The Screengrab : babylon a.d.

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 31-Sept. 5, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

My friends, it has come to my attention that the liberal media elitists at the Screengrab are at it again, spreading their un-American brand of smutty snark – or is it snarky smut? – about movies all over my computer. Don’t get me wrong. I’m always up for a good Tarzan picture or inspirational sports story like The Express. And nobody mourns Don LaFontaine and Jerry Reed more than myself.

But it’s time for us to draw a line in the sand. A line between good, hard-working Americans and Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising. A line between the God-fearing patriot and the Surfer, Dude. A line between your bank account and any theater showing Babylon A.D.

The elite liberal Screengrabbers would have you watch anti-Iraq War propaganda like No End in Sight online. They would tell you that The Top 18+ High School Movies, full of drug references, pre-marital sex and anti-authoritarian notions, are worthy of your time. They would decry made-in-America products like Gigli and Epic Movie as unwatchable. And unlike any of us in this room tonight, they would get away with saying Towelhead.

I say, enough! Enough with the Blue Velvet soundtrack, enough with George Romero’s Knightriders and enough with Robert Altman’s A Wedding! Let’s all go elk hunting with Lee Marvin, and may God bless America!

"Babylon" Tanking: Director Kassovitz Blames His Studio for a Sci-Fi Debacle

Phil Nugent — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

If you're among the select group of people who've seen Babylon A.D. --the sci-fi action whatsit that opened last Friday without the benefit of press screenings--its director, Mathieu Kassovitz has a message for both of you: it's not his fault. Kassovitz, who made a splash as a director in 1995 with his international hit La Haine (and who is perhaps best known here for his acting roles, such as the male romantic lead in Amelie and the boyish explosives expert in Munich) feels that 20th Century Fox, the movie's American distributor--it was co-financed by them and the French-based StudioCanal--gutted and mangled his baby, and he's gone public with his complaints via an interview with the website Scifi Scanner. If you only noticed the faint signals of Babylon A.D.'s publicity campaign and were unfamiliar with Kassoviitz's reputation as a filmmaker, you might be startled to learn that the movie, which stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Charlotte Rampling, and Gerard Depardieu ("wearing," according to New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, "the most superfluous prosthetic nose extension in film history"), and which was originally set to be released back in February, was something that a studio might be able to mishandle. But it turns out that this, once upon a time, was a labor of love. The script, which is credited to Eric Besnard, is based on a novel, Babylon Babies by the French writer Georges Datec, that Kassovitz had wanted to film for years. The director rhapsodizes that "The scope of the original book was quite amazing. The author was very much into geopolitics and how the world is going to evolve. He saw that as wars evolve, it won't be just about territories any more, but money-driven politics. As a director it's something that's very attractive to do." But his efforts to remain true to the material were undercut, he says, by Fox's meddling. "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn't respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience."

" To whatever degree the movie that Kassovitz made resembled what he had in mind, the finished product was further altered when Fox got out the chop-chop scissors before throwing it into theaters over the Labor Day weekend. The official 93-minute release is said to have lost anywhere between fifteen minutes (Kassovitz's best guess) and seventy minutes of footage from the director's version. (Informed of the changes, Vin Diesel, who has spoken of the movie as a comment on "an age where borders are closing," could only ask sardonically, "Am I even in the movie any more?") What's left, Kassovits says, is "pure violence and stupidity...like a bad episode of 24", like the ones where Jack's wife had amnesia. The way he sees i, he wanted to make a movie where "All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters," whereas Fox ""Fox was just trying to get a PG-13 movie." The end result for him has been a sad lesson in just how superfluous the director of a movie can be made to feel. "I'm ready to go to war against them," he says, "but I can't because they don't give a shit."

Morning Deal Report: Can Pee-Wee Herman Find Happiness?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Dark Knight joined the exclusive $500 million club with its weekend take of $11 million. It’s still nearly $100 million behind the only other member of that club, Titanic. Tropic Thunder remained on top of the box office for a third straight week, taking in $14.3 million and keeping the Vin Diesel vehicle Babylon A.D. down in second place. In a sign that we may soon be free of the tyranny of the spoof movie, Disaster Movie finished in seventh.

For some reason, I have failed to mention Todd Solondz’s sequel to Happiness in this space. Let me rectify that immediately. Todd Solondz is making a sequel to Happiness. Actually, Variety describes it as “an untitled part-sequel, part-companion piece to his controversial dark comedy Happiness.” Take that for whatever it’s worth. To me, not much, but your mileage may vary. Emma Thompson, Demi Moore and Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens are rumored to be attached. Attached to the movie, I mean; I’m not trying to imply some sordid love triangle.

Now that you’ve lost your breakfast, take heart in the news that the Poltergeist remake has found its director. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog, The Life Before Her Eyes) is in negotiations to take the helm. “The film's exploration of an ordinary family's reaction to an extraordinarily intense situation likely appealed to Perelman,” claims the Reporter.

Related:
A Hobbit, a Gnome and a Poltergeist Walk Into a Bar
How Batman is the New Beatles

Take Five: Labor Day

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Usually, the Screengrab's Take Five feature is inspired by some new release coming out the day we go to press. However, sometimes, if the raft of new releases in relatively uninspiring or inappropriate, we go with a different sort of them, and since today is the start of Labor Day weekend, what better time to salute organized labor? After all, some of us are union men ourselves (hey, the National Writer's Union is too a real union! We're part of the United Auto Workers for some reason!); and what with the writer's strike earlier this year that brought the movie business to a near-halt, and the possibility of an actor's strike later in the year coming along to finish what the writer's strike started, America hasn't been this aware of what organized labor is up to in years! Unfortunately, unless Vin Diesel's mercenary Thoorop in Babylon A.D. happens to be a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Hired Killers & Machinegun Operators, there's no new released this holiday weekend that are even remotely about unions or the labor struggle. But that doesn't mean we can't dip back into our video vaults and come up with five fine flicks about working-class struggle for your Labor Day enjoyment. (And, as a special treat before you go back to work on Tuesday, take a few hours to watch Barbara Kopple's masterful Harlan County U.S.A., referenced in last week's Take Five.) Happy Labor Day, readers!

MATEWAN (1987)

Possibly John Sayles' finest film, Matewan depicts -- with the heart of a union man and the eye of an artist -- the brutal struggle to unionize among the West Virginia coal miners of the 1920s, one of the bloodiest periods in the history of organized labor. Based on the Matewan Massacre of 1920 and featuring breathtaking cinematography by Haskell Wexler, Matewan' s powerful story is bouyed by wall-to-wall terrific performances by Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, James Earl Jones, and a young Will Oldham, in his pre-rock star days. Essential.

NORMA RAE (1979)

Martin Ritt's feel-good hit about a scrappy female textile worker who takes on the burden of being the point woman for unionizing the clothing mill in the deep South that employs her hasn't held up particularly well -- it's got a handful of good performances (and won star Sally Field an Oscar), but at times it comes across as a bit hokey. But it still stands as a testament to one of the last flashes of union glory in the U.S. before Ronald Reagan's Republicans started their unrelenting war against organized labor in America. Worth watching as a document of its day.

ROGER & ME (1989)

Sure, nowadays, it's pretty easy even for liberals to make fun of Michael Moore. His insistence on making himself part of his stories has gotten out of hand, and in many ways, he's become the caricature lefty the right has always accused him of being. But in 1989, when he launched his quixotic quest to have just a few words with General Motors CEO Roger Smith and ask him to look at the massive devastation wrought by his moving manufacturing jobs out of Flint, MI to avoid union costs, he seemed like a true breath of fresh air and a voice for the voiceless.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940)

It's almost impossible now to overestimate the impact of John Steinbeck's finest novel and the stirring masterpiece of a film that John Ford made of it. With the sting of the Depression fresh in the minds of millions of viewers -- and with labor conflicts so intense that big agricultural interests in California sought to have the movie banned, just as they removed copies of the book from California libraries -- the gorgeous, moving film was no stolid classic then, but an urgent cry for justice and decency at a time when the country was in its direst of straits.

AMERICAN DREAM (1990)

By the time Barbara Kopple finished her disturbing, heartbreaking documentary about a strike by meat packers at the Austin, MN Hormel plant, Reaganism's determination to crush unions wherever they could be found had already made its tragic story about the slow, tangled dismantling and destruction of a labor negotiating unit a familiar one all over the country. A far more ambiguous work than her Harlan County U.S.A., American Dream nonetheless shows the unremitting sadness of the direction our country took when it allowed ideologues to launch an assault on the hard-won gains of the working class.

Trailer Review: Babylon A.D.

Paul Clark — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Watching this trailer got me to wondering where Vin Diesel has been these past few years. But then, if I’d once been anointed Hollywood’s next action superstar and my last big-budget star vehicle was The Pacifier, I’d go into hiding too. Babylon A.D. looks more or less like your standard futuristic thriller, with amoral antihero Diesel discovering his conscience while transporting a beautiful woman who has mysterious powers. As such, it doesn’t look any better- or any worse- than other movies of its type. But what’s disheartening is the continuing slide of director Matthieu Kassovitz, once the promising director of Café Au Lait and La Haine, now the hack behind this and Gothika. Also, is it just me, or has Clint Mansell’s Requiem for a Dream score become the most overused trailer music since the Far and Away began turning up in every other trailer in the mid-90s? Because it sure seems like it to me.