The Screengrab : 2010

DVD Digest for April 7, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a recent Oscar winner finally gets the DVD treatment it deserves, and Warner digs deep into their vaults for a slew of new Blu-Ray titles.

This week’s selection of recent movies is headed by a handful of high-profile December releases, including Jim Carrey in Yes Man (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the Adam Sandler family vehicle Bedtime Stories (Disney, also Blu-Ray), Keanu Reeves in the remake The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and the animated The Tale of Despereaux (Universal, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson in Not Easily Broken (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and the controversial British horror movie Donkey Punch (Magnolia).

Last year, many DVD fans expressed displeasure over the shabby treatment given to the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, released in a bare-bones edition to capitalize on the movie’s recent Oscar success. This week, Disney hopes to remedy this with the release of a new “Collector’s Edition” in both standard DVD and Blu-Ray. This new upgrade boasts more than five hours of new features, including documentaries, and interviews with the filmmakers, cast and crew. Also this week: a 75th Anniversary Edition of Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (Universal); Warner’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, which includes The Cheat, Merrily We Go to Hell, Hot Saturday, Torch Singer, Murder at the Vanities, and Search for Beauty; the TCM Spotlight: Doris Day Collection (Warner)- includes April in Paris, It’s a Great Feeling, Starlift, Tea for Two, and The Tunnel of Love; and the controversial-in-its-day La Grande Bouffe (E1 Entertainment).

The big Blu-Ray news this week is Warner’s release of nine (mostly dodgy, I must say) new titles in the format. The Warner Blu-Ray releases are: Peter Hyams’ 2010, Steven Seagal in Above the Law, Edward Norton in American History X, The Governator in Collateral Damage; the Rube Goldberg-esque thriller Final Destination; Denzel Washington standing up to the American health care system in John Q, an extended cut of Angelina Jolie in Taking Lives, and the 80s-set Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore rom-com The Wedding Singer. Also this week, a double feature of avian-themed Sony releases: Fly Away Home and Winged Migration.

Finally, the selection was pretty thin for plot synopses, so I wasn’t able to find a suitable Synopsis of the Week. The best I can do is a pretty unbeatable title: Britney Spears: The Return of An Angel. Doesn’t that sound like just about the cheesiest thing ever? Too bad the White Elephant Blogathon is over, because that could’ve made for a fun submission. Oh well- there’s always next year…

Set Your DVR!: December 8 - 15, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

First off, many apologies for my absence last week. With houseguests (I call them “Mom and Dad”) around for a few days past the weekend, I didn’t have any time to do the research or write the column, and I figured that very few of you want to read me repeating variations on “I got nothin’ but I sure like booze.” Because I’m all about keeping the high standards around here.
So to change things up a wee bit, I’m going to list a schedule and then write about sentence or two about the movies at the end. Or a few of them, at least. Here’s what’s worth watching in the upcoming week!

Monday, 12/8:
Well, I got nothin’. But I sure like the booze.

Tuesday, 12/9:
5/6 am: Out of the Past on TCM.
5:25/6:25 am: Les Enfants du Paradis on IFC
8:40/9:40 am: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Les Enfants du Paradis on IFC.
3:35/4:35 pm: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.

Wednesday, 12/10:
5/6 am: Cat People on TCM.
6:30/7:30 am: Curse of the Cat People on TCM.
6:35/7:35 am: The Quiet American on IFC.
1/2 pm: The Quiet American on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm: 2001: A Space Odyssey on TCM.
3/4 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC.
5/6 pm: 2010 on TCM.

Thursday, 12/11:
7/8 pm: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC.
11:30 pm CST/12:30 am EST: CQ on IFC.

Friday, 12/12:
3/4 am: Cop Land on TNT.
2:30/3:30 pm: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC.
8:45/9:45 pm: Death and the Maiden on IFC.
10:30/11:30 pm: Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster on VH1CL.

Saturday, 12/13:
8:45/9:45 am: Brother’s Keeper on IFC
2/3 pm: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
7/8 pm: Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster on VH1CL.
11:30 pm CST/12:30 am EST: Elephant on IFC.

Sunday, 12/14:
5:30/6:30 am: Elephant on IFC.
7/8 am: Jules et Jim on IFC.
4/5 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
8/9 pm: Dead Calm on CHILLER.
9:30/10:30 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
11 pm CST/12 am EST: Dead Calm on CHILLER.
11 pm CST/12 am EST: The Godless Girl on TCM.

Monday, 12/15:
1:15/2:15 am: Das Boot on TCM.
9:35/10:35 am: Mystery Train on IFC.
2:45/3:45 pm: Mystery Train on IFC.
6:25/7:25 pm: George Washington on IFC.

The Movies:
2001: A Space Odyssey on TCM: 12/10 at 2:30 pm CST. Do you need a blurb about this movie? I doubt it.

2010 on TCM: 12/10 at 5 pm CST. I don’t think this is a great movie, but my god, it’s full of stars.

Brother’s Keeper on IFC: 12/13 at 8:45 am and 2 pm CST. Fantastic documentary on sibling murder and rural family values.

Cat People on TCM: 12/10 at 5 am CST. Val Lewton & Jacques Tourneur’s no-budget horror/suspense flick.

Cop Land on TNT: 12/12 at 3 am CST. I hate recommending movies that have almost definitely been cut for cable broadcast, but Cop Land is fairly surprising, being a Sylvester Stallone movie that’s actually pretty decent. I could be grading on a curve here.

CQ on IFC: 12/11 at 11:30 pm CST. Roman Coppola’s love-letter to the films of the 60s is not as bad as some argue, although it’s nowhere near as good as it could have been. Jeremy Davies may be the reason for both. I like the scene that copies a scene from La Dolce Vita from another angle.

Curse of the Cat People on TCM: 12/10 at 6:30 am CST. What’s that? Can’t get enough Cat People? Well, here’s a second helping.

Das Boot on TCM: 12/15 at 1:15 am CST. Shockingly, it's not actually about shoewear.

The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC: 12/11 at 7 pm CST and 12/12 at 2:30 pm CST. Fuck a bunch of Keanu Reeves and his entirely unnecessary remake.

Dead Calm on CHILLER: 12/14 at 8 pm and 11 pm CST. Claustrophobic little suspense movie that takes place on one little boat out in the middle of the ocean.

Death and the Maiden on IFC: 12/12 at 8:45 pm CST. People may ask: why are Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley considered such great actors? Well, they made this movie, an underappreciated Roman Polanski film about torture and its consequences.

The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC: 12/9 at 8:40 am and 3:35 pm CST. I saw an early showing of this when I lived in North Carolina, some ten years ago. It’s a micro-budget indie based on the Charles Whitman shooting at UT, and I seem to remember thinking that it was pretty good, although it went off the rails towards the end.

Elephant on IFC: 12/13 at 11:30 pm and 12/14 at 5:30 am. See Leonard’s write-up.

George Washington on IFC: 12/15 at 6:25 pm. Somewhere between Days of Heaven and Killer of Sheep.

The Godless Girl on TCM: 12/14 at 11 pm. Cecil B. DeMille’s last silent film from 1929. That’s all I know.

Jules et Jim on IFC: 12/14 at 7 am. Confession: I can’t stand this movie. Truffaut directed a number of the finest films of the French New Wave, but this one drives me nuts. This shouldn't keep you from seeing it. There's a reason so many people like it; I'm willing to accept that it's my blind spot that's the problem. But GOD I hate this movie.

Les Enfants du Paradis on IFC: 12/9 at 5:25 am and 12:05 pm. One of the great films of French cinema.

Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster on VH1CL: 12/12 at 10:30 pm and 12/13 at 7 pm. Entertaining even for non-fans of Metallica. Maybe even more so. This is what happens when multi-gazillionaires have trouble coming up with something to bitch about for their fans’ pleasure.

Mystery Train on IFC: 12/15 at 9:35 am and 2:45 pm. Mostly great Jarmusch flick about the creepy goings-on in a Memphis hotel overseen by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Out of the Past on TCM: 12/9 at 5 am. One of the blackest and bleakest film noirs, starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by the great Jacques Tourneur.

The Quiet American on IFC: 12/10 at 6:35 am and 1 pm. Decent film about Vietnam and betrayal starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser and based on a book by Graham Greene.

Vanishing Point on FMC: 12/10 at 3 pm. Must-see little existential car chase movie.

The Wild Bunch on AMC: 12/14 at 4 pm and 9:30 pm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the best American movie, period. It's possibly the best movie made by anyone. On one level, it’s about bad men in bad times with a bad end coming at them fast. But that’s only one level.

Summer of '78: "Capricorn One"

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Capricorn One

Release Date: June 2, 1978

Cast: Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro, Hal Holbrook, Sam Waterston, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, OJ Simpson

The Buzz: A conspiracy thriller with a dash of sci-fi intrigue.

Keywords: NASA, Astronaut, Fraud, Chase, Reporter, Scorpion, Helicopter Crash

The Plot: Three astronauts (Brolin, Waterston and The Juice) are onboard their spacecraft ready to launch the first manned mission to mars when a NASA suit rushes them out of the capsule and onto a waiting plane. When they arrive in Los Angeles and meet with NASA chief James Kelloway (Holbrook), they learn that the ship’s cheaply made life support system was deemed unsafe, and that their ship has left for Mars without them. Appealing to their patriotism – and when that fails, not-so-subtly threatening the lives of their families – Kelloway coerces them into participating in a hoax. The Mars landing is faked on a Hollywood soundstage, as is their return to Earth. (You can imagine how this would be a scandal on par with Milli Vanilli lip-synching on the Grammies.) When the ship splashes down, Kelloway announces that the heat shields have failed and all aboard have disintegrated. Figuring that they’ve been duped, the astronauts escape and split up, heading in three different directions. At this point, you will guess correctly that Brolin will be the lone survivor. (The black astronaut is, of course, the first to die, but since it’s OJ, it’s hard to get too worked up over it.) Meanwhile, reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould, doing a broader take on his Philip Marlowe from The Long Goodbye) is sniffing around the story and figuring that something isn’t quite right.

The Test of Time: I’m actually a little surprised there hasn’t been a remake of Capricorn One yet, and not surprised at all that a Google search of “capricorn one remake” turns up dozens of rumor sites. The urban legend that the moon landing was faked persists to this day (see the recent NASA documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, in which exasperated lunar module pilot Charlie Duke points out, “We went to the moon nine times. Why would we fake it nine times?”), and Mars is back in the headlines this very week. Granted, the most recent cycle of Mars movies (Red Planet, Mission to Mars, Ghosts of Mars) met with little support from critics or the box office, but Capricorn has a solid premise, even if the execution is half-baked. In the hands of sci-fi hack Peter Hyams (Outland, 2010), it’s a lumpy thriller with no real momentum and little suspense. Also, the ending SUCKS - it's one of those '70s freeze-frames that thinks its so profound and ambiguous, when really it's just denying us a well-deserved comeuppance for no good reason. It's not like they'd be messing with a classic, so I can easily picture a more sophisticated Capricorn One, in terms of both conspiracy and technology, from, say, Steven Soderbergh. Yes, I can see it now: George Clooney, Will Smith and Steve Carrell as the astronauts. Call me, Stevie! We'll do lunch!

Quotable Quote: “You know, when Apollo 17 landed on the moon, people were calling up the networks and bitching because reruns of I Love Lucy were cancelled. Reruns, for Christ's sake! I could understand if it was the new Lucy show. After all, what's a walk on the moon? But reruns?”

2008 Equivalent: Let’s see…conspiracies, outer space, an investigator who stumbles onto something big…it’s gotta be The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Previously on "Summer of '78": Thank God It's Friday

New "Terminator" Trilogy on Tap: Christian Bale to Play John Connor, Times 3

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Christian Bale is turning out to be quite the franchise monkey. (We say it with love.) Having already done well following in the footsteps of Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney, he'll be seen next year playing John Connor, savior of mankind in its battle against our mechanized tyrants, a job that calls for him to go where Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl, and (on TV) Thomas Dekker have gone before. Bale and director McG are currently shooting Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, which is due to arrive in theaters on May 22, 2009. Now the BBC has reported that the producers of the current production, Halcyon, intend to make three Terminator movies, and Bale has agreed to come back for all of them. "He read the script and he loved it," said Derek Anderson, "so he's signed on for all three." His partner, Victor Kubicek, who calls Bale "really an actor's actor," adds that Bale "was our first choice and he's a big fan of The Terminator, so we're very lucky."

The Terminator series sure has come a long way since James Cameron cobbled together a surprise sleeper hit that, sneaking into theaters in the fall of 1984, blew more expensive, long-awaited sci-fi movies such as Dune and 2010 out of the water and, to the industry's slack-jawed amazement, made a bona fide movie star out of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was already fairly famous but regarded as a steroid freak with a funny accent, a useful guy to have around if you had a leading role that needed to be played in a loincloth. O. J. Simpson, famously was rejected for the role by producers who didn't think audiences would accept him as a villain, and by the time the first Terminator sequels rolled around, it was felt that Schwarzenegger wouldn't be accepted as a bad guy anymore either--or, at any rate, that he didn't want to play one--which meant that the scripts and special-effects people on those movies had to perform terrific feats of contortion to make it seem that the reformed Arnold-model robot might be plausibly vulnerable when pitted against the products of superior but skinnier technology. (Terminator 2 and the twelve-minute theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time are the only Terminator spin-offs that Cameron has had a hand in besides picking up a check for the use of his characters.) The last Terminator movie, Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines, had made it look as if the franchise was pretty well played out--ready for a TV series, in fact.

Who knows how hard the makers of the still-ongoing TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the upcoming film trilogy will work to make sure their plotlines match up, but the really daunting task for the filmmakers may be proving that there's a big-screen audience for this material without Schwarzenegger. (Terminator 3 proved that there's considerably less of an audience for it with the Schwarzenegger of 2003 than there was for it with the Schwarzenegger of 1984.) The casting of Bale signals that the John Connor character is now the de facto headliner; whereas on the TV show, where his mom gets top billing, the humans are regularly upstaged by the quizzical mechanical hottie played by Summer Glau. The producers of the new franchise are purposefully vague about whether Schwarzenegger, who does have a state to run, will have any participation in the new movies. (His only film appearances since Terminator 3 have been cameos in the Jackie Chan-Steve Coogan bomb Around the World in 80 Days and in The Rundown, where he good-naturedly passed the action-movie sceptre to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.) Theoretically, there's no reason that the Terminator series can't go on forever and a day, because its time-travel gimmick is built around the idea that the characters who are on the verge of being vanquished can always return to the past and change things. The down side is that there must be a point where even the most stubbonly devoted fans have to get fed up and want to see something stick.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died, at 90, in his adopted home of Sri Lanka. Clarke broke into publishing through Astounding Science Fiction magazine and later served as "science adviser" to the British adventure comic strip Dan Dare, eventually becoming revered as a major figure of the genre as the author of such books as Childhood's End. To movie lovers, though, Clarke will always be best remembered for his work on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie grew out of "The Sentinel", a story Clarke first wrote in 1948 as an unsuccessful entry in a BBC competition; later published under the title "Sentinel of Eternity", it introduced the concept of the monolith which would anchor the screenplay that Clarke and Kubrick eventually assembled, drawing on other stories by Clarke, such as "Encounter at Dawn." While Kubrick made the movie, Clarke wrote a novel, also called 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was published shortly after the novel's release. Technically, the book, being based on the screenplay, might be called a novelization, but it was intended not as a cheap tie-in but as a work that could stand on its own while also serving as a complementary work to the movie.

Although 2001-the-movie was very much "a Stanley Kubrick film", it raised Clarke's profile immeasurably outside the sci-fi ghetto, even as it linked his name to the director's forever more. They never worked together again, but in 1972 Clarke published The Lost Worlds of 2001, a book that included his observations on the writing of the screenplay and the production of the movie, as well as material from the various drafts of the screenplay that didn't make it into the finished film. In the early 1980s, he published a sequel, 2010: Odyssey II, which subsequently led to a 1984 movie version written and directed by Peter Hyams. (Yet another book, The Odyssey File, subtitled "The Making of 2010", is actually a collection of Clarke's and Hyams' correspondence during the pre-production stages, and is mainly of interest for revealing that Clarke was one of the first people to freak out over the possibilities of an e-mail account.) He was knighted in 2000.