There's something to David Bourke's Last Exit that completely eludes one's grasp: the promise of a better movie made from the raw materials of the one at hand. Despite some sketchy writing and clumsy image-making, there seems to be much personal investment in his tale of down-and-out junkies struggling to make ends meet in Copenhagen, and he's aesthetically ambitious with his digital swish-pan cinematography and rapid caffeine-freak montage. Unfortunately, the ambitions aren't quite realized, and the story in question is a kind of pulpy crime saga trying to appear hard-edged when it should be thinking more of how to flesh out its underdeveloped characters and embroider its stock situations. A certain sensibility lingers, however, even if it can't quite redeem the film from which it emanates. 

Lena Headey, Mary-Louise Parker, Alison Elliott: each unconventionally, incandescently gorgeous, each too talented and intelligent to have gained the stratospheric stardom they deserve. Cast any of them in a film and I'm there with bells on--just the presence of Elliott in Lawrence Bridges' 12 was enough to ride me through its rough first half-hour, and enough again to reward me for my perseverance. There's a haunted quality about Elliott that entrances, making her casting in Michael Almereyda's dreamy, criminally underestimated Trance (known as The Eternal in its home video incarnation) a fait accompli: what she brings to 12 is a thread of emotional clarity that functions as the adhesive for Bridges' decade-long mad labour of love--and a showcase centerpiece in Elliott wandering the streets of Hollywood at night underscored by Lisa Germano's "Cancer of Everything" reminds in a blissful, visceral way of the delirious prologue in Trance set to Cat Power's "Rockets."

Projected from trunks onto the sides of buildings in the Los Angeles area, 12 continues to screen in various evolutions, with the location of its performances announced on its website. (Its soundtrack is piped through a radio station exclusively pirated for that night's show.) Gaining momentum and notoriety for its "guerrilla drive-in" ethic, 12 is a shrine to movie-love that recalls not only the devices of the French New Wave, but also a philosophy of hit-and-run filmmaking that marries an unabashed celluloid infatuation with the supremacy of post-production and editing. Self-described as "never having gotten over [Jean-Luc Godard's] Week End," Bridges has created with 12 (its title and execution shades of Fellini's 8½) something that, in addition to Godard, owes a lot to Luis Buñuel, merging a premise taken from Godard's hélas Pour Moi (the Greek pantheon made manifest) with the satirical thrust of Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. All of it's tied together by a certain Jacques Rivette obsession with stage and performance.

Though not the equal of those sources by any means (long stretches of it are static in a way that doesn't enlighten so much as suggest self-indulgence--and in fairness, neither Godard nor Buñuel were ever known for their modesty), 12 is an exciting exercise in narrative envelope-pushing in its tale of two demigods, both created by a curmudgeonly, balding Zeus (Eugene Rubenzer), struggling to find the perfect play (played by perfect play "The Importance of Being Earnest"), the performance of which will save their lives on this mortal plane.-Walter Chaw

The definition of the self through words--creating mythologies whole cloth through our growing post-modern divorce from the pulse of archetype carried by the modern oral tradition that film embodies (a trail followed by early/late John Sayles and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and speaking in part to the popularity of The Passion of the Christ)--is a canny if obvious place for satire in plastic fantastic LaLa Land. Less obvious is Gregg Brown and Jason Holzman's unassuming documentary Words, which sets out to explore how the ways in which we communicate define our perceptions of the world, ending up as a moving document of how telling the stories of our lives exorcises the demons of our past (and our loneliness). The picture isn't so much a linguistic exercise as an exploration of the hegemony that a lack of expression holds over our shares of grief and regret. William Blake offered once that it was better to kill an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, and Words refines that call to actualization to an invitation to talk.

Beginning silly, with Brown inviting a wide range of people to participate in a Native American sweat lodge ceremony, Words progresses into thorny with a parade of topless women expounding about the silliness of our infatuation with breasts. Words only truly hits its stride when Brown makes the dangerous decision to interview people visiting loved ones at a graveyard--and then films a support group for the bereaved, where he eggs participants on into reliving the most desolate periods of their lives. The ethics of it are suspect, to be sure, but there's no questioning the power of the testimonials of suicide, accident, malice, and endless cycles of not saying enough in time. Ending with a sober documentation of 9/11, an atrocity that might finally be able to be addressed through the prism of symbolism (the symbol of what we lost, the monuments we choose to replace it with), Words seems to find a lot of its resonance by accident and earnest intentions. But that serendipity, after all, plays into its strength, into that dulcet idea that though the reactions may vary, all the experiences in the world share the same headwaters in anthropology and ritual.-Walter Chaw