The Screengrab : Matthew Bright

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve been taking reader suggestions for our Top Tens of late, and this week’s list, suggested via “electronic mail” by F.O.S. (Friend of Screengrab) Kaegan has the added advantage of being topical, what with the ten million recent reviews of Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen that cleverly elucidated how the film’s high school cliques and self-aware characters were just like something from a John Hughes movie...but for real! (And without any Wang Chung on the soundtrack).

Spurred by Kaegan, we henceforth present fifteen worthy homages and/or bad imitations, depending how you look at it (and NOT including Brian De Palma’s numerous Hitchcock rip-offs, which we’re saving for an upcoming list of, well, best and worse Hitchcock rip-offs...so stay tuned)!

FREEWAY (1996), Not Directed by John Waters

I’ve written about Freeway so recently that I’ll merely direct you to that write-up for my thoughts on Matthew Bright’s deranged cult classic...but, considering the film’s white trash milieu, indomitable characters, gleeful celebration of violence and depravity and startling against-type casting, it seemed fitting to kick off the list with the greatest Baltimore-of-the-West film the Prince of Puke never directed.

MIAMI BLUES (1990), Not Directed by Jonathan Demme

In the eighties, Jonathan Demme amassed a sizable following with his films Melvin & Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Each of these films showed a flair for offbeat comedy, as well as an affinity for marginalized characters. So when Miami Blues hit screens in 1990, the handful of people who actually paid to see it could have been forgiven for believing it was Demme’s latest directorial effort. Hell, it was produced by Demme and his usual producing team, shot by Demme’s usual cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, edited by Demme regular Craig McKay, and co-starred newly-hot leading man Alec Baldwin, who had a supporting role in Married to the Mob. But manning the director’s chair wasn’t Demme, but rather his old Roger Corman colleague George Armitage, whose most notable title up to that point had been 1971’s Private Duty Nurses. The style of Miami Blues bears definite resemblance to that of Demme’s work, but Armitage’s sense of humor is more twisted, as in the scene where Baldwin’s Fred Frenger (a Demme name if there ever was one) steals police detective Fred Ward’s gun and badge, plus his false teeth just to rub it in. But if Armitage’s brand of sick humor doesn’t exactly jive with his old pal’s more generous comedy, the two share an affection for characters who are essentially good, embodied here in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Suzie, a kind-hearted prostitute who gets stuck on Fred and comes off like the slower cousin of Something Wild’s Audrey. Once it begins to dawn on Suzie that Fred is far more dangerous than she’d anticipated, her answer is both quirky and heartbreaking: "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me."

THE THIRD MAN (1949), Not Directed by Orson Welles

It's easy to understand why people got the wrong idea about The Third Man. Orson Welles not only gives an electrifying performance as Harry Lime, but improvised various bits of the character's memorable dialogue, including his famous line about Swiss cuckoo clocks. (Indeed, he became so closely associated with the character that he went on to voice him in a radio show called The Lives of Harry Lime a few years later.) The film itself is infused with the kind of morally unhinged noir sensibility that Welles would later master in Touch of Evil, making it seem entirely plausible that his was the mind behind the film. Many of The Third Man's most daring shots, from the shadowy confrontations in the sewers of Vienna to the final, heartbreaking walk taken by Alida Valli, resemble Welles' visual pyrotechnics in his own films, and the overall dark tone of the movie, as well as little touches like the overlapping dialogue, the low-angled two-shots, and the interesting lighting, are all reminiscent of movies that Orson Welles really did direct. To top it all off, Welles was already a famous (or infamous) director when The Third Man opened in the U.S., while Carol Reed, though well-known in his native England, wasn't particular renowned here. But the all-too-common assumption that Orson Welles "really" directed the film does a disservice to the talented and innovative Reed, who, while not on his star's level of genius, was nonetheless a very dedicated, professional and skilled director. Indeed, in at least one way, it was Carol Reed who did Orson Welles' job and not the other way around: Harry Lime's hands reaching through the sewer grate near the movie's end belong to Reed and not Welles, who was gallivanting around Europe when the scene was filmed and hadn't even shown up on set yet.

INTERIORS (1978), Not Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Like a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is obsessed with the work of Ingmar Bergman. Unlike a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is actually capable of getting movies made and widely released across the country. For years, Allen – whose obsession with Bergman is arguably both wider and deeper than his understanding of Bergman – had been trying to get people to take him seriously, and with Interiors, he pulled the trigger in a big way, inspired by Bergman's stark, chilly tales of family unhappiness in everything from the photography to the poster design. Never had Diane Keaton stared so wistfully out of a poorly lit window; never had Woody Allen failed to appear in one of his own movies; and, most importantly, never had a film by America's leading comedic director been such a relentless bummer. Interiors proved to be a massive critical success, with only a few grouches wondering if someone so adept at comedy needed to be spending his time making second-rate imitations of art films by a Swedish director who was still alive and perfectly capable of making such films himself. (Indeed, Bergman managed to one-up Allen even in the casting department: Woody had wanted to use Ingrid Bergman for the role of Eve, but she was already committed to filming a movie in Europe with, you guessed it, Ingmar.) Regardless of whether or not you think of Interiors as a failed Bergman knock-off or a successful Bergman homage, one thing's for sure: it ain't funny. The "I liked your earlier, funnier work" has become a comic cliché of its own when applied to Woody Allen's movies; Interiors is the movie that set it all off.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

PRETTY BABY (1978) & THE BLUE LAGOON (1980)

Europe is a very different place than America, and the seventies were a very different time. From Socrates to Roman Polanski, Europeans have always had a much more, uh, relaxed attitude when it comes to May/December (or even early April/December) relationships. Whether said social mores indicate healthy, sex-positive liberation or sick, twisted perversion, the fact remains: them foreigners sure do make a lot of movies about sexed-up youngsters. In 1971, Louis Malle directed Murmur of the Heart, about a 15-year-old boy who gets hit on by priests and has sex with his mother. A few years later, Malle hit the controversy jackpot with Pretty Baby, the lurid yet turgid tale of a young girl raised by prostitutes whose virginity is auctioned off prior to her marriage to an older man. Brooke Shields, rouged and naked throughout, became the (literal) poster girl for commodified, sexualized “innocence” and a precursor to the sexualization of even younger girls in those creepy JonBenét Ramsey-esque pre-pubescent beauty pageants that Little Miss Sunshine mocked so brilliantly. Two years after Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields lost her virginity again in The Blue Lagoon, this time to a barely legal Christopher Atkins (who would later shake his groove thing for cougar Lesley Ann Warren as a male stripper in the 1983 cheese-whiz classic A Night In Heaven). That Lagoon was such a smash hit in the U.S. had everything to do with the movie’s lush cinematography and wholesome depiction of pure, innocent love and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that its hot teenage stars were (tastefully!) naked half the time...because, of course, we Americans have superior morals.

PALE RIDER (1985)

In this inflated imitation of his own High Plains Drifter, the director-star Clint Eastwood plays a mystical, supernatural gunslinger who materializes after a 14-year-old girl (Sydney Penny) has prayed for a hero to come and deal with the meanies making things hard for her gold-mining community. Once he's arrived, though, Penny isn't content with having him shoot all the bad guys; she also puts the moves on him, only to have him turn her down, maybe because he's got something going on with her mother (Carrie Snodgress). In a snit, Penny has the bright idea of trying to make him jealous by riding off to where the bad guys are holed up so that Eastwood has to come and collect her before a drooling Richard Kiel can club her and drag her off to his cave. Pale Rider is just one of several films in the Eastwood oeuvre that can make you wonder if, back in the early seventies, Clint left some part of his brain unclaimed on the set of The Beguiled.

THE KID (1921)

The title character in this Charlie Chaplin silent is played by the seven-year-old Jackie Coogan, but the movie features a dream sequence set in Heaven, and in that sequence, Chaplin contrived an attention-getting bit for Lita Grey, an untested young actress who, decades before Nabokov wrote his novel, was sometimes known as "Lolita." In the movie, Gray, looking very cute, and playing a character known as "Flirtatious Angel", traipses out wearing big wings and starts cuddling up to Chaplin like a friendly kitten. She encourages him to chase after her by skipping away and flashing what she would later describe as "a very skinny leg", and he obligingly goes literally flying after her. Chaplin used her again in The Idle Rich and planned to cast her as the female lead in The Gold Rush, but she wound up playing a small role in movie history and a considerably larger one in Chaplin's scandal-plagued personal life; he had to recast her role, and marry her, when he got her pregnant at age 16. (Chaplin was 35.) Their marriage, which produced two children and ended in an ugly public divorce, lasted only three years, and her professional and intimate personal life with Chaplin was over by the time she was twenty.

BULLY (2001)

Larry Clark gets accused of a lot of things by critics. I mean, a lot. In the view of some film writers, he’s second only to Lars von Trier as the filmmaker most likely to be Nosferatu reincarnated. But the most common charge is that he’s some kind of dirty old man – a guy who makes movies for no better reason than to look at attractive young people cavorting in front of his camera lens so he can yell “AROO-GA!”. This charge is not only a tad conspiratorial (Clark lives in New York, a city where it’s pretty easy to get a gander at naked teenagers, and making expensive, highly controversial films would seem to be an awfully roundabout way of doing it), but also pretty fatuous when directed specifically at Clark. I mean, can you name a major Hollywood movie of the last 30 years that didn’t feature an attractive, overly sexualized young man or woman in a leading role? Most critics were pretty indulgent of the alleged Chester-the-Molester qualities of Clark’s 1999 debut feature, Kids, because they bought into its sense of impending moral panic; but by 2001, when the world had decided it had bigger problems than that of 17-year-olds having sex, a lot of people decided that Bully, his loose adaptation of a real Florida murder case, was nothing but a justification for Clark to see pretty young things in their altogether. But then, as now, this charge was ignorant of history and tone-deaf to reality. Clark has always been obsessed with beautiful young people who obliviously hurtle into self-destruction, including himself: he’s a brilliant photographer whose first book, Tulsa, featured his speed-freak friends shooting themselves into early graves, and like his films – Bully in particular – the grim realities of death and insanity gave a distinctively un-erotic charge to even the most beautiful bodies in his photographs. It was also released when he was 27 years old (and many of the photos were taken when he was much younger), exempting him from the charge of simply being a horny old coot. Later photographic works would focus on his own drug addiction, the tragic lives of handsome but damaged Times Square hustlers, and, tellingly, the way that media images of young people shape – and warp – youth culture. Far from being a dirty old man, the artist who made Bully was simply following a path he had been on for over 30 years. There’s no denying it’s a film crammed with prurient interest, but that serves only to solidify Clark’s central obsession: that the ignorant self-destruction of youth is all the more tragic because they are so vibrant and beautiful.

FREEWAY II: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY (1999)

Society’s moral strictures being what they are, film directors, when they bring to us a movie featuring a bunch of hot young things romping around in their birthday suits, must think of some way to convince us that we’re not watching for the obvious reason. There are many ways to do this: dramatic tension, outright deception, or the pretense of imparting some sort of grand moral lesson. Matthew Bright, the deranged auteur behind the Freeway movies, has discovered a method that’s, as far as we know, unique to him: he wedges his nymphomaniacal teenagers in between a bizarre framework of re-imagined postmodernist fairy tales tinged with a truly surreal sense of humor. The second movie in a proposed trilogy, Freeway II is, believe it or not, a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel”, only with lesbian shower scenes, cannibalistic transvestite nuns, and David Alan Grier. Absent the deranged trappings, it’s unlikely that this movie would ever have gotten made; Natasha Lyonne was of age in the female lead, but she’s meant to be playing an 18-year-old juvenile delinquent, and her partner in crime, the demented serial killer La Ciclona (played by the riveting Maria Celedonio), is explicity, and we mean explicitly, portrayed as being sixteen years old. Were this a mainstream movie aimed at a mainstream audience, it probably would have generated a Senate investigation when Lyonne and Celedonio get it on in a beer-fueled makeout session in a hotel bathroom; but Bright had already set the scene for this sort of nonsense by presenting us with a mass prison vomiting scene (choreographed like a Busby Berkley musical, with the bulimic prisoners as chorines) and a striptease involving a girl with a prosthetic leg. He continues in this vein, ultimately asking us to cope with the image of Vincent Gallo in nun drag trying to bake the hapless Ms. Lyonne into a pie. In the face of all that, there’s simply no room for self-incrimination for ogling teen girls; you just have to sit back and go where the ride takes you.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

This modern day take on Lolita, reviled by some, adored and Academy-Awarded by others, tells the story of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a miserable hen-pecked middle-aged loser reinvigorated by a surge of life-altering lust for the sexually aggressive friend (Mena Suvari) of his mopey teenage daughter (Thora Birch). To attract Suvari’s character, Angela, Burnham starts working out, pumping up his body while channeling happy memories of his irresponsible, pot-smoking youth. Eventually, Burnham gets his wish to have sex with Angela...but, upon learning that the allegedly promiscuous girl is actually a virgin, he pulls back from the brink at the last moment, suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, an adult. And then he gets shot in the head...a nice, throwback moment to the old Hays Code days when moral transgression always led to a grisly end, cautioning the rest of us against stepping over the line. Yet transgression is part of the film’s DNA, and while I can appreciate the reasons why certain people hate this movie (the artifice, the middle-aged lust thing, the Spacey Smarm Quotient), I nevertheless enjoy the message of the smart Alan Ball script that we are not defined by our age, our possessions, or the way we’re perceived, and lying to ourselves about who we’d rather be instead of accepting who we really are leads to heartache, rage, bad relationships and, occasionally, bullets in the head. Like many dirty old men before him, Lester Burnham thinks he wants sex with a much younger woman, but what he really wants is to simply be much younger, with all of life’s possibilities ahead rather than fading away in the rearview mirror.

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

And speaking of fin de siècle movies with “American” in the title co-starring Mena Suvari...this raunchy-sweet comedy was a throwback to 1980s teen sex comedies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Porky’s, Screwballs, Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, Zapped! and etc., etc. etc. Yet somehow, despite scenes of adolescent pie-fucking, discussions of inappropriate relations with a flute at teenage band camp, tons of high school sex and the deflowering of a pubescent boy by a predatory Mary Kay Letourneau-esque older woman, American Pie barely raised a flicker of controversy upon its release, possibly because it was simply too funny and ridiculous to get all het up about...but also perhaps because of the genuine affection writer/directors Chris and Paul Weitz had for their characters, male and female, as opposed to presenting them as figures of scorn and/or inflatable sex dolls (or just so much bloody meat, like the unfortunate young victims in any number of slasher flicks from Halloween to Hostel, where sex literally equals death). As the esteemed Mr. Pierce’s notes in an earlier post on Lolita, Nabokov’s book, for all the controversy surrounding it, was actually funny...and American Pie, a kind of classic in its own right, proves once again that sometimes the best way to deal with the scary issue of sex is simply to laugh.

FREEWAY (1996)

And then there’s the less funny side of sex: molestation, prostitution and violence against women, all of which is faced and overcome by a modern day So-Cal Red Riding Hood in this astonishing exploitation film by jailbait auteur Matthew Bright, whose fetish for pigtails and ponytails drove him to personally style the hair of his actresses...which must make him a creep, right? And yet, despite Bright's seemingly shady fascination with underage sexuality, this is one of the most empowering, ass-kicking girl power movies I’ve ever seen. Reese Witherspoon leaves this one off her resume, and yet her portrayal of the indomitable white trash warrior Vanessa Lutz is, hands-down, the single best performance of her career, promising a future of nitro-fueled intensity that (Tracy Flick aside) pretty much fizzled into perky romantic comedy fluff. Remember how cool Emilio Estevez was in Repo Man before he became...y’know, Emilio Estevez? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The story pits Witherspoon’s illiterate, underage Lutz against a crack whore mother (Amanda Plummer), an abusive stepfather, the L.A.P.D. and, most notably, Kiefer Sutherland as the story’s Big Bad Wolf, Bob Wolverton (get it?), a leering bogeyman of a sexual predator. The escalating verbal and physical warfare between Lutz and Wolverton taps into something downright primal and possibly Freudian, as if Bright is investing all his forbidden love for the raw sexuality and electric vitality of youth into Lutz and all the self-loathing shame surrounding his secret, twisted obsessions into Wolverton, then letting the two duke it out in a steel-cage match. The result is the greatest B-movie John Waters never made, a loud, raucous, thriller with jaw-dropping stretches of pitch-black comedy and a truly startling cameo by the queen of Jailbait Cinema, the one and only Brooke Shields, who shows up (along with Mr. Bright’s even more peculiar sequel to Freeway) in part three of this list.

KIDS (1995)

In Kids, the first feature directed by the legendary photographer Larry Clark, a bunch of teenagers spend a day and a night wandering around New York City in the summer. They have sex, shoplift, beat the crap out of somebody, take drugs, and have an orgiastic party. There's no plot to speak of, but there is a suspense hook: Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has just learned that she's contracted AIDS from the mushmouthed, seventeen-year-old lothario Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a serial deflowerer of girls who imagines that his sexual partners will always remember him if he's their first but who loses any interest in them after that, and she sets out to try to find him before he can rack up his next intended victim, Ruby (Rosario Dawson). (She is unsuccessful in this.) The whole movie is sunk so deep inside its obsessions with selfish teenage kicks that it gives the feeling that the screen could use a bath. When it first appeared, Kids was THE controversial indie film of its season, and it was defended by some moralists who argued that Clark and his twenty-two-year-old screenwriting partner Harmony Korine were obviously showing us these youngsters acting like animals--which is the closest thing they have to an interesting quality--as a "wake-up call" to parents. Please. Clark's subsequent films (Bully, Wassup Rockers), and for that matter the photo collections with which he'd made his name (Tulsa, Teenage Lust) have only served to confirm that Clark likes to film teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking because he likes to watch teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking; pointing a camera at it gives him an excuse to indulge in his hobby, which he is of course entitled to share with others who have similar interests. Those of us who used to get bored with such things after about three minutes even when we were teenagers need to look elsewhere.

HARD CANDY (2005)

At 21, Ellen Page sure is a hard-working gal. Juno may have made her a star when it opened late last year, but in recent months we've seen the arrival of three other movies in which she stars or has prominent roles (Smart People, The Tracey Fragments, and An American Crime, which played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but recently premiered on Showtime cable). In fact, the success of Juno was the explosion coming at the end of a long fuse set by the cult home video success of Hard Candy, a two-character drama that uses the then-teenaged actress's mixture of seductiveness and spikiness for all it's worth. She plays a 14-year-old who has struck up an Internet correspondence with an adult photographer (Patrick Wilson); when she meets him for the first time, she invites herself back to his place with the promise of hearing a Goldfrapp mp3 he boasts of having. Once they get back to his place, it turns out that she's springing a trap; taking him prisoner, she informs him that she knows that he's a pedophile who's involved in the murder of a girl, and she proceeds to torture him, threaten him with exposure and castration, and cajole him to do the right thing and commit suicide. It's to Page's considerable credit that, by turns enticing, alarming, and outright scary, she remains fascinating throughout, even though she can't make her character believable; she has a degree of infallible self-assurance that would be hard to buy in a SWAT team leader, let alone a 14-year-old girl playing cat and mouse with a psycho on his home turf. Her choicest moment of degradation for her prey may be when, having gotten him where she wants him, she casually reveals that she actually thinks Goldfrapp is pretty lame. Other movies (such as The Professional) know that the viewer's inner pedophile will be flattered by seeing a young girl insist that she wants the older man even if he has the nobility (and the box-office savvy) to not follow through; Hard Candy knows that, while castration threats are pretty bad, the best way to make the older man shrivel up is to let him know that, when he thought he was being cool and up to date, he was actually sounding like an old fart.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent