Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMadison.com. In this week's installment of the Screening Room, Mark looks at "Interview" and "Reservation Road."

INTERVIEW (2007)

When actor's produce, write, and direct films, the work tends to be what is known in the industry as "character driven." That means that the dialogue and the acting, the characters themselves, are more important than location, special effects, or even, sometimes, the story.

"Interview" is a low-budget film with very few actors, just two locations and a lot of very emotional, and complicated acting from Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller.

There isn't much story. Just two people working off each other, playing mind games with each other, looking for power and leverage -- it's like a long improvisation between two actors who are playing characters very close to themselves. The actor's version of tennis. I found it very compelling and entertaining, but it's not for everyone.

There is a lot of alcohol and some drugs are involved, and Sienna Miller plays a B-movie actress who is trying to take herself seriously by doing a nighttime soap opera, so it is familiar territory for me. I also like to watch actors do this kind of work. We love to do the close, personal, emotionally difficult scenes. Exposing ourselves to each other, risking everything, not in a physical way like jumping out of an airplane, but in a psychological way, like when you fall in love, or convince yourself that you have fallen in love, or tell a secret that no one knows. And Buscemi is very good at it. So is Sienna Miller.

I thought she was very good in "Factory Girl," but it was a movie about a vapid person in a vapid time in New York, when emptiness was being celebrated and elevated to the status of tragedy by people with a deep need to feel superior to other people, so the movie itself wasn't very interesting. She has a little more edge here. She is playing a person who everyone imagines to be an empty headed bobble head doll with a great body and sexual appetite to match, but she really has more depth than that. (Don't we all?)

Buscemi plays a man who is a failure in his work and his life but is trying not to believe it about himself -- a political reporter assigned to interview a second-rate TV and movie star. They spend the night together playing a version of truth or dare with no rules. When it is over, nothing has really happened, except one of them has won the psychological tennis game. It's not Jimmy Connors against Bjorn Borg, but it's good.

RESERVATION ROAD (2007)

This film opens by cutting back and forth between two happy families. One at their son's cello recital, then the beach, and then the long drive back home to the little New England town where they live.

The other features a man and his son at a Red Sox game really enjoying each other on what is probably his one overnight with his son due to a difficult custody battle with his wife.

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Related links:

• markmetcalf.net
• comicwonder.com

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