Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s most recent films, the frenetic, punkish "Head-On"  (no, you don't rub it directly on your forehead) and the more meditative and consoling "The Edge of Heaven," have at least two things in common: characters go to Turkey, and they don’t come back — usually for unfortunate reasons. So I was worried when the first attempt to get in touch with Akin, who was vacationing in Turkey, was unsuccessful. The publicist gave me a song and dance about Akin’s two year-old child crying and how he'd have  to receive the call the next day at the office of somebody or something. It sounded a little bit like a rough draft of a Fatih Akin movie. So I was relieved to make the connection the next day.

PK:So you’re in Turkey. Are you at the same beach as the one at the end of “The Edge of Heaven?”

FA: No.  I am on the west coast. never been here before on vacation here. I’ve got another week of vacation

PK: I heard your two-year-old wasn’t happy with you doing the interview yesterday.

FA: He was kind of crazy and wild yesterday. It wasn’t very smart of me to think I could do the interview on the street on my mobile while I was with my family. I couldn’t hear the questions. so I asked the restaurant next to where I’m staying if I could use their phone today.

PK: They say having children changes everything.

FA: It brings out a lot of things that are a part of you but you don’t know they are a part of you. You learn what’s important and what’s not. I’m a family person. I come from a big family. I feel trust in and protected by the family system. I just follow the biology.

PK: Did this contribute to the change in tone from the anarchic “Head On” to the more meditative “Edge of Heaven?”

FA: Yes. I was writing it during the pregnancy and the birth and the first few months. I was very emotional. It was a very frightening time and crazy time as I was writing the screenplay. I was thinking a lot about death while I was experiencing the birth. On the other hand I was also trying to do something different because I had to prove to myself and to critics that I could do something different. I didn’t want to repeat myself. It’s a very curious film. It’s not that funny or crazy. It was inspired by all the stuff I saw in Cannes while I was on the jury in 2005. http://gofrance.about.com/od/cannes/a/cannes05jury.htm And the next film I’m working on will be very different from the last two.

PK: That’s “Soul Kitchen?”

FA: Yes. If it isn’t funny I’ll say it’s a melodrama. Comedy is the hardest. I have been working for five years on that damn screenplay. I think it’s the most difficult film I ever worked on.

PK: It’s your Billy Wilder film?

FA: I am very very inspired by him. And Woody Allen is very top level. You can make people cry -- that’s so easy. Worldwide. You can make people cry in Japan or great Britain about the same things. But timing and humor is so much more difficult. On the other hand, though it is more difficult, you don’t see any comedy in Cannes. It’s considered by all the cinephiles and top film critics as very mainstream-y or not arty enough. I think that’s arrogance. I know what I’m talking about because I’ve been in the middle of the writing process of a comedy for five years.

PK: It shoots in October?

FA: I have financing and everything but I’ll tell you, if I don’t feel comfortable with the script I won’t start shooting I don’t care. We’ll see what will happen.

PK: By the way, “Edge of Heaven” -- do you like that translation of the film’s title?Like translation of title?

FA: Yeah. I chose it. I didn’t like so much “On the Other Side” [the literal translation of the film’s German title, “Auf der anderen Seite”] as a translation. 

PK: “The Edge of Heaven” sounds like a Douglas Sirk film that was never made.

FA: I consider that a compliment. I wanted to give the film its own identity for the commercial market. It’s a very beautiful title in German but when you translate it word for word “On the Other Side…”  There was another film “The Lives of Others.” It sounds similar. It lacked a certain poetry. Maybe there is some, me not being and English speaking person, but I asked English speakers and we discovered “The Edge of Heaven.” When the professor is waiting for his father on the beach at the end. That’s the perfect description.

PK: Which is not  the same beach you’re at now.

FA: The beach here is not so wild. It’s calm and protected and safe for children.

PK: The multi-narrative reminds me of Kieslowski.

FA: Many people have compared it to Kieslowski and I have to admit I’ve never seen his films. Except “A Short Film about Killing” and “A Short Film About Love.” Those are by Kieslowski, right? But I haven’t seen the trilogy.

PK: “Babel” is another film it’s been compared to.

FA: That one I’ve seen. But I saw it during the editing process [of “Edge”]. “21 Grams” was a big influence. For “Head-on” also. The way he shot the film.

But I’m not so much influenced by [Alejandro Gonzalez] Inarritu [the director]. I’m a friend of his writer Guillermo Arriaga. We met in Cannes  and he became a friend.

PK: You also mentioned Persian and Asian films as influences.

FA: When you have a piece written by Arriaga and directed by Inarritu he covers everything from every side so he completely controls it and in the editing room he can do whatever he wants. At first I thought I was going to do it like that. But then we thought we have this modern form of narrative structure like with Tarantino, we decided the structure might be modern but the way we would shoot the film actors landscape space, that was inspired by Asian cinema. This makes the film more interesting, I think. On the one hand there’s the classical oldfashionedc of telling the story and you have the moder way of telling the story and you mix them together. I have some ideas and follow them and in the end something different comes out. It develops its own power and rules and you follow that Kubrick wasn’t like that. He never gave up until he got exactly what he wanted. I don’t have that patience.

PK: Plus he made a film only every ten years or so.

FA: I respect that. But I feel comfortable doing something every two or three years.

PK: You engaged in improvisation on this film?

FA: I don’t come to the set and say, what are we going to do today? Since I’m the producer I like to be on time and be under budget. I like to be fast, organized, prepared. The more you prepare the more space you have to try stuf out. That’s been my experience. Before I  come to the set I have a rehearsal with my actors I know what they’re going to do and I have a shot list for my DP. I know the location. Once prepared you can be free. If  I have another idea o n the set or the actor has another idea which is better than we can do that. But if I didn’t know what we were going to do I would be completely lost. You don’t know what will happen on the set. Maybe it will be rainy on that day you need it to be sunny. Instead of not shooting I will be able to change the script and find a reason to put the rain into it.

PK: Is this more political? With the terrorist political group and the fundamentalist vigilantes?

FA: I don’t think it’s a political. It depends on what the definition of a political film is. A filmmaker like Yilmaz Guney, the great Kurdish director who died in ‘84 and made “Yol” is political…

PK: Aren’t you working on a documentary about him?

FA: I’m working on a project about him. I don’t know yet whether it will be a documentary or fiction. It’s a very difficult subject. But I like him as a filmmaker. His passion, both romantic and visual. But he was a political filmmaker. He believed he could change an audience. He was a Maoist. He tried to teach an audience. He was didactic. Michael Moore also is a political filmmaker. These filmmakers have certain ideas and they try to teach the audience. I don’t want to teach myaudience because I don’t know anything about anything. There’s nothing I know I can teach. If there as message I would just say it and not put it in a film. Like Bob Marley,  he’s got the same message in one line that’s in my films  “One love, one life, let’s come together.” This is what I want to tell people: we’re all one, we’re all united, connected to each other. It doesn’t matter where you come from or your religion. It wasn’t the aim of the film in the beginning. It came out in the process. At the end we could say, oh, it was about that.

It deals with political issues, right. But I don’t want to compare it to those masters. Sidney Lumet, I think he’s a great political filmmaker. He made films about political issues…But his films are about humanity. The human being is in the foreground. He accepts and forgives human beings for what they’re doing. But there are political issues in “Dog Day Afternoon,”  “Serpico” or “12 Angry Men.”

PK: How about Costra-Gavras?

FA: I love him and his work and he’s a political filmmaker. He asked me to appear in his film and I couldn’t because of the time. But later I thought it’s for the best because I really don’t want to act anymore. Even if I act I’m not a good actor. I don’t feel comfortable. Directors always say, trust me, trust me. I know  I don’t do them a favor if I appear in his films. Scorsese could come and ask me and I wouldn’t do it.

PK: He’d act in your films probably though.

FA :Scorsese? That would be funny. That would be great. He’s a great actor.

PK: What’s your deal with Hollywood? Weren’t you planning  to do a Western?

FA: It’s one of those 20 plus things I have to do. Last year I made a huge trip to New Mexico with friends and a camera and we collected a lot of material for something we call “The Western.” Certain issues about Turkey today we discovered that we could put them in an arty framing in the US. I really want to come over and do something. But this is a very expensive and huge and difficult thing to write.

 You have the problem of choice. So many interesting things that people offer to you. Or interesting ideas you discover. Books, subjects. So much stuff to do. And what  I’m going to do now is “Soul Kitchen.” There’s an inner voice that says do “Soul Kitchen.” I don’t think I lack the courage to come over. I’ve been negotiating for two years with an American company to come over with a project. If you flirt with the studio, it’s difficult. This studio has a great catalogue and great people and those people have other people behind them and they have stuff to say. It’s difficult to create an infrastructure where you feel yourself protected. And then it’s like it took me ten years in Europe to get where I’m completely free to do what I want and I don’t want to give this up. To do things  the way I want to do them. My films are better than they were before. The first three films were important. They were my education but the pictures weren’t so much for me but for the producers. They had me do things I didn’t want to do. They forced me to compromise. “Head-on” was the first film I produced so I could do what I wanted and it was the most successful film so far.

They were great producers and they discovered me and taught me. But it was living in the parents’ house. They had their own ideology and ideas of right and wrong and when I became an adult I had my opinions and so I had to move out.

PK: What would you do if a Hollywood studio offered you, say, “Iron Man 2?”

FA: I have agents there. Sometimes I get a script that’s already written. But at this point I’m afraid I’m more a filmmaker than a director. I wish I could be a director. I’ve done that in the past in Germany working from a screenplay. That’s difficult working with my own language. But if I get something in Los Angeles or New York I have to go there and understand people and the lifestyle.

PK: Here’s an odd item I read: you were arrested in Germany for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt with a swastika on it.What happened with that?

FA: The German police wanted to put me in jail. I didn’t know that this was criminal. If I knew it was criminal I wouldn’t wear it. I saw that Hugo Chavez was wearing it and a football player and I was proud wearing the same T-shirt as them. It was interesting - “Der Spiegel” had the story and you should see all the internet users’ comments - very, very ugly comments by Germans. Like, how many Armenians were killed by your grandfather? Stuff like that. On the one hand, it’s good to see what such a symbol brings out in the German mind. There not cool with that at all. They completely freak out. But also like Nazis. Zealous. Really ugly stuff.

PK: But the anti-Bush refrence didn’t bother anyone.

FA: Not at all. Like I tried to tell “Der Spiegel,”  his looking for a reason to attack Iraq was like Hitler’s rationale for an attack against Poland.

PK: Let’s change the subject to Hanna Schygulla. What was it like working with her?

FA: It was like flirting with her. Like dancing with her. I wish I wasolder or she was younger and we could have a love affair or something like that. It was a bit like an unspoken love affair.  I saw some Fassbinder films before I met her, because he made so many. But most of her films I watched afterwards. I met her at a film festival in Zagreb. Then I discovered “Maria Braun” and “Lili Marlene” and all that. “Petra Von Kant.” I fell in love with her. The film was written for her.

PK: It seems in a lot of your films when a character goes to Turkey bad something happens.

FA: I don’t want to create that image. It’s a beautiful country. I think it’s the most beautiful country in the world. I’m a filmmaker, a storyteller. Sometimes I tell dark stories. This is my fantasy. People get angry about my fantasies sometimes. I think America is a great place. But when you see all the films made there with mass murder you don’t think the place is like that.

PK: How goes the Turkish film industry?

FA: . There are a few great filmmakers. Like Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the best director award in Cannes this year. And Zeki Demirkibuz.  He’s a great guy. They produce direct, write and edit themselves. Turkey is a unique country with unique issues. It’s a very strange country. The EU, America can’t help us. We are very alone. Not irrational, but emotional. Passionate. So I think you can look for good cinema coming from here. We have a lot of problems and so a lot of stories to tell.

As you might recall, in his discussion  a few days back of "War, Inc." John Cusack mentioned as an example of a straight-talking journalist CBS newsperson Lara Logan. Indeed, she  might have served as somewhat of a model of that film’s heroine, the crusading reporter played by Marisa Tomei who gets involved romantically with the corporate hitman played by Cusack. Now, according to "The New York Post," life seems to be imitating politically edgy entertainment as they report that Logan had an affair with a US Embassy worker while on assignment in Baghdad (she also apparently found time to make whoopie with CNN reporter Michael  Ware).       

Apparently the embassy guy’s estranged wife is making a fuss about it as leverage in the couple’s ongoing divorce procedures. But you have to wonder about political motivations, since Logan, as Cusack noted, is one of the few outspoken critics of the administration in mainstream media. CBS, however, insists that she will retain her recent post as their  “foreign affairs” chief. You can imagine what "The Post" did with that unfortunate choice of words.

 Let that be a warning to whomever is named in this blog as being in opposition to those in power! Who knew how widely read and influential it must be! Who knows how delusional I can be!

Most  discussions of  “War, Inc.” have concentrated on John Cusack’s outspoken politics and have ignored or dismissed the contribution of the director, Josh Seftel. Which is a shame because the Tufts grad and longtime Somerville resident not only gave the film a big budget look on a shoestring but also brought in some genuine war zone experience, and I’m not just talking about his documentary “Taking on the Kennedys.” Here’s a transcription of our phone conversation from a few days back.

PK: Are you still on the Kennedy hate list?

JS: People always ask me, “Do the Kennedy’s hate you?” and I just think it’s a funny question, and it’s not…. I’ve hung out with Patrick since the film, it’s just so not a big deal with them.

PK: So this is your first feature-length feature film. How did you get involved in making this movie?

JS: Well, I made a short film called “Breaking the Mold: The Kee Malesky Story". Maryland Public Television asked me if I wanted to direct a fiction film. And I said “sure, it sounds like fun,” and they said, “there’s one catch: it has to teach middle-aged children about indoor air quality.” So I said, look, I’ll do it if I can write it, and I can do a director’s cut that I can enter into film festivals, and they said sure, go for it. So I made the film, I shot it in Lowell Mass, and worked with all improv comedians from the Boston area, and that film did well, I mean it played in festivals and was kind of a sleeper. Alexander Payne saw it in Seattle, at a festival, and he called me, and he said, “look,” he said, “you have an original voice, you should be directing features.” And he said, “I have a script I want you to read, tell me what you think of it,” so he sent me a script for a film called “Et tu, Babe” and I liked the script a lot, and he said, “Well, I’m going to introduce you to the guys who wrote it.” And it was written by Mark Leyner and John Cusack. And from that point forward, I got to know John and Mark and John’s producing partner, Grace Loh, and we started talking and hanging out for probably it was a period of 2 to 3 years, where we were talking about finding ways to work together.

PK: So that film was not made.

JS: That film hadn’t been made, no, we talked about a few different projects, and a couple projects almost happened but didn’t quite happen. And then this one came along, and it was just the right timing.

PK: Did you find this to be more challenging than making an independent short film about air quality?

JS: Is it more challenging? I mean in some ways yes, in some ways no, right? Obviously it’s a bigger scope, bigger budget, I mean we weren’t blowing things up. We weren’t blowing shit up in Lowell. But we were in Bulgaria.

PK: Not that Lowell couldn’t use a little blowing up.

JS: No, I love Lowell. And it’s an up-and-coming city, right?

PK: I guess. I don’t know what that means. It’s no Lynn, that’s for sure.

JS: Exactly. So, you know, one of the great things about working on a film of this size and with this kind of cast is having that cast to work with. It’s like being the coach of the dream team,

PK: You also had kind of a low budget. When I found out it had such a low budget, after seeing it, I thought,  how’d they do that?

JS: Bulgaria is a magical place. The budget goes a lot further there. You take 10 million dollars and really it becomes 40 million on the screen. To have extras in Bulgaria …people work for a really small amount of money. And we had a great Bulgarian crew, I mean,he guy on the set, our pyro guy, the guy that blows stuff up? He actually used to work for the Bulgarian mafia.

PK: Ah, great on a resume.

JS: He told us his job was to blow up cars for the mafia. So we had a lot of authenticity with our pyro guy.

PK: You didn’t have any dealings with the Bulgarian mafia other than this guy, right?

JS: Not that I know of.

PK: Do you think the word is going to get out that the so-called liberal “War, Inc.” people were exploiting Bulgarian workers?

JS: I never said they were exploited.

PK: I was especially impressed in a scene in a war zone -- Falafel? Or Falaf? It kind of reminded me of the fortress at the end of the river in “Apocalypse Now” meshed with the Battle of Hue in “Full Metal Jacket.” How did you put that together?

JS: Well, you know, "Full Metal Jacket" definitely something that came to mind when I saw – we found this set, it was actually an old factory that was being torn down, it was in the process of being torn down, we found the set, and we said, “Stop what you’re doing, this is great.” It was a bunch of buildings, that were – all that was left were the frames and a lot of rubble around it. And so they halted the demolition for the time we took to shoot it, and we just came in and had an amazing production designer who actually did the film “Delicatessen,” Miljen Kreka Kljakovic  and he just did amazing things with what was there. That was a big part of it, was finding things that were already there, and making the most of them.

PK: Like that palace on the hill... Was that a found location also?

JS: That was CGI.

PK: Oh, that’s so disillusioning.

JS: There was a house, there was a structure up there, but we made it look more majestic, I think, as I recall. Sorry.

PK: That’s ok. You’ve worked in documentaries up until this point. Did you find that was an asset in making this movie, which is kind of surreal?

JS: The work I’ve done in documentaries was invaluable. When I read the script, I was struck by the absurdity of it and at the same time, there’s so much truth and reality to the absurd moments, and a lot of this stuff I’ve seen in real life. I’ve been in war zones, in hot-spots, I’ve been in the back rooms of political campaigns, I’ve followed pop-stars around as a journalist. I felt like I could bring that to the table, and try to…try to interpret that.

PK: This is all from your work on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that you got all this experience?

JS: Yeah, most of the war-zone stuff, yeah. No, you know, I was in Bosnia, and in Romanian orphanages.

PK: Why were you in Bosnia in 1995?

JS: I was covering the war. It was kind of a youthful adventure.

PK: Dangerous.

JS: Very dangerous. I learned that it’s not fun to be shot at.

PK: Aww, come on. You young guys.

JS: I know, right? This was in Mostar.

PK: Probably saw some nasty stuff.

JS: Yes. Pretty scary stuff. And just devastation. You’re walking around and the streets are all pock-marked with shelling, and buildings, all the windows are blown out, it’s just a wasteland.

PK:  And you were able to bring this sensibility to “War Inc.” You said in an interview that you like to combine the depressing with the funny.

 JS:  This is different from the other films made about what’s going on in Iraq. It’s a different tone, it’s funny, I’d have to say it’s a wild ride, it’s face paced, it’s weird…

PK: It’s funnier than “Lions for Lambs,” let’s put it that way.

JS: You need to give people a different flavor on this topic, they’ve already seen everything on CNN in a serious tone, and it’s just another way of getting at this subject.

PK: Do you think films can change things?

JS: Yeah, change things, or help people, or teach people, you know, what have you. That’s what matters to me the most about the time I’m spending on my work. It may teach people not to put scorpions down their pants, I don’t know.

PK: Or it may encourage people to do it now, ‘cause they saw Hilary Duff do it. I tried it. No big deal.

JS: How did you like Hilary Duff?

PK: I almost didn’t recognize her.

JS: Do you know the story behind that look and everything? I went online and I printed out the trampiest pictures of our trampiest pop-stars in their trampiest moments. And I tried to take the most horrific aspects of several of them and try to combine it into one person.

PK: That’s a lot to work with there.

JS: That is a lot to work with. So we took, you know, purple hair extensions, and the right kind of eye make-up, and the right kind of clothing, we just kept adding more and we looked at her and she still looked really adorable, and so we added more and more, and finally after several applications of make-up and other trampy things, we felt like we hit our mark, but it took a lot to overcome the wholesome factor. And then she just did a great job, I thought, in terms of her performance. I thought it was a revelation. 

PK: Another Hilary making great strides for women. By the way, do you think the election is going to energize the popularity of the movie, because people are so much into politics now?

JS: I think there is something happening right now, things are shifting for sure, and I think this film could be…. I think it’s going to inspire people, for sure, and I think that, you know, like I said, I hope that it changes the way that people see things, or maybe the way people vote.

PK: And maybe the way people make movies too.

JS: Um… we’ll see about that.

Once you get John started on this Iraq thing he sure has a lot to say. Here's the rest of our conversation, which is kind of an education on recent US foreign policy that you probably haven't heard much about if you stick to the mainstream media and are bugged by the poltical referecnces in "Iron Man" and "You Don't Mess With the Zohan." And he still finds time to talk about Hilary Duff's pants.

PK: Do you think this is the best time to release the movie?  Wasn’t it originally conceived in 2004?

JC:  We conceived of it at the very very height of it,  you know, when the statue fell and Bush was strutting around like a peacock. And people were on podiums telling, we should all watch what we say, and all those kind of threats, those McCarthyite threats.

PK: Around the time the contractors were killed in Fallujah…

J C:  It was right around there.  We had been writing the script for a while. You know, I had been studying a lot of this stuff for a while, talking to as many independent journalists as I could, and getting as much information as I could from all the great heoric journalists out there who really put their lives on the line to get the truth out about this stuff, from Naomi [Klein]  who was over there, to Jeremy Scahill, to the reports in the McClatchy Newspapers to Laura Logan and some other people I knew over there.  And the list goes on and on. But when you realize what they were doing. And you realize they had used 9/11 to foster in kind of this shadow version of the state that’s fully privatized. And when you knew that when Bremer walked in there –  you know we sort of based the look of Hauser [the mercenary played by Cusack] off of Paul Bremer, you know the disaster capitalist, as Naomi called him, with the Brooks Brothers suit and the army boots going around in the helicopters. So these aren’t very subtle facts, and the journalists got it out there that while the place was still burning  he basically by fiat exempted Blackwater from any federal or international law and basically issued orders that all the subsidies of the state could be soldto 100% ownerships by foreign companies.  We basically create a market with war. We make money off of destruction of the place, and we come in take over, make money rebuilding the whole place, and then we preach about the free markets, all the while allowing a complete protectionist racket and then tell the Iraqis that when we’re done you can work here. And then with a straight face we say we’re interested in freedom. I mean the balls of that, the hypocrisy, the lies are so intense it makes your eyes water. So if you know what’s going on over there, and you know that’s what this ideology really is. …and of course this has nothing to do with the soldiers who are being manipulated, the only people who aren’t dirty in this mess are the military’s families and the soldiers who are doing their jobs.  But the companies that are trying to create these new “free markets” with war and then protect them and the mercenaries and you know, its like they’re just gorging off of other people’s land and property, is so immoral.  And the other great thing that people don’t know about this stuff is that we’re paying for all these companies to do this.  They just bill us right at the state department.  So lets say you thought it was okay for Blackwater or Bechtel or any of these companies to do what they’re doing over there, well, we’re paying for it. 

PK: Do you think it would have been a more effective movie if it came out in 2004 or is it more so now?

JC: I think that what’s improtant is that we wanted to make it in 2004 and we started making it, but I think right now, the movie has been done five or six months now, but when even four or five months ago when we had the movie done, the reaction was well, that’s anti-American and we don’t want to show it, you know, we always knew we’d get a polarizing reaction to the movie. But now we’re getting a much more open response to it. 

PK: I’ve been looking at some of the reviews, and you expect a lot of the right wing nuts to kind of come out against it and there were a few of those, but most of these negative reviews were from film critics who… 

JC: Most critics are on the liberal side of things

PK: Do you feel sort of betrayed by that? 

JC: Nope, I thought it was kind of predicatable

PK: Why is that?

JC: Well, we’re talking about a culture in the press mostly. I would say the “New York Times,”for example, I’m a big fan of Bob Herbert and a lot of reporters over there, and there’s a lot of great individual reporters.

PK: They win a lot of Pulitzer Prizes. 

JC: Right, but it’s also a culture that enabled the war for six or seven years, broke all the Judy Miller stuff, didn’t take a really hard stand on any of this stuff for years, and at the end of the greatest foreign policy disaster in the history of the country, it took one of the intellectual architects of the invasion, and gave him a column on the back page, Bill Kristol.

 I wouldn’t expect that culture to get the movie. And also I don’t know if some of the reviewers who reviewed it didn’t really know what’s going in Iraq. I mean some people have said the movie is five years too late.  Do they know anything about what’s going on over there? I’ll tell you this: if you look a the people we have on on myspace, some of the people who have been over there, people who have written books about it. I don’t know if they think it’s five years too late.

PK: I think some of the criticism comes from an aesthetic point of view because I think it’s very hard for a lot of critics to accept films that have drastic changes of tone from real madcap comedy to something th at’s really grim. I mean there’s a scene where you get the amputee Rockettes, it’s a real assault.

JC: We wanted to do that.  We thought it needed to be offensive. If you thought of – this is going to sound insane – when Bob Dylan went electric, he got booed. When Punk Rock came out, the easy listening rock critics didn’t like it. I mean it’s not meant to be cherished in that way. It’s meant to provoke and outrage and it’s a raw low-budget movie. But the tone shifts were intentional, that was something that we liked, which is we wanted it to be kind of disarming and kind of like bit like a fever dream. Whether we liked that our not, fine, but for the critics to suggest that it wasn’t intentional…They don’t have to like it, and they don’t have to get it. But let’s just put it this way, the mainstream media and the power journalists haven’t been right about much in the last 7 years.

PK: That excludes me.

JC: Maybe it does, and as I said I don’t like to paint people into brushes, but I will say it hasn’t b een uniformed, but I wouldn’t expect a movie that’s pretty experimental and out there to be appreciated right away.  And many timesa  piece of art is not understood right when it comes out, but yet the more you look at it, the more you go wait a minute that does have a pulse, that does reflect life a little bit, that does reflect what is going on right now.

PK: It does draw on a lot of tradition films going back to “Doctor Strangelove,” even the Marx Brothers.

JC: Or “Putney Slope,” or any of those types of things that challenge the conventional wisdom and the aristocracy, so that you can’t then be upset that the traditional wisdom doesn’t like it.

PK: So the plans are to release it on the platform basis, and then have it come out on DVD in July? 

JC: No not at all. The plan is that it’s gonna come out boosted up by about 18 or 20 theatres in New York or LA. We still don’t have much of an advertising budget, so it’s completely all viral, what’s been happening. But then they’re gonna go to about 10 new markets in two weeks. And if that keeps going well, then we’ll just keep going with it. So we’re gonna  platform it, and I’m hoping that it will, but we’ve gotten all these people who really really love the movie and are into the cause of making it a viral movie.  And they feel like if we can get this movie out there, we can send a message that we want more of these types of movies. And they wanted to actually get interacted with the film and have meetings afterwards and get people together and have fun with it.

PK: If Bill O’Reilly asked you to appear on his program, would you accept?

JC: What, Bill O’Reilly? 

PK: Yeah

JC: I dunno. I dunno what the point would be but I dunno if he’d really be interested in talking about any of it.

PK: He’d treat you like everyone else;  he’d set you up as a pinata, and then not allow you to respond to any of his abuse.

JC: You know I’m Irish too and I don’t take shit from people.

PK: You could probably take him too. You were a kickboxer right?

JC: That’s right. the only thing is that he’s gotten his teeth kicked in so many times intellectu ally speaking, it’s kind of like kicking someone while he’s down.

PK: It’s kind of like picking on George Bush at this point. 

JC: But that man’s still got a lot of power, and that man’s still getting people killed.

PK: Well there’s always Iran. He can still go after them.. 

JC: My only point with this is that I’m hoping that well-meaning Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, anyone with a shred of patriotism in their body, will band together to disgrace, mock, and shame this ideology, but also it’s important that they be held accountable, you know, because if they’re not, I just don’t know what the future of the country is because it means, well, the constitution and the laws don’t mean anything if the Democrats are close to getting power. So because Pelosi takes impeachment off the table, so that means we may get the White House back, the rule of law doesn’t matter?

PK: I think impeachment has been off the table since Nixon got off the hook for Watergate.

JC: Yeah, but I think that’s a disaster.

PK: Definitely. But this is what my readers what my readers are interested in. Is it true that you dropped a scorpion down Hilary Duff’s pants?

JC: She dropped it down her own pants. 

PK: How is that possible?

JC: I dunno, there wasn’t any law against it in Bulgaria [where the film was shot], and Hilary read the script and she knew she wanted to do it.  She’s really game.  She’s  like a pretty spirited wild-woman. She’s pretty great. 

PK: Was that an allusion to"The Wild Bunch?" 

JC: I don’t think we probably thought of it, but I’m sure it was in some way.

PK: I guess my question is, how do you avoid getting stung? 

JC: Well there’s a scorpion wrangler in Bulgaria, which is a good job if you think how many scorpion wranglers could there be in Bulgaria. He’s probably got the market cornered there. But he had these scorpions and he took off the poison stinger, or he somehow neutralized the poison stinger, and Hilary put that scorpion down her pants.

In between political ads and appearances on MSNBC firing back at Bill O’Reilly, John Cusack has been working hard lately to promote his new film, “War,Inc.” And for good reason. Not only is it another film about the Iraq (or "Turaquistan") War, which so far have all gotten beaten up both critically at the box office, but it’s also a satire, the genre that, as George S. Kaufman put it, "closes on Saturday night." Not to mention, as Larissa Alexandrovna darkly hints in the “Huffington Post,” a “blacklisting” by critics presumably all part of the right wing conspiracy. Well, we should be so lucky.

Despite the demands on his time, John still was able to spare me about 40 minutes on the phone. I found him thoughtful, passionate, prone to long pauses while he ruminated. Literally ruminated, as in “chewed,” for, as I eventually realized, he was eating his lunch.

So go see this movie if only to let this poor man eat his lunch in peace.

PK: In its first two weekends at four theatres it’s rivaled in per screen average Indiana Jones and Sex and the City. How do you account for that?

JC: Well it's kind of a long answer but I’ll see if I can give you one. Whenever we’ve gotten the movie in front of the audience, people have really, really loved it, and we’ve had a really polarizing response to the movie, which we sort of thought we would going in. And what’s been reported sort of in the press a little bit  is that everyone hates the movie, but somehow people are going anyway, and that’s a weird a story but if you look at what’s happening on in the press, and we have a big myspace page and we have, I dunno, 30 or 40 heroes of the left and the activist left, you know, from Gore Vidal to Naomi Klein, to  Damien Hurst to Laura Logan from “60 Minutes,” to people who really know these issues, and who write more about just movies and junkets. They’re writing about politics and culture and life, and many of the people who have defended the movie and championed it have never written about films before, although they’re people from like Larissa Alexandrovna and some others, and we’ve had alter “Alternet,” Crooks and Liars.  You know, there’s been a real viral groundswell about the movie. and so people are thinking , there’s seems to be a lot people who really do get it, and those people seem to really impress people, so I think that gets people in the door.  And people are probably realizing that the movie is meant to be offensive and it takes aim at the corporate media and the mainstream media as much as it does the neocons.  So I think it’s inevitable that certain people weren’t gonna get it.  Some people looked at the movie and saw that, you know, it has a happy ending, and they don’t really realize that we’re satirizing happy endings in movies. So it’s okay that people don’t get it. No one is required to like our little punk rock movie.  But I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that there hasn’t been a whole bunch of support for the movie too. I mean from people in meanstream media like the “Los Angeles Times” and “Time” magazine and “USA Today.” So, we’ve gotten a polarizing response to it and not entirely negative. And it’s sort of being presented like it’s just negative.  I think people want a  movie that takes it right to the heart of the Bush-Cheney cabal.

PK: All the other Iraq War movies have tanked. This is the only that’s a comedy. Do you think that’s why it’s been more appealing to audiences?

JC:  Well I think there’s that, and also I think that there’s two ways you can go. That there’s this sense of inevitability about the whole thing and that maybe that Bush and Cheney and what they represent, which is this kind of 30 year movement from this far far right which is to kind of, totally privatize everything that it means to be a state. I think that people know that that’s, you know, they have a sense of inevitability that this is the way things are and it’s just too entrenched and its so depressing what’s happening and what America has been reduced to and the damage that’s been done to our military and the damage that’s been done to the image of America across the world. And so it’s very depressing, so when you finish work, and you know, you might not want to be reminded of that in a very serious and somber way. But when you get a comedy or satire, and this isn’t like “The Wedding Crashers,” it’s not like it is, well sometimes it is, but it’s not like you’re suppopsed to just laugh and escape.  You’re supposed to have nervous laughter and uncomfortable laughter and you’re supposed to think. But I think this type of a film allows you to reclaim your sense of defiance and your sense of outrage and the sense of subversion.  It should be fun to tell the right people to go to hell. It should feel good to tell the truth and run.  So, I think this allows people to get riled up in a healthy way.  And I think that’s what absurdist comedy does because it basically just takes current trends to their logical conclusion in a world that’s gone totally mad. That logical conclusion is surreal and insane, which is exactly what the Bush-Cheney world view is.

PK: So you think that at this point, most of the American people are against the war and realize it’s a mistake and so forth, but they don’t think they can do anything about it. So when a movie comes up that tells them what they already know they’ll just feel depressed, unless you can somehow convince them there’s something they can do about it, or that a spirit of subversion is actually something they can aspire to.

JC: Yeah I mean I think that there’s.  there’s a great writer name Arundhati Roy. http://www.weroy.org/arundhati.shtmlAnd what she said I tried to remember when we were making the movie.  And we tried to remember it.  “Our strategy should not only be to confront empire but to lay seige to it, to deprive it of oxygen, to shame it, to mock it with our art, our music, our literature, our stubborness and our sheer relentlessness and our ability to tell our own stories, stories that are different than the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they’re selling. Their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.  Remember this, we be many but they be few. They need us more than we need them.”  So I thought that was kind of brilliant quote which I thought encapsulates that. And I that, you know, if it wasn’t Arundhati Roy, it might have been Abbie Hoffman saying it.

PK: He probably did say that, but maybe not in exactly the same way.

JC: But what I’m saying is that sentiment is one that we desperately need, because the first thing that we need to reclaim is our sense of outrage and our spirit and our sense that we’re not gonna let these bastards get away with this. That’s what I feel anyway, but I think that movie seems to be tapping into that spirit a bit.

NEXT:  Hilary Duff and the scorpion.

And so the debate about the future of film criticism, which, admittedly, only film critics seem to be interested in, goes on.

Here’s my own recent illustrative anecdote. A couple of weeks ago the local publicists for Disney invited me to an early screening of their big summer animation movie, “WALL-e.” Then they, well, disinvited me. Why? It seems the early screenings were only for those who were gioing to do interviews for puff pieces on the film or who were going to write stuff like:

"WALL*E" delivered big time. How big time is big time? Let's just say it's a good thing I was sitting in the back row, because this movie charmed my fucking pants off, then went down on me in public for an hour and a half. (To the family sitting next to me, sorry for all the noise.)”

as in this review.

As you can see, then, the Disney and Pixar people, like all studios, fear us. One bad word from us would topple the “WALL-e” juggernaut from clearing $60 million in its opening weekend despite enlisting people like NASA in its PR campaign (see below). How else could mediocre blockbusters like “Iron Man” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” clean up at the box office if not for a thumbs up from the top tier of movie critics? Only a cynic would suggest that the movies were going to make a ton of money anyway and these guys are just desperately trying to seem cool, in the loop and relevant by liking them.

And if you have any doubt about the power of criticism, how about Sony Classics avoiding New York City in their opening of Mark and Jay Duplass’s “Baghead” and instead releasing the film in places like Portland and Austin that “tend to connect with what’s new and different.”

The reason? David Poland in Movie City News suggests it might have something to do with this negative “New York Times” review of the Duplass Brothers’ first film “The Puffy Chair.”

So there you go: when critics aren’t proving their mettle by getting on the bandwagon for the most recent heavily promoted summer movie, they can show their stuff by scaring off anyone who dares to show originality and talent on a tiny budget. So there!

Leave it to eagle-eyed critic Debbie Schlussel to spot the hand of Al Qaeda in Andre Dubus III’s Oprah-touted “The Garden of Last Days,” which “sympathizes” with one of the 9/11 terrorists. Good call, Debbie -  if we start to try comprehending the motives and psychology of our enemy, then the terrorists will win.

But it doesn’t stop there. Of course you’d expect a pointy-headed liberal “auteur” like Steven Soderbergh to spend four hours of screen time celebrating the life of a cold-blooded commie killer in his new hagiographic biopic “Che.” Nor is it a surprise that our craven European “allies” are turning out garbage hailing such deranged political criminals as the Baader-Meinhof gang (in the upcoming German film “The Baader-Meinhof Complex”)  or  the lovable Carlos the Jackal in a new film by French director Olivier Asssayas. 

But in fact the bad guys are much closer to home, no further away than the local multiplex. Again, hats off to Debbie Schlussel on tipping us off months ago about the baleful influence of "Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo:" “It's not exactly a newsflash that Hollywood sides with Islamic terrorists and is against the impotent War on Terror,” she sagely reminds us. “And I've noted that actor Kal Penn, who played Kumar Patel in the hit movie, "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," is sympathetic with Muslims and Islamic terrorists…”

No doubt about Kal Penn. I mean, he LOOKS like a terrorist. But Adam Sandler? Sad but true. His new comedy “Don’t Mess With the Zohan” not only portrays a terrorist (played by John Turturro) as “sympathetic,” but has the malignant audacity to suggest that one way to solve the ongoing crisis in the Middle East is by having Israelis and Palestinians getting along with each other!  “[H]igh quality Bin Laden Cinema” indeed.

You can mess with the Zohan. But don’t  mess with Debbie Schlussel

Around the time of the moon landing when people were wondering what Neil Armstrong would say when he first set foot on the surface some comedian whose name I can’t remember joked that he could make himself a pile of money if he just shouted “Coca-Cola!” Those were the days. Now such Philip K. Dickian crass commercialization of space flight is the norm and what’s left of the final frontier is only on the Sci-Fi channel or in Star Trek sequels. These days, instead of exploring new worlds, NASA has been reduced to hauling plumbing supplies and pushing product placement items to promote upcoming Pixar movies. To wit: in addition to bringing a replacent toilet for the crew, the “Discovery” makes a much needed delivery of a Buzz Lightyear action figure from Pixar’s “Toy Story” to the space station just in time for the release of “Wall-E,” its new animated feature about a futuristic robot. No doubt this will help move the  film’s  “300 robot-themed consumer products that will arrive on store shelves over the next month.”  In the face of such cosmic merchandising, the barrage of labels let loose in “Sex and the City,” a virtual “Super Bowl for women” as a studio rep  put it for “Vanity Fair,” seems  small potatoes.