But more people, I guess, I'm trusting, know him as the finest, most relentlessly honest cut-to-the-chase poet this country has ever sired...the least compromised and airy-fairy, the fullest of spirit, the most beautifully precise and uncommonly clear-eyed....as well as the loneliest, the saddest, the surliest.

The fact that Bukowski -- his book "Hollywood," I should say -- is briefly seen in MY DATE WITH DREW, sitting on a wooden table in Brian Herzlinger's spartan one-bedroom apartment, speaks volumes about his reputation among the urban under-40 set.

Bukowski's stuff is for people who don't like poetry, but I'll bet he's made more converts to the form than all the dandified, gussied-up poets who've been given the okay by the literary establishment. The scholared elites still regard Bukowski as unfit for membership, apparently.

That's because he drank a lot and wrote about his rude, lower-depths experiences in an unrarified, brutally honest manner. He wrote mainly about loneliness, sex, drunks and drunkenness, living off shitty jobs and living in flop-houses and being in love with floozies....that general line of wallow.

If you haven't tried Bukowski, start with autobiographical narratives like "Post Office," "Ham on Rye," "Women," "Hollywood" or "Factotum," and then read the poetry volumes like "Love is a Dog From Hell" or "You Get So Alone Sometimes It Just Makes Sense."

Oh, yeah...the movie. Dullaghan gets Bukowksi as right as I can imagine anyone getting him. He tells you all about the life of this gnarly gentle brute, and passes along a good understanding of what his writing was about, and the sum of it just lifts you right up and over, I swear.

You'll probably come away from it liking Bukowski enormously, or respecting the shit out of him at least, particularly the devotion that he brought to pounding his stuff out, day in and day out. The guy wrote and wrote. I've read there's enough unpublished poetry to supply at least another couple of volumes to come.

A well-condensed Bukowski primer -- life, work, links, photos -- is easily viewable at http://www.magpictures.com/distribution/bukowski, if you don't want to sift through my thing here.

Dullaghan talks to Bukowski's widow, Linda Lee, some other ex-lovers, some old pals and colleagues, and four or five celebrity fans (Sean Penn, Bono, Tom Waits, Taylor Hackford), but the movie is mainly Bukowski talking about himself.

Dullaghan shot a lot of footage, but also uses slices of other docu profiles...one taped by Hackford in the early '70s, another by some Dutch or Belgian journalist who talked to Bukowski in the '80s....bits and pieces here and there.

The film shows us less of the snarly, impudent, beer-swilling Bukowski from the poetry readings he used to give, and more of the reflective, quiet, vulnerable guy. Mostly. It's got an alarming piece of footage in which Bukowski loses his temper with Linda and kicks her (booze is never a good thing to have in you during an argument). It's obvious from this that he had ugliness in him. But there is so much else of him in the film that is penetrating, moving, graceful.

I met Dullaghan and publicist Fredel Pogodin a few weeks ago at Musso and Frank, the old-school, low-lit Hollywood restaurant. (It happened two days before VAN HELSING opened, and the reason I remember this is because a Universal publicist, who must have been feeling under attack at that point, was lunching with my friend Anne Thompson in the next room.)

Dullaghan and Fredel and I had a pleasant chat. Mostly we just shot the shit and traded Bukowski stories. He said there'll be a lot of good extras on the BORN INTO THIS DVD, but that the money to mix it in hadn't yet materialized. Dullaghan is a true believer. He's been wailing on this film for many, many years.

I wrote the BARFLY press kit (with Schroeder demanding rewrite after rewrite...it got so I couldn't read the damn thing after a while) when I was working for Cannon Films publicity. Cannon was a wacked operation, certainly as far as the Bad News Jews were concerned, but there was great spirit among the staffers, who were all first-rate.

Anyway, out of all this I got to enjoy an evening sit-down with Bukowski and Linda at their home in Long Beach. I was nervous at first, but I remember loosening up when Bukowski laughed and spoke of me in the third person by saying, "He's influenced by Bukowski!" I remember his warmth and kindly smile, and how he always rolled his own cigarettes.

Like I said, BUKOWSKI: BORN INTO THIS (Magnolia) is currently playing in L.A., San Francisco, Berkeley and Cambridge. It opens in Manhattan this Friday, and will be slowly moving into other cities (Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego) over the next several weeks .

Taste

I took a 36 hour round-trip drive early last week from Padova, Italy, to Slovenia and Croatia and back again. It was a nickel-and-dime journey all the way, but one of the things that made the trip pleasurable is that I spent a good chunk of it listening to a two-and-a-half-hour CD of Charles Bukowski reading his stuff.

It felt right to be listening to him in this milieu. Bukowksi's family was German, and his stuff has always sold more vigorously in Europe than in the States. His purring, soothing, slightly drawly voice was, in any event, infinitely preferable to the Europop crap on the radio.

This is the Bukowksi poem that got to me the most. He called it "The Genius of the Crowd." I'm ignoring Bukowksi's poetic punctuations (all those slash marks...okay, I'm a peon) and just running it the way it sounded:

"There is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day.

"And the best at murder are those who preach against it. And the best at hate are those who preach love. And the best at war -- finally -- are those who preach peace.

"Those who preach God need God. Those who preach peace do not have peace. Those who preach love do not have love.

"Beware the preachers. Beware the knowers. Beware those who are always reading books. Beware those who either detest poverty or are proud of it.

"Beware those quick to praise, for they need praise in return. Beware those quick to censure: they are afraid of what they do not know. Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.

"Beware the average man, the average woman. Beware their love. Their love is average, seeks average. But there is genius in their hatred.

"There is enough genius in their hatred to kill you, to kill anybody.

"Not wanting solitude, not understanding solitude, they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own. Not being able to create art, they will not understand art. They will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world.

"Not being able to love fully they will believe your love incomplete, and then they will hate you.

"And their hatred will be perfect. Like a shining diamond. Like a knife. Like a mountain. Like a tiger. Like hemlock.

"Their finest art."

After The Fact

I missed the boat on THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, and it's all over now. Everyone saw it last weekend and put it down with their friends after the show, and vaguely felt like fools...slight baah-ing fools...for giving their money to 20th Century Fox.

I saw it on Monday, but I didn't suffer as horribly as I thought I would. It's total crap, of course, but I enjoyed watching all that cool CG....for as long as it lasted. Most of the good stuff is gone by the midway point, you see.

If only Tom Rothman had approved spending $300 or $400 million so director Roland Emmerich could really go to town on the CG stuff and ignore the story and the characters and the dialogue, which he's pretty awful at anyway.

Look at this photo of this big tsunami about to slam into midtown Manhattan... it's cool, dammit. I eat this shit up. We all do.

My mistake was going to see a "version originale" at the Pathe Wepler multiplex at Place Clichy. (Oh, yeah....I'm in Paris for a couple of weeks.) I should have gone to a French-dubbed version, which I almost went to by accident. It would have been more tolerable on some level. You know how that works...subtitles and exotic languages have a way of making a movie seem better, even if it sucks.

It could have been a lot funnier. Fox should have released the Roland Emmerich version along with an alternate WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY? version...you know, with the scripted dialogue wiped off the soundtrack and some SNL types adding goofball put-on material in its place. Fox Video should really consider doing this -- seriously -- for the DVD.

There's a scene when paleoclimatolgist Dennis Quaid tells the White House bigwigs that everyone in the northern part of the U.S. needs to move south, and President Perry King says, "What are you suggesting?"? This time have Quaid say, "I'm suggesting that we all buy some sarapes and sombreros and start to learn to speak Spanish...fast."

(My Mexican director friends will be offended, but we all know about crude stereotypes and comic punchlines.)

This movie is a total hoot....a whoopee cushion. People in Emporia, Kansas, know this as well as I do. Why not have fun with the cynicism and make more moolah? Are you listening, Tom Rothman? Trust me, the audience is way ahead of what you think everyone wants or would like.

The military guy who freezes to death in a matter of seconds...that was a howl. (There was a bit just like this in an Abbott and Costello film I once saw.) I doubt if Emmerich intended it to be funny, but maybe.

The TV weatherman who is instantly killed by a flying piece of metal....I laughed at that one too. I hate weatherman. It was good to see one die.

And I liked the shots of Americans sneaking across the Rio Grande into Mexico....decent gag.

Nobody in the world liked those scenes with Sela Ward constantly comforting that bald cancer-chemo kid in his hospital bedroom. The audience I was with became impatient after the third or fourth reprisal of this, and some in the audience stood up, raised their fists and started chanting, "L'enfant doit mourir ! Tuez-le! L'enfant doit mourir! Tuez-le!" (Okay, they didn't....but I'll bet they were thinking this.)

Well, at least it's another get-the-Bushies film. That asshole Vice President (Kenneth Welsh) is obviously modelled on Dick Cheney, and his oblivious-to-the-environment responses are straight out of the Dubya manual.

Why did Emmerich have those stupid wolves on the frozen ship....they came from a nearby zoo, was that it?...why did he make the wolves into super-sizers, and why were they so obviously digital? Emmerich couldn't find real wolves, or trained dogs that could be made up to look right?

Quaid's snow-shoe trek from Washington, D.C., to New York City to hook up with son Jake Gyllenhaal is ridiculous, of course...although it makes a certain emotional sense. He's supposed to get to the library and hug his son and then...what? Nothing. "Well, I guess we're gonna be Popsicles soon, son...but at least we'll be freezing together."

The sun coming out at the end is bullshit. The Vice President changing his tune and sounding like a human being at the end is bullshit. Jake Gyllenhaal staying with the pay-phone call to his dad despite the rushing waters getting closer and closer to his nostrils is bullshit. The Russian freighter floating down 41st Street is bullshit.

I have to go see Alfonso Cuaron's HARRY POTTER movie in an hour or so, so enough of this.

Closer and Clive

Curiously, weirdly, Upcoming Movies editor Greg Dean Schmitz has for the last few months continued to fail to create a page for Mike Nichols' CLOSER, an adaptation of Patrick Marber's play that Columbia will be opening on December 3rd.

This despite the likely heat this thing will be bringing to the Oscar race, despite the obvious quality of the play (I wrote an admiring piece about it two or three months ago), and despite the implied promise of Nichols, a reliable actor's director, taking Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen and Nathalie Portman by the hand.

Well, perhaps intransigent Greg will change his tune after reading this report from a screening that happened last night (Tuesday, 6.1) at 7:30 pm at the AMC 7 in Santa Monica. It comes from a reader named Donlee Brussel.

"I just got out of the very first screening of CLOSER, and all I have to say is that the film is all you'd expect it to be and then some. Almost every single scene builds to astounding crescendos.

"Jude Law is good, but Clive Owen is the big scene-stealer. He steals every one he's in. The range he shows when he breaks up with Anna (Roberts' role)is amazing. Another scene he has with Portman in a strip club is just pitch perfect in the way he plays it.

"This film, more than CROUPIER or the upcoming KING ARTHUR, shows that Clive is really the Next Big Thing.

"And no, Julia Roberts does not fuck things up by relying on her usual tricks...laughing, flashing her teeth, the big smile, etc.

"After the film ended, there was some very long clapping. And for the first time ever at a research screening I've attended, not one person left before filling out the comment card. I wanted to be a part of the focus group afterwards, mainly to say that not a frame should be changed, but they already had enough yuppie couples.

"As is, CLOSER is the best thing I've seen all year. It's certainly the best thing anyone in the film, including Nichols, has touched in years.

"There are some little details from the play that have been changed. We see the opening car accident, for example. And while the film has a rep as being erotic on some level, the only person with a nude scene is Clive Owen.

"Natalie Portman is a revelation. Along with her work in GARDEN STATE, her transition from teen to adult films is now complete.

"The funniest thing in the movie is an online conversation between Owen and Law where there is no spoken dialogue between them. I worry though that this scene and the Owen-Roberts break-up one might push the film to an NC-17 for dialogue alone, like it did with CLERKS and YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS.

"What made me love the film so much was how realistic so much of it felt -- the dialogue, actions, reactions. Pretty much all the dialogue from Marber's play is intact. The scenes go on for five minutes and are enthralling every second. The blocking is very theatrical as well, and I think that only served to help.

"I can't stress how good this thing was. Expect to see some enthusiastic AICN reviews popping up starting on Wednesday. There's definitely a buzz on this thing because there was a line around the block when I got there at 6:30. By the time I got up front, the line was around the block again, and theywere turning away more than half the people.

"I can only hope they promote it properly."

F.X. Strikes Again

On May 19th during the Cannes Film Festival, the NEW YORK TIMES ran an A.O. Scott column that included a discussion with screenwriter and film critic F.X. Feeney about his 15 year rule of movie history.

Feeney's notion, wrote Scott, "is that nations often experience a flowering of cinematic creativity about a decade and a half after undergoing a radical social and political transformation."

Examples includes the French new wave, the British free-cinema/"kitchen sink" dramas and the Italian-director surge that included Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti and Pasolini, all of which came to fruition in the late 1950's and early 60's, or 15 years, more or less, after the end of World War II.

Scott also mentioned the German economic miracle of the early 60's bringing about "the miraculous mid- 70's careers" of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Ditto the death of Franco in 1975 and the ascendancy of Pedro Almodovar and Carlos Saura in late '80's, the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the Iranian festival-film boom of the mid-90's, and so on.

Good theory, but what about the good ole' U.S. of A.? We're kind of a hydrid or an oddity along these lines.

This country went through major cultural and political convulsions starting in '65 and '66 and saw them start to wind down with President Nixon's resignation in '74. Not as traumatic or earth-shaking, perhaps, as the convulsions endured by the other countries mentioned, but definitely heavy by U.S. standards....'68 being the peak year for the sense that things were really starting to fall apart and go crazy.

But what happened in U.S. movies 15 or so years after the start of the '60s cultural revolution? Nothing. In fact, the golden period of the late '60s and '70s ended around '80 or '81. (If you go by convention wisdom, that is, as passed along by Peter Biskind's book and those two docs about the great flowering of American cinema...A DECADE UNDER THE INFLUENCE and EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS).

Actually, a New Emptiness kicked in during the early '80s....the tits-and-zits movies, more and more reliance on high concept movies, the studios looking more and more to appeal to teens, more and more former TV execs running studios, etc.

What happened in U.S. movies 15 years after Nixon resigned? Well, the late '80s happened, which was neither here nor there with the mainstream flicks. I suppose you could make the argument that the flowering of indie cinema started around '89 (that's when Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures" says it began to happen), so maybe here's where Feeney's 15 year rule kicks in.

Anyway, the really great period of U.S. cinema, particularly regarding mainstream films, started almost concurrently with things starting to come apart socially and politically and whatnot....not 15 years later. Or so it seems to me.

I sent these comments to F.X. on Tuesday and asked him to jump into this again, and here's what he sent back.

"America is hard to chart, because we have so much seismic activity culturally. Here's my reading of certain temblors, and their cinematic aftershocks that came 15 years later.

"1963: JFK is assassinated. 1978: THE DEER HUNTER. (Vietnam lamented, America affirmed, a sense of irreparable loss -- that broken-hearted 'God Bless America.')

"1964 --1965: War starts to escalate out of control. Hippie and protest movements start to ignite. 1979: APOCALYPSE NOW, the ultimate hallucinatory catharsis not just of Vietnam, but of the LSD '60s. 1980: RAGING BULL -- the black & white epic sweeps away the dust of a lost world, opening as it does in 1964 and jumping back to 1946. And HEAVEN'S GATE, ending 'The Era of the Director.' (It doesn't matter if you hate Cimino's film. Consider its turbulent mural of protesting immigrants being destroyed by the wealthy powers that be -- a film that would've been inconceivable to produce in 1965.)

"1974 --1977: Nixon's resignation, defeat in Vietnam, the Bicentennial and Jimmy Carter's 'Man of the People' inauguration. (Call that quartet of events a 'false spring' for political progress.) Fifteen years later, 1989 -- 1992: sex lies and videoptape. (The only part of this triad Tricky Dick didn't have was the sex.) WINGS OF DESIRE. DANCES WITH WOLVES. (A.k.a "Kevin's Gate," a more successful apocalyptic western with subtitles.)

"Also Oliver Stone's JFK. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. TERMINATOR 2. (This is a hugely influential movie, not just because of its morhpic digitals but because of its hair-raisingly vivid dramatization of L.A. being destroyed by a nuclear blast. You better believe that set of images scarred viewers of every political stripe.)

"Also in 92: UNFORGIVEN. (Committed amorality unthinkable in a 1977 western.) RESERVOIR DOGS. LAST OF THE MOHICANS. (This last is an extremely positive expression of the American predicament, but offered free of illusions and false hopes.)

"1979 -- 1980: The hostage crisis, Reagan rises and is elected, and John Lennon is shot. Fifteen years later: PULP FICTION. Kieslowski's THREE COLORS. (PULP & the Kieslowski are extraordinary pioneering films. They make so many other innovations possible.) FORREST GUMP (sappy as hell, but an earnest summing up of our era). Oliver Stone's NIXON."

Caveat Europcar

"I read your Europcar lament in the 5.21 column with understanding.

"On our Honeymoon in Italy last October, the wife and I spent nearly an hour waiting in line at Europcar's kiosk in the Rome airport, and then another 20 minutes or so waiting for the car itself.

"It wasn't that the line wasn't particularly long (10 or so people), but rather that their employees spent the entire time joking around, flirting with each other and generally doing everything but getting people to their cars. It felt as if none of us in line were actually there.

"Nothing says 'welcome to our country' like being made to feel small and irrelevant by the desk jockeys at a rental car company. I'm sorry to hear you had the same experience, but am also comforted with the knowledge that I'm not the only one who's taken it up the a** from Europcar." -- John R.