle in Ireland, so it's off to

the land of leprechauns to depose the household staff. Among the fiddles, clog

dances and shamrocks, the movie takes a detour, and the two very charming stars

get a chance to display how much charm they really have, getting married in a

drunken Guinness stout stupor. Back in Manhattan, when he wins the divorce case

because of a piece of evidence he finds accidentally in her garbage bin, it's

time for them to hit the judge's chambers for their own divorce. By this time,

the movie has collapsed along with every attempt at artificial respiration-but

they're so pretty to look at, and this movie isn't over yet. If you haven't

dozed off, there are more surprises on the way.

The eternally debonair Brosnan, who is more underrated

than he should be, mixes some of his celebrated sardonic James Bond wit with

the sensitivity he showed in the marvelous film Evelyn . The delectable Ms. Moore is clearly having a rest from her

usual tense and demanding assignments. Famous for roles that are usually one

step away from depression, danger and death, they both look like they are

having a swell time playing a sexy, relaxed, contemporary and self-confident

rivalry in the Tracy and Hepburn mold. And there is a crisp, appealing and

hilarious contribution by Frances Fisher, who plays Ms. Moore's rich, vain

mother. This ageless logarithm with the face lifts and the Eve Arden wisecracks

is, in real life, almost the same age as Julianne Moore. When Mr. Brosnan meets

her for the first time, he asks, "Are you really 56?" She purrs girlishly,

"Parts of me are." She's got all the best lines-or maybe it's just that they're

the only lines in the picture that don't sound like they've been rewritten a

dozen times. Depending on which credits you read, several screenwriters have

been listed. Sometimes two and sometimes three-Aline Brosh McKenna, Karey

Kilpatrick and Robert Harling-are credited, which is never a good sign. The

dialogue is so muddled it's hard to know who wrote what, but Mr. Harling ( Steel Magnolias , The First Wives Club ) has such a talent for clever zingers you can

almost place bets on which lines are his. The movie's weak stab at making some

kind of statement on the divorce issue doesn't ring true at all, and although

the British director, Peter Howitt, proved with the Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors that he can juggle styles

and tempos without confusing excess, he doesn't seem entirely comfortable with

American comedy. Thank you, Jesus, for the two stars. It's their movie all the

way, and Mr. Howitt has the wisdom to just get out of the way and let them go

at each other like chinchillas in heat. I liked Laws of Attraction , but it doesn't really add up to much more than

a fun date flick-for folks who are still dating after 50.

Douse That Fire

For relentless, mean-spirited, stomach-heaving violence,

look no further than a depressing horror called Man On Fire . Everything is incoherent about this mess, from the

unbelievable plot to the mixed-up geography. It starts in El Paso, then moves

across the Mexican border to Juarez, although the locations look like Mexico

City. Occasionally one of the many cars loaded with killers and kidnappers will

pass the famous scenic volcano Popocatepetl, near Cuernavaca. Suffice it to say

nothing about this pumped-up, hyperthyroidal Tony Scott revenge flick makes

sense, but it takes two hours to kill off as many people and demolish as many

vehicles as Charles Bronson used to do in 30 minutes. Denzel Washington plays

Creasy, a scruffy, drunken tough guy who has seen better days fighting

terrorists. Desperate for money to feed his Jack Daniels habit, he cleans up

and go to work as a bodyguard for a Mexican millionaire with a pretty blond

wife (Radha Mitchell) and a cute, blond and thoroughly precocious little

daughter (played by cute, blond and thoroughly precocious child star Dakota

Fanning). She adores the big, black former counterterrorist who specializes in

bone-crunching violence in two languages, with subtitles. To him, it's a job.

He's paid to protect the kid, not be her pal or playmate. Overwritten by Brian

Helgeland, who seems to be writing half of the brainless blockbusters coming

out of Hollywood these days, the film tries to delve beneath the hard exterior

of this killing machine. He's sullen, depressed and guilty about his past ("Do

you think God will ever forgive us?" he asks his retired buddy, Christopher

Walken, who is totally wasted in the movie but at least doesn't play the

villain for a change). The movie never explains what it is that Creasy is

guilty about. He once tried to commit suicide, but the gun jammed. He considers

that his lucky bullet. You flunk Formula Film Class 101 if you don't know (1)

that cute little moppet will be kidnapped, (2) that lucky bullet will find a

purpose in a crucial moment in the screenplay, and (3) Creasy will find his own

humanity and heart. She buys him a medal of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost

causes. He teaches her to swim. But first there are about 2,000 Mexicans to

kill. The little girl disappears, Denzel is riddled with enough burning iron to

incinerate a mere mortal, and instead of heading for San Diego or Pizmo Beach, he

takes on the case all by himself, dispensing advice to the rats and hoods of

the barrio like: "Revenge is a meal best served cold." Man On Fire piles on every blood-splattering Latino cliché from

Anthony Mann's Border Incident to

Steven Soderbergh's Traffic , with

tortures even the Punisher never thought about. I can't tell you how dismaying

it is to watch a great actor like Denzel Washington ripping off one man's

fingers and ears, one by one, with a carving knife, then sealing the bloody

stumps with a hot cigarette lighter. The audience screams for more. So he

inserts a remote-control time bomb into another victim's alimentary canal and

pushes the death button. I am amazed the Mexican government hasn't found a way

to seek revenge against Tony Scott for the damage he has done to the Mexican

tourist industry. No wonder the movie is so addled about where it takes place.

By the time Denzel takes on the entire country, blowing up everything in sight,

the movie's opening crawl ("There's a new kidnapping every 60 minutes, and 70%

of the victims never survive") has become a reality illustrated with arty

camera angles, pretentious jump cuts, noisy explosions, fast-forward speed

projection, and all manner of annoying and distracting camera tricks that make

the movie impossible to follow-and who cares, anyway? Man On Fire turns one of the most beautiful countries in the world

into a hopeless dump of rotting immorality and crime where nobody is safe.

According to this cynical movie, the government officials, the businessmen, the

peasants, the children, even the cops are corrupt and dangerous, and there is

no authority figure in the entire country trustworthy enough to turn to for

help. It's up to a man like Denzel/Creasy to smash skulls together, even if it

costs him his own life. Preparing for the throw-up violence in the final reel,

Christopher Walken surveys the corpses and says, "Creasy's art is death-he's

about to paint his masterpiece." In today's cinematic pathology, garbage comes

in many forms. In the long, incomprehensible and preposterous Man On Fire , you get all of them in the

same movie.