The Screengrab : boys don't cry

"Stop-Loss"; Kimberly Peirce on the Back-Door Draft

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Kimberly Peirce's first feature, the 1999 Boys Don't Cry, starred Hilary swank as Brandon Teena, the cross-dressing woman who was murdered by a couple of male associates who had met her when she was presenting herself as a man. It was one of the biggest indie success stories of the period and made a star of Swank (who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance), who had previously been best known for The Next Karate Kid. Of all the up-and-coming filmmakers who managed to get their bids in just before the millennium turned, Peirce has been perhaps the most conspicuously missing in action since. Now, nine years later, she's back with her new film, Stop-Loss. The title refers to the "loophole" in American soldiers' contracts permitting for "involuntary extensions" of their tours, as "national security" is deemed to require it. Peirce learned about the so-called "back door draft", which the military has been relying on in the face of a drop-off in recruiting numbers during the Iraq war, from her half-brother, who enlisted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Peirce herself had responded to 9/11 by "traveling the country in 2003, interviewing military men and women and recording homecoming parades for a potential documentary about soldiers from sign-up to return." Then she started tinkering with a script for a fictional film called "AWOL." It wasn't until she'd listened to her brother's stories, and watched his cache of videos made by soldiers overseas, that her ideas began to focus around the idea of a patriotic soldier (played in Stop-Loss by Ryan Phillippe) who wanted to serve his country and has done his time but now wants to be allowed to move on and live his life. The army has other ideas.

Peirce hasn't just been kicking back for much of the nine years since Boys Don't Cry. Even before she began grappling with this new subject matter, she'd flirted with making movies based on Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Arthur Golden's novel Memoir of a Geisha, and the notorious inside-Hollywood murder of William Desmond Taylor. She also considered adapting The Ice at the Bottom of the World, a novel by Mark Richard, before instead inviting Richard to collaborate with her on the script of what became Stop-Loss. A self-described "Southern conservative," Richard may have counterbalanced Peirce's politics and helped prevent the script from turning into a screed. But if Stop-Loss is one more Iraq movie, it also has core similarities to Boys Don't Cry. “When I talked to a wounded soldier who lost his limbs and still wants to go back," says Peirce, "he told me, ‘It’s not the war, it’s the men." As in Boys Don't Cry, Peirce has caught hold of a story of small town kids who risk their lives out of a need for a certain kind of camaraderie. The heroes who feel that they've fulfilled their duty and now expect to be dealt with honorably have only their tiny support network to rely on. “There was a sense of deep, deep longing before Stop-Loss," says Peirce. "Boys set the bar very high artistically for me. I wanted to be that much in love with my next character. I wanted to feel it was taking over my whole life. I was lonely when I wasn’t able to work on a movie at that level again."

Morning Deal Report: Amy Ryan on a Hot Streak

Peter Smith — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Amy Ryan is doing well these days, with parts in Dan in Real Life and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and a highly acclaimed performance in Gone Baby Gone. (I just finished watching her fine work in Season 2 of The Wire, to boot.) Now she and Greg Kinnear are joining Matt Damon in a Paul-Greengrass-directed thriller based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction Iraq chronicle, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. This also marks a reunion of Damon and Greengrass, which any Bourne fan knows is a good thing.

Jessica Biel costars with Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas in the Noel Coward adaptation Easy Virtue.

Boys Don't Cry and Stop Loss director Kimberly Pierce wants to adapt Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. It's always interesting when a serious, realism-minded director steps into sci-fi. Let's hope this happens.

Trailer Roundup: Stop-Loss

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If I were more of cynic I would probably roll my eyes and brace myself for the inevitable op-ed pieces about how Americans don't want to see Iraq War movies that would follow the eventual failure of this film at the box office. But if I'm going to be honest, I've got pretty high hopes for this one. Maybe I'm just glad to see Kimberly Peirce making another film, as it's been a full nine years since Boys Don't Cry. Judging by the trailer, it appears she hasn't lost any of her feel for portraying flyover-country (now called "red state") life onscreen. In addition, Stop-Loss looks to be a more ground-level approach to the Iraq War, more a soldier's story than a grand statement, which is a welcome change from all the lofty rhetoric on either side of the issue. Gordon-Levitt aside, the cast isn't especially promising, but we didn't exactly think much of the girl from The Next Karate Kid either before Peirce got her hands on her, and look how well that turned out.

Take Five: Movies With Lyrics

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Danish director Susanne Bier’s new film, Things We Lost in the Fire, is already generating a tremendous amount of indie hype. If the buzz manages to survive this opening weekend, it may result in the words "Oscar" and "Halle Berry" being mentioned without the words "fluke" or "Catwoman" appearing in the same sentence. The quiet family drama’s name may seem pretty arcane to people who aren’t as into indie rock as they are indie film – the title is drawn from an outstanding 2001 album by Duluth slowcore band Low. As more and more directors who grew up on a diet of punk, alternative and indie rock start making films, we’re likely to see more such abstractions; but while we wait for a generation raised on post-hardcore to grow up, here’s a few films from the past with musical names.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968)

Filmed simultaneously with the Rolling Stones' recording of the song of the same name – indeed, footage of the Stones putting down tracks for the single are featured in the film – this was one of the first movies to use a rock song as its title. Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary/agitprop/drama/black comedy/whatever is a typically brilliant, typically frustrating film, very much in keeping with his work of the era. And, like the song, the film seems to be nothing so much as an admission that the end of the Sixties were a chaotic, turbulent vortex that owed as much to the hand of Satan as they did the peace-and-love generation.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus Van Sant’s disorienting, dazzling, neo-Shakespearian drama about the lives of two gay hustlers (Keanu Reeves and the late River Phoenix) was a major step forward in the director’s postmodernist sensibility. Crammed with classical allusions, stunt casting, surrealism and shattered (or at least badly bruised) fourth walls, its determination to blend the sophisticated and the trashy was an appropriate tribute to the junk-culture leanings of the B-52s. "Private Idaho", a track off their 1980 sophomore effort Wild Planet, lent the movie its name more than a decade later. It’s a pretty good match, too – try dancing to the song’s frenetic rhythms during some of the movie’s more depressing moments.

THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (1995)

Unfairly slammed as a third-rate Tarantino knockoff for no better reason than its unfortunately timed release date, this intricate, too-clever-for-its-own-good heist thriller from director Gary Fleder is really more of a second-rate film noir that somehow got made fifty years too late. Still, maybe it deserved some of the bad reputation that got it lost among a raft of hip, violent thrillers – while it drew its name from an evocative, hilarious song off of the late Warren Zevon’s 1991 album Learning to Flinch, the filmmakers (no doubt aware that you can’t copyright a title, even one as distinctive as this) neither sought not received Zevon’s permission in using the name.

BOYS DON’T CRY (1999)

The movie that put Hilary Swank (and, to a lesser degree, Chloe Sevigny) on the map was also the first major Hollywood release to treat transgender people as anything but a punch line. The story of Brandon Teena, who lived most of his life as a male before being beaten to death by friends after they discovered he was biologically female, set the tone for a spate of indie films about homosexuality and gender issues. Its deeply ironic name was drawn from a 1980 single by the Cure, taken from their debut album of the same name, but the version featured in the movie itself is a far inferior cover. Seek out the original, one of the strongest the band put out before becoming a self-caricature.

MAN ON THE MOON (1999)

It’s no coincidence that Milos Forman’s biopic of experimental comedian Andy Kaufman drew its name from the 1992 R.E.M. song of the same name (from their Automatic for the People album). The song is itself a worshipful tribute to the comic, featuring references to his most famous routines and a chorus where singer Michael Stipe imitates Kaufman imitating Elvis. What’s more interesting is that this may be one of the few times where the video for the original song is far superior to the movie the song inspired – the inventive Peter Care-directed video is much more memorable than the somewhat stodgy and predictable film by Forman.

— Leonard Pierce