The Screengrab : barry sonnenfeld

Morning Deal Report: Basterds Bound for Cannes

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited World War II epic Inglourious Basterds will have its world premiere at Cannes next month. “The Brad Pitt starrer, set in Nazi-occupied France, has been invited to play in competition at the Cannes Film Festival,” Variety reports. “Insiders said Tarantino, a longtime favorite of the French, has accepted the offer and has told the film's backers -- the Weinstein Co. and Universal Pictures -- that the pic will be ready for its world premiere during the May fest. The movie, which follows a band of Jewish-American soldiers whose mission is to take down a group of Nazis, will bow Aug. 21.”

Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard and Cillian Murphy are all in talks to join Leonardo DiCaprio in Christopher Nolan’s latest, Inception. “DiCaprio's character is mentioned as a CEO-type, while Cotillard would play his wife. Page is a young college grad student and DiCaprio's sidekick,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Inception is the sci-fi thriller “set within the architecture of the mind,” lest we forget.

Barry Sonnenfeld will open The Spellman Files for Paramount Pictures. The adaptation of Lisa Lutz's novel “revolves around a single private eye who has to juggle the demands of running her family's business with her dating life.”

Related:
Trailer Review: Inglourious Basterds
Ellen Page Whips It for Drew Barrymore

Morning Deal Report: Sinbad Sails Again

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Hairspray director Adam Shankman has two new projects ready to roll, Variety reports. Bob the Musical “centers on a mild-mannered man who suddenly hears the ‘inner song’ of people's hearts after being struck on the head.” Shankman is also in negotiations to re-launch Sinbad (the sailor, not the Vegas comedian). “Story centers on Sinbad and his crew, who are marooned off the coast of China and embark on a quest to find the lamp of Aladdin.”

Shattered Glass and Breach writer-director Billy Ray will switch things up with an adaptation of a 1943 horror/fantasy novel. The Conjure Wife “centers on a New England college professor who discovers that his good fortune is the result of his wife's secret, magical interference. When he pressures her to stop, dark forces descend on the couple without her protection.” I think I had that professor.

Not a moment too soon, Barry Sonnenfeld will direct The How-To Guide for Saving the World. “Story's centered on an instruction manual for saving the world left behind by a secret group that protects the Earth from alien invaders but is wiped out,” Variety reports.

Related:
In Other Blogs: The Musical
John Phillip Law: 1937-2008

The Rep Report (August 1--5)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Nobody can accuse Elliott Gould of having micromanaged his career to death. Gould scuffled for work for many years before 1970's M*A*S*H made him not just a star but a counterculture icon and a Time cover boy. Just a couple of years after his anointment by newsmagazine, bad career decisions and personal choices had left Gould with his head in a bad place and reputation for being not just borderline unemployable but, as Pauline Kael put it (not unaffectionately), an "anachronism." These days, Gould is regarded not as a superstar or a flake but a pretty solid pro--okay, maybe a flaky pro--and his best performances particularly the work he did for Robert Altman in M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, and California Split, hold up as well as anything done in front of a camera in the 1970s. (His Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, once a lethal flop, is now widely remembered as one of the great comebacks of all time.) "Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age (August 1--21) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music features all those pictures as well as Gould's first significant movie role, as one of the titular quartet in Paul Mazursky's 1969 satirical time capsule Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. In an interview in the current issue of Stop Smiling that centers on California Split, Gould calls himself "a jazz actor", and in these musical, improvisationl performances, which have a tossed-off feeling that belies their technical daring and emotional depth, it's easy to see what he means. The program is padded out with other early-'70s pictures that mostly serve to chart the course by which Gould contrived to stay employed in movies between gigs with Bob and Paulie. (The big exceptions are the limper than limp I Love My Wife and the overblown, hollow Harry and Walter Go to New York, which don't serve any purpose whatsoever.) Getting Straight, one of Gould's biggest hits, is a campus-unrest flick directed by Richard (The Stunt Man) Rush that provides a taste of what a thinking-young-person's exploitation movie was like circa 1970. Busting (1974), an attempt to package law-and-order politics in a loose, sort-of-comic Gouldian package, wound up being most notable as the movie that taught Starsky and Hutch how to dress. And Ingmar Bergman's 1971 The Touch, a movie that did Gould no good in any department--it didn't do Bergman any favors either--is worth checking out if you're a Bergman completist or would like to see just why so many people thought that, by that point, Gould had already worn out his welcome.

Starting August 2 and running through most of the month, the Museum of Modern Art's "Collaborations in the Collection" series spotlights Joel and Ethan Cohen, a pair of filmmakers whose collaborative creator was kind of inevitable. But as the programming points up, the Coens have also made a virtue of repeatedly teaming up with those they've done good work with, including cinematographers Barry Sonnenfeld (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing) and Roger Deakins (everything else, basically) as well as the composer Carter Burwell and such actors as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito, and Frances MacDormand, whose collaboration with Joel Coen extended to matrimony.

CHICAGO: At the Gene Siskel Film Center, the 14th Annual Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video --"The Midwest’s biggest and best celebration of the black experience on film, Black Harvest highlights talent from around the nation and around the world, with a special emphasis on our own Chicago-based filmmakers"--will run from August 1 through the 28th. On August 5, critic and interviewer Elvis Mitchell, last seen on the Turner Classic Movies series Under the Influence, where he barely managed to overcome his shock at hearing Quentin Tarantino confess that he has never seen the Judy Garland A Star Is Born, will swing by with a print of his new HBO film The Black List, Vol. 1 tucked under his arm, and the night after that will include a special screening of the monumental new Katrina documentary Trouble the Waters. A smaller but still very affecting documentary touched by Katrina, Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, is also among the many feature films and shorts.

From August 2 through the 24th, the Siskel Center will host "Paradjanov the Magician", a celebration of the vibrantly colored, strange and moving work of the Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov. It includes a new print of his masterpiece, Shadows of Our Fogotten Ancestors.

SAN FRANCISCO: Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles, a stunning, black and white semi-documentary look at a group of Native Americans drifting through a dazed, aimless existence in Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, was recently plucked from forgotten obscurity by some hardy restorers and, "presented by" Native American novelist Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett, recently started making its way across the country thanks to Milestone, the same company that brought Burnett's Killer of Sheep back from the dead. It plays the Castro August 1 through the 7th.

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives' "Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" (August 1--23) boasts an impressive array of films inspired by the writings of the cult pulp writer. Although Goodis was American and many of the films included here were Hollywood productions, the best known titles are both French: Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), based on Goodis's Down There, which remains one of the freshest and most thrilling products of the New Wave, and Jean-Jacques Beinex's 1983 The Moon in the Gutter, which remains one of the ghastliest things ever brought into the world by the misguided will of man.

LOS ANGELES: August 1 and 2, the Los Angles County Museum of Art presents "Two Comedies by Pietro Germi", and they're the right two: the justly famous Divorce Italian Style (1961) and the even funnier follow-up Seduced and Abandoned (1964), both featuring the luscious comedienne Stefania Sandrelli. The only way to imagine a better package for a hot weekend would be if the museum would spring for a lemonade waterfall.

That Guy!: Delroy Lindo

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:45:00 GMT

All throughout Black History Month in February, the Screengrab's That Guy! feature will be taking a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. Last week we focused on Ving Rhames, and this week, we're taking a look at the man recently voted Most Likely To Be Mistaken For Ving Rhames: Delroy Lindo. Born in London to a family of Jamaican ancestry, Lindo's facial similarities to Rhames, along with his powerful physique and tendency to portray gangsters, drug dealers and other low-lifes, has often led to confusion between the two. But while Rhames' on-screen style is smooth, calculating and understated, Lindo tends towards the edgy, the explosive, the half-mad. After making his first major film (More American Graffiti) in 1979, Delroy Lindo didn't make another film for a decade, preferring to focus on the stage roles to which he still occasionally returns; he earned widespread praise (and Tony nominations) for his work in Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys and Joe Turner's Come and Gone. When he finally returned to the big screen, he found his biggest proponent in America's most prominent black director: Spike Lee cast him in a number of memorable roles, and even handed him the role of family man Woody Carmichael in Crooklyn — a thinly veiled portrait of Lee's own father. Despite his frequent portrayal of criminal thugs, Lindo imbues even his most brutal characters with a rind of humanity, and has equally excelled at playing patriarchs, professionals, and even the odd romantic lead. One of his least-appreciated performances was a natural and charismatic turn as legendary Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige in the TV movie Soul of the Game; the NAACP, at least, liked him enough to hand him an Image Award for the film. Lindo's film career has been quiet of late; after landing his first major television role (aside from an enjoyable performance as a frustrated social worker in the "Brawl in the Family" episode of The Simpsons) in the short-lived thriller Kidnapped, he's preferred to focus exclusively on his work in the theatre, appearing in major roles in London and on Broadway and even in Toronto, where he lived for some time. However, at 55 years old, Lindo is at precisely the age when immense opportunities can open up for character actors of his skill and demeanor. We'd hate to think that he'll make us wait another ten years before his next big-screen appearance.

Where to see Delroy Lindo at his best:

MALCOLM X (1992)

Delroy Lindo's first major film appearance after his decade-long exile from motion pictures was Spike Lee's epic biography of the black nationalist leader Malcolm X. His turn as West Indian Archie, the Boston numbers runner with the photographic memory for whom young Malcolm worked, was by turns fearsome and pathetic, perfectly conveying the sense of loss and rage that Malcolm felt at the degradation of blacks in America. It's one of the most memorable performances in a movie full of them, and it served to make Lindo's reputation as a character to watch out for.

CLOCKERS (1995)

Soon after casting Lindo in Crooklyn, Spike Lee gave Delroy Lindo his third choice role in a row as the sinister drug lord Rodney Little. Although the movie has since become notable as the big-screen debut of Mekhi Phifer, it's Lindo who steals the show as Rodney: as is typical of his portrayal of criminals and undesirables, he charges the role with unmistakable emotion and humanity, especially in the scenes where he innocently plays with model trains after ordering the death of his subordinates. One of Lee's most underrated movies, Clockers is anchored by Lindo's role in a story that strongly presages the urban realism of The Wire.

GET SHORTY (1996)

The second installment of John Travolta's umpteenth career comeback was this slight but enjoyable Barry Sonnenfeld adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. While Travolta's Chili Palmer is the star of the show, it's Delroy Lindo as the L.A. gangster Bo "The Cat" Catlett who gets most of the movie's best lines. Diverging from his usual mode of instilling his thugs with a redeeming sliver of decency or vulnerability, here Lindo goes for flat-out humor, and proves himself to be a rather able screen comedian. Even when he doesn't have the great one-liners — which isn't often — his ability to mix nervousness, intimidation and exasperation carry the laughs.