The Screengrab : andrew o'hehir

In Other Blogs: Swing and a Drive

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

As I write this, we’re 72 hours from Opening Day and I can practically taste the peanuts and Cracker Jack. OK, that’s because I had a bowl of peanuts and Cracker Jack for breakfast, but you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about the Beyond the Multiplex interview with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, directors of what Andrew O’Hehir calls the best baseball movie ever, Sugar. “One of the things that drew us to this story was this really staggering statistic,” says Fleck. “If you look at the '80s, the percentage of African-American players in baseball was around 22 percent. That has gone down to somewhere around 8 or 9 percent now, while the Dominican population in baseball has risen dramatically….Major League Baseball has taken money out of the inner cities, partly because baseball is an expensive sport to play. It's not like basketball, where all you need is a ball and a hoop. You need lots of equipment, and you've got fields you have to take care of. They've taken money out of the cities and flipped it into the Dominican Republic, where they can sign players much cheaper.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson wonders whether Blu-ray has gone too far. “The announcement of a pristine, digitally enhanced Blu-ray release of Edgar G. Uhlmer's grimy 1945 noir Detour got me thinking in granular terms... It would be a mistake to 'clean up' the noise of some kinds of music, just as it would be counter to the spirit of, say, John Cassavettes (or Ed Wood) to create digitally pristine copies of their grittier work for Blu-ray release. A movie that was shot in 16 mm or on grainy stock for low-light conditions looks that way because... that's the way it was made. It's part of the work itself, integral to the experience the filmmakers created. Is it a good idea to ‘restore’ (‘remodel’ is more apt) a movie to look brighter, sharper, clearer than it ever was before?” Good questions, but as Emerson eventually points out, that “digitally pristine” edition of Detour was an April Fool’s Day joke.

Via GreenCine Daily, a look at a most unusual Craigslist posting. “Just this afternoon, I stumbled upon this hilariously pathetic, 'negotiable' pitch under the quite-clickable heading Attention Film Critics (Los Angeles): ‘Hi. We just finished a film and need to buy a one sentence quote from someone who calls himself a film critic. Thanks.’…I half-worry that an unscrupulous somebody might just take that person up on the offer. On the other hand, perhaps it's a positive sign for critics, that our opinions still hold a monetary value.” This is truly disgusting, repulsive and contrary to every ethical impulse in my body. And dammit, it looks like they’ve already found someone else to do it.

If you enjoyed Paul Clark’s entry in the White Elephant Blogathon, you can check out the rest of the entries here. I’m particularly thrilled that She Blogged by Night was forced to sit through the recent Unwatchable entry 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. “Speaking of rejuvenated manhood, at one point Medusa -- in her skin tight black leather S&M gear -- practically straddles Dave Dragon while telling him she'll make him her boytoy. Frankly, and I say this with all the maturity and dignity I can muster, I would have much rather seen the movie that would have led to.”

And if you didn’t get enough April Fool action on Wednesday, CinemaBlend has a roundup of some of the best film site pranks (although not our own, harrumph), including Seth Rogen In Talks for Galactica Film, Johnny Depp Is Freddy Krueger and Daniel Craig Quits Bond.

In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Oscar night is almost here and the blogs are a-buzzin’. Once you’ve made your way through our definitive look at the All-Time Best and Worst Best Picture Winners, head over to Future of Classic to compare notes with Flashback Five - The Worst Best Pictures in Oscar History. Here’s a hint on the number one choice: This “shaggy-dog story about a lovable dimwit was technically accomplished, cloyingly sentimental, and politically suspect.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir checks out the Foreign Film nominees. “Instead of trying to write a bunch of new jokes about the lameness of the Academy's foreign-language film nominations, I wonder if anyone would notice if I just republished a few greatest hits from my last three years' worth of bitching and moaning?... It should go without saying that the foreign-language Oscar bears no relationship to whether given movies are, y'know, actually any good, or to whether any paying audiences, American or otherwise, want to see them. In fact, it's difficult to say what the furrin-film Oscar measures, other than providing readings from an especially eccentric focus group: What kinds of movies with subtitles would a bunch of cranky, seniorish film-industry professionals in Los Angeles County like to watch, if they actually liked to watch movies with subtitles?”

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule makes the Best Actress case for someone who isn’t even nominated. “In a perfect world, one in which the academy supposedly devoted to excellence in motion pictures, but which routinely ignores genius-level comic performances or finds a way to ghettoize them in supporting role categories, actually acknowledged the age-old dictum that comedy is hard, Angelina or Melissa would have been kicked to the curb to make room for Anna Faris's hilarious sunburst performance in The House Bunny…she makes every scene she’s in feel like it’s something brand-new through a combination of brilliant timing, vocal mannerisms, physical grace (and its opposite, cannily choreographed clumsiness) and pure movie star charm.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny takes a look at the unusual Blu-ray release of a previous Oscar winner. “One supposes that it was inevitable—that someday, some extremely conscious men of vision would use the most advanced, sophisticated, versatile digital imaging technology extant for the purpose of making a given film look like an immaculate, scratch-free print of a '70s eight-millimeter porno loop. Do I exaggerate? A little. Maybe. I'm still not sure. I looked at the new Blu-ray of William Friedkin's 1971 The French Connection last night and have to say I'm still of several minds about it. Rather than use digital technology to make obvious, you know, fixes—like really nail down whether that Santa Claus bust scene at the beginning takes place at night or during the day—Friedkin and his tech cohort performed a radical overhaul of the film's look, stripping away any traces of studio-process sheen and going for a very detailed brand of grit.”

Finally, get an edge on the rest of your Oscar viewing party guests with Defamer’s “In Memorium” Oscar Montage Pool. Will Mr. Blackwell make the montage? Will Charlton Heston end it? And who will get the montage’s first sound clip? (I’m betting it all on Harvey Korman.)

William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation

Vadim Rizov — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:50:00 GMT

On the occasion of the DVD release of 1970's The Boys In The Band, Andrew O'Hehir has interviewed William Friedkin. Friedkin is best known to the general public as the man who engineered the back-to-back successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, then flopped forever more. For hardcore film nerds and auteurists, he's either a constant failure or an underrated master.

Aside from small cult affairs like 2003's The Hunted — a fairly brilliant pared-down continuous chase film derided for its deliberate lack of characterization — the reason Friedkin annoys a lot of people are a twin pair of gay-themed films viewed fairly continuously as homophobic. The Boys In The Band annoyed post-Stonewall gays for its ostensibly stereotypical portrait of self-loathing queens going at it for condescending straight viewers having their worst fears confirmed. 1980's Cruising — cop Al Pacino vs. gay murderers in New York's S&M scene — was reviled even before it was filmed; as Trenton Straube wrote when the film was re-issued on DVD last year, the Village Voice's Arthur Bell predicted it would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." When it was released, the National Gay Task Force compared it to The Birth Of A Nation.

Whether or not the films are inadvertently homophobic is beside the point. What O'Hehir's interview shows is something I've suspected for a long time: Friedkin is a director so sociopathically honed in on exploring environments, he's completely indifferent when it comes to any sense of social responsibility.

Even in his two biggest hits, plot takes a back story to location shooting: The French Connection is far more memorable for its locales (and the way they ground the famously intense car chase) than the plot. The Exorcist qualifies as an odd horror film, one which spends at least as much time showing you the mechanics of hospital surgical proceedings as the symptoms of Regan's possession. The pattern continues to the present day: in his last film (the underseen Bug), Friedkin gave the actors room to stretch out, but he was equally concerned with capturing, with impressive pungency, what it feels like to live your life in small, cheap motel rooms, or what America's worst rural roadside bars look like.

In the interview, Friedkin says "I never remember talking even once to Mart Crowley [who both wrote and produced the film] about trying to make a statement about gay people. The story wasn't about gay people." In other words, he was oblivious to any sense of alleged social responsibility he might have. (Friedkin also seems to be equally oblivious to the idea that having gay people represented on-screen in any context isn't necessarily desirable in and of itself. "We paved the way for 'Will and Grace,' he says. "I really believe that." Some of us might think that's not such a good thing.) This kind of obliviousness is mildly sociopathic in its disregard for consequences, but it's also the stamp of a true if myopic artist: Friedkin sees the world in terms of atmospheres and sub-cultures. How they play to the outside world is no concern of his. Whether or not the films deserve their current re-evaluation and (sort of) welcome back into the fold is one question, but whatever you think of them, whatever message is there isn't Friedkin's doing; he just doesn't care.

Andrew O'Hehir: Even Farther Beyond The Multiplex

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:30:00 GMT

One of our favorite film bloggers here at the Screengrab is Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. His "Beyond the Multiplex" blog, focusing (as we try to do here in the Nerve Film Lounge) on independent cinema, is a favorite stop on our daily tour of the moviecentric web. If he didn't keep asking for more money and balk at our requests to pose nude, we'd have stolen him from Salon a long time ago; as it is, though, we'll just have to keep stealing from him as long as he's over there.

Luckily, there seems to be a lot more of him lately — "Beyond the Multiplex" has recently undergone what appears to be a major overhaul. It's easier to read and to navigate, and features the usual top-notch comment from Mr. O'Hehir; recent worthwhile entries have included a podcast interview with Cristian Mungiu, director of Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days; an interview with Marianna Palka about her Sundance hit Good Dick; and an interesting take on Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games, which tipped at Sundance last week. A more than welcome reboot of a nifty film blog — check it out.

Hair Today, Coen Tomorrow

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After largely triumphant tour of the festival circuit — it premiered at Cannes last spring and recently played at the New York Film Festival — the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men has now started trickling into commercial theaters. With a cast headed by Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and widely hailed as a "return to form" for the Coens after a couple of poorly received comedies (the doomed remake of The Ladykillers and the sharp, cruelly underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty) the picture does not lack for talent, cultural cachet, and the news hook. Yet from the very first reports from Cannes, one detail has tended to dominate the coverage: the hair helmet that Bardem sports in his role as the borderlands Terminator, Anton Chigurh. The first notices the movie received simply described it as a "pageboy haircut", which is accurate enough but fails the convey the full, shocking impact of the sight of the thing.

But the people who've been waiting these past months for the movie to open so they could weigh in on it have no intention of being left out. Paste magazine calls the character "splendidly coiffed", but that's either sarcasm or the minority opinion weighing in. More typically, Dana Stevens of Slate calls him "a bob-haired golem," while Jan Stuart of Newsday refers to his "forklift mop of hair." Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club, and David Edelstein of New York magazine have all invoked Prince Valiant, but Salon's Andrew O'Hehir thought Bardem looked more like Ringo Starr. In the Village Voice, Scott Foundas invoked Cousin Itt. (New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, a man with a literary background who understands the value of understatement, simply described Chigurh as "a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut.")

This is hardly the first time that a Coen brothers movie has attracted attention of a tonsorial nature. The corny-surreal tone of Raising Arizona was quickly established by Nicolas Cage's haircut, which suggested an attempted imitation of Kevin Bacon's tastefully spiky 'do as executed by an epileptic barber with the blind staggers. As the title character of Barton Fink, a leftist playwright who seemed to be a cartoon of Clifford Odets, John Turturro wore a pop-top hairdo that actually made him look more like George S. Kauffman by way of Eraserhead. We may never know for sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to make the Odets-like character seem more "universal" or if the hairdresser on the picture was working from a miscaptioned photograph. In The Big Lebowski, all the political and cultural battles of the 1960s seemed to have come down, decades later, to an uneasy truce between Jeff Bridges' hippie-burnout look and the squared-off cropping of Walter, the reactionary Vietnam vet played by John Goodman [and inspired by John Milius! — ed.], who looks like a cinder block wearing tinted shades. "I'm a hair actor and proud of it!" George Clooney once insisted, and maybe the Coens wish there were more performers out there willing to define their characters somewhere above their eyebrows. After all, it was the Coens who, in O Brother Where Art Thou?, established that George Clooney isn't just a fine actor, a major star, and the unashamed voice of show business liberalism: he's a Dapper Dan man! — Phil Nugent