The Screengrab : bilge ebiri

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Amreeka

bilge — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:30:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

The number of films about Middle Eastern immigrants in the US have ticked up noticeably in recent years, for obvious reasons, and as a Middle Easterner myself, I had high hopes that Cherien Dabis’s Amreeka would provide a corrective to the easy potshots at suburban ignorance that are starting to become a staple of the genre. My hopes were dashed, but that’s not to say that there’s a lot to admire in Dabis’s low-budget, earnest effort.

The first is Nisreen Faour’s performance as Muna, the optimistic but overwhelmed Palestinian divorcee who comes to suburban Illinois with her young son Fadi (Melkar Muallem) in search of a better life. Commanding the screen, Faour brings to her character a wide-eyed generosity that conveys her hopes and dreams through the fact of her sheer presence: When she gets a job at White Castle and tells her family that she’s actually working at the bank next door, we don’t need any extra cutting or close-ups or over-emoting to understand both the hit to her dignity as well as the chin-up resoluteness with which she tackles the job. Faour does with simple posture and bearing what most actors try (and usually fail) to do with dialogue and heavy-handed histrionics. Whenever Amreeka focuses on Muna’s plight, it soars: From the way in which she feels like a burden to the relatives who’ve opened up their home to her, to her ignorance at some of the social mores of middle-class America, I feel like I’ve seen this person before, in real life. Dabis gets her exactly right, and that is to her eternal credit.

Alas, the rest of the story starts to fail her right quick, by focusing on the troubles Fadi has at school with a bunch of white douchebags straight out of central casting. We know these guys will fuck things up, we know the name “Osama” wil get tossed around, and we know that Fadi himself will probably do something stupid in retaliation. I’m not saying things like this never happened (though, please, Middle Eastern filmmakers take note: the US was actually way better at avoiding this sort of thing than pretty much any other country) but I am saying that seeing it onscreen for the umpteenth time offers little insight or truth. Amreeka does give us plenty of sympathetic white characters – from Muna’s kind-hearted, blue-haired coworker Matt (Brodie Sanderson) to Fadi’s principal, Mr. Novatski (Joseph Ziegler) – but they feel to me like figures placed on a spectrum of tolerance, which may just be a side-effect of my response to the obvious places the rest of the story goes.

Screengrab at Sundance: Slamdance

bilge — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I’ve always felt guilty about not doing enough coverage of Slamdance, the underdog cousin to Sundance that runs in Park City around the same time. It often shows excellent films – especially in the shorts department – and is staffed by cheerful, enthusiastic people who love to watch and make movies. I didn’t get around to it this year either – I did drop by their office and pick up some screeners – and judging by the fact that most writers I knew were complaining about how little time they had, I imagine most of them didn’t either. Which is a shame. And I’m not sure it’s going to get any better. Which is why I’ve come to a realization: Slamdance should consider moving its dates, its location, or both.

Hear me out, hear me out: Slamdance has become a world class festival. For cryin’ out loud, it’s where Christopher Nolan and Marc Forster got their starts, among many others. Larry Clark and Steven Soderbergh have shown films here. Part of being a world class festival, though, is to establish your own identity and to carve out your own space. Slamdance has done this, to some extent, by taking over the top of Main Street in Park City and sending its scrappy, attention-hungry filmmakers out onto the street with their postcards, their goofy costumes, and their persistence, in an effort to grab the attentions of Sundance attendees. This has worked up until now. But how long can they go on feeding off Sundance’s crumbs? Maybe the solution is to just shift the dates slightly, so that there are a few non-Sundance days when press and other assorted folks can take a look at Slamdance films?

This will probably never happen – being here during Sundance is Slamdance’s raison d’etre. And for all I know maybe they get enough while they’re here – this year they got coverage in the LA Times, Indiewire, and some other venues. I do know that many of their screenings sell out. And I’m sure their sponsors would have something to say about the notion of moving the festival away from Sundance’s bracket. But I feel like being thought of simply as the Bizarro to Sundance’s Superman isn’t doing Slamdance’s filmmakers any favors. True, they get to be in town while all these agents and producers and reps and critics are also in town, and maybe they even get lucky and meet some of these people. But it’s hard enough for a Sundance film to get noticed during Sundance. I imagine it ain’t easy for a Slamdance film to get noticed during Sundance. Anyway, it’s just a thought. One that will go unheeded, but whatever, I’ve had my say.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of The Girlfriend Experience

bilge — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I’m a bit late in getting to The Girlfriend Experience, which Steven Soderbergh premiered two nights ago at a secret Sundance Sneak Preview. (Full disclosure: I had to first write about it for my other outlet.) I was initially hesitating to review the film, simply because the director deemed it a “work in progress” and I have this weird feeling that he’s still trying to find his movie. But then everybody else went and reviewed it, so I guess that shouldn’t stop me. Yet it still sort of does: Maybe it’s because I had some more issues with it than most other writers seemed to.

True, the film seemed to play fine with the audience – it’s a return to the deliberately elliptical, improvised storytelling the director last explored in Bubble (which I loved). Porn star Sasha Grey seemed at ease acting out the role of a cold, high-priced call girl reassessing her long-term relationship while a series of increasingly futile transactions make her question the state of her life. “Transaction” seems to be the key word here – every exchange, every moment of intimacy is dulled down and treated as a bland procedural by Soderbergh’s cold, often static camera. I’d add “to a fault,” as the film often feels adrift amid all the dry negotiations and small talk. In his post-screening Q&A, Soderbergh said he was influenced by Antonioni’s Red Desert, and yet Desert is quiet, hypnotic, and tense – like a horror film in slow motion. The Girlfriend Experience, in its current state, is talky and immersive – it could use some of Desert’s tautness and dreamy melancholy.

That dry blandness is the point, of course: In 21st century America, everything has become a transaction. No wonder our heroine eventually confuses a particularly receptive trick for a potentially life-altering love affair. I wonder if there’s a double meaning to that title: A “girlfriend experience” is apparently the term for the full suite of services our heroine offers. In other words, you get more than a meaningless fuck when you’re with her; you get to go watch a film at the IFC Center, talk about it over an expensive meal, then go home, cuddle, and ease into your meaningless fuck. But is our heroine, who spends most of the film emotionally inert, finally duped by a desire to have her own “girlfriend experience”?

A mood of late-period capitalist doom hangs over the proceedings, as if we’re watching the whole system in all its intricate, soul-destroying glory right before it all comes collapsing. Appropriately enough, the story takes place in October of 2008 – the financial crisis is constantly referenced, as is the Presidential election. This was partly a result of circumstance – the film takes place in October because that’s when Soderbergh shot it – but it may also be a hedge: It makes a fitting bookend to Bush-era filmmaking, an epitaph for the Old New America.

Screengrab at Sundance: When Critics Attack

bilge — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I guess I should say something about this whole dust-up that occurred yesterday between Variety critic John Anderson and sales rep Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. For those unfamiliar with the event, a full account can be found here, but basically, Anderson wound up punching Dowd after the latter wouldn’t let go of Anderson after learning that he was not a fan of Dirt! The Movie, a film which Dowd is representing at the festival. Apparently, Dowd was trying to convince Anderson to re-consider a statement he had made that the film wouldn’t be popular with the public. Somehow, Jackie Martling was involved. Some have claimed that Dowd was telling Anderson to go easy on the doc because of its worthy subject matter; Dowd disputes this. Part of the problem seems to be that, as a critic for Variety, Anderson holds an unnatural degree of power over whether the film will get picked up or not. Then again, Dowd, who was the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’s character in The Big Lebowski, is no slouch himself.

I don’t really know either of them – I have met Anderson once, and I may have gotten an email blast or two from Dowd at some point -- and I wasn’t there, so I have nothing to offer about the event, but the ostensible subject of the argument itself is one I have given some thought to. Does a documentary with a worthy and important subject deserve some kind of bonus points even if it just plain sucks? (Mind you, I haven’t seen Dirt! yet, so this has nothing to do with that film.) Or, perhaps more pertinent, what if said documentary is not terrible but merely serviceable?

Others have tackled this question before, and I’m not sure there’s an easy answer. The serious-minded critic obviously owes it to him or herself to judge a film on its artistic merits – and said merits can also include the justice it does to its subject, btw. I have often been in a position where a documentary didn’t float my boat artistically but still seemed to be doing something vaguely important, such as shedding light on an important subject. (Holocaust docs often suffer from this problem.) What did I do in this case? Well, when I had the space, I often went ahead and noted that others may find it more worthwhile.

But isn’t it also true that a filmmaker often owes it to his/her subject to find a strong and unique way to present it? That is, unless they simply want to preach to the choir. As a fan of punk, I may get just as excited by a simple, artlessly-done PBS special on the Sex Pistols as I might by Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury, a film full of strong artistic choices. However, someone who isn’t interested in the Sex Pistols may not be too taken by the PBS special, but they may very well be drawn in by The Filth and the Fury. In other words, strong aesthetic choices may very well help a film do justice to its subject; the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. This seems like an obvious point, but I’m always amazed when people forget it.

At the same time, it’s also a fact that Sundance and many other lesser film festivals are choc-a-bloc with documentaries that seem to be asking for pats on the back more than anything else. I don’t like to question the motives of anyone who spends a year or two making a film, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel like the filmmakers think they’ve got a better shot at popularity if they treat a worthy subject. Again, I have no idea if Dirt! is one of these films, but it seems to me that Anderson was sticking up for an important critical principle: The right to call bullshit on even the most sacred of cows when the situation demands it.

That is, until he went and punched the guy, I mean jesus.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Bronson

bilge — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

Aka I Beat, Therefore I Am. Nicolas Winding Refn’s explosive, beautiful, hilarious, and infuriating Bronson is one of the best films about self-actualization I’ve ever seen. It could have easily been directed by its subject: Charlie Bronson, nee Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy, in one of those bulked-up, electrifying performances I’ll be telling my grandkids about), Britain’s most violent inmate and a man who has spent 30 of his 34 years in prison in solitary confinement, largely as a result of his fondness for kicking the living shit out of prison guards and pretty much anyone else who happens to cross his path. This is no grim and grimy prison film, however. Instead, Refn films in a vibrant, operatic style that tries to approximate the sublime joy Bronson gets from his confrontations. Utilizing lush cinematography, bursts of Verdi, Wagner, and the Pet Shop Boys, along with Hardy’s transformative performance, Bronson works its way towards repeat crescendos of violence; where other prison films might ladle on the triumphant music when their protagonists break free of their captivity, Refn’s film does so whenever its hero gets in a fight. It amounts to pretty much the same thing.

The film had a lot of buzz coming into the fest thanks to an early critics’ peek, but it’s proven to be a lot more divisive after its screenings here. That’s because its guiding spirit is not the ultra-violent dramas of recent years like Chopper and Fight Club (which some were expecting) or even Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (which it explicitly references), but the far more complicated European art cinema of the ‘70s, which isn’t exactly in tune with the sort of stuff that usually shows up at Sundance. (Another critic friend compared it to the work of Derek Jarman, which was always kind of an extension of that…and I can’t imagine the average Jarman film going over too well at Sundance either.) Necessarily fragmented, even downright bipolar, it denies us the easy pleasures of traditional narrative – most of the time, we don’t even know why Bronson is locked up. Scenes of his family life are opaque and inconclusive. Two love affairs flash by without any resolution. In other words, you won’t actually learn anything about Charlie Bronson from watching this movie.

Instead, Refn offers up a repetitive, almost rhythmic, structure composed largely of situations that end with Bronson flailing away at small armies of cops and/or guards. It seems like a Sisyphean endeavor – each fight sends him back into solitary – until we realize that this is how Charlie Bronson breathes. The man seeks violence the way we seek oxygen. Stripped down to his birthday suit, head shaved, and ready for all comers, each fight is a rebirth, because Bronson at rest is a void (a notion that the film’s final two shots make explicitly clear).

Of course, the film does progress towards some kind of redemption, but it’s not the kind of I’ve-changed-my-ways style bullshit one might expect. Charlie Bronson today is also an artist, but he creates work that is just as brutal and damaged as he is. The film’s third act brings together Bronson’s physical confrontations and his discovery of art in an explicit way, resulting in a climactic scene that represents one of cinema’s most effective portrayals of the violence of creation. This is extraordinary filmmaking at the highest level, and I can only hope that someone is brave enough to make sure the rest of the world gets to see it.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of An Education

bilge — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

Gimmick-free and solid in all the right ways, Lone Scherfig’s An Education, based on a memoir by Lynn Barber (with a screenplay by Nick Hornby) is the kind of absorbing, literate drama that often gets lost at a place like Sundance. Luckily, it’s also got a breakout performance at its heart – Carey Mulligan, who also appears in The Greatest at the festival – and has attracted serious attention from both audiences and industry.

Set in the early 60s, the film is the story of 16-year old Jenny (Mulligan), a precocious and beautiful schoolgirl from a lower middle-class milieu who studies hard, plays the cello, and rifles through a dog eared copy of L’Etranger while dreaming of going to France, as Juliette Greco sings in the background. Jenny isn’t exactly a goody two-shoes, however. Most likely Oxford-bound, she has the smarts and the passion to know that she’s cut out for better things. One day, when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a handsome, older man with a taste for all the fine things she only dreams about, drives by and shows an interest in her, Jenny falls fast. David is a charmer, to be sure. He’s got money, he’s got friends who hang out at auctions and buy Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and he also has plenty of pointed lies to deploy: He convinces Jenny’s conservative parents to let him take her for a weekend jaunt to Oxford by promising he’ll introduce her to C.S. Lewis (or, as he calls him, “Clive”).

David’s facility with untruths doesn’t trouble Jenny at first, and although we can certainly sense that this romance isn’t exactly headed in the right direction, the film never turns David into a villain. His love for Jenny feels true, and we get the sense that we’re watching a man who can’t help himself in her presence, even as the lies and inconsistencies rack up. Sarsgaard brings a perfect blend of mystery and affability to the character; he seems harmless, even as we sense that there are undiscovered corners of his soul. In other words, we like the snake – a rare occurrence in this sort of film.

Sarsgaard may be great (and mention should also be made of the always-reliable Alfred Molina as Jenny’s well-meaning but ambitious father), but this is Mulligan’s film all the way. It’s a deceptively tricky part: We have to watch this whip-smart girl accumulate and compound her mistakes without losing sympathy or involvement with her story. That she maintains her character’s grace and poise even as the façade begins to collapse around her is a testament both to Mulligan’s riveting performance and to the way that Scherfig and Hornby place us firmly within her world.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of In the Loop

bilge — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

There was plenty of buzz on Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop even before the fest started, as a result of both some advance press screenings and people’s fondness for Iannucci’s past work on hit UK shows such as The Thick of It. And while the film is certainly very, very funny, the advance word on it as a kind of Dr. Strangelove-style satire on the run-up to the Iraq War seems decidedly misplaced. For starters, I don’t think Iraq is actually ever mentioned in the film – with good reason, because the film appears to be taking place in an alternate contemporary universe where the UK and the US are preparing to go to war with an unnamed country, without any regard for the actual run-up to the Iraq War. The story here, such as it is, centers around the efforts of an embattled UK government minister (Tom Hollander) and what happens when he accidentally voices opposition to the impending war. As he tries to preserve his status within the corridors of power, we get the sense that everyone else around him is trying to do the same. Certainly, the U.S Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy (Mimi Kennedy) has found herself in a similar position, after airing a report from one of her aides criticizing the war. As everyone scrambles to maintain their professional dignity, they lose sight of the greater indignity about to be perpetrated on tens of thousands of human beings.

What I’ve just described actually sounds like a pretty solid premise for a caustic satire, but I’m not sure In the Loop is that movie. If it is even a satire, it’s a largely flaccid one – its humor comes not from irony or circumstance but from the nasty and intensely quotable wit of its embittered, foulmouthed characters. Imagine The West Wing peopled entirely by Entourage’s Ari Gold, and you get the general idea. Strangelove works its way towards a conclusion that makes us choke on our laughter, as we look around and realize what we’ve allowed ourselves to be entertained by. In the Loop never quite offers a similar moment of clarity – it’s content to remain in its hermetically sealed world of ticked-off characters talking shit to one another. Lacking dramatic shape or purpose, its only real weapon is the sheer energy with which they rack up the punchlines, and that can’t help but flag as the film meanders towards its finale; after all the lubricated horse cock and poodle-fucking jokes, what, really, are we left with? But again, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh quite a bit, especially in the first hour. Watching a bunch of embittered, sarcastic Type A jackwads going around hurling funny insults at one another certainly has its place.

Screengrab at Sundance: Half Full and All That...

bilge — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I’ve already discussed the fact that I consider this year’s Sundance lineup to be an exceptionally strong one. And many of the discussions I’ve had with other critics have confirmed this. There have been a couple of notable sales: Antonie Fuqua's operatic cop epic Brooklyn’s Finest went for somewhere south of $5 million, and the delirious blaxploitation satire Black Dynamite went for $2 million after a rousing midnight screening. The widely-acclaimed Push will, when all’s said and done, go for a decent amount, too, and there have been reports of a potential simmering bidding war over An Education. But because this year’s Sundance has so far lacked the huge sales that marked previous festivals, there will no doubt be grousing from some quarters about the fest being an underwhelming one.

Don’t believe their lies. There are many reasons why the big sales don’t seem to be occurring. For starters, there hasn’t been one film so far that has completely broken out ahead of the pack, a la Little Miss Sunshine or Napoleon Dynamite. Instead, what we’re seeing is a consistent stream of solid work. That may not make for $10 million sales, but it does make for good filmmaking. Furthermore, the economy is crap and buyers are reluctant to spend too much money. Plus, there are fewer of them out here, which means fewer bidding wars. It would be a shame if all this put a shadow on what has been, by almost all accounts, a sterling lineup.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Don't Let Me Drown

bilge — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

It’s become par for the course to use words like “electrifying” and “explosive” when discussing dramatic debuts at Sundance – directorial or otherwise – but director Cruz Angeles’s engagingly acted, beautifully made competition title Don’t Let Me Drown comes from a place of such understated honesty that breathless adjectives feel cheap around it. And yet I’d be lying if my heart didn’t race from the sheer joy of discovery as I watched it.

On the surface, it’s a tale we’ve probably seen in umpteen manifestations before. Lalo (E.J. Bonilla), a Mexican teen, and Stefanie (Gleendilys Inoa), a Dominican girl, fall in puppy love in inner-city Brooklyn. Her father is stern and abusive and doesn’t want her seeing anybody; his mother doesn’t like the idea of him dating a black girl. Add to that a post-9/11 backdrop (his father was a janitor at the WTC and is now working cleanup at Ground Zero, her older sister was killed during the attack) and the fact that Lalo’s best friend Jonathan (Dennis Kellum) is also Stefanie’s cousin, and Angeles seems to be setting himself up a minefield of cliches that no mere mortal filmmaker can navigate.

Such a cursory description does the film no justice, however, because Angeles has a soft touch that feels decidedly old school. This isn’t one of those films where handheld cameras wander the streets of Brooklyn focusing and refocusing on an actor’s ear. The shots feel composed, like someone actually thought about where to place the camera before starting a scene. Little bits of character detail intrude on the frame or the background; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Angeles is a fan of Italian Neorealism, as he manages a similar kind of classical precision here, one that manages to preserve a character’s dignity while still allowing a story to emerge. That’s not to say, however, that the film lacks spontaneity. Indeed, every exchange brings with it a small moment of surprise – an unexpected line of dialogue, an unforeseen narrative development, or maybe just a glance – that the film, for all the indie portent of its plot, feels like the freshest thing in years. It’s perhaps too small to be some kind of breakout hit, but it’d be a crime if it didn’t get a proper release.

Screengrab at Sundance: Grumbling About the Grind

bilge — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

Is it just me, or am I sensing more of a sense of burnout from the other journos here at Sundance than in previous years? It seems as if every other discussion I have with another writer centers on the impossibility of filing or posting timely copy and still managing to see films. People are harried, bleary-eyed, sweaty, and just plain exhausted. This has always been part of the Sundance experience, but it seems to have reached epidemic proportions this year. Why was this not that big a problem in the past? Maybe because the immediacy of the news cycle has become a bit more immediate over the past couple of years. Between Twittering, blogging, and reviewing, is there any time left to just watch something? It's also a fact that some writers who in the past simply covered Sundance for post-festival print packages are now required to blog about it for their outlets on a regular basis. I've always come here as a blogger, so this hasn't been much of an adjustment for me.

There is one thing everyone seems to agree on, though, and it is that wireless service is ridiculously spotty this year. (Jeff Wells has already had a borderline nervous breakdown over crap wi-fi experiences.) Even the Marriott Hotel, where the Festival Headquarters is located, seems to be experiencing slow speeds. (My hotel room’s connection doesn’t work at all, which totally fucking sucks.)

My way of keeping things manageable has been to try and stay mostly in the Fest HQ-Press Screening venues. This keeps me away from Main Street much of the time, which means that I don't necessarily get as much of the "color" of Sundance as maybe I should. (If you want to spot celebrities and get a sense of the crowds, Main St. is the place to be.) But I get to see the movies, which is fine by me.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of The Greatest

bilge — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

Shana Feste’s The Greatest came to Sundance trailing a cloud of buzz, in part because of fest director Geoffrey Gilmore’s gushing descrip ti o n of the film in the festival guide. So imagine my surprise when the film turned out to be a variation on Ordinary People, only significantly less stylistically assured. (Fuck you. Redford’s film is stylistically assured.) Here, Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan play the parents of an 18-year-old boy killed in a horrific car accident during the film’s opening scene. When his girlfriend turns out to be pregnant and with nowhere to go, they bring her in to their family. Wackiness most certainly does not ensue.

To be fair, grief is always a hard subject to tackle onscreen, always carrying with it the slight whiff of exploitation, and Feste’s story appears to come from an honest place. The tone varies sharply, perhaps by design – the main conflict in the film is a strange war of attrition between Brosnan and Sarandon’s characters. She wants to indulge her pain to the fullest, wanting to know as much about her son’s final moments as possible. In her quest to do so, she finds the man who crashed into the car (Michael Shannon), who himself is comatose, and begins to nurture and read to him. (In what appears to be an awkward narrative oversight, the film never explains how Shannon’s character went from being fully conscious and active following the accident, even going so far as to walk over to the boy, give him his coat and – we later learn – talk to him, only to somehow wind up in a months-long coma.)

In truth, though, Sarandon has done the grieving mother role before – many, many times – and it’s hard not to think of films like Lorenzo’s Oil or Moonlight Mile or Safe Passage while watching her. That sense of familiarity with her performance works against the film’s attempts to convey the upheaval in its characters’ lives. No, it’s actually Brosnan who makes the film, and without him in it, I’m not sure I would have been able to take it at all seriously. As a math professor who finds obsessive comfort in numbers, the actor turns his preternatural cool into a weapon; his aloofness here comes not from confidence but from a deep, unsettling awkwardness. When he does finally break down, it’s painful and clumsy, and we want him to go back to holding it all in. But that seems to be partly the point. His presence here takes what might have been an agonizingly obvious drama of grief and threatens to turn it into something altogether more surprising.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Tyson

bilge — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

James Toback has always seemed like a documentary filmmaker trapped in a narrative filmmaker’s body. The most exciting parts of his films have always been those moments when reality intrudes: Mike Tyson suddenly punching out Robert Downey, Jr., in Black and White immediately comes to mind, but there are others. So it comes as little surprise that the maverick director’s documentary portrait Tyson might just be the best thing he’s done to date. Featuring an extended interview with the former heavyweight champ at his most candid and eloquent, Tyson is unafraid to just put its subject center stage and let him go.

Toback does give us archival footage of Tyson’s famous fights, as he should, and the sight of Tyson at the height of his powers, like a small hurricane of anger let loose in the ring, still carries with it an extraordinary charge. And this is where Toback’s narrative skills come into play: Archival footage plays out almost as if we’re watching Iron Mike’s own memories, and it helps give his journey shape.

Tyson admits that he’s a recovering addict, and one wonders to what extent Toback, a man who’s famously struggled with his own addictions over the years, is using the film as a kind of exorcism of his own demons. But there’s something genuinely confrontational about the way Toback films the champ. Tyson talks about all the ways in which he’s changed, and insists on a newfound humility, but Toback’s direct style suggests that the filmmaker doesn’t see him as a fallen, broken soul at all. With this film, Mike Tyson becomes yet another of the unapologetic fuck-ups that people Toback’s films. Iron Mike may be repentant, but Toback seems to suggest that it was all worth it for the story. He might just be right.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Moon

bilge — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

To be fair, it’s hard not to get excited – or at the very least just a little curious – about an indie sci-fi flick starring Sam Rockwell and directed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones. For all that, though, Moon turns out to be a curiously bloodless affair – precisely directed, expertly acted, but cold to the touch, perhaps by design.

As Sam Bell, the sole occupant of a lunar mining base where he’s helping harvest energy from the moon’s surface, Rockwell has to give us both a sense of his dreary, solitary existence (the job is a three-year contract) and the calmly methodical personality trait demanded of space travelers. In other words, he has to do what Keir Dullea did in 2001: A Space Odyssey – but he also has to find a way to carry the film’s emotional weight, since he’s all we got. (Dullea, at the very least, had Gary Lockwood and Strauss to keep him company.) Rockwell does what he can – when he attempts to talk to his wife and daughter on Earth, we do get a sense of his longing. By contrast, Gary Lockwood’s response to an intra-galactic transmission from mom and dad in 2001 was comically flat.

These 2001 references aren’t just obligatory; Moon replicates or references so many of the Kubrick film’s elements (it even has a dry shipboard computer, Gertie, voiced by Kevin Spacey) that it sets up strange narrative expectations; such aggressive referentiality is often a sign that a film is about to take a sharp left turn at some point. For my part, I kept waiting for it to turn into The Truman Show. It doesn’t do that (sigh), but it does contain two major twists -- both of which are somewhat predictable, though still not worth giving away. Let’s just say that Sam is not quite alone.

Jones does have a deft stylistic touch; the film feels composed without being showy, and the chilly aura of the moonbase certainly comes through. None of this is particularly original, mind you, except for the fact that this is a sci-fi film made for a low budget that never betrays its price tag: One suspects that Steven Soderbergh spent many times more on his remake of Solaris and got pretty much the same look. Come to think of it, the glacial, submerged melodrama of Soderbergh’s film might make for a better comparison than the Kubrick. Save for the presence of Rockwell, who has slowly become one of our finest actors and almost saves the day here.

So why then did Moon fall so flat for me? Perhaps because it didn’t quite get to where it felt like it needed to be going. It starts off as a film about alienation, but as the story progresses, it becomes more a film about co-dependence. (It is, after all, called Moon.) But the style of the film still seems stuck in that glacial register where everything is static, haunted, and silent. This seems par for the course with “thinking man’s sci-fi” films, which suggests that genre fans will enjoy it more. But I needed something more alive.

Screengrab at Sundance: A Quick Start to a Slow Festival?

bilge — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:50:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

The big dirty secret of this year’s Sundance Film Festival is actually that it may be one of the better fest lineups in recent memory. The first few days at the festival tend to be ones of disappointment, but the films this year seem to be challenging that assumption. At least so far.

Having seen over a dozen of the films even before I left New York, I was suspecting this might happen. The docs slate, as usual, is loaded with interesting work, but even a number of the narrative features screened in advance left most critics impressed. In the Loop and Bronson, in particular, are two films that emerged from their New York screenings with deafening buzz. More on those as the festival rolls along. (I actually haven’t seen them yet.)

As for crowds, the rumors of a stripped-down festival in which everyone is reeling from a combination of financial ruin and a looming boycott of All Things Mormon don’t appear be carrying much weight either. Sure, a lot of old Sundance faces are missing, and this is the weekend, but the crowds seem robust. (The buses are certainly still packed. Fuck.)

The first day of the festival brought a number of well-received premieres, with Lee Daniels's coming-of-age melodrama Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, Lynn Shelton's bros-doing-gay-porn comedy Humpday, and Antoine Fuqua's cop epic Brooklyn’s Finest all generating a significant degree of buzz. Press screenings for the African thriller Johnny Mad Dog and the Sam Rockwell sci-fi drama Moon also left a number of critics impressed. I'll have more on these soon as well, but for now, the big acquisitions heat seems to be centered around Push and Humpday. The former in particular counts as a surprise, since it features a performance by Mariah Carey -- pretty much never a good sign -- and was directed by former producer Daniels, whose first directorial outing, the Cuba Gooding, Jr., hitman melodrama Shadowboxer, left, uh, something to be desired.

Watching "The Watchman": An Interview with Kent M. Beeson

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In case you’ve slept through this past weekend, the summer movie season got off to a roaring start with the big-budget adaptation of Iron Man. With many more comic book movies in store this summer, and even more after that, I figured it was about time to catch up with former Screengrab contributor and all around good dude Kent M. Beeson. As a comic-book fan and movie buff of long standing, Kent recently secured a position with the Web site comiXology, writing a bi-weekly column entitled The Watchman. Kent was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule- which also includes numerous freelance jobs as well as a wife and 14-month-old daughter- to conduct this interview via e-Mail.

How did you get your position with Comixology?

Dumb luck, if you ask me! Peter Jaffe, the Online Content Editor for Comixology, asked former ScreenGrab editor Bilge Ebiri to recommend someone to cover film and TV for Comixology, and he named me. I'd done some writing for ScreenGrab, including several on comic books, so I suppose that's why name came up. if I had to guess, I'd say that my ScreenGrab posts on the Watchmen and Shazam! movies had something to do with it, but really, I have no idea.

Why do you suppose Hollywood has made so many comic book movies in the past few years?

I suppose the standard reasons are that the executives greenlighting these movies are the ones that grew up in the 70s and 80s, and grew up reading these comics, coupled with CGI that lets filmmakers show just about anything they can imagine. When those two moments in history coincided, it was bound to be a fertile period. What's really interesting to me, though, isn't that so many comic book movies are being made, but just how important fidelity to the source material has become. It still boggles my mind that Zack Snyder is keeping Watchmen in the 80s -- that never would have happened just a few years ago. We've come a long way from the aborted Tim Burton Superman with Nicolas Cage in a freaky black suit. But even this is a bit of a quirk of history -- I don't think we'd be seeing so many faithful adaptations if it weren't for Bryan Singer's X-Men showing it could be done and Raimi's Spider-Man showing just how friggin' huge it could be.

What are your favorite comic books?

Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, comic or otherwise. Paul Smith's run on X-Men -- I think I might prefer it to Byrne's, actually. Ambush Bug was way ahead of its time. One I loved back in the day, that seems to have been forgotten, was an horror anthology called Wasteland. It was written by John Ostrander and, of all people, improv pioneer Del Close. Some really twisted shit -- I can still remember one story called "R.Ab" that is just... soul-crushingly dark. Like Idiocracy without the safety of the comedy. I always thought this is what reading the E.C. comics back in the day must've been like.

Favorite comic book movies?

The stupidly-titled X2 is, fortunately, stupidly awesome. Spider-Man, I can watch over and over. Akira is great, but it's animated, so maybe that shouldn't count. I have a soft spot for Batman Returns, but the unfortunate practice of overloading a film with villains can be laid squarely at its feet.

Best adaptation?

Spider-Man is the best, I think, but it's adapting a character and his world and not so much a single story (other than the origin), so if you eliminate those, I guess that leaves me with Sin City. Visually, it's breath-taking and kind of addictive -- it's hard to look away from it when it's on. More importantly, though, it turned a series of borderline-unreadable books into something pleasing.

Most underappreciated/overappreciated comic book movies?

Let me go ahead and catch hell from two different camps. The first Superman movie is pretty terrific for about forty minutes when dealing with his origin, but once Luthor enters the picture, it gets too jokey and lame. Reeve and Kidder are impeccable, however. And Ghost World is pretty much ruined by Zwigoff's cheap misanthropy. I mean, Clowes isn't exactly Mr. Positive, but it's clear from the book that he's trying to find some kind of hope. Zwigoff buries it under shots of pregnant women smoking and Blockbuster gags that would never have made it past the Mad TV writing room. There's a reason Bad Santa works -- it's all misanthropy.

I think Hellboy is a bit underappreciated. Considering that the comic isn't very well-written and has one of the most non-sensical origin stories ever -- Mignola came up with the look of the character first and made up everything after, and it shows -- it holds together pretty well. Del Toro's really coming into his own, he's starting to find just what he's capable of, so I'm looking forward to Hellboy II.

When a comic book movie doesn't remain true to its source, how difficult is it for you to turn off your comic book side and simply appreciate it as a movie?

Well, my attack plan for the stuff I'm unfamiliar with -- like Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, or the upcoming Wanted -- is to watch the movie first. I want to be able to enjoy the movie -- or not -- as a movie first, without any baggage, which is how most viewers are going to see these things anyway. And then I go back to the comic. The comic is usually going to have more information anyway, and I don't need to bring that into the movie. I actually started watching Persepolis after reading the first 20 pages or so of the comic, and it totally fucked it up for me -- I had to go back and see it again to fully appreciate how well the filmmakers were able to streamline the story for the movie. Luckily, most comic movies are adapting characters and not specific stories, so it's pretty easy to turn off the preconceptions.

Obviously, with something like Watchmen, that's not going to be possible. I'm not sure how that's going to work. I might have to conk myself on the head and induce amnesia just before I walk into the theater.

What big-screen comic book adaptations have actually improved on their sources?

I just finished the original A History of Violence, and wow, what a stinker. The movie pretty much repudiates the source, which, admittedly, is an interesting way to go about adapting something. Sin City -- well, my loathing of Frank Miller runs pretty deep, so it was great to see such a tiring and self-important comic turned into high camp by simply giving the thing motion. Whenever I see Clive Owen float down to the street in his red shoes, I crack up.

In your opinion, what are the keys to making a successful comic book adaptation?

Jesus, I really have no idea. The first thing that comes to mind is balance -- knowing when to be faithful to the source, and when to realize, hey, this has to work as a movie first and foremost, and just go off. A History of Violence is pretty faithful for the first 1/3 of the book, then it jettisons the rest, to its credit. I don't think the adaptation of The New Frontier went far enough -- there were small changes here and there that indicated that they knew the story wasn't going to work as is, but they really should have rethought the whole thing from top to bottom. But, saying that, I bet we'll see (if we haven't already) a movie that either is completely faithful or totally throws everything out but the title and works perfectly well.

Now that Watchmen is being made, what are some of your other dream adaptations?

I want to say FLCL, but the comic came later. Does Cowboy Bebop count? It was a serialized manga first. I could totally see an adaptation with, say, Ryan Gosling as Spike, Selma Blair as Faye and The Rock as Jet. I think The Rock is underrated as a performer -- for someone who was supposed to be Schwarzenegger's heir apparent, he displays more genuine warmth and a sense of humor about himself than Arnold ever did. While Jet is a badass, he's still essentially the mother of the group, and it'd be interesting to see him in a movie where his physicality is in strict contrast to his role. Matthew Vaughn is doing Thor, but I'd kill for a Gilliam version -- nobody does giants better, and I'd love to see them get their ass kicked by a blonde dude with a hammer.

The Watchman runs every other Wednesday on comiXology. Kent’s piece on Iron Man will run this week.

Memoirs of a Movie Ape

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Being a mime in the movie business usually entails getting punched in the face, but Dan Richter managed to parlay his trapped-in-an-invisible-box skills into a key role in “one of the most influential and important sequences in film history.” No, not the tennis scene from Blow-Up; you’ll remember Richter for hooting, beating his chest and – most famously – throwing a bone in the air.

Not only did Richter play “Moonwatcher,” the ape-man who invents weapons of mass destruction in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, he also choreographed the “Dawn of Man” sequence that opens the picture. “It so happened I was teaching private classes in mime in London at the time,” Richter told our man Bilge Ebiri at New York magazine’s Vulture blog. “Anyway, I was asked if I would go out and let Stanley pick my brain. I said, "If you give me twenty minutes, a stage, leotards, and some towels, I can show you how to do it." So he hired me to choreograph it, and eventually talked me into playing the part of Moonwatcher as well.”

Most of us probably assumed notorious control freak Kubrick trained his own apes for the film or even built a set of mecha-monkeys in his basement, but in fact Richter conducted his own little Full Metal Jacket boot camp for his fellow ape-men. And although he didn’t design the makeup – that was Stuart Freeborn’s work – he’s still a little miffed that Planet of the Apes wound up with the Oscar for Best Makeup. “It was so below what we were doing! Also, I'll tell you something else: We had stuff stolen. I can't say it was Planet of the Apes, but they were the only other movie shooting at the same time and same place we were. Stanley and I even had someone steal a mask and some ape hands right out from under our noses on the backlot, where someone had hid in a drainage ditch.”

If only the damn dirty apes had kept their stinkin’ paws on, that never would have happened.

Screengrab Review: Funny Games

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:15:00 GMT

Review by Bilge Ebiri

Full disclosure: despite my fondness for the original, I had to leave Michael Haneke's remake of his own film Funny Games before its crazed, depressing finale. Ordinarily, this would probably be a deal-breaker for a review, but in this unique instance, where the filmmaker seems to be deliberately daring his audience to abandon his film, there was something strangely gratifying about bailing on it.

There was also an added dimension to my departure; in effect, I had already seen this film. No, I hadn't technically seen this particular one, with this unique IMDb ID number. But there's no doubt about it: this is the same movie. A wealthy couple (Tim Roth and Naomi Watts) and their young son go up to their fancy cottage. A couple of fey, eerily polite preppies (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) show up to ask for eggs. Then they capture and torture the family. And thus is bourgeois society and the American culture of violence critiqued. (Sort of. More on that later.) Other than the fact that the actors are different (though in effect giving the same performances as their Teutonic counterparts) and the dialogue is now in English, Haneke has rendered his original shot for shot, this time with the full power of an American distributor behind him. (He probably got paid a lot more for this one, too.)

But in doing so, Haneke has done a disservice to his original vision: no longer is Funny Games the demented little experiment in suspense that made it a cult film for those of us who enjoy being abused by our European auteurs. Now, at least if you've seen the original, it feels like some weird old joke that no longer works. Devoid of the surprise element, Haneke's narrative transgressions just feel like tired, empty provocations. Gone is the feeling of having been ensnared in some stifling, terrifying cinematic trap. Now we know there's light on the other side of the door, and we know that we can leave.

Unless, that is, you've bought into the least interesting part of Haneke's thesis (and, arguably, the least appealing aspect of his work in general). The presskit for Funny Games offers up a number of chestnuts about how the film should always have been an American film in the first place, because it was in effect critiquing the violence and bloodlust of American films. By that logic, Haneke has now heroically entered the belly of the beast, like some grizzled Luke Skywalker, ready to fire his neutron bomb into the heart of pop culture's bloodsoaked Death Star. And that you owe it to yourself to see the movie again just to see what kind of effect it has on those evil, evil American audiences. (Oh, and by the way, please give us your money. Pleeease.)

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. Haneke's scolding pedantry has always rung false — it's hard to buy into the notion that the director of The Piano Teacher and Benny's Video is in truth some concerned, avuncular softy who makes violent films just to criticize his audiences' fondness for same. If this remake of Funny Games proves insight into anything, it's the degree to which Haneke's work had steadily advanced since the original, gaining resonance and complexity. Better to forget about this tired regression and move on. — Bilge Ebiri

Screengrab Review: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Review by Bilge Ebiri

How ironic that a film so determinedly old-fashioned should be undone, at least in part, by lack of style. Directed by Bharat Nalluri and adapted by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy from Winifred Watson's novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is eager to recreate the glories of a different time, and a different era of moviemaking. Complete with rapid, witty dialogue and mannered performances, Miss Pettigrew concerns a hapless London governess (Frances McDormand) who winds up, during the Blitz, becoming social secretary to a glitzy, ditzy actress (Amy Adams) and helping her juggle a rather complex love life. It could have succeeded, were it not for its singularly drab visuals and its leaden rhythms. It's a TV movie posing as a '40s bedroom farce. Despite a whole set of terrific performances and a sparkling script, it fails to recreate the excitement of the movies' golden age.

The very American McDormand is an odd choice as the titular failed nanny, but the casting works: she's always possessed a keen ability to convey proletarian desperation with a quiet sense of grace and charm. Similarly, Adams yet again delivers a performance that simultaneously draws you in and winks at you not to take her too seriously. All that said, the true standout here is the always estimable Shirley Henderson, who finds humanity in a rather thankless part, as a scheming socialite who winds up battling Pettigrew for the affections of underwear tycoon Ciaran Hinds (also excellent).

These great performances really should have resulted in a film that raised the pulse a bit more. But Nalluri's main dictum appears to be to not get in the way; usually an admirable philosophy, but nearly disastrous in this case, where style and dash are key to the type of film he's trying to create. Miss Pettigrew carries its viewer along, for the most part, but in order to truly work, it needed to weave an illusion around us, beguile us with the plastic facts of this very plastic world. That it most decidedly doesn't, and the result feels workmanlike — something decidedly less than special. — Bilge Ebiri

The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History, Part 2

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS (1966)

The great Ennio Morricone has contributed to some of the greatest opening credit sequences of all time, but the opening to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows holds a special place in the hearts of anyone who has seen and heard it. Here, in tune with Pasolini’s conception of the film as “a comic opera,” the credits are actually sung, in a boisterous vocal performance (courtesy of the great Domenico Modugno) that ranges from cackling laughter to pronounced wail to gentle whisper. Reminiscent of both the rhythmic Spaghetti Western scores Morricone was becoming famous for and the more wacked-out electronic experimentation he was beginning to dabble in, it also displays a weirdo playfulness that is pure Pasolini. Indeed, try to imagine what’s going through the head of this fellow, as he performs this strangest of compositions in concert with Morricone, decades later.

RAGING BULL (1980)

With Martin Scorsese directing and Michael Chapman doing the cinematography, it’s no surprise that the Jake LaMotta biopic has opening credits that are a treat for the eyes (and they’re tremendously aided by the simple choice of making the title of the film show up in red against the black and white of the rest of the sequence, another little touch that makes the whole so incredibly memorable). The ears are also given their due, with the selection of the intermezzo from Pietro Mascagani’s Cavalleria Rusticana providing a mournful, rising sound against which the slow-motion camerawork and the silently exploding flash bulbs play like a dream. But the truly astonishing thing about the opening credit sequence of Raging Bull is how perfectly and precisely it echoes the thematic content of the film: the ring seems impossibly huge, almost as if it’s an open field, but to Jake LaMotta – a snarling, raging animal even before the fight starts, bounding about and throwing phantom punches, champing at the bit for the violence to start – it’s a cage that stifles him, that can barely contain him. Fighting is as close as he gets to Heaven, yet smoke encircles the arena and transforms it into Hell; and while he is at his greatest, his most legendary, in the ring, he seems somehow tiny against its permanence, and he grows as he dances, faceless, towards the camera, only to shrink again into anonymity and nothingness as he once again drifts away. It’s as if the entire film and everything it has to say is contained in these two and a half minutes.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Even the stinkiest of Spike Lee joints generally boast memorable opening credits; think of the kids playing street games like hopscotch and double-dutch in the otherwise problematic Crooklyn, or the unlikely slice of Americana – a lyrical slo-mo basketball montage scored to Aaron Copland’s “John Henry” – that opens He Got Game. So it’s no surprise that Lee’s finest film features one of the most vivid, arresting main title sequences of the past 20 years. Lee obviously knew he had created an incendiary piece of work, and determined to grab the audience by the throat right from the beginning as the pulsating, near-apocalyptic beat of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” kicks in on the soundtrack, accompanied by a take-no-prisoners one-woman dance-off. Alternately clad in colorful, curve-hugging tights and boxing apparel, Rosie Perez embodies the tale of tensions boiling over on a hot summer day with her aggressive, near-violent gyrations. This was Perez’s first screen appearance; it’s hard to imagine a more mesmerizing introduction.

SE7EN (1995)

It’s hard to believe how long ago Se7en was. It was not only pre-Brangelina, it was pre-Brad&Jen – it was, in fact, circa Brad and Gwyneth. It was before the gruesome goresploitation of all the Saw flicks and before the mind-f@#$ing of Memento. And the opening credits alerted you right away: you were watching something different. Someone was going to great detail to set a tone, and the tone made you uneasy. The jittery stop-motion, the yellowed pages, hand-scratched letters, red darkroom light, and the Nine Inch Nails “Closer to God” remix, it was all indicative of some serious sociopathology. Like the Tom Waits song, “What’s he doing in there?”, you were privy to someone obsessively doing something. And you just knew all that snipping, scrawling photo-developing, photocopying, and bandaged-fingers hand-sewing would amount to no good. Se7en’s opening credits not only caught you up in the horror of the film before the film started, it also launched director Kyle Cooper’s career. It set the bar pretty high for all the horror flick opening credits that came later. For all we know, it may even be responsible for launching a different creepy trend: the scrap-booking craze.

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

A great title sequence does not guarantee a great movie, of course; sometimes the opening credits promise more than the filmmaker is able to deliver. The hypnotic opening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a prime example. Designed by Jay Johnson, the sequence is deceptively simple: a driver’s seat point-of-view of an endless road stretching out ahead into pitch blackness. Our progress is swift, but unsteady – we’re weaving all over the broken yellow line in the middle as credits swoop out of darkness ahead, pause briefly, then shatter against the windshield. David Bowie is no comfort on the radio, singing “I’m Deranged.” Wherever we’re going, something terrible is going to happen when we get there. Well, the movie that follows isn’t terrible; it has its moments, although on the whole it’s ponderous and half-baked, nowhere near the dangerous thrill ride promised by the opening. With its themes of identity confusion, it’s almost a rough draft of the much more successful Mulholland Drive; you almost wish Lynch could keep the title and the credits and take another crack at the rest of it.

PANIC ROOM (2002)

David Fincher, one of the most visually inventive directors working today, usually pulls out the stops when creating his title sequences (see Se7en, elsewhere on this list, as well as Fight Club and Zodiac). Panic Room, though a neat little thriller, isn’t his finest film, but it’s another fantastic accomplishment in terms of setting the table for what’s to come. Its very simple setup belies how incredibly effective it is: we see a number of exterior shots of Manhattan, as the names of the cast and crew appear in stylized photography throughout the sequence. But this bare-bones description in no way communicates the unsettling nature of the actual credits: the names appear as if they were floating in mid-air, part of the physical landscape of New York, carved into nothingness by the hand of God himself like the writing on the walls at Nebuchadnezzar’s palace as a quietly ominous score by the usually overwrought Howard Shore plays on the soundtrack. There’s a disturbing air to the entire sequence, even though nothing menacing actually happens (other than an almost subliminal glimpse of the film’s tagline – “FACE YOUR FEARS” – that appears on a Telex screen). A collaboration between Fincher, design company Picture Mill and special effects outfit Computer Café, the credits took almost a full year to finish, and the fruits of their labors are extremely rewarding, full of subtle menace and nameless dread.

- Bilge Ebiri, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Pazit Cahlon

Read Part 1 of this feature

Screengrab Review: Chop Shop

Peter Smith — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Review by Bilge Ebiri.

With 2006's Man Push Cart and his latest, Chop Shop, Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani has made a good case for himself as the neorealist poet laureate of New York's immigrant underside. Shot with breathtaking immediacy and featuring casts of non-professionals in real-life locations, Bahrani's films give narrative shape and compelling character shadings to documentary worlds. The result is something that feels like a new language being born, even though it owes a conscious debt to both non-fiction filmmakers like Shirley Clarke and realist narrative masters like John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica. Which is all just a fancy way of saying you really, really should not miss Chop Shop.

Bahrani trains his camera on parentless street kid Alejandro, aka Ale (Alejandro Polanco, in what must surely be the performance of the year, so far), who lives with his teenage sister Isamar above the auto-body shop where he often works. Both fiercely loyal and persistent, he's a street-hustling capitalist in training (see if you can spot the eerie similarities between this and There Will Be Blood), except that he's trying mainly to just keep his head above water. What dreams he has — and he does have them — are expressed with a poetic spareness that is both haunting and evocative. There isn't really that much plot to speak of — and yet the film is riveting, in part because Bahrani stays so focused on Ale's unflinching desire to stay ahead of the game.

Even so, the director still manages to effectively convey the broader world of the chop shops of Queens, so that a portrait of a community emerges from the film's accumulation of detail, character, and incident. And despite all the gritty despair and documentary intensity of Chop Shop, there's something lovely and almost mystical about Bahrani's vision: Like the best fairy tales, it is at heart a harrowing story about an innocent child in a scary world. Just don't look for any happy endings this time around. — Bilge Ebiri

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.

The Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray, KINGPIN (1996)

Bowling is enjoyed by millions of Americans of all ages, but in the Farrelly brothers' second film Kingpin, the professional bowling circuit is portrayed as being forever trapped in the seventies. Professional bowlers are seen as sleazeball would-be lounge lizards, dressing in garish clothes, doing cock-of-the-walk victory dances, and relentlessly chasing women when they're not bowling. But in Kingpin, the most telling remnant of their faded vocation is almost certainly the hairdos they sport. In the seventies, Harrelson's Roy Munson and Murray's Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken were well-coiffed slicksters. Two decades hence, they try, with varying degrees of success, to maintain their youthful appearance by engaging in that age-old solution practiced by creepy old men the world over — the comb over. True to their characters, Big Ern is better at maintaining the façade — his 'do looks like a woodland creature parked itself atop his pate, but at least it doesn't reflect the light. But once the rivals take to the lanes for the climactic showdown, Big Ern shows his true colors. Usually a cool customer, he lets the stress get the better of his hair, and it gradually begins to detach from his head, until it resembles the world's largest ripped seam. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet's Clementine speaks of having mood hair, but we'd like to think that, as with so many great things in cinema, Bill Murray got there first.

The Leningrad Cowboys, LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA

Rock'n'roll has a history of some pretty questionable hairdos, but none like those worn by the Leningrad Cowboys. Almost surely the most rockin' band to get their start north of the Arctic Circle, the Cowboys first entered the scene as the brainchild of director Aki Kaurismäki, who assembled some of his rocker pals for his 1989 stone-faced mockumentary, Leningrad Cowboys Go America. In the film, the Cowboys, tired of playing in Siberia, mount an American tour, despite their uncertain grasp of the English language. But if their songs mark them as foreigners, their hair is positively alien, with all members sporting uniform black pompadours, each with a large, unicorn-like forelock pointing out into the distance. As the film progresses, we discover that this hairdo is actually a congenital signifier of musical skill — the musically-challenged cousin who stalks the combo has but a tiny tuft to his name. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the U.S. tour is mostly a washout, but they'd find more enduring success at home following the fall of the Iron Curtain. They appeared in two more features, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and the concert film Total Balalaika Show, in which they teamed up with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, as well as over half a dozen music videos directed by Kaurismäki. Finally, the Cowboys made their triumphant return to the American stage for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All the while, the band remained true to their roots, never touching so much as a strand of those terrible, awesome hairdos.

Demi Moore, STRIPTEASE

Some might think the obvious choice here would be G.I. Jane, but somehow even a number-one blade on a pair of clippers only revealed that Demi Moore had a perfectly shaped head, and didn't diminish her hotness in the least. The same cannot be said for the bangs-and-blow-dry look of Striptease. Yeah, we know she's supposed to be playing a stripper, but those are clearly hair extensions, and not very flattering ones at that. Most people at the time were probably distracted by the reveal of Moore's surgically enhanced breasts (we liked the originals just fine, thank you) and there are certainly many places the finger of blame can be pointed in this nuclear stinkbomb of a movie — but you shouldn't underestimate just how bad a haircut had to be back then to make Demi Moore look unattractive.

Kevin Costner, THE BODYGUARD (1992)

The story behind one of Sir Kevin's more laughable haircuts (and, if you've seen his mullet in Robin Hood, that's really saying something) is actually kinda touching: The interracial romance-thriller The Bodyguard was originally conceived as a vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen way back during the 1970s. When the film was finally made in 1992, starring Costner and Whitney Houston, the star decided to try and channel McQueen; to do so he adopted the legendary icon of cool's trademark close-cropped haircut, which looked fantastic on McQueen but downright surreal on Costner. That said, Costner did have the last laugh: The Bodyguard was one of his worst films, and a stain on screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's career (it had been his first script — turns out he made up for it with The Empire Strikes Back), but it wound up being a huge hit. Indeed, we're not unconvinced that Costner's follicular follies in this film didn't lead indirectly to the George-Clooney-and-his-Caesar-haircut craze a couple of years later. There you go, folks — one more societal ill you can blame on Kevin Costner.

Nicolas Cage, NATIONAL TREASURE (2004)

Full disclosure: For weeks the spot for this entry stood empty on this list, with simply the words "Nicolas Cage, FILM TO BE DETERMINED LATER" holding its place. Because let's face it, any number of films starring Nicolas Cage from the past few years could go here — from the god-awful toupee he sported in Ghost Rider to the goofy balding curls he fretted over in Adaptation (of course, we don't hold that last one against him, not only because his bad hair was a plot point in that film, but also because we have this disturbing suspicion that, had nature been allowed to take its course, that's what Nicolas Cage's real hair might actually look like today). But we're going with National Treasure, for the simple fact that we spent the whole film staring at the slug-like patch of weave at the very tip of the actor's forehead. Seriously, this isn't hair, it's a lid. In these later years, Cage and Kevin Costner have switched places, but if you'd asked us fifteen years ago which of the two would allow himself to go bald gracefully while the other kept trying new ways to make himself look like he had something resembling a "full" "head" of "hair," the answer might have been different.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 1!

The Ten Worst Hairdos In Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we know, we know, that haircut soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Javier Bardem sports in the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is pretty disturbing and awful. But that's not even the worst haircut of Javier Bardem's career. (Read on!) Indeed, thinking about No Country got us thinking about some of the other truly monstrous 'dos we've encountered over the years on the screen. Here's our list of the Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History.

Mickey Rourke, YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

In his shambling youth, Mickey Rourke had a tough veneer with a sensitive undertone. He might have become a major movie star (as opposed to an object of cult worship in France and some of your better dorm rooms) in the Hollywood Heartthrob, Good-Bad-but-Not-Evil division, if he'd found a few more roles like the Baltimore honeydripper he played in Diner. But he drove his career into a ditch in a misguided effort to show what a tough, hard-slugging badass he was. His performance in this descent into the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone Thunderdome tells you everything about what went wrong, and much of it is concentrated on his hair. Twenty-eight years old when the film was shot, Rourke seemed a little young for the role of a much-decorated NYPD veteran who learned about the deviousness of the Asian criminal mind while serving in Vietnam, more than ten years earlier. So the decision was made to send him down to the high school and have the erasers clapped together over his head. His chalk-encrusted tresses here make his entrance a guaranteed laugh-getter, especially since he wears a hat that he must have borrowed from a flatfoot in a Bogart movie; when he plops it down onto his noggin, you expect a cloud of white dust to envelop the room. (In some scenes his hair darkens to a grayish tint and then goes white again, suggesting that the testosterone release of beating up Chinese punks and having sex with Dutch-Japanese-supermodel-slash-godawful-actress "Ariane" has youth-restoring benefits, but they wear off fast.)

Sean Penn, CARLITO'S WAY (1993)

Penn's performance as Al Pacino's fast-talking lawyer, who lusts after the bad-boy cred and sleazy thrills that his client has outgrown, is a beautiful comic turn, and the selflessness that makes it possible extends fully to his scalp. With a little mop of frizzy curlicues that suggest that he's had his pubic hair transplanted onto his head, he looks like Art Garfunkel, Superstar. (This effect was especially funny back in 1993, when it was possible to go from this movie to see Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and see that the actual Art Garfunkel had turned into Larry Fine, C.P.A.) His red mop grows more excitable and unruly as his character grows ever more dangerously unhinged. At the end, we hear a gunshot that signals that his character has been put out of Carlito's misery, and it is a great disappointment that the camera cuts away without showing his hair scurrying away under its own power. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to set up a sequel anymore.

Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO (1997)

You think his hair in No Country for Old Men is bad? Pfft. For some of us, our first impression of Javier Bardem was with another bad hair cut, the one he had in Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (aka Dance With the Devil). Playing a homicidal, kidnapping voodoo priest, Bardem sports an unholy mullet that could scar your eyeballs. It's a scary character, and the hair cut makes him scarier because you know he knows he can get away with it. And you fear what would happen if you accidentally made fun of it. Nobody's making "business in front, party in the back" jokes around him, we guarantee you.

Anne Bancroft in THE HINDENBURG (1975)

In 1937, a German passenger zeppelin caught fire and exploded as it was preparing to land in New Jersey. The catastrophe was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman, and in 1975, some master of taste and sensitivity got the inspiration of trying to tap into the mid-'70s "disaster movie" fad by making a period melodrama leading up to the horror. Looking to tone this idea up a little, the movie posits that the explosion was set off deliberately, as an act of anti-Nazi sabotage. An alternate theory is that the saboteur felt that it was necessary to wipe Anne Bancroft's hair off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost. Bancroft plays a German countess who is also a morphine addict, which must be pretty mild stuff compared to whatever the hell her hairdresser is on. Since this is the kind of movie that tries to impress you with the historical accuracy of its fashions and knick knacks, Bancroft's grisly coiffure must have been the result of intense research. But could the researchers not have kept it to themselves that the stylish German junkie of 1937 walked around looking, as Pauline Kael put it with baleful accuracy, as if she had "black potato chips stuck to her head"?

Keith Carradine in TROUBLE IN MIND (1986)

Every once in a while, the writer-director Alan Rudolph feels the need to make a movie so strange that all his other movies will consider reporting it to Homeland Security if it threatens to move into their neighborhood. At present, the holder of this title is probably his 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but Trouble in Mind, a sort-of-futuristic daydream set in "Rain City", a drizzly place where the local criminal kingpin is played by Divine, took on all comers for quite a while there. This is one of the few times Divine played a non-drag role, but he must have brought his make-up case with him, because it looks as if Carradine got into it and made a hell of a mess. He plays a dopey young punk from the sticks who falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes overly enamored of the decadent thrills that Rain City has to offer. The most garish of these are apparently dispensed at the local Supercuts, because he keeps disappearing for awhile and then returning with his hair drenched in sticky-looking glop and twisted into fun house shapes, with his face painted as if he'd gotten a job as David Bowie's stunt double on the cover of Aladdin Sane. All in all, this may have been Keith Carradine's unstudliest hour.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 2!

Critics Make Lists, Give Awards, Close Book on '07

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

It's nearing the end of the moviegoing year, and you know what that means- a heaping portion of top ten lists and awards from critics around the country. We here at Screengrab plan to post our best-of-2007 lists over the next week or so, but until that happens there are plenty of other year-in-review pieces all over the Internet that should tide you over. We won't link to every one of them here, but you can find two of our favorites after the break.

First off, there's the Critics' Poll over at Indiewire. Indiewire polled 106 critics for this survey of the best cinematic achievements of 2007, with participants including quite a few very cool critics, such as former Screengrab editor Bilge Ebiri, Screengrab contributor Vadim Rizov, and Nerve.com critic Mike D'Angelo. The Critics' Poll also does away with a longstanding awards tradition by refusing to separate awards by gender- the acting categories are simply "Best Performance" and "Best Supporting Performance." Best of all, there's plenty of commentary from the participating critics, providing plenty of fun for all you inveterate list junkies out there. You know who you are.

But for the more visually-oriented among you, deliverance has arrived in the form of Jim Emerson. Not content with simply banging out a list, Jim has cut together a short video of shots from his top ten movies of 2007, and invites everyone to try to guess the movies in question. As most of the shots Jim includes feature architecture rather than actors, this is harder than it sounds. I was able to identify 9 out of 10- see how you fare over at Jim's blog, Scanners.

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 2

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

LITTLE DORRIT (1988) Running time: 360 mins.

Charles Dickens, who peaked at the time of the serialization craze in English fiction, got paid by the word, and it's easy to imagine that's the reason for the vast, sprawling length of his many novels. But when writer/director Christine Edzard created her ambitious movie version of his Little Dorrit, she was determined not to short-change the complex richness of the narrative simply to bring the production in at a tidy two hours. After all, if Dickens took the time to make his legions of characters and mountains of subplots all come together like clockwork, why shouldn't she extend him the same courtesy? Clocking in at around six hours, Little Dorrit isn't just long for length's sake: it's in service of a cleverly ambiguous plot, split into two often conflicting points of view. Everyone brings their best game to Little Dorrit, from the set designers to the cinematographer, but especially the actors: for those who have a low tolerance for Dickens' wicked excess, twisted excursions and talky supporting characters, it's the acting, featuring a veritable Who's Who of quality British actors of the 1980s, that keeps you in your seat. Edzard may have learned her lesson — she never directed anything as ambitious again after this — but she did what she set out to do: create the most intricate, essential, and faithful recreation of a Dickens novel ever made.

WAR AND PEACE (1967) Running time: 414 mins.

Due to the limited commercial prospects for extra-long movies, most of the films on this list are relatively low-budget. But this wasn't the case for actor/director Sergei Bondarchuk's epic adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's literary masterwork. Far from it, in fact — the film had what was referred to as an "open budget," which basically meant that the entire Soviet film industry shut down to work on it. Estimates in 1967 put the budget of War and Peace at about $100 million; forty years of inflation puts it at no less than seven times that amount. But as the saying goes, every cent is up there on the screen. If nothing else, War and Peace is the biggest, grandest epic of all, boasting tens of thousands of actual soldiers in the battle scenes, some of the most opulent sets ever committed to film, and an awe-inspiring re-creation of the siege and burning of Moscow by Napoleon's army. But Bondarchuk's epic vision didn't stop with the size of the production. Instead, every frame of War and Peace represents the director's tribute to the irrepressible spirit of the Russian people, which managed to survive even the threats posed to it by Napoleon. Each of the film's larger-than-life performers reflects this idea, none more so than the incandescent Ludmilla Savelyeva, a ballerina who turned out to be the most perfect choice imaginable for the film's pivotal role of Natasha. War and Peace is huge but not plodding, a thrilling, emotionally satisfying populist drama that just happens to be seven hours long. It is that rarest of cinematic creatures — a film that actually does credit to the literary masterpiece that inspired it while standing as a masterpiece in its own right.

HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (1978) Running time: 442 mins.

Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour, twenty-two minute Hitler: A Film From Germany — or Our Hitler, as it was retitled for its American run — is a multi-part experimental feature consisting largely of monologues (performed by actors representing Hitler and others) meant to explore the meaning of Hitler's legacy and the sources of his appeal and fascination to the German people. Taking a page from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of the film's avenues of exploration is Nazism's banality, and Syberberg, a disciple of both Brecht and Richard Wagner — he followed this film up with a four-hour, fifteen-minute movie version of the opera Parsifal — has no fear of examining banality at a length and degree of detail that some might consider above and beyond the call of duty. Heralded by praise from Susan Sontag, and "presented" by Francis Ford Coppola, it arrived on these shores in 1980 as the official brainiac cinema experience of the year.

SATANTANGO (1994) Running time: 450 mins.

For years, Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour Satantango has been one of the great rites of passage for the serious cinephile. But while a long-ass black-and-white movie about a Hungarian farming commune might lead the uninitiated to expect a massive slog, the truth is that Satantango isn't nearly the frightening behemoth its reputation would suggest. To begin with, Tarr's style is gorgeous, with masterful use of long takes and silky-smooth Steadicam that gives the film a surprising amount of momentum. Tarr rarely keeps his camera still, following his characters on their journeys through life. The results can be hilarious (as in the famous barroom scene), or unbearably sad (like a scene between an ill-fated girl and her cat), or just plain hypnotic (who can forget a follow shot of three men walking down a road while discarded newspapers blow all around them?) But Satantango isn't simply an empty exercise in bravura filmmaking. Tarr's film is nothing less than a postmortem for Communism in Eastern Europe, the story of an aimless band of farmers who are inspired by a charismatic local to follow him, only to be suddenly abandoned, separated and scattered to the four winds. Satantango has been described as "not so much a movie as a place you visit," and it's a destination every true lover of film should make a journey to at least once.

EMPIRE (1964) Running time: 484 mins.

Watch the YouTube clip that accompanies this entry. Then watch it eighty more times. That's a rough approximation of the experience of watching Andy Warhol's silent-film triumph, Empire, which consists of over eight hours of a single shot of the Empire State Building, taken from late one evening until early the next morning. Even more maddening, the film is meant to be screened at a slower speed than it was filmed — the actual footage is only about six hours long. The first question that springs to everyone's mind upon hearing about Empire for the first time is: "Why would anyone want to film a skyscraper for eight hours?" To which the answer is: "Why would anyone want to paint a bunch of soup cans?" And the answer to that is: "Why would anyone want to make a bunch of soup cans?" Part of Warhol's particular genius, and the reason that he is such an important figure in modern art, is that he forced us to look at the things we had made, to see them with new eyes. In a sense, of course, like much conceptual art, Empire is something you know about, not something you actually sit down and watch: but if you give it the chance, it's a film that can almost literally hypnotize you with its simple beauty and repetitiveness. Warhol was trying to establish, as Tom Vick writes, that "the camera is a machine capable of paying attention to anything for any length of time." Warhol throws down a gauntlet with Empire, as he quietly did so often in his career, and asks us to watch our creations doing what we made them capable of doing.

SHOAH (1985) Running time: 503 mins.

Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film about the Holocaust attempts to redefine the documentary form and the whole accepted approach to its subject, allowing its interview subjects long, long takes in which to discuss their experiences and observations. When released to theaters in this country, the movie seemed to consume all the cultural oxygen in places, inspiring tributes that spilled over from the arts sections to the op-ed pages. Since then, Lanzmann has expanded it by six minutes while tinkering with its outtakes: he's carved two subsequent interview films, A Visitor from the Living (1997) and Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M (2001) out of the mountain of footage from which Shoah was assembled. (And Lanzmann himself can be seen onscreen in Marcel Ophuls's four-and-a-half-hour documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a film that shows his influence.)

OUT 1 (1971) Running time: 773 mins.

When you're making a list of great long films, not including at least one selection by Jacques Rivette is unthinkable. After all, here's a guy who regularly makes movies that are more than three hours long. But Out 1 is mammoth even by Rivette standards, an eight-part, nearly thirteen-hour beast of a film that's catnip for Rivette fans and damn near indecipherable for just about everyone else. Taking as his starting point Balzac's History of the Thirteen, Rivette begins the film with two rival theatrical troupes (one of which is staging Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes despite the fact that it only has six members), plus a con-artist and layabout played by Juliet Berto, and Jean-Pierre Leaud as a deaf-mute who plays an off-key harmonica for people in the street until they get annoyed enough to give him money. The narrative, such as it is, involves a shadowy organization called "The Thirteen," with various characters that are either part of The Thirteen, wish to join The Thirteen, or want to probe the mysteries of The Thirteen. Given Out 1's running time, you might think Rivette would provide some closure, but you'd be sorely mistaken. In Out 1, the narrative digressions and dead-ends ARE the story, and there are some real corkers — a theatre rehearsal that degenerates into animalistic grunts, an interview with a pompous Balzac expert played by Rivette's fellow critic-turned-filmmaker Eric Rohmer, an extended search and fruitless search for a larcenous troupe member — leading up to a final shot that's a cross between a winking grace note and an extended middle finger. Frankly, Rivette's fans (masochists that we are) wouldn't have it any other way. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the ever-lovely Berto, who spends much of the film running around in a pair of super-foxy striped jeans.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) Running time: 939 mins.

It's a bit unfair to call Ranier Werner Fassbinder's masterful adaptation of the Alfred Döblin novel the longest narrative film ever made, as some critics do. Berlin Alexanderplatz was conceived of and executed as a television mini-series (making tremendously long, ponderous TV movies was apparently all the rage in Germany around this time; Edgar Reitz's eleven-hour Heimat was made only four years later), and it's unlikely that even a provocateur like Fassbinder intended for anyone to sit through the whole thing at one go. Still, it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking regardless of your method of intake: marked by tremendous acting and incredibly inventive direction, Berlin Alexanderplatz is both a step away from Fassbinder's twisted takes on melodrama and a refinement of methods used in his previous films, most especially clever camera movements and long, discursive conversations. Following in the footsteps of Erich von Stroheim, Fassbinder attempted to make an absolutely faithful filmed version of his source novel, using a number of the book's interesting narrative techniques to create a digressive yet highly focused sense of place and time. This isn't the best place to start with Fassbinder, but it may be the best place to end: it was, in many ways, the movie he'd waited his whole life to make.

HONORABLE MENTION:

GREED (1924) Semi-Restored Running time: 239 mins; Original Running time: Long As Fuck

Anyone wondering why Erich von Stroheim became the model for the modern stereotype of the film director as demanding, egomaniacal slave-driver (complete with puffy pants, monocle, and thick Teutonic accent) need look no further than Greed. The first feature-length film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was meant to be of standard length — then, as now, around two hours — but von Stroheim would have none of it. So impressed was he by Frank Norris' novel of a love triangle destroyed after the sudden windfall of a lottery win, that he set out to recreate it, scene by scene and word for word: not as an adaptation, but literally as a visualization on screen of the entire novel. This necessitated, among other things, hiring a huge cast, defying the studio by shooting on location whenever possible, and spending a then-unheard-of half million dollars before turning in the completed product. And even then, MGM's troubles were just beginning: von Stroheim's initial cut of Greed was an astonishing ten hours long, likely the longest movie ever submitted to a major studio. The enraged executives demanded a new cut, and von Stroheim submitted an edit (which he considered a huge compromise) that was still over four hours long. The studio essentially banished him from the project after that, eventually releasing a two-hour cut that eliminated so many characters and subplots that it was nearly incomprehensible, and widely panned by the critics. Turner Entertainment released a 'restored' version of the second, four-hour cut of Greed a few years ago, using surviving footage, script, and still photographs, that suggests how good the original might have been. But we'll never really know — the vast majority of the reels from the ten-hour version were accidentally destroyed over fifty years ago by an MGM maintenance worker.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

There are long movies, and there are really long movies. But there's also that notorious third category: The Long-Ass Movie. You know them. Usually they have to be split into two or three parts. Sometimes they have to be released as mini-series, with abbreviated versions put out in theaters. Occasionally they're hacked to pieces by studios and distributors, and become founts of controversy. More often that not, they're made by Germans. (We're not kidding. Check the list.) And most of the time, though sadly not always, they're great — ambitious, sprawling, uncompromising, and riveting. There's something really special about a long-ass movie, which, for our purposes, we're classifying as a film over four hours long. You never forget the experience of sitting through it. We certainly didn't. Here's our list of the Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time.

HAMLET (1996) Running time: 242 mins.

It's highly unlikely that anyone in Shakespeare's time actually saw Hamlet in full. As many critics and biographers have noted, the full text of The Bard's masterpiece would run over four hours if performed — a prohibitive length even today, despite such modern conveniences as lighting, electricity, and weekends. Clocking in at a limber four hours and two minutes, Kenneth Branagh's full-text version of the play struck a remarkable balance: an uncompromised performance that was also relentlessly cinematic. Some called Branagh's camera tricks show-offy, but he was simply following in the footsteps of one of the great linguistic show-offs of all time. The film's baroque visual style complemented the verbal gymnastics of Shakespeare's sweet tongue, and the result is not only the most faithful adaptation of Shakespeare ever filmed, but also, for our money, one of the absolute best.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) Running time: 280 mins.

Don't laugh. The two-hour, thirty-eight-minute U.S. theatrical release version of Wim Wenders's insanely ambitious sci-fi epic romance was a messy, albeit fascinating, journey through an ultra-globalized millennial world, with William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin bouncing around the planet recording with a revolutionary camera designed to help blind people see, accompanied to snippets of songs from the director's favorite rock acts (Nick Cave, R.E.M., U2, etc. — the soundtrack CD for this thing was a mainstay in many a contemporaneous college dorm room). The full, nearly-five-hour version, it turns out, wasn't nearly so messy. Rather, it was a sober, compelling, and visionary lament for the ways in which the oncoming technological transformation of society would transform human contact; Wenders's portrait of a hyper-connected world predated the Internet revolution. More importantly, it had even more of that awesome music.

1900 (1976) Running time: 315 mins.

Unjustly tarred on its initial release as a disaster, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, a highly personal film despite its five-hour running time, has withstood the test of time far better than anyone would have expected. Its big-name cast, surprisingly, doesn't hold up particularly well — thanks to a sometimes shaky script and a not insignificant language barrier. But as an epic of great scope and a continuation of Bertolucci's tremendous visual-storytelling techniques, it's a raging success. Five hours fly by in the presence of such gorgeous filmmaking, thanks to the sensual, earthy tone of the film, the solid pacing, and the director's extreme care. Bertolucci apparently envisioned 1900 as his own response to the success of The Godfather — he would tell the modern history of Italy, just as Francis Ford Coppola had told the modern history of Italian-Americans, with a similar sense of range and scope and sweep. At the time of its release, no one would have credited Bertolucci's film as successful on that level, but if he'd had the foresight to do as Coppola did and release it as two separate films telling a single story, it's easy to imagine that 1900 would have enjoyed a much better critical reception.

NAPOLEON (1927) Running time: 330 mins.

Abel Gance was one of the towering French directors of the silent era, one of those pop-eyed geniuses whose only reservation about the movie medium was that it would be a shame if it turned out to have any boundaries at all. The massive epic that is now Gance's best-known work was originally intended to be only the first chapter in a multi-part historical epic consisting of six enormous features. You get a taste of what Gance hoped to achieve at the end of this picture, when three different projectors are used to show contrasting images on three screens, achieving something like a split screen image to the nth degree. Unfortunately, this silent landmark was completed the same year as The Jazz Singer, and Napoleon was released in America in a savagely truncated version that didn't even attempt to preserve the triple-projection imagery. Gance would continue to work, but most of his wildest ambitions would go unfunded and unfulfilled. He didn't become fully appreciated until the film historian Kevin Brownlow assembled a restored version that, with live musical accompaniment, played to ecstatic responses in packed theaters in 1980 and 1981. (Thankfully, Gance lived to see it — he died late in 1981.) That initial restoration ran five minutes short of four hours, but Brownlow kept going back, and by 2000 he had extended the film by another thirty-five minutes. It remains a thrilling mixture of audacious filmmaking, charming corn, and some very strange politics: Napoleon is so thrilled by the French Revolution that he sets out to bring democracy to other countries by invading them — evidence that the French, of all people, created the Bush Doctrine.

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) (2000) Running time: 345 mins.

As huge fans of Peter Watkins, we found that the number of Watkins-related items on Screengrab has been shockingly low of late, so we'll take any opportunity we can to plug his work. La Commune, his epic film about the Paris Commune of 1871, which in its full form runs five hours and forty-five minutes, is in many ways a summing-up of Watkins's career that tests the methods and techniques he'd developed over the course of more than thirty years. The Commune was a group of intellectuals, students and workers who took over a section of Paris in 1871 and formed an experimental government. True to form, Watkins took over an abandoned factory and staged the rise and fall of the "Commune" as covered and reported on by modern TV crews, who take turns interviewing the non-actors who represent the political leaders, the common people, the military forces working to smash the Commune, et al. He even tosses in a dandyish news anchor who spreads anti-Commune sentiment on a competing network, "Versailles TV." Ever the iconoclast, Watkins refuses to consign the fervor of Communards to the distant past, and by doing so he celebrates the revolutionary spirit both past and present, as when a discussion between the characters gives way to a contemporary debate about globalization. It may be the crowning achievement of one of the strangest film artists of his time — a man who sees himself as trying to bring history alive in order to educate the masses, but who has no apparent ability to make films in a way that might entice the masses to want to see them.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.

Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

Steve Martin's Nose in ROXANNE (1987)

This modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac is a comedy, so Martin's "C.D." doesn't have to die at the end or fail to get the girl. But he does have to go through the whole movie with a nose like a foot-long breadstick jutting out from the center of his face. As befits the non-tragic tone of the movie, the nose is too openly silly-looking to make Martin look ugly, though it does look unwieldy, especially in a shot where a bird perches on it and in a scene where Darryl Hannah slaps his face. (Instead of reacting to the slap by touching his cheek, his places his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if afraid that it might come flying off.) The nose also adds an unacknowledged layer of comedy to the happy ending: so this Cyrano gets his Roxanne, but how is he going to kiss her?

Alec Guinness's Teeth in THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

Leading a gang of blackguards who rent a room from a sweet old lady so they can use it as a gathering place to work on plans for their armored car heist, Guinness needs a physical quality to set him apart and clearly define him as team leader. He finds it in his enormous choppers, which serve as an unspoken reminder to the younger and stronger men in the room that if they give him any guff, he can always bite their heads off. Trying to follow in Guinness's footsteps in the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks affected a Colonel Sanders-from-Hell look, an oil-slick hairdo, and a laugh that seemed to be coming out of his ears, none of which served him half as well as Guinness's malignant bear-trap grin.

Mark Wahlberg's Penis, in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry saga Boogie Nights is many things to many people: an epic, a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, a period piece. But for a good part of its running time, we were a bit worried that the film was also going to be a Beckett-ian exercise in dislocation: Waiting for Godot, except this time Godot is a giant dong. Luckily, director Anderson knew the delicate balance he was striking here: a movie in which we constantly saw rising porn star Dirk Diggler's allegedly massive dick would have been exploitative and unreleasable; but to not show it would feel exploitative in a wholly different way. So, understanding the value of a good money shot, Anderson waited until the last moment of the film to reveal its ostensible protagonist. The result was dramatically sound, curiously poetic, and also broke new ground in male onscreen nudity. Of course, it was also a fake. A damn good fake. There are still people out there who think that grand revelation was Marky Mark's actual member. Some of them are probably hanging out in his rec room as we speak.

Orson Welles's Face in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Had he played the role of the brilliant but hopelessly corrupt border cop Hank Quinlan ten years later, Orson Welles wouldn't have needed any help from his makeup department. In 1958, though, the director still had yet to be completely ruined by rich food and high living, so he relied on padded clothing and tricky camera angles to make him look fat and shambolic, and layers and layers of prosthetics to give his face the appearance of an aging, gin-blossomed alcoholic. Quinlan's addiction to dandy candy and quicker liquor accounts for his puffy cheeks, bloated nose, and crooked teeth, and he looks like such a fright that even a long-in-the-tooth Marlene Dietrich is shocked at his appearance. Accompanied by a memorable fat-man gait, an out-of-breath voice and a tremendously ravaged performance, the prosthetics turned the director into a hulking parody of the man he would later become. Welles himself told this story: since filming often ran quite late (he did much of the principal photography at night to avoid the prying eyes of studio spies dispatched to keep him in line), one evening he found himself on the way to a dinner party while still wearing the bulbous nose and flappy cheeks of Hank Quinlan. Arriving home to greet his guests, one actress sized him up — having not seen him for several months — and said, through a terribly forced grin, "Oh, Orson! You look wonderful!"

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

There was a bit of brouhaha recently over Ryan Gosling's getting fired from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones for having packed on too much weight. The story has since been denied, so we don't know whom to believe in that dispute. It may have been apocryphal, but the incident did get us thinking about some of the more notable bodily transformations we've seen on film. And we're talking real transformations here. (Sorry, Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours and John Hurt's fake face in Elephant Man and Eddie Murphy's whole body in like every other movie.) We're talking De Niro eating his way through Italy to plump up for Raging Bull. We're talking Christian Bale starving himself silly for The Machinist. We're talking about actors so devoted to their craft (and, in at least one case, so utterly stupid) as to commit their bodies to real, physical changes for a part. Here are the Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film.

ROBERT DENIRO in RAGING BULL (1980)

When Robert DeNiro won an Academy Award for Best Actor in his role as tortured prizefighter Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, he found that after the ceremony, nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody was far more interested in discussing his role as would-be political assassin Travis Bickle in 1976's Taxi Driver — a role which allegedly inspired the actual assassination attempt of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley only days before. Now that things have lightened up a bit, and DeNiro isn't distracting everybody by making good movies anymore, his role as LaMotta has become the textbook case for total character immersion. To play the young, lean LaMotta, DeNiro worked his then-slender physique into even better condition, going through the actual workout regimen of a prizefighter (he even entered, and won, a handful of amateur bouts) and honing his body into a whipcord-thin, muscle-rippled wonder. Then, to play the older, decaying LaMotta, he put back all the weight and more, gaining a stunning sixty pounds and utterly transforming himself into a doughy blob of a man whose muscle had all collapsed into fat. There were many more sacrifices, mental and physical, made for Raging Bull: DeNiro really did bash his head into that concrete wall, and Joe Pesci broke a rib during an unsupervised fistfight. But it's the lightning-fast loss and gain of weight that's still remembered today, and which rang out like a challenge to other actors — one that would soon be answered.

VINCENT D'ONOFRIO in FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam-War epic still has a very mixed reputation. While it's no longer widely considered a failure, most critics still maintain that it's a mushy, aimless middle held together by an incredibly strong beginning and end. The anchor of the opening sequence, a brutal story of Marine Corps basic training, is the conflict between the relentless, abusive Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) and the slow, heavy recruit Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio). Both actors were appearing in their first major roles, but while Ermey had the distinct advantage of essentially playing himself, D'Onofrio transformed himself both psychologically and physically, from an urbane, gentle Brooklynite to a dull-witted, marginally psychotic southerner who needed only the right stimulus to be pushed over the edge. The fact that D'Onofrio broke Robert DeNiro's Raging Bull record by gaining seventy pounds to play Pyle sounds more impressive than it actually is — seventy pounds on his hulking, six-foot-four-inch frame wears a lot less visibly than does sixty pounds on DeNiro's much smaller 5'9" physique. Indeed, it's a testament to DeNiro's then-superhuman abilities that he managed to go through the entire cycle of transformation in half the time it took D'Onofrio, who needed a year and a half to gain, and then lose, the seventy pounds. But it's still an amazing accomplishment, one that helped yield the perfect body for one of the most memorable characters in the annals of war films.

LINDA HAMILTON in TERMINATOR 2 (1991)

To really appreciate Linda Hamilton's transformation from Sarah Connor in T1 to Sarah Connor in T2, you have to step back and remember the '80s. Sure, these days, when G. Stef has a one year old and a six-pack, muscles are practically de rigeur. But the '80s were the era of the twenty-minute workout: aerobics, jogging and jazzercize were the norm. Jane Fonda was the model of female fitness, and bouncing was a way of life. In T1, Linda Hamilton played a normal looking waitress with nice big eighties hair. Flash forward seven years to T2. To play Sarah Connor, the institutionalized warrior with Cassandra-like prophecies, Hamilton strength-trained till she sculpted her body into peak form. This was a new shape for a female movie star — muscles and sinews and veins, oh my! She was strong, agile, fast and fearless. And hot. She quickly re-set the standard for the female physique; magazine articles told women how to get a Sarah Connor-like body for summer. Did she pave the way for a rash of muscled heroines in leading roles on the big screen? Not quite — but she did her part. And her transformation was iconic enough to give Sarah Connor (the character) her own show in January '08 — sixteen years after Linda Hamilton shocked Hollywood with her abs and buns and everything else of steel.

MARIEL HEMINGWAY in STAR 80 (1983)

After her acclaimed performances in Manhattan and Personal Best, Mariel Hemingway was one of Hollywood's hottest young actresses. But the slender, girlish Hemingway would've been few people's ideal choice for the role of Dorothy Stratten, the ill-fated 1980 Playmate of the Year, in Bob Fosse's final directorial effort. All that changed when she received breast implants, which increased her cup size from an A to a C, the same size as Stratten's all-natural assets. Hemingway has insisted that her enlargement surgery has nothing to do with the role, but whether she did or not, it certainly made her more believable in the role. Hemingway gave one of her best performances as Stratten, but the film was largely reviled by critics and ignored by audiences, and her once-promising career faltered. Oh, Mariel — don't you know that you need to make yourself LESS alluring if you want Hollywood to love you? Star 80 has experienced a small critical resuscitation in recent years, but Hemingway, despite working steadily in the intervening decades, never managed to live up to the potential many had forecast for her. Nowadays, she's arguably as well-known for her yoga and self-help books as she is for her acting. A strange footnote in this story is the fate of her implants themselves. Following FDA warnings about silicone implants, Hemingway had hers replaced by noticeably smaller saline ones in 1993. In 2001, after one of the saline bags ruptured, they were removed altogether.

MICHAEL CAINE in EDUCATING RITA (1983)

Promoting this movie, in which he plays a middle-aged-going-on-elderly literary professor, Caine went on The Tonight Show and lamented that he had been forced to pack on the extra pounds and grow a beard for the role because it demanded that he look "unattractive." It says something about Caine's standing as an authoritative embodiment of manly cool that this remark was enough to inspire a national newspaper columnist to publish a crestfallen demand that he apologize to all bearded males. By De Niro standards, Caine's weight gain may not qualify as a jaw-dropping transformation, but because of the way Caine uses his physical equipment as an actor, it's actually one of the most effective ever caught on film. The professor is a drunk and a burnout who uses his education to keep the world at bay, and Caine uses his own flesh and hair as a metaphor for how emotionally armored he is against letting in anyone who might ultimately cause him pain. You may not realize just how effective a device it is until the final scene, after Rita (Julie Walters), the ambitious Liverpool hairdresser with whom he's bonded and who's now about to disappear from his life, forces him to let her give him a haircut and tame his unruly face fuzz. When she's done, the professor no longer looks the same, but because of the actor's deep immersion inside the character, he doesn't look quite like Michael Caine, either.

— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw