Roman Coppola borrowed the keys to daddy’s film company to make this inconsequential but high-spirited paean to late 1960s European genre filmmaking, particularly Roger Vadim’s Barbarella and Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, which it apes lovingly. (Supporting player John Phillip Law was in both of ’em.) Jeremy Davies plays Paul Ballard, an American filmmaker living in Paris. He’s working by day as film editor on a lushly dopey SF flick called Codename: Dragonfly; at night, he’s shooting candid footage of himself, his dingy flat, and his French girlfriend (Élodie Bouchez) for his "personal film."

Ballard is more a character type than a character; he acts stupid and alienates his girl partly because he’s fully invested in his own pretentious exercises rather than in their relationship, but also because he’s fascinated by the incredibly sexy Valentine (Angela Lindvall), Dragonfly’s frequently naked starlet. Meanwhile, directors get hired and fired and Ballard winds up shouldering responsibility for making the movie work. Given Coppola’s fetishistic recreation of the tropes of old European films, it seems obvious that he’s arguing for the enduring values of the hucksterish but dreamlike Dragonfly over those of Ballard’s ersatz-Godard art flick — which just makes this protagonist even more empty and uninvolving. Who cares if this guy ever finishes his "personal" film, or breaks up with this French chick who’s too good for him anyway?

The good news is that there’s something to admire on screen for the duration—the cinematography by Robert Yeoman is preternaturally crisp, and folks like Gerard Depardieu, Giancarlo Giannini and Jason Schwartzman are the bit players, for Christ’s sake. Also good fun is Coppola’s inside-Hollywood take on filmmaking, with pissed-off auteurs, slick Italian moneymen, and an enfant terrible (Schwartzman) who treads in Austin Powers territory butting heads. A scene showing Ballard falling quietly for Valentine when she shows up to loop some sweet nothings is pretty terrific. But beside the evident love of movies, there are no emotional hooks here. I like Bava as much as the next Web-based movie reviewer, but when you boil it down, CQ is essentially a lesser Euro-trash variation on Ed Wood.

The extended silence you may have noticed at this site was me spending time in Hollywood and in Colorado. I answered some email and at least toyed with the idea of posting some Weblog entries, but wound up not having enough free time to think straight. I considered going to see Simone (or is that more properly spelled S1m0ne?) at some point, but didn’t get to that, either. I don’t much like this writer/director Andrew Niccol’s work, see, but I am interested in keeping track of what he’s up to. But, geez, did anybody like his new one?

I was amused to learn that Spider-Man was the feature on my westward flight from New York to California. I didn’t plug into the audio, but instead took in the visuals while I listened to assorted MP3s. I was pleased to note that, yep, the A- I gave it seems to hold up under scrutiny. This is a goofy, giddy superhero movie, and the purest embodiment of exactly what I hope to see in a summer blockbuster. The trick in this case is, I think, that the film was storyboarded extensively, with the result that the images play out in distinctly comic-book fashion. My main cavil is still the too-frequent replacement of Tobey Maguire by obnoxious CGI, but even some of the whiz-bang graphics have an exuberant appeal this time around, in a bet-you-didn’t-think-we’d-ever-be-able-to-show-you-that way. I did notice that, while the film’s frequent bursts of violence — including a final-reel impalement! — seem to have been left more or less alone by the airline censors, Kirsten Dunst’s naked-beneath-her-clothes nipples
had been digitally removed from the scene where Spidey rescues her from a group of thugs. Good lord, the lengths to which people go to strip even the hint of sexuality from anything that they might have to watch with their children. (Ever wonder if the folks who run sites like Screenit.com get any particular jollies from their exhaustive cataloguing of explicit content? Here’s how they describe the scene in question: "Mary Jane shows some cleavage in various outfits in various scenes. In one scene, she's caught in the rain and her wet top reveals that she's not wearing a bra (the shape of her nipples can be seen)." Sounds pretty hot to me.) Makes me long for the good old days of PG-rated Swamp Thing and topless Adrienne Barbeau.

Since getting home, I have taken the time to check out the new Kino DVD of Code Unknown. I didn’t exactly avoid this one when it was playing in New York, but I didn’t make any effort to put myself in proximity to a theater showing it, either. This was due, I think, to my deep-seated irritation with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, a film I felt was trying to hector me, start to finish. All that makes me a chump because, boy howdy, is this a terrific movie. I hope to write something about it. For now, I’ll just say it’s a shame Kino couldn’t do better than this version of the film. I suspect that the DVD is transcoded from a PAL master, partly because the details are kind of fuzzy and also because the frames flicker in weird ways when I try to step through them. In one scene that Juliette Binoche plays in long shot, her face is just a big pink spot at the center of the screen. I wondered if she was wearing a stocking mask, for all the detail I could(n’t) make out. At the very least, this should have been anamorphic widescreen instead of plain letterbox. But if you turn up the volume (a six-channel sound system will definitely help) and turn out all the lights, I suspect that even this version of Code Unknown works the way it’s supposed to.