The Screengrab : 3 women

In Other Blogs: The Blogger Experience

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Some Came Running proprietor Glenn Kenny recounts his Girlfriend Experience at The Auteurs. Kenny has a role in the film that was pitched to him as “the Harry Knowles of internet escort reviewers.” Kenny was not immediately flattered. “Harry Knowles, if you don’t know, is famous for founding Aint It Cool News, a movie fan boy website of large popularity and no small industry influence. Knowles (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) is also, as Kyle on South Park would put it, a great big fat fuck. I am, hence, slightly put off.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir talks to Girlfriend Experience director Steven Soderbergh about his prolific, unpredictable career. “I'm always trying to be Howard Hawks, sure. I envy the opportunities that the studio directors got in the '30s and '40s. It was assumed that you would make more than one movie a year, and that that movie could be a western or a musical or a comedy or a drama. Very early on, before I made sex, lies, and videotape, I fantasized that I could have a career in which I could move around like that. It's not easy.”

Ali Arikan breaks from the Trek pack at The House Next Door. “Which is all by way of saying there is absolutely no nuance in J.J. Abrams’s film, not even a soupçon of subtlety, no genuine humour. It’s all piff-paff, whack-bang, etc, packed with heaps of post-modernist “irony” or whatever it is they call this bollocks. Nudge nudge, wink wink ahoy. We are all wallowing in a never-ending adolescence these days. So, instead of making us laugh, J.J. Abrams just wants to make us feel clever, and the whole thing becomes a big ego-massage”

Bright Lights After Dark considers the geography of 3 Women. “It's a point that many viewers miss, though it's difficult to blame them: Robert Altman's 3 Women is really "about" California, and quite distinctly so -- it doesn't belong to its contentual municipality in the sense that, say, Nashville does. And it's not about the psycho-sprawl urban California of Los Angeles or the spittle, cardboard and tinsel California of Hollywood or the plugged culture retro-future sophistry California of San Francisco. It's about the other California, by which one means the smattering of middle-of-nowhere cities always on the brink of suburbia these days, and always reminding us of somewhere else. The dusty, mid-western-like cock-and-bull towns that flank the interstate 5 with ranches and groves. The shattered-shell-and-hanging-kayak-wind-chime Mediterranean beach villas that dot the coastal region from Monterey to Santa Barbara. And, of course, the boilingly barren, frenziedly phallic desert settlements that circle the parched Mojave and Joshua Tree territories.”

And finally in List-o-Mania, Topless Robot offers the 10 Most Blatant Terminator Ripoffs, including Cyborg Cop. “A renegade cop (is there any other kind in these movies?) goes to the tropics to find his long lost brother, who has been transformed into a cybernetic killing machine by a mad scientist in this '93 movie. As the scientist, John Rhys-Davies seems to be under the impression he's filming an episode of Gilligan's Island as his performance has to be seen to be believed.”

Summer of '78: "A Wedding"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

All summer long we’ve been flipping back the calendar to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse thirty years ago. Today is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, and the official grand finale of…The Summer of ’78!

A Wedding

Release Date: August 29, 1978

Cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mia Farrow

The Buzz: If your only problem with Nashville was that you thought there just weren’t enough characters – have we got a movie for you!

Keywords: Wedding, Dancing, Dental Braces, Unplanned Pregnancy, Frog, Greenhouse

The Plot: This is about as plotless as it gets, even by Robert Altman standards. The title is no lie – it’s a wedding. The ceremony takes up the first 15 minutes or so, as feckless Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) is married to braces-wearing daughter of privilege Muffin Brenner by near-senile Bishop Martin (John Cromwell). The matriarch of the groom’s family (Lillian Gish) dies while awaiting the reception guests at the family manse, but her demise is concealed by the family doctor. As at any wedding reception, numerous subplots unfold as the alcohol flows. Mother of the bride Tulip (Carol Burnett) is wooed by guest Mac Goddard (Pat McCormick). Dino is accused of impregnating the bride’s sister Buffy (Mia Farrow), much to the dismay of her overly attentive father Snooks (Paul Dooley). Exes of both bride and groom turn up to complicate matters, as does a tornado. Events take a seemingly tragic turn as it appears the happy couple is killed in a car accident en route to their honeymoon, but it turns out it was just their exes leaving together in the car meant as a wedding present – so who cares?

The Test of Time: During the production of 3 Women, a reporter asked a badly hungover Altman what his next project would be. “We’re shooting a wedding,” he snapped. It figures that a project based on an offhand sarcastic comment would end up being one of the director’s lesser efforts. In a DVD commentary (and in several interviews), Altman lays out his basic plan for the film: first, he wanted to double the number of characters from his most ambitious effort, Nashville. And he wanted the near real-time film to catalogue the follies of the typical wedding, when two families and sets of friends are thrust into an artificial union. It could have worked, but the delicate Altman alchemy fizzled this time around. All the usual tics are present – zoom-ins and –outs, overlapping dialogue, actor improvisation – but the magic just isn’t happening. Part of the blame goes to the cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr. and company aren’t exactly the Nashville A-list. But blame Altman for crowding so many of them into such a confined space and time. We spend too much time trying tell the bridesmaids and distant relatives apart, and by the time we’ve figured it out, few of the storylines are compelling enough – or developed enough – to command our attention. There is the odd worthy moment – a handful of wedding workers and guests passing a joint around outside the greenhouse as the dusky mist descends – but the disproportionately dark denouement is a downer that sums up the cynicism of the whole endeavor. Robert Altman made at least a half-dozen of my all-time favorite movies, so it’s pretty easy for me to shrug off his missteps. Still, the summer of ’78 sure ended with a bummer of A Wedding.

Quotable Quote: “You mean you don’t drink? In other words, when you get up in the morning, that’s as good as you’re gonna feel all day.”

2008 Equivalent: There will never be another Altman.

Thanks for joining us for the Summer of ’78! If we’re all still alive a year from now, tune in for the Summer of ’89!

Previously on Summer of '78: The Driver

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

3 WOMEN (1977), Not Directed By David Lynch

Like any number of David Lynch films, 3 Women starts in one genre, telling one story about a certain group of characters, then at some point the acid kicks in, reality shifts, and if you went out to get popcorn or go to the bathroom, you’d be forgiven for coming back in and thinking you’d wandered into the wrong theater (or living room) given the batshit craziness that’s replaced whatever movie you'd previously been watching. In this Altman phantasmagoria, inspired, like many if not all of Lynch’s films, by a dream, Shelley Duvall plays a chirpy sanitarium worker who makes the mistake of taking in spooky, Carrie-era co-worker Sissy Spacek as a roommate, only to see her previously unexamined life unravel as she and Spacek swap personalities with each other (and maybe even a few other people, possibly including the third of the 3 Women, a mysterious desert mural artist played by Janice Rule). Things get trippier in the final twenty minutes than Quintet and Popeye combined (or, for that matter, any other Altman film I can think of), and if none of it seems to make a lick of sense, well, Altman didn’t entirely understand the ending either, though apparently he had a “theory,” possibly involving all the film's recurring twins and triplets, the red lampshade, the Cowboy, the homeless man behind the Winkie’s, the family of rabbits, the creepy, white-faced specter of Robert Blake and...wait...what was I talking about? Oh no...it...is...happening...again...

CHOOSE ME (1984), Not Directed By Robert Altman

After a beginner's period in the early 1970s directing low-budget horror pictures with titles such as Barn of the Screaming Dead, Alan Rudolph was born again working as assistant director to Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville. After working on the screenplay for Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Rudolph resumed his career as a writer-director with 1977's Welcome to L.A., a movie made very much in the shadow of Altman. (The script was spun off from a "suite" of rock songs by Richard Baskin, who worked on the songs in Nashville and had a small role in that movie.) Since then, Rudolph has worked prettily steadily, sometimes writing his own material and sometimes not, often proudly displaying his Altman influence and not infrequently tripped up by it. This sex comedy, which uses Teddy Pendergrass (a big, big improvement on Richard Baskin) on the soundtrack and joins the visual lyricism of 3 Women to a fairly bouncy romantic-entanglement plot, is most likely his proudest achievement -- except for the less Altmanesque Songwriter, a beautifully directed movie which had the advantage of being written by somebody else. Both films were completed and shown in certain parts of the country in 1984, but didn't branch out distribution-wise until 1985...which means that 1985 was definitely Rudolph's year, especially considering that the Altman movie made by Altman himself that year was O. C. and Stiggs.

CRIMEWAVE (1985), Not Directed by The Coen Brothers

A pair of marginally competent criminals. A minor crime that balloons into a bloody, out-of-control mess. Cartoonish, overblown physical gags balanced by cerebral filmmaking and hilarious, quotable dialogue. Loopy, incongruous accents. Characters named Helene Trend, Arthur Coddish and Renaldo the Heel. The presence of cult and character actors like Paul Smith, Brion James, Edward Pressman, Antonio Fargas and – of course – Bruce Campbell. This has to be a Coen Brothers movie, right? Well, yes and no. Made in 1985, just after Joel and Ethan Coen wrapped Blood Simple and just before they started working on Raising Arizona, the underrated and hard-to-find Crimewave was actually directed by their good friend, frequent collaborator and college buddy Sam Raimi. The Coens wrote the screenplay, but despite the presence of some highly explosive camerawork (by Robert Primes) and the presence in the cast of a number of future Coen Brothers regulars (including Frances McDormand and Ted Raimi, Sam's brother), the direction is all Sam Raimi, who at one point seemed like an anarchic offshoot of the Coen sensibility more than the middle-of-the-road blockbuster director he later became. If nothing else, the movie stands as a unique curiosity: the only movie written by the Coen Brothers that they didn't also direct.

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), Not Directed by Douglas Sirk or Ranier Werner Fassbinder

Douglas Sirk was born to direct Far from Heaven. Its combination of lush, stylish visuals, soap-opera-style emotional fireworks, and ever-present societal pressure was right in his wheelhouse – it was the sort of movie he'd built his reputation upon making. Unfortunately for the movie's producers, Sirk was unavailable to make the movie, having unfortunately died fifteen years prior. The next logical step would be to hire a fellow German director who was, in many ways, Sirk's inheritor, both in terms of high drama, visual flair, and expertise at making tangible the invisible pressures exerted by society. In a further bit of bad luck, it turned out that Ranier Werner Fassbinder was also dead, having perished some twenty years before. In the end, they had to go with the guy who had written the movie in the first place: the pioneering queercore director Todd Haynes, who, even since his first student films, had seemed like an exceptionally talented amalgam of both Sirk and Fassbinder. For years, he had talked about how the two German filmmakers had influenced him, from their elegant visual styles to their focus on the taboo, but it wasn't until he did the positively retro Far from Heaven (which was dedicated to the memory of Douglas Sirk) that the influence turned into an outright homage. Setting its story of repressed homosexuality and interracial love smack dab in the middle of Sirk's 1950s, and infusing Sirk's forbidden romantic obsessions with Fassbinder's much more explicit treatments of racism and homophobia, Todd Haynes managed to create something that comes across as exactly the movie Sirk or Fassbinder would have made, were they able to escape death and the tenor of their times.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

In Other Blogs: Spring Break Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

One of our all-time favorite blog names is Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule; it really sums up the finest things in life in one pithy phrase. This week, proprietor Dennis Cozzalio has outdone himself with a mammoth rep report of his own, dedicated to specialty screenings in Los Angeles over the next month or so. A Mario Bava retrospective and a timely "Heist Films" festival are among the highlights, along with a series at the UCLA Film and Television Archives "highlighting the work of one of the pre-CGI greats of special effects, L.W Abbott. If you are of a certain age (like me), Abbott is probably directly or indirectly responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring images you eve saw in a movie theater, and maybe even one of two of your most indelible nightmares as well. Abbott started in the film business as an assistant cameraman on no less than Sunrise, ended as a consultant on the physical effects for 1941, and spent some of the multitude of years in between, for 1957 to 1972, as the head of 20th Century Fox's special photographic effects department. The series, entitled 'Wire, Tape, and Rubber Band Style: The Effects of L.B. Abbott', is an unbelievable gathering of amazing imagery (and occasional patches of some clunky dialogue, if I remember correctly) that effectively illustrates the great talent Abbott summoned to create some of the most spectacular sequences in movies during the '60s and '70s."

At The House Next Door, Dan Callahan offers up an appreciation of Shelly Duvall, "one of the weirdest and most beguiling performers to ever find regular work in movies." We're in total agreement that 3 Women is "Duvall's magnum opus, her tour-de-force for Altman. She wrote some of her own role, the unforgettable Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan Alice Adams/Stella Dallas, and Duvall plays this isolated, deluded creature with such risky comic and tragic precision that it belies (or maybe confirms?) her seeming lack of technique. Millie's eyes are blank, and she moves stiffly beneath her yellow sun dresses (the hem of her skirt always gets caught in her car door, marking her as one of life's big losers). You could call what Duvall is doing here minimalist, but that implies a choice of some kind, and I think that she's really just working within the set confines of her own droll personal style, as a person, as an artist, but not really as an actress, per se. Millie talks and talks to the air in her light, fey voice, like a Beckett heroine, and her inane babble reveals what artist Jack Smith once termed the 'uninterrupted commercial intrusions into our daily lives.'"

At Cinematical, Kim Voynar rebuts "another conservative rant against the liberal Hollywood machine" from Libertas, this one concerning "the movie industry's current favorite character, the sensitive pedophile." And here I thought the movie industry's current favorite character was the pregnant teen. I just can't keep up!

Andrew O'Hehir goes Beyond the Multiplex to explore "the boomlet of theatrical revivals and re-releases — often of obscure, forgotten or orphaned films — that has blossomed in recent years, even as contemporary films from all over the world beach themselves and expire on American sands."

Last week we presented our ten most anticipated SXSW screenings; Erik Childress of Hollywood Bitchslap has ten recommendations of his own. There is some overlap, but whereas Childress has actually seen his picks already, you might get more out of them than from our barely informed speculation.