By Armond White

Auto Focus
Directed by Paul Schrader

Nothing’s funny about 60s tv actor Bob Crane’s sexual addiction or the compulsion toward questionable friends and associates that eventually led to his murder in 1978. But Auto Focus, the latest dreadful Paul Schrader film, wobbles between ridiculing the man’s life and using it for a half-hearted treatise on spiritual agony.

Schrader can’t seem to make up his mind about the significance of Crane’s struggle with pornography and promiscuity; his attempt at religious profundity clashes with the snide cultural satire that screenwriter Michael Gerbosi borrows from producers Larry Karazewski and Scott Alexander—the team that wrote Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt and the Andy Kaufman flick Man on the Moon. An uneven mix of its makers’ egotism, Auto Focus demonstrates an appalling inhumanity. Schrader is self-righteous and the screenwriter/producers are derisive. Crane gets murdered all over again.

The marvel of Ed Wood came from director Tim Burton’s regard for that delusional and inept filmmaker (Burton’s goofy, sweet affection extended to the b&w imagery, surprisingly hokey and piquant, like a box of Good & Plenty). No matter how outre Wood was shown to be (and Johnny Depp enthusiastically impersonated him), there was evidence that Burton approved of the man’s essential humanity. We could see past the angora sweaters, high-heel shoes and quick-and-dirty hackwork to the crazy innocence of a harmless trash-lover. Auto Focus shows no sympathy for Crane beyond treating his perversity as adversity. It’s a puzzling experience to see a man’s decline turned into a joke and then a quasireligious sermon. Not every movie protagonist can be a martyr or a visionary, but without committing the folly of heroizing (empathy), the Karazewski and Alexander method is just cruel—a demonstration that they are superior to their subject.

It’s not that they understand Crane’s pathology too well; they make no effort to understand it at all. Auto Focus suggests that old-timey technology turned bachelor-pad smut into quaint naughtiness. (Crane and his shady buddy John Carpenter, played by Willem Dafoe, photographed their orgies with strippers using primitive VTRs—video tape recorders.) Angelo Badalamenti was recruited to contribute a mocking lounge-music score. But unlike Badalamenti’s work with David Lynch, there’s no appreciation of the pathos in human weakness; Auto Focus lacks Lynch’s peculiar fascination with retro-decadence as a clearer way of understanding timeless human freakiness. Instead, Schrader injects several secular confession scenes between Crane and his pastor—half-hearted gestures to salvage his first marriage. But these don’t help; rather than gaining complexity, the movie goes cold and flat.

This pervy bio-pic turned sour at its conception. It suffers Hollywood’s innate inability to look honestly at itself. Crane’s advance from local radio DJ and part-time comic actor to the star of the Hogan’s Heroes tv series pushes the old price-of-fame button. But in Hollywood, fame and money produce a species of irresponsible, selfish sybarites who make crap commercial product and lead lives of wasteful prerogative as a custom. The documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture proves that in Hollywood there’s never an impulse toward self-examination—only self-justification. When Crane whimpers, "I dream about somebody who gets me, who I am," he recalls Jennifer Aniston’s hateful twat in The Good Girl, a figure of modern Hollywood’s solipsism. But Auto Focus’ casting deliberately avoids insight. Greg Kinnear (with his phenomenal TV-Q) is so like Crane he’s anomic, where Kevin Spacey might have replicated Crane’s masochism, innerness and glee. Dafoe is such a cliche of evil he could be reprising his Spider-Man role. Negating class, race and homosexuality, these actors are employed in Hollywood denial. Karazewski-Alexander, Gerbosi and Schrader get moralistic about Crane because they haven’t shown the bad taste to get killed. They can afford to be snide and pious.

Still flaunting his punishing Michigan Calvinist background, Schrader uses religion as shtick—like the explosions in James Cameron movies. Frankly, all his pedestrian fundamentalism and sophomoric existentialism get boring. Agape is a gift, just like sensuality, and Schrader is hopeless at conveying either. His incapacity for film as psychic perception makes Auto Focus anti- erotic and strangely distant. I’m sure some naive viewers will mistake even this blandness for profundity—the dead man’s narration out of Sunset Boulevard, the furniture catalog settings, the pop-cult irony of "Psychotic Reaction" heard on the radio or "I’m a Girl Watcher" accompanying the strippers montage ("Tits are great!" Crane declares). But it’s just imitation-Kubrickian misanthropy. What’s the point of watching Crane’s wretched life if we can’t learn sympathy from it? Schrader’s take is far too prudish to explore—or allow—the enticements of sexual pleasure. (You wouldn’t guess that this movie comes from the same era in which pornography is a billion-dollar industry—the orgy tapes are censored by pixels.) As usual, Schrader is interested in dirt yet he doesn’t want to get muddy. He’s high-minded but with low craft.

Brown Sugar
Directed by Rick Famuyiwa

"I remember exactly the day I fell in love with hiphop," says Sidney (Sanaa Lathan), the hiphop journalist-editor-heroine of Brown Sugar. But I got fed up with hiphop the day I attended Brown Sugar’s premiere at the Ziegfeld. The nearly full house of BET celebrities and scene-makers (including the film’s producer Earvin "Magic" Johnson) was barraged by an endless repetition of hiphop references—not so simple (or enjoyable) as mere record samples, but bald mentions of the term "hiphop" as a kind of mantra, code word, status symbol. Clearly, hiphop has arrived as a marketing tool. A contemptuous approach always sold mainstream newspapers and magazines; Brown Sugar takes a "positive" approach in order to sucker unsophisticated filmgoers—whether hiphop heads (mostly male) or the Terry McMillan brigade (mostly female).

Director Rick Famuyiwa angles the romantic comedy of Sidney’s hooking up with her childhood friend "Dre" Romulus Ellis (Taye Diggs), who is now a hiphop record producer, to reflect hiphop culture’s move from the ghetto to the mainstream over the past two decades. That phenomenon—if it is indeed a portent of authentic black American feeling and experience, as the reverently repeated term suggests—is exploited in the silliest, most craven way. There’s no connection made between the stereotypically political (or at least aggressive) ideas expressed in hiphop and this film’s slick, buppie storyline; it’s a transparent, desperate, obvious attempt at pacification. The actual politics of the hiphop middle class—familiar from the lethal self-promotion of black hiphop journalists and the pernicious opportunism of black hiphop producers—are ignored. (Get off on the bling-bling, the filmmakers suggest.) Famuyiwa and screenwriter Michael Elliot don’t even flatter the hiphop fan’s inside knowledge by adopting a thinly veiled roman a clef (imagine a Vibe editor hooking up with an Interscope producer, say). This film’s view of love and business is an embarrassment next to the rigorous and raucous 24 Hour Party People.

Brown Sugar ignores how rebellious youth culture can be capitalized into social appeasement—an old story that hiphop repeated. This trivial plot perverts the ideas that made teenagers (and a few idealistic adults) take hiphop personally. The social protest and quasi-black nationalism of hiphop’s middle period (’87-’93) has been completely co-opted and forgotten. To pretend otherwise is as disingenuous as the scolding moralism of Auto Focus. Sidney and Dre’s trifling love story distorts black youth’s proprietary feelings about hiphop ("For many people hiphop is that first friend, the first to talk to us, to understand") and ignores the culture’s trap. Sidney’s nostalgia for the early days is unconscious of the Reagan-era indoctrination; disenfranchised kids were impelled to claim hiphop ephemera (even a bad attitude) rather than claim the city through political awareness and clout. A rush and a push and the Escalade is ours.

Earlier generations of black youth (beboppers or Motowners) never fell for this okey-doke. Common’s "I Used to Love H.E.R." (always wack opportunism to me) is discussed by Sidney: "That song reminds me of us. Hiphop was so real. Remember the first time you heard ‘The Bridge is Over,’ ‘Bonita Applebaum,’ ‘Paul Revere!’" No respectable hiphop editor would uphold such a troika. Brown Sugar reflects the hateful rock-crit tendency toward elitism—speciously validating hiphopism like rockism. Affection for pop can be ideologically great—open and inclusive—while hiphopism is ideologically insular, fascistic. Besides, it’s not "hiphop" black people love, it’s rhythm, melody and honesty—the same thing all people like about pop music expressions whether country, punk or metal.

Brown Sugar lies about how Me-generation loving has led to cutthroat professionalism. Sidney and Dre’s glibness about marriage and divorce and their insensitivity toward their rivals inadvertently shows how immoral hiphop can be. Brown Sugar’s celebration of a culture is nothing more than repackaging. It’s poetic justice that Sanaa Lathan is less impressive here than in Love & Basketball. However, Sidney’s suitor, played by superfine Boris Kodjoe, steals matinee idol status from under Taye Diggs, wrecking the film’s romantic comedy structure. Kodjoe rocked the Ziegfeld. Is it cynical to worry about what will go wrong in his career, rather than predicting the Hollywood stardom that should automatically come his way?

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Better stuff at Resfest this week than the crush of theatrical films. Extraordinary videos include a moving exercise in cgi nostalgia by Robert Bradbrook called Home Road Movies, Shynola’s Eye for an Eye, a perverse Disney cartoon and Salaryman 6, an extra-widescreen Andreas Gursky-style vision by Jake Knight that even outdoes Wong Kar-Wai’s entry Six Days. This is also the place to catch Stefan Nadelman’s excellent Terminal Bar. Resfest 2002 offers exciting proof that the digital future will not take place in movie theaters.