But where does it take you? What does it leave you with, aside from a welcome appreciation of Eastwood's considerable strengths as a director? Not a whole lot, really.

I saw it last May at the Cannes Film Festival, and for some reason I've never felt moved to write anything since. That reason, I suppose, is that it didn't leave me with anything I could honestly call surprising or startling, although it was certainly tasty in the sense that any film this assured and well composed is always a modest turn-on to sit through.

What MYSTIC RIVER tells us is that childhood trauma endures and metastasizes and screws you up well into adulthood, and that it can fan out and infect in ways that can be terribly tragic. Okay, but I kind of knew that going in.

It's a present-day crime story set in a working-class Boston neighborhood, about the murder of a young girl. But the emotional underpinning -- the rape of a young boy by a couple of 40ish adult males who take him away in a car, pretending to be cops -- is rendered in the opening scene, set in the '70s, and the film keeps dipping back into this grotesque history.

It's all about this one thing, really, and the movie keeps telling us the same thing. What these kids went through still burns, numbs, terrifies -- and it won't let go.

Three kids were walloped by this episode, actually -- the victim, Dave, and his friends Sean and Jimmy, who were with him when the predators came along.

The adult Dave (Tim Robbins), is married and still living in the same neighborhood, and has all kinds of antsy flickerings and emotional twitches to share, whatever and with whomever. Grown-up Sean (Kevin Bacon), an emotional hider whose marriage is dying on the vine, is a homicide detective. And Jimmy (Sean Penn), an ex-con who runs a grocery store in the old 'hood, is the snarliest of the three and also the most combustible.

It's Jimmy's 19 year-old daughter who turns up dead. Sean is assigned to investigate, and as things progress a strange notion takes hold that the skittish, deeply bothered Dave may have been somehow involved. In the end it's Jimmy's throttling vigilante rage -- a rage not entirely driven by his terrible parental loss -- that leads to the film's final bitter tragedy.

And we're left thinking what a sad fucked-up mess we sometimes make of our lives. Yup. No argument there.

The NEW YORKER's David Denby has written that Eastwood "may have specialized in [films about] cold, dead-eyed killers when he was young, but it's long been obvious that the mean had serious interests and ambitions...and yet no one, I think, could have expected him to pass so thoroughly from the shallowly mythic to the profoundly matter-of-fact."

That's what Eastwood has been doing better and better as he goes along - underplaying, avoiding any semblance of arty pretension, melting the snow into pure H20 and just letting his themes and undercurrents speak for themselves.

Terrific -- but I don't think MYSTIC RIVER takes you anywhere that's all that transforming. It's just about people and their baggage, and how that baggage tends to leave them in a sadly reactive and imprisoned place. It's all solid and true, but I wasn't levitating as I walked out of the Grand Palais last May, and I don't see paying audiences doing handstands this weekend either. If I'm wrong, fine...but I don't see it happening.

It's one of Eastwood's best, certainly, but it still runs second to UNFORGIVEN.

The awards picture might pan out. If Clint winds up with a Best Director nomination or the film itself is put up for a Best Picture Oscar, great. It could happen.

The church-choir praise from L.A. TIMES critic Kenneth Turan, bannered on the front page of Wednesday's Calendar section, gave MYSTIC RIVER a good start in Los Angeles. Turan's hosannahs may have had an unusually uplifting effect upon liberal-minded Academy members who otherwise felt bummed by Arnold's electoral victory. (Different things bleed and bounce into each other in our heads all the time.)

But I don't think Penn's performance, which some are saying could put him in Oscar contention as well, is anywhere near as masterful or affecting as his work in Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's 21 GRAMS. But we'll see.

Turtle Blues

It's funny, but thinking about MYSTIC RIVER and its haunted-childhood theme brought out a memory of my own that I've been pushing down all my life, and which I can barely think about without twitching. I'm feeling it right now.

When I was seven or eight, I came upon a fairly large turtle that was inching its way out of a drainpipe in a wooded area behind my parents' home. I'd been reading about snapping turtles in school, and had heard scary stories about what ugly, hissing monsters they could be, and how they could bite your finger off. This guy looked to me like he might be one. He was big and grotesque-looking, and I felt alarmed and scared.

Being the well-brought-up child of middle-class parents that I was back then, I acted upon this like a sadist. I picked up a piece of board and beat the turtle on its shell. Not once or twice, but repeatedly. There was no stopping the emotion once it started. The poor turtle's shell gradually started leaking blood.

I have never done anything in my life as cruel and singularly hateful as this. I could be brought into a therapy session with Jesus and Krishna together, and they could both smile and tell me to not to feel so badly -- kids do cruel things, I was acting out of ignorant fear or self-defense, etc. They could end the session by hugging me and telling me to leave my guilt and move on with my life and spread joy, and I wouldn't hear them. I'll carry this one to my grave.

This is what a good movie about real life will sometimes do. It puts you in touch not just with its own concerns, but ones of your own that fall into the same general category. So maybe I'm wrong about MYSTIC RIVER. Maybe it'll strike similar chords out there, or maybe I just had to air this turtle thing. Whatever.

Violent? Funny?

The biggest wrongo out there now is the view that KILL BILL is the bloodiest and most violent mainstream film ever made, and that audiences outside of your martial-arts geeks and Quentin Tarantino fans may shun it because of this, and that Disney bigwigs are up in arms that a facet of their empire, Miramax Films, has tarnished their image by churning this thing out.

For violence to be upsetting, it has to be sincere. It has to bring real pain upon its victims, and be delivered with absolute malice, like the real-life kind. You want real violence? See MYSTIC RIVER. Better yet, go rent Mike Nichols' WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRIGINIA WOLFF. That movie is about nothing but wounding and jabbing and drawing blood.

Obviously, on-screen violence can offend in all kinds of ways, but the worst way is when it's presented cynically or carelessly within a story or atmosphere meant to conjure a reflection or semblance of life as it actually tastes and feels. It's hard to find a violent film these days that doesn't play the violence-as-fashion game to some degree, but I can't think of one that has the ripe magnetism and off-the-planet panache of KILL BILL.

Other violent movies spit and swear and stomp around. KILL BILL sings and dances. Other violent movies have their character and plot moves pretty well worked out, but they're a drag to watch. KILL BILL has almost no character development and the story barely ignites, but it's cooler than cooly-cool.

This movie is not some mixture of style, story, homage and whatever violent-movie clichés may have been floating around when Quentin shot it. It's a chop-socky jape inside a B-movie masquerade riding a samurai-sword hard-on inside Tarantino's twisted head.

The violence in KILL BILL is arch, baroque and as insincere as it could possibly get. A guy gets his head sliced off and a fountain of red Kool-Aid spews out all over a conference table, and people are calling this film "bloody"? Okay, and QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE with Zsa- Zsa Gabor is about the challenge of inter-planetary travel.

There's a scene in Roman Polanski's REPULSION when Catherine Deneuve's beautiful but deranged beauty salon worker is cutting the cuticles of an elderly woman customer, and she accidentally jabs the woman's fingernail and draws a spot of blood, and the woman screams. It's hard not to flinch and imagine what it might feel like. This one little bit is ten times more jolting than anything in KILL BILL. Get some perspective, people.

I don't think Tarantino's film is going to tank (figure $65 to $70 million, at least) because it makes the audience feel included and in on the goof. Granted, he's not the name director he was right after PULP FICTION because he's been too fucking lazy and hasn't kept himself in the game, and this has posed a marketing challenge. (Tracking -- i.e., awareness levels -- weren't where Miramax wanted them to be a couple of weeks ago.)

The bottom line is that Tarantino is a director who has a knack for getting to audiences the way Frank Sinatra used to convey on one-on-one intimacy through his singing and the way the young Mickey Rourke, as Pauline Kael once observed in a review of DINER, had a way of "acting right to you."

There's also an issue about laughs and INTOLERABLE CRUELTY that came up the other night that I find amazing. One man's humor is another man's torture chamber, but I had an astonishing discussion with a guy after seeing it the second time last Wednesday. The mind- blowing thing wasn't his claim that it's not a very good movie (it is, of course -- just not in a way he's able to understand or digest), but his insistence that it's not all that funny.

I have two words to say to him and to the world: Wheezy Joe. See this Joel and Ethan Coen movie this weekend and you'll know what I mean. There's a truckload of funny stuff besides what comes out of W.J.'s mouth (or what goes into it, rather), but...ahhh, just go.

Return of Jarecki

I happened to bump into Andrew Jarecki again earlier this week. I last spoke to the director of CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS last May at the Cannes Film Festival. He was in Los Angeles earlier this week putting the finishing touches on his acclaimed documentary's two-disc DVD.

The DVD will start to be mailed out to journalists sometime later this month. The commercial release will be in January '04.

Jarecki said he couldn't divulge who the DVD's distributor is (the deal was just closing) but said he didn't want to comment about whether the MPAA's screener-mailing ban would affect plans to send the DVD out to Academy members. Magnolia Films, the theatrical distributor, is not an MPAA signatory.

A totally riveting, tirelessly probed, relentlessly creepy real-life tale of a Long Island family caught up in a child-molestation scandal that erupted in the late '80s, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS ran 107 minutes when it opened commercially earlier this year. Jarecki said at Sundance last January that the original cut had been 5 1/2 hours long.

Call me odd, but the film is so good and such a trip that I wanted to see this version on the DVD. That's not happening, Jarecki said, but the DVD's "special features" disc will contain 26 short films taken from the 5 1/2 hour cut that couldn't be fit into the theatrical release version. These supplementary features run well over two hours and are presented under the title "Capturing the Friedmans: Outside the Frame."

Jarecki let me see three or four of these in his hotel room at the Beverly Hills Peninsula.

The biggest knock-out is a letter written by Arnold Friedman, whose pedophilia was brought to public attention when Great Neck cops charged him (along with his son, Jesse) with repeatedly molesting young boys in a computer class he taught in his home. He is heard rationalizing the difference between a wounding predatory pedophile (which he wasn't, he claimed) and a caring and considerate pedophile (which he considered himself to be).

The segment is called "Anatomy of a Pedophile." The letter is read by Long Island attorney Peter Panaro, who represented Jesse and is one of the doc's various talking heads.

I asked Jarecki why he didn't include this "smoking gun" tape in the film, especially as the film plants questions in the viewer's mind if Friedman (who committed suicide in prison in 1995) was quite the pernicious molester that the authorities made him out to be. Jarecki answered he felt the film worked better as a Roshomon-like meditation on the case.

There's also a fascinating short in which the various participants in the case are seen debating the ins and outs during a q & a held after a screening at last spring's Tribeca Film Festival.

The principal FRIEDMANS characters are Arnold, Jesse and David, the eldest of the family's three sons. What made the documentary possible was the fact that David, a professional party clown, videotaped his family obsessively during his father's persecution.

I said it last May and I'll say it again -- denial is a deeply fascinating disease. It's probably the #1 affliction in America right now. I've had my encounters with it personally (who hasn't?), but until I saw CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS I'd never imagined denial could be practiced this oppressively. Denial seethes through the pores of this film like that red gooey-glop pushing its way through the metal air vent in the movie theater in THE BLOB ('57). It rises up out of the murk of this true story like THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON.

Is there any limit to a person's willingness to deny an apparent fact, regardless of whatever proof may exist to support it? CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS says no. There are none. The sky's the limit.

Manchurian Remake

"It would make sense to remake THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE if the 1962 movie had been a softer, squarer version of a smart, hip book. Then we'd want a new version that delivered what had been missing.

"But does anyone doubt that a big-budget 2004 version will dull every one of the edges that the original has, from Raymond's unlikability to Marco's nervous exhaustion to the hints of incest between Raymond and his mother to the gentle satire of John McGiver's decent (if a touch windy and wimpy) liberal senator?

"Even with Scott Rudin producing, which God knows is better than Bruckheimer producing for Michael Bay (though that would certainly have been ironic, given the rumors about the latter's parentage), I expect this to be as bad a job of modern-Hollywood sugarcoating as when Frankenheimer's brilliantly bleak parable of aging SECONDS was largely ripped off for the make-Michael-Douglas-a-better-yuppie fable, THE GAME." -- Michael Gebert

Wells to Gebert: I never associated THE GAME with SECONDS, but whatever.

Gebert back to Wells: "While the purpose of the mystery corporation is different in the two films, there's a lot of similarity in how the main characters get sucked in. They have to take a test under blaring fluorescents, they have unnervingly off-kilter interviews with a company rep who won't really tell them anything, they have an old friend/kid brother who's simultaneously offering the program and warning them against it, etc. (You could even argue that Fincher cast WASPy bureaucrat type James Rebhorn because he's so reminiscent of WASPy bureaucrat type Wesley Addy.) Not noticeable unless you happen to see them close to each other, perhaps, but well beyond coincidence."

More Bush/Saud

"An excellent website that I highly recommend to all 'mainstream Americans-with-a-brain' is called www.spinsanity.com. As the name might suggest it attempts to document and get to the bottom of egregiously spun issues. It is devotedly non-partisan and has been praised by right and left wing columnists. It was also used as a reference by Al Franken in his new book.

"There's an article on this site that attempts to 'de-spin' Craig Unger's VANITY FAIR article. They credit his reporting -- just not the way it is being spun.

"The article focuses on the timing of the Saudi flights after 9-11. The authors agree that it is possible that interviews were compromised, but they clearly put the lie to the message that Bush allowed the Saudi's to leave US airspace 48 hours after 9-11 before commercial air traffic was allowed. To be clear, I think Unger did a great job pointing out the influence the Saudi royal family has on Bush."

"The link is www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2003_09_14_archive.html#1063681105639678." Louis Wainwright

Unger replies: "They are making a lot of fuss about nothing. The key point is that the process of repatriation of the Saudis began while private aviation was still locked down. True, most of the flights left US soil after lockdown, but the point is that when the process began, special White House permission was required -- and granted. The article says this, and I've said it on CNN.

"So what if the repatriation wasn't finished until after the lockdown was lifted? The larger point is that at a time when virtually no one in the US could fly, when heart transplant recipients had their replacement hearts downed from the skies, when FBI counterterrorism agents were not allowed to fly, the White House granted special permission to the Saudis, including the bin Ladens, to have sole use of American airspace. They also, with the FBI's cooperation, allowed them to leave the country without being interrogated.

"In addition, the release about Richard Clarke's quote is accurate in saying that 'the Bush administration decided to allow a group of Saudis to fly out of the U.S. just after September 11... at a time when access to US airspace was still restricted and required special government approval.' But the timing refers to when the decision was made, not to the when the repatriation process was over.

"I might add that even Colin Powell, on Meet the Press, and later Dick Cheney did not dispute the piece. "

Moore Trashings

"You've already posted some responses in your column that questioned Michael Moore's reliability and integrity. There have been a lot of reports floating around in the mainstream press that questioned various issues he has raised, particularly attacking parts of BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE as blatantly biased or strictly untrue.

"I admit that I gave these reports some credence myself, simply because they were showing up in mainstream press, whom I thought would have some integrity of their own, or would at least investigate the plausibility of the accusations.

"However, Moore has put up a web page on his site that addresses all of these attacks in a very straight-forward manner. You might want to post it for the skeptics.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/

"Moore might be too strident for his own good at times, but at least he seems to be trying hard to be truthful." -- Buck Thighmaster