The Screengrab : alex cox

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

REPO MAN (1984)

Mike18xx, the nice fellah who posted the clip above, notes in his YouTube comments that “Seeing the ending won’t actually ‘spoil’ the film if you haven’t seen it before,” which is absolutely true. The plot of Alex Cox’s first, best film (involving aliens, car thieves, secret government shenanigans and the search for a very special 1964 Chevy Malibu -- what Mike18xx rightly calls the best McGuffin in film history) isn’t nearly as important as the overall vibe, a pleasant reminder of a more innocent pop culture moment when punk and indie weren’t just corporate flavors and Emilio Estevez was actually kinda badass (although, judging by a recent feud unwittingly instigated by our own Scott Von Doviak, it seems both Cox and the Mighty Duck still have at least a little piss left in their vinegar). Plus, like all the best endings, Repo Man features an effective curtain call of characters and themes, as well as a memorable epigraph for my own particular hipster doofus generation: “The life of a repo man is always intense.” (AO)

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

Love him or hate him -- and there are plenty of cinephiles in both camps -- it’s hard to deny that nobody could end a movie quite like Michelangelo Antonioni. With plenty of wonderful conclusions in his work, it was hard to confine ourselves to just one Antonioni film (or even two, as we ended up doing), but ultimately we couldn’t possibly overlook the finale of this, his most critically-savaged work. Taken as a whole, Zabriskie Point is a scattershot vision of late-sixties America -- sometimes visionary, sometimes ponderous, often both. But even if you aren’t a fan of the movie, the ending packs a wallop. Sure, it’s somewhat obvious what Antonioni’s up to here, blowing up a gaudy “modern” house that has intruded on the natural majesty of the desert, even showing the explosion from multiple angles for extra emphasis. But it’s how he does it that turns the scene from sledgehammer symbolism to transcendent cinema (besides, this is relatively subtle compared to Antonioni’s other proposed ending, which involved an airplane writing “Fuck You, America” across the sky). As Antonioni shifts the film into some of the slowest slow-motion the cinema has ever seen in order to capture the explosions in exhaustive detail, he manages to exact his cinematic revenge on consumer culture -- watch as he blows up a television, a refrigerator, even a loaf of Wonder Bread -- while simultaneously transforming the destruction into something beautiful, with an assist from a modified version of Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.” For lack of a better phrase, it’s pure cinema. And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s the notion that even a director as art-damaged as Antonioni knows sometimes his hardened audiences just want to watch stuff blow up real good. (PC)

PLANET OF THE APES (1968) & BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Sorry to ruin it for you, but the planet of the apes? It was Earth all along! Charlton Heston sure feels silly now. But not as silly as he’ll feel when he finds himself the prisoner of underground mutants in the sequel. Now he’s really had enough, and it’s hard to blame him for overreacting. I’ve told this story before, but one more time before they turn out the lights: Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen." (SVD)

WEEKEND (1967)

By the end of the ‘60s, it was clear to everyone that Jean-Luc Godard was through fucking around. He was using cinema less as a means of communication and more as a weapon, but how deadly serious he was about deploying that weapon didn’t become clear until the final scenes of his dizzying film Weekend. The circumstances are brutal enough; the bourgeois couple we’ve followed throughout the film, cheated of their inheritance, resort to murder and end up in cahoots with a pack of radical revolutionaries with a taste for human flesh. But throughout Weekend, Godard was operating on a higher level: it’s full of meta-reference, and the director makes no bones about his characters being tuned into their own artificiality at every juncture. He planned it not as a mere statement, but as a command: this art form, he said, is dead; leave the theatre not to discuss it, but to seize and tear down. It was a powerful message, and a prescient one a year before Paris exploded into a nearly miraculous revolution. But even in that atmosphere, only Godard would have had the balls to give Weekend its famous ending: a simple title card reading “END OF CINEMA/END OF WORLD.” (LP)

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY (1966)

Spaghetti Westerns, particularly Leone's, aren't concerned with Western realism, but the myth of the West, which they blow up like Greco-Roman gods. This might be the most iconic and expressionist movie ending outside of, y'know, German Expressionism. The clip above starts after Tuco and Blondie find the graveyard, with the camera spinning through the graves as Tuco races through the rows, looking for the right name. Then Blondie forces him to dig. Angel Eyes appears and there's the first double-cross: the grave Tuco is digging up has bones rather than money in it. The Mexican standoff. The second and third double-cross: Tuco's gun is empty and Blondie didn't write anything on the rock. Tuco digs at the right grave, but as soon as he strikes the gold, there's the fourth double-cross: Blondie has hung a noose over his head while he was working. The camera stays with Tuco as Blondie rides away, and we all watch him disappear, thinking, "wait, that one is The Good?" But he returns and frees Tuco, calling back to an earlier scene of camaraderie between them. It sounds like a story from The Odyssey even as I describe it here. If there had been such a thing as a Mexican standoff when Homer was writing, I'm certain that Odysseus would have found himself at one point of the triangle, one step ahead of the others. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

Not a Review of Alex Cox's "Searchers 2.0"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

As you may have deduced from the title of this post, I had originally planned to bring you a review of Alex Cox’s latest film Searchers 2.0 in this space. That’s not going to happen for the very simple reason that the screening of the film I’d planned to attend last night never happened. The official reason for the cancellation was “circumstances beyond our control.” These circumstances are somewhat mysterious, yet very disappointing for any fan of the self-described “radical filmmaker” behind Repo Man and Sid and Nancy.

Cox was scheduled to appear at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin to present both Searchers 2.0 – which was actually inspired by one the Alamo’s Rolling Roadshow events, a screening of Once Upon a Time in the West in Monument Valley – as well as the 1966 spaghetti western Arizona Colt (Italian oaters being one of Cox’s passions; he appears prominently in the documentary The Spaghetti West and he authored a just-published book on the subject, 10,000 Ways to Die.) Tonight he was to introduce his cult classic Repo Man, a screening that will still go on without him. According to the Austin Chronicle blog Picture in Picture, “The word on Cox's sudden detour into Suck City comes from the Alamo's ever-reliable (and insanely hard-working) Zack Carlson, who rang us this past Wednesday with word that Cox, for whom the Alamo had already secured plane fare from his home in Los Angeles as well as local lodging -- as they do for all incoming cinema legends (yes, even the cast of Troll 2) had mysteriously balked at the layover times in his airline itinerary. Carlson emailed back to swap flights around until Cox was satisfied, but that gambit proved fruitless, netting only a final, bewildering email from one of Cox's associates which stated that, and we quote, ‘Alex feels he has been mistreated and has chosen to cancel his appearance.’”

I interviewed Cox in connection with his scheduled appearance (you can read it here), and found him good-humored and entertaining, as I always have in his talking head interviews and commentary tracks. Honestly, I’ve generally found him more interesting as a film fan than a filmmaker. Although Repo Man is one of my desert island discs, and I’m very fond of his little-seen Three Businessmen, a shaggy dog story that plays like a cross between Slacker and a Bunuel film. Most of his filmography is more fun to hear him talk about than it is to watch, but I was looking forward to Searchers 2.0, which looks to be right in my wheelhouse. Maybe there’s another side to this story that doesn’t make Cox look like a petty jerk. I sure hope he has a better reason for letting so many people down than inconvenient airport layovers. Not too radical.

A Big Bowl of Spaghetti Westerns with Alex Cox

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

If you’ve ever seen the IFC documentary The Spaghetti West or the extras on the Once Upon a Time in the West DVD, you know Alex Cox loves him some Italian westerns. “My obsession with the spaghetti western started early,” Cox writes in The Financial Times. (Really, Commie Alex? The Financial Times? That just seems wrong, somehow.) “Mostly, I blame my schooling. While it’s thought that girls do better, academically and socially, if educated separately from boys, the awful corollary of this is that boys would be educated separately from girls. And that – as I discovered when attending a single-sex grammar on the Wirral in the mid-1960s, where arbitrary violence and crazed sadists ruled the playground – is a horrible thing.”

Cox theorizes that attending a mixed-sex school might have facilitated an appreciation for nuanced cinema, but as it turned out, “the world I knew best had more in common with the psychos and testosterone freaks depicted in the new Italian, or spaghetti, westerns that emerged during this period.” Since the American western was in serious decline in the mid-60s, it was up to the Italians to pick up the slack. “For them, westerns were a great fantasy world, something they had enjoyed in films or comic books. Yet their take on the wild west was something quite different. Hollywood had chosen to manufacture a certain type of product, pretending this was what the audience wanted: it was sentimental, propagandistic, authoritarian stuff. The Italian directors made cynical – ironic would be too mild a word – popular action films, sometimes about gladiators, sometimes about spies. All featured the kind of infantile male violence that greatly appealed to teenage boys such as me and my classmates. The fact that the Italian westerns tended to receive an X certificate – and were, therefore, banned to all under 16 – made the thrill even bigger to 13- and 14-year-old boys.”

After arriving at UCLA in the mid-70s, Cox finally tracked down his holy grail of spaghetti westerns, Django. He even wrote a book on his favorite genre, 10,000 Ways to Die. It was never published, but a new version of the book is due out soon, and you can download the original (re-titled Massacre Time) from Cox’s website.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, as part of our ongoing coverage of the South-By-Southwest Film, Music & Interactive Festival, we decided to get our collective groove on with a list of our favorite movies about real-live musicians.

But who says musicians have to be real to be memorable? Sure, Mitch & Mickey may be fictional characters portrayed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Christopher Guest’s faux-folkumentary, A Mighty Wind...yet despite the fact the duo never really existed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my lovely Polish bride and I danced at our wedding reception to that non-existent classic hit of sweet, sweet romance, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow." And, sure, the real Sid Vicious was nice and all...but I have equally fond memories of Gary Oldman’s fictional version in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

To blur the lines of fiction and reality even further, this week’s list also includes movies about make-believe people affected by real musicians and real musicians transforming themselves into make-believe people as your pals at the Screengrab salute OUR FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC: FICTION EDITION!

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

Yes, we all know it's hilarious. But This Is Spinal Tap is a classic for more reasons than simple hilarity. This was one of the first major films to be classified a "mockumentary", and in order for the style to work at all, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had to get all the details down cold. This meant concocting an elaborate backstory involving multiple group names, format changes, and a parade of dozens of drummers who met their respective ends under bizarre circumstances. But beyond the more obvious references, Spinal Tap had to walk, talk, and play like a real aging rock band, from the principles writing and performing their own songs before actual crowds to the shorthand that the band members have with each other, as when Nigel (Guest) calls out "GSM" during rehearsal to signal that he wants to practice the song "Gimme Some Money." The gambit worked -- numerous moviegoers at the time were convinced that Spinal Tap was a real touring act, and the movie quickly became a favorite of legitimate rock acts, who identified with such scenes as the group getting lost on their way to the stage. Soon enough, life imitated farce, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer began touring as Spinal Tap, even releasing a second album in 1992 entitled Break Like the Wind. Even today, Spinal Tap endures, both in its cinematic form and its real-life incarnation, with a tour coming later this spring.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002)

Steve Coogan has a motor-mouthed smart-guy comedian's dream role as Tony Wilson, TV reporter, pop theorist, and the man behind Factory Records, which brought the sound of Manchester to a postpunk world. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie, which also provides plum roles for Shirley Henderson (as Wilson's first wife), Paddy Considine (as his sidekick Rob Gretton), Andy Serkis (as the deranged genius producer Martin Hannett), and Sean Hayes (as Ian Curtis), covers the first public performance by the Sex Pistols, the rise and end of Joy Division, the band's resurrection as New Order, the slaphappy career of the Happy Mondays and the coming of rave culture, and Factory's death throes, with Coogan's Wilson walking through it explaining himself and the culture he's part of, always talking a mile a minute. Coming from the cerebral Winterbottom, the movie itself could be called a sustained work of rock criticism, except that rock crit hasn't been this funny since Lester Bangs swigged his last bottle of Romilar.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

John Cameron Mitchell energetically transposed his hit off-Broadway show to celluloid with 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual punk rock goddess named Hedwig (Mitchell) who narrates her life story while travelling across the country playing second-rate venues, her shot at stardom stymied by a former lover and disciple (Michael Pitt) who became a music sensation by stealing her songs. Hedwig’s is a lunatic odyssey which begins in East Berlin where, as a young boy, she undergoes a sex change operation in order to marry her U.S. army lover and escape the Iron Curtain, and which is partially conveyed via a bevy of musical numbers and animated sequences that are striking in both their ingenuity and power. Bolstered by rollicking, blistering tunes that are as well suited for arenas as they are for the stage and screen, Mitchell’s film is rowdy, bombastic, idiosyncratic and heartfelt, a combination to which only a select few movie musicals can legitimately lay claim.

THE DOORS (1991)

A close friend once derided The Doors’ music as “bad poetry with keyboards,” and while I’m generally inclined to concur with his assessment, there’s nonetheless something transfixing about Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which has the type of on-the-edge, trippy-druggy dynamism that typified the director’s creatively fertile early-‘90s period. Stone’s anything-goes aesthetic showmanship is an ideal approach for a portrait of the L.A. band and, in particular, lead singer Jim Morrison, whose larger-than-life persona – drunken fool, callous bastard, earnest poet, sex god – naturally appealed to a filmmaker fascinated with mythologizing socio-political icons. The Doors oozes reverence without alienating those who might think the film’s subjects and their classic-rock canon fall somewhat short of greatness, due in part to uniformly superb performances led by Val Kilmer’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the lizard king, but mostly thanks to Stone’s lack of inhibition, his madman stylistic excesses (and yes, I’m including the Indian in the desert), supremely well-attuned to the careening rollercoaster energy of The Doors.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I'M NOT THERE (2007)

With these two films, Todd Haynes has produced the finest examples of fictional rock movies that I can imagine. Both have taken the lives of real rock musicians -- Bowie & Iggy in the former, Dylan in the latter -- and played up the mythic qualities to create a transcendent hyper-reality. No, Bowie and Iggy and Dylan didn't really live like this. But speaking from the point of view of poetry and mythology and literature, these are more true than mere reality can manage. That's what myths and stories are about: heightening everyday reality into a more universal truth. Most people's lives aren't up to the examples set by Ulysses or Hercules or even Ishmael or Natty Bumppo. But I think few would deny that there's a universal recognition of the truth in the lives of these wandering heroes. Celebrities sometimes play the role of real-life analog to idealized heroes. That's why so many urban myths leap up about the lives of celebrities; people need to believe in the extraordinariness of others. Rock musicians in particular often play the debauched Dionysian role of the glorious artistic mess, the pleasure-seeker who indulges in sex and drugs to feed his or her creative output. With these movies, Haynes pushes past the mere facts to feed the stories, and the results are fascinating, part narrative and part critique. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale plays a journalist in an Orwellian Britain of the late '80s. A series of events causes him to investigate -- and recall -- the heyday of glam rock and its figurehead Brian Slade, who is basically the Platonic ideal of David Bowie (with elements of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure) as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Slade's closest associate is Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is mostly Iggy with a little Lou Reed thrown in. The two are lovers, and Slade gleefully expresses his fluid sense of sexuality. So there's three layers right there: Orwellian future, permissive past, rockers as trangressors. But there's more. Haynes dares to suggest that the bisexual/creative impulse was a gift from aliens (or angels) to Oscar Wilde in the Victorian era, and has passed down through the ages to the instigators of glam. That's, well, audacious as all hell. Haynes specifically compares Slade to both Wilde and his horrendous creation Dorian Gray. So, that's at least two more layers, maybe more. So, yes: gay theory, rock theory, lit theory, treatises on repression and freedom combined with the cults of youth and beauty. There's a lot going on in this movie. And it rocks like hell.

In I'm Not There, Haynes similarly adopts all of the myths about Bob Dylan into a narrative that's both fractured and more meaningful than a straightforward film could convey. There are six Dylans in this film, which is fewer Dylans than real life has given us. But these six Dylans represent the greatest periods of his life. Marcus Carl Franklin, an 11-year-old African-American boy, represents the youngest Dylan myth, the farmboy who rides the rails calling himself Woody Guthrie, learning America's traditional folk and blues music along the way. Ben Whishaw plays the interior Dylan, the playful interviewee who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud and comments cryptically on the rest of Dylan's life. Christian Bale plays the young and sincere New York folksinger Dylan, the socially active songwriter who calls himself Jack Rollins and travels to the South to sing to Civil Rights workers in a field. Rollins will later morph into Pastor John, the born-again Christian Dylan of the late '70s and early '80s. Heath Ledger plays the actor Dylan, the one who is horrible to his beautiful wife and torn in two by their divorce. His name is Robbie Clark and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is Claire, and their story evokes the mid-'70s Dylan of Renaldo and Clara and Blood On The Tracks. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the rock star Dylan of the mid-'60s and Don't Look Back. Quinn is explicitly shown as dead from a motorcycle accident at the beginning of the movie, which references Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident which effectively killed off his Don't Look Back-era persona. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, who is the Dylan of The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Gere's Billy lives in Riddle County, where the carnivalesque/Old West/Old Testament world of the Basement Tapes springs to life. So, that's the shallowest overview I could provide, and it more or less ate up all my space. Layers and layers in these films. Watch 'em again. And again.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

MIRANDA AND STEVE, SEX & THE CITY (2008)

So, you know that whole thing about how men and women are different? Well, here’s a good example: for women, last year’s big-screen adaptation of the beloved HBO estrogen-fest was a feel-good romantic comedy, while for many straight guys, it was nothing short of torture-porn. And no, I’m not talking about Kim Cattrall’s sex-positive female drag queen Samantha, who got all the best lines and looked pretty damn hot wearing nothing but sushi. And I’m certainly not talking about the sweet pairing of Kristin Davis’ ray-of-sunshine Charlotte and her frog-prince fellah, Harry (the closest thing in the Sex-iverse to a normal, healthy relationship...albeit one padded by Davis’ relentlessly cheery demeanor, perfect cheekbones and boundless Upper East Side gelt). I’m not even talking about SJP’s Carrie and Chris Noth’s Mr. Big, two gigantic pains in the butt who truly deserve each other. No, the couple that curdles my gonads even worse than Norman Bates and his mama in Psycho or Kathy Bates and James Caan in Misery is, yes, Steve and Miranda, that terrifying nightmare combo of pussy man and man-eating pussy. David Eigenberg’s Steve is every spineless masochist convinced that low self-esteem = sensitivity, while Cynthia Nixon’s endlessly miserable harridan Miranda is the sort of castrating, ball-busting career woman stereotype that men get branded as chauvinists for perpetuating and women (at least Sex & The City fans) somehow find empowering. After months of celibacy and endless abuse, Steve finally cheats on Miranda, who subsequently withholds even more sex and unleashes even more abuse in retaliation, until she finally deigns to forgive Steve at a meeting in the middle of the usually romantic Brooklyn Bridge. But my only thought as I watched Steve (through my fingers) approaching his awful, awful wife was, “NO, STEVE! NO!!! RUN AWAY!!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!” But Steve didn’t listen. Characters in horror movies never do.

HARRY LIME & ANNA SCHMIDT, THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Technically, as poisonous as it is, this shouldn’t be listed as one of the most toxic romantic duos in screen history; it really needs to be considered as a romantic triangle. In brief: Holly Martins is Harry Lime’s best friend, and Anna Schmidt is Harry Lime’s best girl. Holly Martins begins to suspect that Harry Lime is not such a swell fellow after all – as, not coincidentally, he begins to suspect that Anna Schmidt would be better off with him, anyway. Holly learns that Harry is a heel, but Anna not only doesn’t rush into the tender and loving arms of the upstanding Holly – she doesn’t give him the least bit of play, and goes on loving Harry even after it becomes clear to everyone that Harry didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. There’s so much more to this amazing, groundbreaking noir film than that, but the impossibly frustrating relationship between the three people forever remains at the center of it: Harry’ selfish, caddish treatment of the people he claims to love; Anna’s impossible devotion to a man who loves her but never as much as he does himself; and Holly’s shock at the betrayal of his friend – and even greater shock at how Anna doesn’t react in the same way as he does to that betrayal. The Third Man is filled with moving, telling moments that portray both the depth and the damage of the relationship, from Harry doodling love notes to Anna in the window of a Ferris wheel to Anna’s heartbreaking long walk at the end. What makes it even more astonishing is that the movie accomplishes all this while never even showing us Harry and Anna in the same room together.

SID & NANCY, SID & NANCY (1986)

He was the immature, unstable bassist for chaotic punk pioneers The Sex Pistols. She was a shrill American obsessed with the band. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s love affair was one for the anarchic ages, a relationship forged by heroin and defined by violence and pathetic need. Ending in 1978 when Sid stabbed Nancy to death in New York City’s famed Chelsea hotel, followed a year later by his own fatal overdose while awaiting trial for her murder, their amour was of a blisteringly dysfunctional sort, and depicted by director Alex Cox with squalid, impassioned romanticism in 1986’s Sid & Nancy. Electrified by dual lead performances from Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb that reek of grungy, rancid desperation, Cox’s love story is a magnetic spectacle of sordid self-immolation, a tale of love’s consuming, destructive potential which the director – capturing both the intoxicating fervor of Sid and Nancy’s mutual infatuation and the foulness of their junkie downfall – depicts with equal parts disgust, pity and compassion.

AOYAMA & ASAMI, AUDITION (1999)

A lonely widower with a young son, TV producer Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is convinced by a friend to stage phony auditions in the hopes of finding a new spouse. That process leads him to Asami (Eihi Shiina), a prim, dainty, mysterious beauty to whom he grows dreamily attached over the course of a few dates. As implied by a scene in which she waits patiently by the phone for Aoyama’s call, Asami isn’t exactly what she seems. And neither, it turns out, is Takeshi Miike’s film, commencing like a patient, thoughtful Yasujiro Ozu-inflected domestic-drama meditation on marriage, responsibility and social pressures, and then shifting gears to become something far more unnerving. None of the director’s subtle hints at forthcoming horrors quite prepare one for the stunningly disturbing finale, which not only involves the immediate end of Aoyama and Asami’s relationship, but – viciously building upon their romance’s unequal economic, social and gender dynamics – reveals the film to be a proto-feminist nightmare custom-engineered to scar the male psyche.

WALTER NEFF & PHYLLIS DIETRICHSON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

In noir, love and sexual desire are equally deadly, driving men (noble or corrupt) to throw caution to the wind and take risks that invariably spell their doom. A prototypical example of that recklessness is the case of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman whose routine life is plunged into deadly disarray by Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a platinum blonde beauty whose body goes vroom-vroom-vroom and whose eyes promise an early grave. When Phyllis asks Walter how she might take out a policy on her husband’s life without actually informing him about it, the agent balks, but such initial protestations are as sturdy as wisps of smoke, and it’s not long before the smitten Walter is knee-deep in a scheme to knock off Phyllis’ spouse and run away with her and the substantial insurance payout. As is customary in the doom-laden genre, however, all that awaits the couple is tragedy, Neff’s ignominious end a result of fate’s cruel hand and, just as fundamentally, a foolhardy romantic fantasy unattainable in a cold, indifferent world.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab's Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

As part of Screengrab’s year-end List-a-palooza, we asked you, our imaginary internet friends, what topics you’d like to see featured in our weekly Top Twenty.

Janet immediately stepped up to the plate with the following suggestion: “Last week, Walker finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue, in my current reconsideration of all things Alex Cox. As I watched it, I kept thinking about My Best Fiend, which I had watched about a month ago. I realized that there were at least three films I could name that revolved around a White man traveling to Latin America and going crazy, and I started wondering if there were more. I'm not even sure if there are enough for a Take Five, but I count on your broader knowledge on the subject. So, if you would be so kind, I would love a list of White Man Goes to Latin America and Goes Insane movies.”

And so, in honor of Janet, this week’s list features plenty o’ white dudes livin’ la vida loca south of the border...but we also broadened our mandate to include all manner of fish-out-of-water stories -- from aliens in New York to city slickers in the Great Beyond -- as Screengrab travels the world (and the time/space continuum) to celebrate our favorite cinematic tales of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND!

WALKER (1987)

And speaking of strange, it’s hard to get stranger than the 19th century American soldier of fortune William Walker or the eponymous cinematic tale of his misadventures conjured by the determinedly peculiar British cult director Alex Cox a century or so later. The real-life Walker invaded Mexico and Nicaragua more or less on his own and was eventually executed by officials in Honduras for being such a colossal pain in the ass. Cox was inspired to make his film (starring Ed Harris in full, spooky glower) “in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people...with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks' outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation.” Although ostensibly a period piece, Cox filled his film with anachronistic elements like tanks and helicopters to show how “nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker's genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” Reaction, as they say, was mixed. Liberals were offended by Cox’s bizarre, slapstick take on the material (prompting Robert Redford to consider making his own preachy, ponderous version...a project that mercifully never materialized). Most everyone else was merely baffled by the quasi-biopic, and Universal essentially buried the six million dollar production, which barely grossed a quarter million dollars domestically...although, according to Cox, the movie was “extremely popular in certain places. It was the second biggest film hit ever in Nicaragua, after The Sound of Music,” thus making Cox's Latin American adventure about a zillion times more worthwhile than those of either Walker or North.

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Fish-out-of-water stories basically come in two variants: nightmares about characters who fall down a rabbit hole and land in Hell, or happier fantasies about some lucky bastard who happens upon Shangri-La. Bill Forsyth's beautiful little comedy, one of the few movies that might be called achingly charming, falls into the latter camp, but with a cruelly bittersweet twist. The setting is a seaside village on the coast of Scotland; the hero, Mac (Peter Reigert), is a young Houston oil company executive who is sent there to buy up the residents' homes so that the area can be despoiled. The residents are eager to get their checks so that the company can get on with the despoiling, but Mac, who in his native environment is so robotically detached that he has no trouble conducting a phone conversation with a co-worker who he can see to wave to through the other side of his glass office wall, falls so deeply in love with the place that when his boss, Happer (Burt Lancaster), flies out to connect with him, Happer doesn't recognize him. Happer himself is an amateur astronomer who looks deeply miserable sitting behind his desk in his lair atop his own personal skyscaper; he's outgrown his identity as a staid CEO, just as Lancaster had finally, fully outgrown his movie star identity as a grinning action hunk. Even in his suit and with his private helicopter, it's clear that he belongs in this magical landscape with its wide-open possibilities, just as it's clear that Mac, even with his new casual style and unshaven face, doesn't; much as he wants to, he still has his face pressed against the glass. The last scene, after Happer has blithely ordered Mac back to Houston so that the party can continue without him hovering at its edges, cuts deep.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

The British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg, who for a while made a specialty of eroticizing alienation, made his solo directing debut with Walkabout, a ghostly 1971 strangers/strange-land story about a proper white teeenage girl and her little brother who are stranded in the Australian outback. In this science-fiction film, Roeg extended his vision to cast the whole planet Earth -- or at least America, which to an Englishman trying to make a career in moviemaking in the 1970s must have seemed like pretty much the same thing --- as the strange land into which he drops his hero, an alien visitor (David Bowie) on a mission to save his dying planet from drought. On one level, the movie is a straight-faced joke on the idea that some of our most celebrated world-shakers, such as Howard Hughes, have scarcely seemed human at times. (Bowie's mission requires him to become titanically rich by bringing, and copyrighting, his civilization's advanced technologies.) But it's also a Christ story that happens to be set in a time so debased, and with such a short attention span, that the martyred hero, though he's able to have his purity corrupted through a developing lust for drink and television, can't manage to hold the villains' interest long enough for them to bother completing his crucifixion.

WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1926)

Lon Chaney and his favorite director, Tod Browning, made this silent version of the 1926 play Kongo, which is mostly set in what used to be called "darkest Africa." Chaney plays a married stage magician who loses the use of his legs after brawling with his wife's lover, played by Lionel Barrymore. Chaney, now known affectionately as "Dead-Legs," to his associates, relocates to Africa and sets himself up as the leader of a tribe of natives, who take his magic tricks for the mark of a peerless and dangerous witch doctor. When Chaney learns that his wife died in childbirth, he assumes that Barrymore was the father and sends for the now orphaned girl. He then proceeds to mistreat and debase her as cruelly as possible, with the intention of turning her into a broken animal; his plan is to present this ruined creature to Barrymore and then treat himself to the sight of Barrymore being treated to the sight of the natives burning the girl alive. You get one guess what the big surprise twist turns out to be. Kongo itself was later filmed as a talkie with Walter Huston; it, like Zanzibar and other films such as the weirdly stagebound White Cargo, belonged to a long-dead genre of films about white men in the jungle lording their superiority over the natives, unless they (like the juvenile character in White Cargo) are driven mad by the sultry, seductive powers of the helplessly sexy natives. Zanzibar is powered by the sheer, chugging hatefulness of which both Browning and Chaney were macabre masters, which is probably why it feels fresher now than those other films. The racial component, while never front and center, is more palatable today when it's presented as part of a horror fantasy, with the white antihero as twisted as anyone he's going to meet out there in the Congo.

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (2007)

There's been a lot of ink spilled on Sylvia in the list-making blur we've all just emerged out of. Suffice it to say Sylvia is the rare movie not to capture the experience of traveling in a specific city or country, but just the essence of what it means to stay in one part of an urban European city for a few days and slowly begin to see the same strangers and places over and over again, acclimating slowly to the local rhythms. The fact that it's seen through the eyes of a young, self-consciously arty idiot doesn't matter one whit; with him out of the frame for maybe 1/3 of the film, it's as much a film about the weird pan-European charms of Strasbourg as anything.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Marx Brothers

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In a provocative piece in the Guardian, Danny Leigh uses the ongoing "Punk 'n Pie" program at BAM to ask, where are the great punk movies? At BAM, as in many a retrospective or critical study, punk movies are movies that deal with punk music as a subject, whether as performance movies or biopics or documentaries or anthropological field trips, or movies that are populated by celebrities and hangers-on from the "scene", such as the now-forgotten Downtown detritus cranked out by '80s filmmakers such as Beth B. and Scott B. and the young Susan Seidelman. Leigh writes that "quite apart from the questionable merits of the films concerned, I've always thought there was something grimly pedestrian about the way such a firecracker cultural moment should be represented by something so drab as a canon at all. And yet wheeled out every so often for an audience of ebbing nostalgiacs are the same old dusty reels, those already mentioned joined by or interchanged with the grim Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, cosy Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, and/or the various filmic portraits of the Clash, principally the near-unwatchable curate's egg Rude Boy and the Joe Strummer tribute The Future Is Unwritten."

Mind you, it was ever thus with rock music, which in its first flush of exploitable excitement was packaged in a shelf's load of movies that collected performances ranging from the leading acts of the time, bound together with the flimsiest of connective tissue. To see what this kind of movie might look like if it were good--which is to say, if it were made by people who lacked contempt for the music and its audience--the world would have to wait for 1978's American Hot Wax, made at a time when its biggest names, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, were, in rock 'n' roll terms, practically senile. (In fact, one of the best ways to tell these movies apart from those made by the greatest punk bands is that the punks, coming along after the official invention of pop culture, tended to get involved with projects that were self-consciously, conceptually screwy. Not content to make a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, the Ramones agreed to make what was supposed to be a cheeky put-on of a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, though independent taste tests found it hard to tell it apart from the real, semi-spoofy thing. The idea behind Rude Boy, featuring the more politically minded the Clash, seems to have been to let the guys the fans wanted to see play second fiddle to uncharismatic roadie Ray Gange, the designated stand-in for all the little people out there to whom the band's music means so much. As the hilarious but seemingly well-intended Wikipedia entry for Gange notes, "In his one and only well-known film appearance, Gange displayed a variety of expressions, although some have pointed out that they all look somewhat similar to the one at the start of the film which shows him waking up and looking out the window.")

There are some great rock performance films, but it's hard not to feel a special affectionate respect for those movies that somehow come across as "rock movies" to their core because they seem to embody something essential to the spirit of the music, even if the music in the movies scarcely captures its essence. Thus Walter Hill's The Warriors is a better "rock movie" than Jailhouse Rock, even if nobody in his right mind thinks that Arnold McCullers's version of "Nowhere to Run" deserves to shine the shoes of Martha and the Vandellas'. And the '50s mutli-performer rock film that holds up best today is Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, not because Tashlin was especially sympathetic to the music but because a man who'd cut his teeth putting Bugs Bunny and Jerry Lewis through their paces had a built-in appreciation of that which was not culturally respectable. (Truth be told, the singing cast member who seems to elicit the highest degree of respect from the director is Julie London, who was more likely to be recruited by NASA than she is to ever be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Leigh argues that "if a film has any aspiration at all to being 'punk' then it cannot be about a band - any more than surrealist cinema can be represented only by biopics of Dalí and Breton...Indeed, it's one of the stranger aspects of British punk films that, if it's debatable whether any ever had anything genuinely punk about them, it's certain that none ever captured the sense of punk. Not punk as a mere footnote in the history of guitar rock, but punk as a democratic shifting underfoot best expressed by the misfits in the audience." As examples of films that do catch hold of that snarling spirit, Leigh nominates the Marx Brothers circa Horse Feathers (featuring Groucho's anarchist anthem "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"), Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue (which takes its title from Neil Young's tribute to Johnny Rotten, and which a not-yet-detoxed Hopper took over directing after being cast as the heroine's daughter), "the anti-corporate self-immolation of the Monkees' Head; the volatile brevity of Punch Drunk Love and the outsider portraiture of John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet." He also drops the name of Eraerhead, and there he will get no argument from me.

Punk shares affinities with the concept of "termite art" championed by the late Manny Farber, and traces of the stuff itself can be found in many of his favorites, from the ratty, volatile action films of such directors as Don Siegel and Sam Fuller to the art-conscious apocalypse of Godard's Weekend, which suggests both the splenetic fury of bands such as the Pistols and the icier, critical-intellectual stance of Gang of Four and Wire. (There are echoes of the latter approach in both Alan Clarke's Elephant and more recent films by Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes.) The Ramones recognized Todd Browning's Freaks as kindred spirits, leading the way to the pre-multiplex films of John Waters and also to Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Re-Animator, and all those midnight flicks that were born with one foot in the art house and one in the gutbucket. And of course the aforementioned Luis Bunuel anticipated punk both with the Surrealist shock effects of his earliest work and his unflinching depiction of those clinging to the bottom of society in such films as Los Olvidados. Although a movie that seems punk to its core still comes along every so often--Matthew Bright's Freeway leaps to mind--it's generally easier to think of movies that anticipate the movement than movies made since 1976 or so that reflect its ideals, probably because nothing kills the spirit quicker than deliberately straining to do it justice.

The case of Alex Cox, who probably worked as hard to create a punk cinema as any director working in the last twenty-five years or so, may be instructive. In his first feature, the 1984 Repo Man, he delivered the ultimate sick joke of Los Angeles punk, complete with a self-parodying appearance by the Circle Jerks and a tossed-off homage to Kiss Me Deadly. In Straight to Hell and Walker, he exposed the connections between punk filmmaking and the dusty fever dreams of Sergio Leone and the Sam Peckinpah of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a director who never saw a scene of blood-soaked carnage that he didn't figure could be improved with just a few more buzzing flies. But when Cox set out to deliberately recreate the hallelujah days of British punk in Sid and Nancy, he made a soft, nostalgic, dishonestly self-pitying film with speeches about the music's importance and Gary Oldman's sweetly sleepy, harmless Sid Vicious. His closest American counterpart may be Penelope Spheeris, whose Decline of Western Civilization documentaries had a sharp, smart edge entirely missing from her attempts to take punk mainstream in such films as Suburbia (1984), a standard-issue misunderstood youth film with a Mohawk, and the highly regrettable Dudes (1987), which set some kind of record for toxic obnoxiousness just by sticking Jon Cryer and Flea in the same film frame. Part of the thrill of punk is that it tends to pop its head out when and where you least expect it. Well, not literally where you absolutely least expect it, because there's not a lot of it in Spheeris's 1994 version of The Little Rascals.

Morning Deal Report: Alex Cox Drives “Repo Chick”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

A few months ago we told you about the Repo Man sequel Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday. That was a graphic novel adaptation of a screenplay Alex Cox had written in the 1990s, and really didn’t have much to do with the 1984 cult classic at all. Now comes news that Cox is proceeding with an actual big screen sequel, although this doesn’t mean Emilio Estevez should start waiting by the phone any time soon. According to ScreenDaily, the follow-up will be called Repo Chick and Cox has already completed the screenplay. “Repo Chick will unfold against the backdrop of the credit crunch and the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, where repossessions of homes, cars and other forms of property is at a new high. ‘The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations...children,’ Cox told ScreenDaily.com.” Please post your Repo Chick casting suggestions in the comments below.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is not just the motto around Screengrab headquarters, it’s also the title of a memoir by Tucker Max to be adapted for the screen by director Bob Gosse (Niagara, Niagara). Per the Hollywood Reporter: “The film, written by Max and Nils Parker, follows his trip to a friend's bachelor party, where he ensnares the groom in a lie that threatens the wedding, then abandons him to pursue further carnal knowledge. After being banned from the nuptials, Max attempts to get back into his friend's good graces.” Wait, you can make a lot of money writing a memoir about drunken wedding behavior? Someone should have told me sooner.

And from the Please Don’t Be True file comes news that Quentin Tarantino is planning a remake of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! According to Variety, QT “thinks he may have found at least one of his leading ladies in the form of Tera Patrick, who is the No. 1 'erotic performer' in the world.” Of course, this information comes from Liz Smith’s column, so there’s reason to believe it’s not etched in stone.

Related:
OST: "Repo Man"
Alex Cox: Revisiting "Walker"

Derek Jarman Jubilee

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:45:00 GMT

As a friend of the Screengrab pointed out a few weeks ago when we did our Gay Pride list of great movies with homosexual symbolism and thematic content, we missed a bet by not including the innovative, daring British filmmaker Derek Jarman in our tally of the most influential gay filmmakers of the 20th century. Always fiercely political at the same time he was deeply personal, Jarman -- who worked wonders in both experimental and narrativef formats --was not only one of the earliest and best gay directors of modern cinema, but also arguably the first true punk rock filmmaker, beating out even his countryman Alex Cox for the privelege of that title. (See his astonishing film Jubilee for an especially choice example of Jarman's many and often contradictory tendecies blending together perfectly.)

Almost fifteen years after Jarman's death from complications related to AIDS, Sam Adams at the Museum of the Moving Image pens a thoughtful and informative appreciation of the man and his art, which even today is far more internally contradictory than many imagine: "Sometimes fusing the personal and political, and sometimes pitting them against each other," Adams writes, "Jarman's films are animated by the interplay between past and present, accuracy and anachronism, nostalgia and protest. They are, quite often and quite openly, at war with themselves, tied to national and cinematic traditions and rebelling against them." Noting the irony of Film London's Jarman Award, which aims to celebrate directors who are to their time what Jarman was to his, he notes "if there were a Derek Jarman of today, he or she might be as proccupied with shunning Jarman's influence as succumbing to it.

The article -- which also contains useful links to other Jarman scholarship, including a sensitive treatment of his legacy by contemporary writer Jon Savage and a letter to Jarman in his final days from Tilda Swinton -- concludes by discussing the director's refusal to be driven into the softness of metaphor by his own confrontation with the AIDS epidemic. "As AIDS hysteria and homophobia mounted in the 1980s,Jarman sharpened his knives and strengthened his stance." Even the eventual loss of his sight to the disease didn't stop him from expressing his feelings in a visual medium: Jarman's films became literally and figuratively darker, until finally there was Blue, "a solid, unwavering block of color, matched to a complex audio collage of interwoven voiced and ambient sounds" -- a series of "profane hyms" that "make hash of identity politics" that literalized the polyhonic approach of his visual fims and allowed him the perfect, and final, expression of "divergent, but not conflicting voices".

Related Posts:

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)

OST: "Repo Man"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Alex Cox's 1984 cult classic, Repo Man, is in every way the greatest punk rock movie ever made. In its feel, its tone, its perfect blend of artsy surrealism and an obsession with junk culture, it precisely encapsulates everything great about American punk, and it's also one of the few movies (maybe the only movie made in the 20th century) to capture a specific punk scene-- in this case, the L.A. punk community of the early '80s -- without coming across as a limp, stereotypical joke. Cox staffed his cast with legitimate punk rockers, and so it only made sense that he'd do the same thing with the soundtrack. The resulting album, released on MCA Records in the same year as the film, is one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time, and a perfect companion piece for the movie.

In fact, the soundtrack to Repo Man was, in its own way, more groundbreaking than the movie. It was one of the first movie scores to consist mostly of pre-released material by established pop bands; nowadays, the process is commonplace, but in 1984, it was still something of a novelty. Cox, who compiled the tracks for the album himself, was pitch-perfect in his selection of songs: starting out with a monster epic by punk forefather Iggy Pop, the record goes on to treat us to choice tracks from many of the L.A. scene's best bands, including Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Burning Sensations, and the criminally underrated Plugz, whose blend of punk velocity and snarly Mexican-American attitude holds the whole record together. Of course, as great as the soundtrack is, listening to it on its own can't compare to the sleazy thrill of enjoying it in the context of the movie. Iggy's crushing title song is perfectly blended with a clever and memorable opening credit sequence, and one of the movie's biggest laughs comes when Emilio Estevez as the gutter-punk Otto visits a club and, seeing the Circle Jerks doing a lounged-up cover of their own slamdance classic "When the Shit Hits the Fan", mutters, "I can't believe I used to like these guys." Repo Man is one of those rare films where the songs on the soundtrack are blended so seamlessly with the action on screen, it's as if they were paired together from the beginning. But even if you're not watching the movie, you could do a lot worse than to go for a drive down the freeway of your choice with the OST blaring from your car stereo.

BEST TRACKS: Iggy Pop's massive, stunning "Repo Man", featuring a killer percussive riff and some of the Igster's funniest lyrics; the angst-ridden (and hilarious) adolescent classic "Institutionalized" by punk/thrash metal outfit Suicidal Tendencies; and a pair of incredible Latino-tinged hardcore numbers by Los Plugz: the amped-up mariachi number "El Clavo y la Cruz" and the surf-guitar/film-noir collision "Reel Ten".

Alex Cox: Revisiting "Walker"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The director Alex Cox drove his career off the rails a while back, and he's kind of self-congratulatory about it, and a lot of his movies, well, suck, but he did make Repo Man, and there's something likable about him. Like John Sayles, Cox sets an admirable example as an ornery, self-supporting filmmaker even if you'd rather not watch at least half of his movies (and can't locate copies of the other half), and he makes for a better interview. Dennis Lim talks him up on the subject of his "Waterloo moment", Walker, on the occasion of that badly received movie's debut on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. The film itself remains one of the strangest of all relics of the Reagan era. It was loosely inspired by the historical figure William Walker, a medical doctor, lawyer, newspaper editor and journalist, and soldier of fortune who, in 1853, briefly installed himself as president of part of Baja, California after he and a force of forty-five men "conquered" it from Mexico. After the Mexicans drove him off, Walker signed on with the rebel forces in Nicaragua, and in 1855 he took the capital of Grenada and installed himself as ruler of the country, first acting through a puppet leader and then having himself "elected" to the position of president. He was driven out of the country after a year and ultimately executed by firing squad while futzing about in Honduras.

When Cox encountered the story of Walker, he saw it as a chance to stage an action-adventure that would serve as an eerie parallel to the Reagan administration's then on-going proxy war to drive out the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He actually managed to persuade the Sandinistas to let him shoot the movie on location in their beseiged country, and perhaps more remarkably, he got Universal to pay for the thing. (He also made the spaghetti Western parody Straight to Hell, featuring Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and the Pogues, as a sort of warm-up, saying that he wanted to work on his action-filmmaking skills by staging a bunch of shoot-outs with his cast, which was largely made up of politically like-minded musicians who had the time on their hands because a planned tour of Nicaragua had just been scuttled.) Cox wanted a sort of Sergio Leone-Sam Peckinpah flavor for Walker, and to that end he hired Rudy Wurlitzer, who had written the script for Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid — though granted, when he first wrote it, he thought it was going to be for Monte Hellman — to whip up a screenplay. By the time that Cox, Wurlitzer, and a cast that included Strummer, Xander Berkeley, Rene Auberjonois, Alfonso Arau, Gerrit Graham, Miguel Sandoval, Sy Richardson, and Ed Harris as Walker, were shooting in Nicaragua, the Iran-Contra scandal had broken, Oliver North was a television star, and Nicaragua was bigger news in America than it had ever been. Lines such as Walker's ominous, taunting "You may think there will come a time when America will leave Nicaragua alone" would have had some special resonance. But when Walker opened in December of 1987, you could all but hear crickets chirping.

Twenty years ago, the conventional wisdom regarding the movie's commercial failure was that it was snide and self-congratulatory yet underbaked, unrealized, and disposable. Cox has other theories. As he sees it, he actually set out "to make a broadly popular film, which is why it's full of jokes and violence and beautiful women." He also clearly thinks that his sins were political, not aesthetic. Cox may have expected a bad reaction from conservatives, but he also thinks that lily-livered liberals such as Robert Redford were too soft and pious to appreciate his brand of audacity and the film's mix of gore and anachronistic sight gags (Walker appears on the cover of Time magazine and is choppered out of the collapsing country by an American helicopter) and random punk gestures (Marlee Matlin, whose role as Walker's deaf-mute fiancee was her first movie appearance after winning an Oscar for Children of a Lesser God, gets to sign "Go fuck a pig"). Weird thought this seems now, Walker was Cox's big one for an American study, and he says that "since 1988 I have not had one offer of work from any of the Hollywood studios. I've existed entirely independent of the studios. You make one political film, and that's it — blacklisted. But that's okay, it's a good film to be blacklisted for."

"Chicago 10": Cartooning the Sixties

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

When Alex Cox was trying (unsuccessfully) to make a movie version of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and later, when Terry Gilliam was (successfully) trying to make it, both of them reportedly pissed off Thompson by announcing their intention to incorporate animated sequences into their films. The good doctor is said to have objected to the idea of having his masterpiece reduced to "a goddamn cartoon." This reticence, which in Thompson's case may have been related to a feeling that Garry Trudeau owed him some royalties, may turn out to be the key failing in Dr. Gonzo's longtime mission to make sense of the sixties. Since Gilliam's movie came out, a younger generation of filmmakers seems to have taken up the idea that the period can only be captured as a goddamn cartoon. A couple of years ago, with A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater used rotoscope animation to capture a look and feel that he found appropriate to Philip K. Dick's surreal vision of paranoia among druggie burn-outs. Now, the documentarian Brett Morgen (best known for The Kid Stays in the Picture, the movie version of the autobiography of Robert Evans — speaking of cartoons) has employed brightly colored "motion capture" technology for Chicago 10, his film about the trial of '60s political radicals that grew out of the violent chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention. (At the start of the trial, the defendents were collectively known af "the Chicago eight"; they became better known as "the Chicago seven" after one of them, Bobby Seale, after being bound and gagged in the courtroom at the orders of Judge Julius Hoffman, had his case severed from that of the others. The title of the movie is meant as a way of paying tribute to all of them as well as their lawyers, Leonard Weinglass and the late William Kuntsler.)

Morgen, who was born not long after the convention, sees his relative youth as an advantage here. "The world simply did not need another movie about the ’60s made by someone from the ’60s," he says. "We weren’t making a movie about 1968 per se. I don’t want to smell patchouli. I don’t want to see bell-bottoms." He says that he was driven to return to the protest culture of the sixties as a way of challenging what he sees as the political apathy of his own generation and those younger — and towards that end, instead of the usual hippy-dippy music choices, he includes newsreel footage of Chicago cops thrashing protestors to the accompaniment of Rage Against the Machine. (The movie also features voice work by Jeffrey Wright as Seale, Liev Schrieber as Kunstler, Hank Azaria as Abbie Hoffman, Mark Ruffalo as Jerry Rubin, James Urbaniak as Rennie Davis, Dylan Baker as David Dellinger, and the late Roy Scheider as the famously demented Judge Hoffman.) Towards that end, the movie concentrates on the trial as an example of (often hilarious) political theater, a kind of media prank. Though by all accounts it is scrupulously accurate in its details, some of the original participants take exception to its revolution-can-be-fun angle. "This is an Abbie Hoffman story." says Tom Hayden. "Abbie was a great rebel, but there is a danger in theatricalizing history." To which Leonard Weinglass adds, "The film is entertainment, but it is not a political education." (It should be noted that the idea that the trial could best serve its political purposes as an example of living satire also dates back to the time of the trial itself; as early as 1970, just months after the trial ended, Bantam published a paperback collection of comic highlights from the court transcripts. It was titled The Tales of Hoffman and included a chortling introduction by the radical "political critic" Dwight Macdonald.) For his part, Morgen is so high on trying to "get the story out" that he's thrilled by the news that Steven Spielberg is thinking of making his own Chicago seven/ eight/ whatever movie: "We’ve been consulting with them and providing them with our databases." In the meantime, the surviving participants will continue to learn what Hunter Thompson already knew about the dangers of becoming a cartoon. Or as Leonard Weinglass says, complaining about his animated doppelganger's costume design, "Never in my life have I had a lavender suit."

DVD Digest for February 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

New this week: another Jean-Luc Godard film goes Criterion, and plenty of Oscar-bait (successful and not-so-successful) premieres on DVD.

DVD of the Week: The latest Godard classic to get the deluxe Criterion treatment, Pierrot le Fou is quite possibly the lightest and least didactic of the master's Golden Age output. The film lacks the poetry of earlier films like My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders, as well as the revolutionary fervor of Week End and La Chinoise. In many ways, Pierrot feels like the closest Godard came to making a lark, complete with impromptu musical numbers, gorgeous Cinemascope photography, and Anna Karina at her loveliest. But despite the deliberately minor feel of the film, it's a seminal work, both for the filmmaker and for the period. The two-disc Criterion edition of the film also includes: a new interview with Karina; archival interviews with Godard, Karina, and Jean-Paul Belmondo; the video A "Pierrot" Primer, directed by Godard associate Jean-Pierre Gorin; and a documentary about Godard's personal and professional relationship with Karina.

Also on the Criterion front this week is Alex Cox's Walker, a notorious flop in its day that has become a cult favorite in the intervening years. I haven't had the chance to watch the film yet, so I'll direct you to an appreciation of it by former ScreenGrab editor, and unabashed Walker fan, Bilge Ebiri.

Other new releases on DVD:
American Gangster (Universal, also HD-DVD)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Lust, Caution (Universal)
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount)
Michael Clayton (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Rendition (New Line)

The new Criterions aside, it's looking like a lean week for classics coming to DVD, although I would be remiss if I didn't mention Sony's Blu-Ray-only release of Tom Tykwer's propulsive arthouse hit Run Lola Run. In addition, Sony is releasing a 1992 documentary about old-school criminals like Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel entitled... The American Gangster. I can't imagine why they'd wait until this week to release it.
Finally, new TV on DVD: Universal's Coach: Season 3; Fox's Newhart: The Complete First Season (note: this is the one where he runs the inn, not the one where he's a shrink); and, as promised, the much-anticipated Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season. I can't imagine there'll be much overlap between people renting this and those renting the Alex Cox Walker, but you never know.

Criterion’s Shaman of Design

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In addition to their many other virtues, Criterion Collection DVDs are justly praised for their lavish packaging. Not content to simply slap the old familiar one-sheets on their covers and stuff two-page booklets inside flimsy slipcases, Criterion often starts from scratch, creating all-new key art and design elements that lend fresh context to the treasures inside. One of the artists responsible for this shelf candy is Marc English, profiled this week in the Austin Chronicle. Once you learn that English is member of the Austin Film Society’s board of directors, it’s no surprise to learn that his first assignment for Criterion was their 2004 edition of Slacker, directed by Film Society founder Richard Linklater.

“From a corporate identity standpoint,” English explains, “the existing Slacker logo had a certain amount of equity, so I didn't want to mess with it too much. What I did was take the iconic image of Pap smear girl [Teresa Taylor], print it out on a laser printer, soak it in water to make it look beat, duct-tape it to a telephone pole, and then just hold a stencil of the title up in front of it and shoot the whole thing in camera. Which created an instant extension of the film's DIY edge.”

English is also responsible for the recent Criterion edition of Two-Lane Blacktop, which has met with director Monte Hellman’s enthusiastic approval. “His work just exemplifies Criterion's style in that it catches your eye immediately…I'm just really overwhelmed by Marc's work on the design. I think it's one of the most gorgeous packaging jobs I've ever seen. I just like everything about it.”

The artist’s latest effort will be on shelves next week, as Alex Cox’s much-maligned Walker finally makes its DVD debut. The Chronicle site features a number of cover designs English produced before arriving at the Cox-approved version below.

The Rep Report (February 14-21)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable annual treat, the "Film Comment Selects" series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (February 14-28) gives the writers and editors of that magazine a chance to decorate the screen of the Walter Reade Theater with a wide-ranging selection of films, new and old, that they love a lot more than the U.S. distribution business does. There are new films by George A. Romero (the opening night selection, Diary of the Dead), Jacques Rivette (The Duchess of Langeais, to be shown with the actress Jeanne Balibar in attendance), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop), Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate), Lukas Moodyson (Container), and Alex Cox (The Searchers 2.0). The weird revivals include Cox's 1987 Walker, Crispin Glover's 1992 Rubin and Ed, and a couple of Richard Fleischer movies, the 1971 English true crime story 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough, and the mind-boggling 1975 Southern slave-owners' potboiler Mandingo.

"Milos Forman: A Retrospective" (February 14-28) at the Museum of Modern Art covers the expatriate director's career from his early, attention-getting work (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), traces his American work from the 1971 Taking Off to his finding a groove as a respected Hollywood pro (from the Academy Award-winning smash One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt); it also includes some items from off the beaten tracks, such as his contributions to the omnibus films Visions of 8 and I Miss Sonja Henie.

CHICAGO: For one week starting February 15, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's exploration of youth culture, revolutionary leftist politics, and bright, shiny primary colors, La Chinoise (1967). This is an important film in the career of a major director and a unique experience on its own terms, and it's never been available on home video in this country, and it doesn't get out to play very often, so I'd advise the curious to brave whatever disaster-movie weather you have to brave to make it to the theater.

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Repo Man!

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

That’s the last we ever saw of Otto (Emilio Estevez) the hero of Alex Cox’s 1984 cult classic Repo Man. . . until now. No, Estevez won’t be climbing back behind the wheel of that ’64 Chevy Malibu anytime soon, although at one time Cox had hopes that he might. In the mid-'90s, Cox wrote a screenplay called Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday that continued Otto’s adventures a decade later, and presented it to original Repo Man producer Michael Nesmith. As Cox tells Entertainment Weekly, “We all came down for the meeting at Universal, and the executive that we had been delegated to meet was, like, twenty-one years old and had never seen the original Repo Man. [Laughs] And so it was an absurd meeting of these four old men and this sprightly individual who just didn't know what we were doing in his office. Nothing came of it.”

For a while, Cox tried to produce the sequel independently, but the project fell apart. Now, finally, Repo Man is back. Sort of. Cox’s script has become a graphic novel illustrated by Chris Bones, but for legal reasons the original characters aren’t quite as we remember them. As Cox explains, “He's been away on a journey in a car for ten years and just returned. He thinks he's only been gone for the evening. Now, he may indeed be Otto. He may have been transmogrified on the way back into Waldo. Or that may have happened to several people at the same time. Like, how Lee Harvey Oswald and all these other U.S. Marines defected to Russia at the same time. And then they all came back a couple of years later. So, maybe a whole bunch of people were picked up by aliens in a similar way and made prisoners on Mars, and then released 10 years later when they were of no further use.”

Did you catch all that? If not, you can take a sneak peek here and see if that clears it up.

Morning Deal Report: Alan Parker Does It His Way

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Apparently Sid Vicious biographer Alan Parker has some beef with Alex Cox's 1986 Sid and Nancy. He's making his own Vicious biopic, which I guess will make clear to us all that Sid Vicious was actually a genius and totally nice guy.

The inevitable Night at the Museum sequel may feature Reese Witherspoon as Amelia Earhart.

Looks like that long-rumored miniseries adaptation of A People's History of the United States is on its way.

— Peter Smith

Enter the Moviedrome

Peter Smith — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:45:00 GMT

British cineastes love Alex Cox for his BBC series Moviedrome, which highlighted cult films. Until its demise in 1994, it was required viewing on a Sunday night, when Cox would pop up and introduce a couple of short films that he felt were neglected, interesting or screwed-up. This was when "cult" didn't have that sniffy sense of intellectual superiority. A lot of filmmakers cite Cox's excellent Moviedrome introductions as kicking off their interest in cinema. Unseen since their original broadcast, they've now popped up on YouTube. The very first Moviedrome introduction, above, for The Wicker Man, also features Cox's definition of cult. Others have included Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Halloween, a film he's reluctant to praise. Hopefully his more enthusiastic intros to Mishima, The Parallax View and Django will make it onto the net soon. — Faisal A. Qureshi

Take Five: Rock Stars

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a rock star, especially if they have the good grace to die early and provide the scriptwriter with a nice tidy ending that doesn’t involve getting old and boring. With Control, Anton Corbijn’s celebrated directorial debut, opening this weekend, we’ll get to see how the movies do with the compellingly tragic story of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis; his cult status, enigmatic qualities and spectacular suicide would seem to make him an ideal candidate for big-screen immortality. But while we wait for this and Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic I’m Not There to hit our local screens, we can always immerse ourselves in previous big-screen treatments of rock and rollers — both real and imaginary — that Hollywood has brought us.

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)

It wasn’t really until the 1970s that Hollywood came to terms with the idea that rock music wasn’t some passing fad (check out, oh, say, any movie about rock 'n' roll made during the 1960s as evidence), but they figured out quickly enough that the best rock star was a dead rock star. The first truly successful rock biopic wasn’t really the stuff of Hollywood legend — it played awfully fast and loose with the historical facts, and its script set a hokey, faux-spiritual tone that a lot of later movies would follow — but it’s worth watching for a standout lead performance as the chief Cricket by a pre-laughingstock Gary Busey, and excellent supporting roles by Charles Martin Smith and Conrad Janis.

SID AND NANCY (1986)

Very few people were in as good a position to make the quintessential punk-rock biopic than Alex Cox. He’d already proven with Repo Man that he was probably the only director of the 1980s who really understood punk-rock music, and with Sid and Nancy, he managed to strike just the right tone of empathy and tragedy. Gary Oldman, who'd go on to have a stellar career, does a fantastic job playing the born-to-die hellraiser Sid Vicious; Chloe Webb, who wouldn’t, is equally fantastic as the doomed Nancy Spungeon. A depressing but essential rock 'n' roll biography.

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? (1993)

Falling into a lot of the same traps as The Buddy Holly Story (and, for that matter, a hundred other rock biographies), this look at the surprising career arc of Tina Turner falls into the trap of beatifying its subject — not surprising, given that it’s based on her own autobiography. It also spends so much time demonizing Ike Turner as an abusive monster (which he was) that it doesn’t really convey the sense of him as a musical genius (which he also was). Still, it’s redeemed by winning performances in the lead roles by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. Ike’s own autobiography remains unfilmed.

BACKBEAT (1994)

Possibly due to the notoriously litigious nature of the surviving members of the band, Hollywood has always had a standoffish approach to telling stories about the life and times of the biggest rock band in history. Maybe it’s because of the approach this nearly forgotten independent flick took towards the development of the Beatles that it managed to succeed on its own terms. Telling the story of the early days of the band and focusing on the forgotten Stu Sutcliffe, it’s by turns hokey and transcendent, and manages like few films before or since to make something fresh out of one of the most-told stories in pop music history.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998)

Todd Haynes’ underappreciated interpretation of the glam rock era doesn’t name any names — it doesn’t have to. We all know that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is playing a veiled version of the chameleonoid David Bowie, and that a magnetically sexy Ewan McGregor is an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain. And, in a way, the approach couldn’t be more fitting — the glam era was all about radical reinvention, fluctuating identities, and sexual ambiguity, and that’s what Haynes delivers in spades, along with a healthy dose of political paranoia, divine mystery and straight-up rock and roll fun.

— Leonard Pierce

That Guy!: Xander Berkeley

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

This week’s That Guy!, the long-awaited Xander Berkeley, is a groundbreaker in many ways. He’s the first character actor we’ve featured in this spot whose name starts with an X; he’s also the first to have designed his own my-skin-is-falling-off makeup while portraying a person suffering from acute radiation poisoning. But he also follows in some well-traveled paths: he’s the second person we’ve featured to have come to prominence as a cast member of 24, a show that seems to specialize in snatching up talented Hollywood character actors, as evidenced by previous That Gal! Mary Lynn Rajskub and future That Guy! Dennis Haysbert. Like a lot of other contemporary character actors, he’s found steady work as a voiceover specialist (appearing, as has almost every other B-lister in the business, on the Justice League cartoon), and he bankrolls artsy projects like his back-to-back appearances in Timecode and The Cherry Orchard with, er, slightly more pedestrian fare like Barb Wire and The Rock. A favorite of maverick director Alex Cox, Berkeley appeared in three of his films in a row early in his career. His first role was as a grown-up Chris Crawford in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and he’s gone on to make almost seventy feature films in twenty years (his most recent was Seraphim Falls), qualifying him as one of the hardest-working men in show business despite being almost completely unknown to most people who don’t watch 24. Berkeley, a New Yorker by way of Jersey, has specialized, in his latter days, in bland, arrogant schmucks who are up to no good. But he's displayed a terrific range in his remarkably prolific career, playing everything from typical romantic male leads to scene-stealing darkly comic turns, as in his cameo role as a cab driver in Leaving Las Vegas. He’s also almost certainly the only actor we’ve ever featured who has portrayed an eight-armed violinist who robs banks alongside a robotic Soviet vending machine.

Where to see Xander Berkeley at his best:

SID AND NANCY (1986): The first and best of Xander Berkeley’s lengthy collaboration with Alex Cox comes in this desperate, moving biopic of Sex Pistols provocateur Sid Vicious and his clinging, doomstruck girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. Berkeley portrays the drug dealer Bowery Snax, a living symbol of the pathetic degradation of the couple’s final days; when he delivers the line “Sid, Nancy, pull up your pants”, it encapsulates everything sadly wrong with their entire lives as well as an ugly reflection of the day-to-day reality of the junkie.

SAFE (1995): Berkeley’s finest hour came in this Todd Haynes masterpiece of the alienation of affluence. Playing the husband of Julianne Moore’s panic-stricken housewife, he must transition from unlikable standoffish breadwinner to bizarrely sympathetic and utterly confused caregiver, as the woman he married undergoes a transformation neither she nor anyone else can explain or even articulate. It’s a tremendous performance, in some ways the moral center of the film, and in a just world, it would have made him a big star.

AIR FORCE ONE (1997): It’s hard to pick a favorite from Berkeley’s mainstream movie appearances; he’s done good work in, among other films, Terminator 2, Apollo 13, A Few Good Men and Shanghai Noon. Our favorite, though, is probably his rogue Secret Service agent in Air Force One, part of a rash of "fightin’ president" movies in the late 1990s. Not only was it a reunion of sorts with Sid and Nancy’s Gary Oldman, but it was perhaps the pinnacle of his understated snotty jerk roles, even if the script requires him, along with everyone else in the movie, to do far too much yelling.

— Leonard Pierce