The Screengrab : angela bassett

Screengrab Review: "Notorious"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:15:00 GMT

When FOX Searchlight Pictures announced last year that they'd be producing a film based on the life of slain rapper Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls and the Notorious B.I.G.), few people took notice -- until they followed up the announcement by saying the lead role would be filled by an unknown selected by an open casting call to which anyone could apply. Tens of thousands of rappers, actors, and wannabe superstars tried out for the role of one of the most charismatic figures in the New York hip-hop scene of the 1990s, until the part finally went to a young man named Jamal Woolard. The good news about Notorious, which opens in wide distribution today, is that Woolard is terrific, fully inhabiting the role of Biggie and conveying both the hard street stye of the self-made Big Poppa and the tender, desperate moments of a man who sometimes had no notion of how to take care of himself after having come so far so fast.

Better still, Woolard doesn't have to carry the movie entirely on his own: he's surrounded by a capable supporting cast, especially in the form of Angela Bassett as his mother Voletta, Naturi Naughton as Li'l' Kim (who does a much better job than Li'l' Kim would have), and Sean Ringgold as brutal record mogul Suge Knight. Refreshingly for a big release featuring legions of newcomers, Notorious isn't let down by its cast. Unfortunately, let down it is.

Soul Food writer/director George Tillman Jr. isn't lacking in basic competence behind the camera, but basic is as good as it gets; the direction in Notorious, a story that cries out for flash and style and aggression, is purely pedestrian -- a Notorious B.I.G. video directed by Nora Ephron. Likewise, the script -- which draws on a decent but unspectacular biography by Cheo Hodari Coker, turned into an utterly dull screenplay by Biker Boyz scribe Reggie Rock Blythewood -- is crammed full of cliche even by biopic standards, and the whole production never manages to rise above the standard TV-movie-of-the-week level. It's a shame to waste such a promising cast on a movie that seems as inspiringly written and directed as a mouthwash commercial.

In Other Blogs: Drinking in the New Year

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

It may still be too soon after New Year’s Eve for some of you to contemplate the subject of serious drinking, but the dawn of a new year does seem like the perfect time to introduce a new blog to our roster: Booze Movies! It’s the self-described 100 Proof Film Guide and its mission statement is one we at the Screengrab can get behind: “Alcohol--the fabric of film history is soggy with the stuff. Still, film historians have rarely given booze its due. This site is dedicated to setting the record straight.” The latest entry concerns - what else? – Sideways. “Most films have little cultural impact beyond diverting an audience for a couple of hours, but Sideways changed the drinking habits of many Americans. Liquor stores across the country suddenly saw their wine sales rivaling (and in some cases surpassing) their beer sales. Moreover, Pinot Noir, a grape that most consumers had never heard of prior to the film, enjoyed a huge upswing in popularity, while Merlot sales dipped slightly. This can only be attributable to Miles’ advocacy of Pinot and denigration of the latter varietal within the movie.”

Perhaps you read our year-end Top 10 lists last week and thought to yourself, “This is all well and good, but where is Vadim Rizov’s list?” Well, it’s at The House Next Door, and topping the list is A Christmas Tale. “I was so blown away by Desplechin's alleged crowd-pleaser that I stole home uncustomarilly psyched I had the rest of the night open (i.e. empty) to grapple with the film and tease out some explication, if only for my benefit. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I didn't even begin to unpack how much is going on here. At this point it'll take years of re-viewings and reading to get the full benefit of it. For now, the one thing I'll add is that I find Desplechin's broad frame of reference exhilarating: this is a film with equal time for Blackalicious and Mendelssohn, The Ten Commandments and Vertigo, Angela Bassett's ass and Nietzsche.”

Our erstwhile colleague Vern has seen The Spirit, and its suckage has inspired some thoughts on the current state of our culture. “You know what it is, man? It's nerd overreach… I truly believe that my associate Harry Knowles and many of his colleagues and competitors have transformed western culture. As recently as the '80s and '90s being a nerd or geek was not something anybody would want to admit to themselves. They were the lowest of low, the socially awkward, the uncool. With the rise of the internet though came the rise of ‘geek culture,’ and slowly these people reclaimed the word, turned it into a badge of honor. (I wonder if in 20 years people will proudly call themselves douchebags?)…We're all used to these articles about, ‘Trust me, this is one of the good guys! He's a geek like us, he knew everything about TRON, he has a tattoo of J.R.R. Tolkien on his calf, he has it in his will that a Mexican lobby card of KRULL will be burned and mingled with his ashes.’ And people on the internet would become protective of these "geek" filmatists and their projects, hype them up on their websights and postings, petition the studios, force their nerd views into the conventional wisdom. The Nerd Panthers.”

Roger Ebert wonders: “Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail?” Specifically, he wonders about Nicole Kidman and her ex-husband. “Now consider the case of Tom Cruise. Did you read the buildup before the release of Valkyrie? The picture was widely predicted to be the nail in the coffin of his career. On Nov. 18, 2008, before the film was first publicly screened, Courtney Hazlett of MSNBC.com breathlessly reported: ‘...those who've gotten an early glimpse say not only is the film nowhere near as exciting as a thriller, but Cruise's performance elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs.’…Hazlett did not see the film, and apparently did not see her first sentence (‘the film elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs’) before writing her second one (‘you almost start to laugh’). The story lists three sources: (1) ‘Those who've gotten an early glimpse;’ (2) ‘Sources;’ (3) ‘One person who saw the film.’ Help me out here. Are we referring to three different people, or the same person three times?”

And finally in List-o-Mania – and we apologize in advance – Cinemablend offers The 100 Most Likely People to Die in 2009. Let’s just say if Roger Ebert is reading this, he may not want to click on that link.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The problem with biopics, as most cineastes know, is the way they often tend to play like a greatest hits of their subjects’ lives, packed with historical moments and celebrity impersonations rather than realistic character development or any kind of specific story worth telling.

But Gus Van Sant’s Milk vaulted out of the specialty box office charts and into the mainstream top ten largely on the strength of a gripping, inspirational (and, sadly, still timely) story of persecution, triumph and tragedy, featuring a classic protagonist/antagonist duo embodied by Sean Penn’s crusading gay rights activist and Josh Brolin’s conflicted assassin.

And so, with Oscar buzz clinging to Van Sant, Penn and Brolin like...wait for it...yes, milk mustachios, we here at the Screengrab decided now would be the perfect time to Walk Hard through the positively true story of OUR FAVORITE BIOPICS OF ALL TIME!

ED WOOD (1994)

Tim Burton’s tribute to the so-called “worst director of all time” is a two-fer: while Johnny Depp’s relatively obscure title character is the focus, the Oscar-winning main attraction was Martin Landau’s portrayal of a lusty, foul-mouthed, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in the final years of his life, after Hollywood had kicked him to the curb and the once proud actor could only find work rolling around in a lake with a giant rubber octopus. Lugosi’s son, Béla Junior, initially criticized Burton’s film for its inaccuracies with regard to his father (who, for example, was married at the time of his death and rarely used profanity, at least according to friends like Forrest J. Ackerman, Ed Wood’s one-time “illiterary” agent). But what makes the film great is that docu-drama realism was never the point: we don’t necessarily see events as they happened, but rather the way Ed Wood, Jr. (and, to a certain extent, Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and cartoonist/old Hollywood enthusiast Drew Friedman) perceived them: in surreal, melodramatic black & white fantasias where an alcoholic transvestite wannabe could actually transcend death and live forever like his idol, Count Dracula.

I'M NOT THERE (2007)

If ever there was an artist who required no further mythologizing, it would have to be Bob Dylan. A conventional biopic of the Bard might well be unbearable, which is why it's a good thing Todd Haynes, World's Cleverest Film Student, signed on for the task. Haynes takes the well-known Dylan mythos, scrambles it all together and then bounces it off a series of funhouse mirrors, delighting in the ever more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors play six different versions of Dylan, among them Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), an 11-year-old African-American boy who rides the rails with hobos, spinning tall tales of a rambling youth with no direction home; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), an alternate universe troubadour whose Dylanesque career unfolds as scenes from a mockumentary in the mode of A Mighty Wind; and Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who is playing Jack Rollins in a conventional biopic called Grain of Sand. (Sample dialogue: "I'm only a pawn in their game!") The standout is Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for an Oscar for her eerie take on hipster-dandy Jude Quinn, supernova post-Beatles pop star. In appropriating and manipulating various filmmaking styles, Haynes is striving for a cinematic equivalent to the way Dylan adapted and exploded traditional folk forms in his music. The resulting surreal swirl recalls Dylan's most fertile creative period, his mid-60s "thin, wild mercury music" wherein characters ranging from Paul Revere to Jack the Ripper to Cecil B. DeMille could inhabit the same soundscape. Through these methods, Haynes is attempting a biography not so much of a man, but of an artistic sensibility. If I'm Not There is occasionally impenetrable, pretentious or overly impressed with its own cleverness, that only serves to make it a more accurate, warts-and-all portrait, without delving into tabloid trash. You may love it or hate it, but you get the feeling its subject wouldn't want it any other way.

LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1972)

This soapy treatment of the life of Billie Holiday is not beloved by jazz critics or historical purists, who recoil from its sloppy handling of the facts of the singer's life and gag on Diana Ross' pop stylings when she sings Holiday classics such as "Strange Fruit." But the movie remains highly enjoyable when taken on the terms that it set for itself in 1972: a chance for African-American audiences to wallow in the kind of old-Hollywood melodrama that had been spun from the lives of white celebrities such as Lillian Roth and Ruth Etting, with a dash of blaxploitation attitude for flavor. (It turns out that Billie needed a toxically blond white man to turn her onto heroin. Who knew?) Ross' singing here takes a back seat to her acting, which should have marked the start of a major movie career. She proved she had the talent, but once she'd tasted success in Hollywood, her diva gene ate her common sense alive. Her scenes with her piano man sidekick, Richard Pryor, have a special poignance today, because it's hard to remember that there was a time when Diana Ross and Richard Pryor occupied the same planet.

GENTLEMAN JIM (1942)

This affably sanitized life of heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett (Errol Flynn) is probably the most entertaining example of the boxer-biopic genre that Martin Scorsese was to bury for all time with Raging Bull. It also provided its star, Errol Flynn, with a rare chance to appear onscreen in street clothes instead of leggings or cowboy gear. The premise is that Corbett was the first brainiac who conquered his opponents by means of the "scientific" method, which enables him to whup such swaggering sides of beef as John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond). This allows Flynn to win his fights and still display a glib enough tongue to pitch woo at society gal Alexis Smith. This is also the movie that was in theaters when Flynn was dragged into court on hinky charges of statutory rape, a sideshow that turned out to do the movie not the least bit of harm at the box office.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)

In this updating of Love Me or Leave Me (the 1955 cult classic in which Doris Day, as singer Ruth Etting, was physically abused by James Cagney as her husband-manager), Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne play Ike and Tina Turner, from their days starting out together on the R & B touring circuit and the period when electrifying star performances on-stage alternated with one-sided sparring matches backstage to the day that Tina, having discovered the untapped strength at her core with the help of a chanting regimen, starting punching back. The closest thing to a flaw in Bassett's performance is that she didn't have Turner's legs, a problem that today would probably be corrected with the help of CGI; she compensates with her slugger's arms, which make the scenes of abuse easier to get through, since you can't help but anticipate the moment when this woman realizes that she can take care of herself. Fishburne may be even better, tapping into deep reserves of rage that a lesser actor would have been tempted to take out on the costume designer. This is probably the finest lead performance ever given by an actor who at one point is forced to don hot pants and a Prince Valiant haircut.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Unwatchable #65: “Meet the Browns”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

First, let me apologize for the long layoff between Unwatchable entries. I deserve some of the blame, as does Netflix, but mostly I’d like to blame Tyler Perry. In my capacity as a film critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I have been assigned to review several of Perry’s movies. Since Perry never screens his stuff for critics, this generally entails catching the first show on opening day and quickly turning around a review, which is a pain in the ass – but then, so is sitting through a Tyler Perry movie in the first place. When Meet the Browns came out earlier this year, I held my breath waiting for the assignment, but this time I dodged the bullet. Until now, that is. I’d blame cruel fate, but I think we all realize by now that I’ve brought this upon myself.

When Meet the Browns appeared at #65 on the IMDb Bottom 100 list, I dutifully clicked over to Netflix and put it at the top of my queue. It arrived a couple of weeks ago, and after seven or eight stiff drinks, I popped it into the DVD player. What appeared on my television was not the 2008 theatrical release Meet the Browns, however; rather, it was a 2004 stage production of same, shot on shoddy video and released straight to DVD. “Netflix,” I says, “you sent me the wrong Meet the Browns. Send me the right one.” And then I wait and I wait and it never shows up. “Netflix,” I says, “the Unwatchable faithful are waiting! Where the hell is Meet the Browns?” So they send another copy and it finally arrives and now here I am. So let’s just get it over with.

Single mother Brenda Brown (Angela Bassett) is struggling to raise her three children in the projects of Chicago. When the factory that employs her closes down and the electric company shuts off the lights, things are looking bleak. Bus tickets to Georgia arrive in the mail; it seems Brenda’s father, whom she never met, has passed away. She and the kids, including oldest son Mike, a basketball phenom, go down for the funeral and meet the extended, wacky Brown family as well as neighbor and basketball scout Harry (Rick Fox).

Harry sees great potential in Mike, but Brenda is mistrustful of him, and men in general, mainly because Mike’s daddy is a non-child-support-paying jackass. When Brenda’s father’s will is read, it turns out that she has inherited a dilapidated house he used as a rental property. Will Brenda and the kids stay in Georgia surrounded by her crazy relatives or return to the Chicago projects where she has no job and no prospects. It’s a head-scratcher!

Basically what we have here is another bowl of Tyler Perry’s usual tepid gumbo of sermonizing, self-help platitudes and ham-handed ensemble comedy. I hate to come down too hard on a grassroots filmmaker catering to an underserved audience, but watching his movies, I get the impression that Perry’s holy trinity is Jesus, Oprah and Good Times, and he doesn’t seem to notice when the pieces don’t fit together. It’s a jarring transition from the chitlin-circuit antics of David Mann in his Bozo the Pimp outfits to the would-be wrenching social commentary about absent fathers. And let us not even speak of Perry's obligatory yet inexplicable cross-dressing cameo as Madea.

I can say that Meet the Browns is the best Tyler Perry movie I’ve seen, mainly thanks to the heartfelt performance by Angela Bassett, who elevates the proceedings above the likes of Why Did I Get Married? or The Family That Preys. That’s not the same thing as saying it’s any good, though.

Previously on Unwatchable:
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam
69. The Perfect Holiday (pending)
70. Epic Movie

Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You know how there’s usually nothing good on TV, and then finally there are TWO shows you want to watch and they’re both on at the same time? That’s what this election has been like for me. After a a lifetime of troubled Democratic administrations and doomed Democratic candidates from McGovern to Kerry (and don’t even get me started on the disastrous Gore/Lieberman campaign, Nader haters), we finally get two really strong contenders...IN THE SAME FREAKIN’ ELECTION YEAR. And they just spent the past few months beating the shit out of each other.

But that's all behind us now: according to media scuttlebutt, Hillary will officially concede the Democratic nomination on Saturday and become America’s #1 Obama Girl, while Barack moves one step closer to becoming our nation’s first real black president, after many years of fake black presidents on TV and the big screen.

And so, in honor of Senator Barack Obama’s historic achievement, Screengrab decided to look back at some of the African Americans who occupied the Oval Office in fiction before reality finally caught up:

Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact (1998)

After playing God in Bruce & Evan Almighty, President of the United States was actually a step down for Morgan Freeman...but America was lucky to have his wisdom, authority and soothing, inspirational baritone during a crisis involving a potential Extinction Level Event, a.k.a. a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. Rather than farming out the whole thing to Haliburton, President Beck freezes wages and prices to prevent an economic disaster and dispatches Robert Duvall’s Capt. Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner and a multinational crew of astronauts, who sacrifice themselves to destroy the big rock, thus saving (most of) humanity. Heckuva job, Fishie.

Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer on 24 (2002-2004)

After surviving assassins in a truly harrowing California primary, Haysbert’s resilient, basso profundo commander-in-chief is faced with nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as attempts by corrupt American businessmen to manufacture war in the Middle East in order to drive up oil prices and...uh...hey, isn’t this a Fox show with a big conservative fan base? Must be all the torture...so much torture, in fact, that West Point Academy worried cadets were starting to view such behavior as acceptable interrogation procedure, and I’ve personally heard talk radio guys condone extreme neo-con interrogation policies because, heck, they always work for Jack Bauer. Yet isn’t it also possible, given the show’s impact, that Haysbert’s performance as the indomitable President Palmer in some way helped Middle America get used to the idea of a handsome young African American Democrat in the White House?

Bill Clinton as President Bill Clinton in Contact (1998)

While not technically African American, Bill Clinton received an honorary designation as the nation’s first black president (until the real thing comes along) from a plurality of U.S. comedians. And while not technically a cast member of Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s tale of Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, Clinton nevertheless received more screen time than Rob Lowe or Angela Bassett thanks to a presidential speech about rocks found on Mars that was repurposed (controversially) as a fictional proclamation about alien transmissions received by astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). Ironically, the only reason Clinton got to portray the president in the movie was because Sidney Poitier passed on the role.

Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in Idiocracy (2006)

Of course, some presidents are better than others, though given the average IQ of the dumbed-down populace of Mike Judge’s little-seen, depressingly spot-on social satire, Idiocracy, Crews’ President Camacho doesn’t really do that bad a job. Sure, he almost executes the smartest man in the world (Luke Wilson’s cryogenically-preserved average Joe, whose 21st century common sense reads as genius in 2505 America). But he does have leadership skills, and when Joe’s brilliant plan to water crops with, y’know, water instead of corporate sports beverages helps to end a crippling food shortage, Camacho has the wisdom to actually listen to expert opinion rather than (ahem) stubbornly staying the course.

Tommy “Tiny” Lister as President Lindberg in The Fifth Element (1997)

Forget the Axis of Evil...Lister’s science-fictional administration has to deal with The Great Evil, a sentient flaming asteroid intent on, yes, wiping out all life on Earth. While Bruce Willis’ cab driver and Milla Jovovich’s supernatural supermodel do most of the heavy lifting in the fight against Evil (and its chief henchman Zorg, played by Gary Oldman in a peculiar plastic hat), President Lindberg nevertheless doesn’t ask and Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod doesn’t tell when his ultra-flamboyant radio host joins the mission, and the intergalactic commander-in-chief even supports his troops by preventing a naggy mother from cock-blocking Willis’ eventual clone chamber tryst with Jovovich...talk about advocating stem cell research!

That Guy!: Laurence Fishburne

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:30:00 GMT

February is Black History Month, and since we enjoyed combing through the stacks in preparation for last week's featured That Guy!, Yaphet Kotto, we figured we'd continue on in that vein and take a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. We've discussed before how it's much harder for a woman to make a reputation playing character roles; actresses tend to be valued more for their looks than their acting skills, and women who aren't traditionally beautiful have far fewer opportunities to build a career based on their chops and personalities than do men who aren't conventionally handsome. Similarly, it may actually be easier for African-Americans to become character actors, for no other reason than for a very long time, leading man roles were generally denied to them. With his commanding demeanor, strong and handsome face and forceful personality, there's no reason that Larry Fishburne shouldn't have become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and for a brief period in the early 1990s, it seemed like he would be — but for various reasons, it became clear that even at that late date, the movie business had only one opening for Serious Black Superstar, and it was already being filled by Denzel Washington. (It still is, for that matter.) So Fishburne — a rare black child star who became an even rarer black actor who never fell into stereotypical action or comedy roles — had to settle for nabbing some of the highest-profile second-banana roles available. Fishburne has always been a remarkably gifted actor, even as a child, and despite often being cast as a militant, a prophet, or some other variety of visionary, he's willing to take the piss on occasion (witness his almost satirically self-important voicing of the Silver Surfer in the recent Fantastic Four sequel), and is actually a lot more fun in light comic roles than anyone gives him credit for, as he showed when he played Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse. Still not yet fifty years old, Fishburne has a lot of good roles ahead of him, if he doesn't give up acting altogether and move into writing, directing or producing — all areas at which he's shown talent. And if he never became America's next black superstar, he did get to marry the luscious Gina Torres, and that ain't bad as a second prize.

Where to see Laurence Fishburne at his best:

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It wasn't his first movie — the former child star had already impressed audiences with his teenage turn in Cornbread, Earl and Me — but Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam nightmare was certainly the film that put young Laurence Fishburne on the map. As Mr. Clean, he gives the purest and most human performance in the movie, and his death is the most touching and tragic. It's all the more astonishing that Larry (as he called himself at the time) was only fourteen years old when filming began, having fudged his age to get the part. Of course, the filming of Apocalypse Now took so long, he was approximately thirty-eight years old when it wrapped.

BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)

This was the movie that seemed to predict superstardom for Fishburne; so successful and influential was it at the time of its release that it's also the film that inspired him to start going by Laurence instead of Larry. John Singleton's directorial debut, Boyz N the Hood is one of the first, and undoubtedly the best, of a mini-wave of ghetto-realist gangsta films, and despite heavy competition from pre-living-joke-status Cuba Gooding and Ice Cube (and Angela Bassett, with whom he would later shine as Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It?), Fishburne anchors the cast as the morally complex, conflicted Furious Styles.

THE MATRIX (1999)

The Wachowski Brothers' high-toned blend of wire-fu, gunplay and slapdash philosophy holds up less well with each year that passes by. But at the time of its release, it perfectly synthesized a number of elements of the zeitgeist into an action movie that, if it wasn't as smart as it thought it was, at least wasn't dumb. Fishburne landed the role of a lifetime as the mystical hacker Morpheus, and it's a testament to his acting skills and more or less permanent sense of gravitas that he managed to avoid magical Negritude in a role that pretty much defines the magical Negro. It probably also managed to buy him a pretty nice house, so who's complaining?

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent

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