The Screengrab : brazil

LA Critics Go Wacky for WALL-E

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Certainly no one will be confusing the Los Angeles Film Critics Association with the Golden Globes this morning. The LA crit pick for best picture of the year is the little-known arthouse curiosity WALL-E, with the vaguely Scandinavian-sounding The Dark Knight as runner-up. When will these artsy-fartsy dweebs in their berets and monocles figure out that they’re simply out of touch with the movie-loving public?

Perhaps you sense sarcasm. It’s true, I am tweaking my West Coast brethren a bit for picking two of the year’s most popular movies – but I should state for the record that both WALL-E and The Dark Knight are still in the mix for my own Top 10 list, so I’m not really complaining that much about their choices. If this is truly the consensus of the group, then let it be; there’s no rule that says critics can’t prefer mainstream fare to more adventurous, innovative or difficult material, particularly if the latter was in short supply this year. But I do have suspicions. Suspicions that critics, who are losing jobs by the bushel as newspapers bleed red ink, may be playing it a little safe, lest they be deemed completely irrelevant sooner than later. Not all critics, certainly – but you would expect the ones who live at show biz ground zero to be particularly susceptible to such fears. It’s no big deal, maybe, but it is sobering to recall that it was this same group that bestowed Best Picture honors on Brazil based on an unauthorized outlaw screening, and perhaps saved it from being released in butchered form or not at all. What exactly are they doing for WALL-E and The Dark Knight? What undiscovered audience are they serving?

On the other coast, the Washington DC critics have weighed in, bestowing their top honors upon Slumdog Millionaire. The Broadcast Film Critics have announced their nominations; among the ten movies contending for Best Picture are the abovementioned lonely robot and grim vigilante, along with Milk, Doubt and The Wrestler, among others. The full lists of all the awards and critics prizes announced so far can be found at Movie City News.

Related:
Roger Ebert: The Death of the Film Critic is the Death of Society
Ever-Mysterious National Board of Review's Year-End Awards

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Whither Bill Forsyth? Withering, apparently: after a charming run of movies in the 1980s (including Gregory’s Girl, Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping), the Scottish director flamed out with 1993’s Being Human (a terrible film which, unsurprisingly, stars Robin Williams), disappearing for good after 1999’s Gregory’s Two Girls (which may or may not be terrible, since I only just learned of its existence through the Internet Movie Database). But Forsyth can make sequels and terrible Robin Williams movies from now until doomsday and he’ll still be one of my favorite directors of all time, if only for bringing Local Hero into existence. A simple but compelling vision of utopia, the film takes place in a gorgeous Scottish fishing village where everyone is welcome and accepted at the local ceilidh, from punk rockers and homeless beachcombers to American businessmen, Russian sailors, African preachers and pretty big city scientists who just might turn out to be mermaids. Movies (especially the Hollywood variety) are usually too impatient, loud and cynical to capture the best parts of actually being human – the beauty of a fantastic night sky, the electric giddiness of a new flirtation, the relaxed camaraderie of smart, decent people – but Forsyth seduces us with the salty sweetness of his celluloid world the way the fictional village of Ferness eventually seduces the film’s shaggy dog protagonist, Mac (played with deadpan cable-knit sweater warmth by the ever-reliable Peter Riegert), an oil company executive tasked with paving paradise to put up a shiny new oil refinery...and, like most real-life utopias, the sense of bittersweet impermanence only heightens the appeal of the place.

SOLARIS (1972)

The beginning of Tarkovsky's Solaris takes place in a retro-future world so sterile and strange that it was filmed in Tokyo. There's a lovely long tracking shot as our hero, Kelvin, drives through the city. I long to sync it with the retro-future sounds of the krautrock band Neu!, which similarly used repetition, driving drums and avant-noise to achieve transcendence. Kelvin visits his parents' house, too, and it is a little Eden of a cottage with a nearby pond. Kelvin soon leaves the cold, clean Earth for the broken-down spaceship circling the planet Solaris, which is potentially sentient. It's not long before his ex-wife, a suicide, shows up in the flesh, so to speak. The end of the film finds Kelvin in his little Eden again, although everything is different now. It's a mirror of Kelvin's perfect little Eden, but the reflection cannot live up to the reality. And the reality is lost to memory, anyway. The above clip is from the end of the movie, so be forewarned. (Soderbergh's remake is interesting, but lacks the punch of Tarkovsky's film.)

BRAZIL (1985)

Terry Gilliam, according to legend, had always wanted to do a movie of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Michael Radford beat him to it, so he had to invent his own version. It’s probably a good thing he did – Gilliam, whatever his strengths as a director (and they are many, as many as his weaknesses), is probably too weird to make an adaptation of the rise and fall of Winston Smith that made any kind of sense. But as great as Radford’s movie was, Brazil is greater, not in spite of, but because of the fact that it’s so relentlessly strange. The ever-watching eyes of the state peer endlessly at its own civil servants, with results that are as hilarious as they are tragic. Technology is meant to be miraculous but is instead disastrous, and the most subversive thing someone can do is to fix things. Government torturers dress in absurd masks and order the deaths of the wrong people through bureaucratic cock-ups. The heads of state and upper-level party functionaries, instead of being grim and faceless tyrants, are self-deluding clowns who make themselves unrecognizable with plastic surgery or spout endless, hollow sports metaphors. Orwell had seen life’s horrors in his time, and reflected them in his novel; but Terry Gilliam chose to focus on life’s absurdities, and his nightmare vision of the future was one of a man who couldn’t believe that human beings, asinine and incompetent as they were, could even get a dystopia working properly.

PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)

When it was released (to complete indifference from the public and general hostility from the handful of critics who saw it), Peter Watkins’ unnerving pseudo-documentary seemed, to some, unnervingly real. Its nightmarish dystopia seemed, to those who opposed Nixon and his crackdown on anti-war activists, right around the corner: dissidents would be rounded up and used as little more than cannon fodder in military training exercises. Watkins is still the master of the alternate-historical documentary, and for its target audience, the scenes (mostly improvised by an amateur cast) of sneering young soldiers putting increasingly hysterical political prisoners through their paces must have come across as chillingly plausible. In later years, the film became hard to find, which might have seemed for the best: with the eschatological frenzy of the Vietnam era beginning to fade, it probably came across as increasingly strident and paranoid, with every thoughtful dissenter who claims that in a time of government oppression, the honorable path is that of a criminal, there’s an overblown windbag spitting at the pigs and screaming about the Man. It finally came to DVD at just the right time, though: in the post-9/11 era of the USA-PATRIOT Act and governmental scorn for Constitutional protections, it was newly relevant. Latter-day conservatives feverishly dreaming of being locked in confiscation camps by Comrade Obama might even find something to like in it, if its protagonists weren’t a bunch of dirty hippies.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

A “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” By Any Other Name

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In Jack Mathews’ book The Battle of Brazil, which recounts Terry Gilliam’s struggle to get his director’s cut of Brazil released by Universal Pictures, the author reprints a list of alternative titles the Universal suits presented to Gilliam. Apparently they felt Brazil was confusing or misleading – after all, the movie didn’t take place in Brazil, and they certainly didn’t want to give audiences the wrong impression. And you can certainly see how these titles would have proved clearer and more appealing to the masses: If Osmosis, Who Are You?, Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name, The Girl in the House on the Truck That's on Fire, and my all-time favorite, Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak and Other Bestial Places.

The point is, choosing the title of a movie can be a multi-million dollar decision, as Josh Friedman reports in the L.A. Times. It’s so important, there’s even a consulting firm called TitleDoctors, started by marketing consultants Seth Lockhart and Jamil Barrie. Imagine, this is a job you can have – meeting with movie executives and presenting them with a list of old song titles you think would be a perfect fit for their new romantic comedy or crime drama.

“Getting studios to agree on a name change is never easy (none of the titles for the 13 films Lockhart and Barrie consulted on during their first year in business has been adopted),” Friedman writes. “Filmmakers and production executives can become enamored of a movie's ‘working’ title. And studios may have already invested millions in marketing a project under a particular name, making it financially costly to alter.”

Some title changes are for the best; it’s hard to imagine Annie Hall achieving classic status under its original moniker Anhedonia, after all, and if you’re making a comedy about a pampered pocket dog from the 90210, you might as well call it Beverly Hills Chihuahua. But as Friedman points out, audiences are likely to flock to Hancock as much as they would the proposed alternate titles Heroes Never Die and Less Than Hero. And it’s probably for the best that the original title, Tonight, He Comes was jettisoned. As star Will Smith told Entertainment Weekly, ““You don’t want your movie to already have the porno title.”

That Guy!: Jonathan Pryce

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater. An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures. Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today. A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

Pryce (the son of a Welsh shopkeeper, and originally named Price; the reason for the name change is murky and doubtless irrelevant) still keeps extremely busy with stagework, and even his big-screen roles maintain elements of the theatrical: one of the few times he broke away from his normal roles as precise and deliberate, almost timid, characters is when he played Argentine strongman Juan Peron opposite Madonna in the 1996 big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. But despite the moneymaking blockbuster roles he takes, and the occasional foray into television work, he still wins his highest praise for independent or 'little movie' screen work, and in 1995, he received what he's described as one of the highest honors of his storied career, winning the Best Actor award at the Cannes film festival for his sensitive, powerful and emotional portrayal of British novelist Lytton Strachey in director Christopher Hampton's little-seen Carrington. Recently, Pryce got the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and portray Sherlock Holmes on British television, but he's been taking less work recently to spend time with his family. He'll be appearing (as the president of the United States, no less!) in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie, although his devotees are much more excited about next year's My Zinc Bed, where he'll be playing the lead in a new David Hare adaptation. Pryce just recently turned sixty, and with a few more choice roles (and, well, a few less G.I. Joes, he's still got a good chance at following in Olivier's footsteps as a Grand Old Man of British cinema.

Where to see Jonathan Pryce at his best:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983)

Though it wasn't the breakout role that would come his way two years later, Pryce's performance as the sinister Mr. Dark in this spotty but entertaining adaptation of a Ray Bradbury novel is incredibly compelling. As the proprietor and ringleader of a curious and somewhat menacing circus that comes to visit a small town, Pryce strikes a perfect balance of sophistication and terror; throughout his entire time on screen, it's hard to take your eyes off of him, and he swills Bradbury's ripe dialogue around in his mouth like a fine wine, making the moments when he loses control all the more effective. A stunning performance from a nearly forgotten film.

BRAZIL (1985)

The movie that really thrust Jonathan Pryce into the public eye was his performance as the hapless and ultimately hopeless Sam Lowry, best described as Winston Smith with even more British repression. It would be the first of many collaborations between Pryce and Terry Gilliam, and while it made quite clear the reasons why he wasn't cut out to be a typical romantic lead, it was a brilliant piece of acting, aided and abetted by the clever and theatrical scripting of Tom Stoppard. Gilliam and Pryce would work together several more times, from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to The Brothers Grimm, but it would never be this magical again.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

As the terrified and uncertain would-be real estate investor James Lingk, Jonathan Pryce not only gets the chance to act in one of the most powerhouse ensemble casts in recent memory (including getting to play the majority of his scenes off of Al Pacino at the very last moment in his career when he did any actual acting, as opposed to just yelling at things), but he also played the unusual role of the film's moral center, getting to act like a normal human being among these amoral Type-A monsters. Curiously enough, Pryce went on to play Shelley "The Machine" Levene -- portrayed here by Jack Lemmon -- in a London revival of the David Mamet play.

No, But I've Read the Movie: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

If nothing else, you have to give Michael Radford credit for ambition. With nothing more than one minor feature film and a Van Morrison tour documentary to his credit, he somehow finagled his way into tackling one of the most colossally important novels of the 20th century. He wrote the screenplay himself, rejecting all offers of assistance from any number of literary lions; he was determined to film in in London, regardless of the expense; and he decided to release it in the year 1984, cementing it for good in the public consciousness as the definitive version of the classic novel of a totalitarian future. Determined or not, though, Radford encountered endless difficulties in making the film, and it very nearly didn't happen. George Orwell's widow very nearly didn't give him the rights to the property (she'd previously blocked David Bowie from crafting a rock opera -- the record that ultimately became Diamond Dogs -- out of the story), and billionaire Richard Branson, who bankrolled the project, tacked all sorts of demands on Radford under which he bristled until he publicly denounced Branson's meddling at the BAFTA awards that year. But the fact that he attended the BAFTA awards should give you an idea of whether or not the director -- then a 'young buck' at 37 -- managed to realize his titanic ambition.

For all its formidable reputation, though, Nineteen Eighty-Four is, among the 'great books', one of the most filmable. It has a memorable set of characters, a linear plot, a comprehensible storyline that took place both internally and externally, and, for all the feuding that later took place between liberals and conservatives about which of them, exactly, Orwell was complaining, an overall point that was hard to miss. It also contained enough science fiction elements to keep fanboys entertained (though one of Sonia Brownell's conditions for granting Radford the rights to film her husband's novel was that it not contain hi-tech special effects), a juicy sexual subplot, and a richly detailed, yet highly believable, fictional world to be relaized on screen. Despite his onerous conditions, Branson ponied up a lot of money for Radford to play with, ensuring that he could pursue the look he wanted, the feel he needed, and the cast he depended on to make a successful adaptation. If he did it right, Nineteen Eighty-Four could be a huge success. So did he?

WHAT IT HAD: In many ways, the restrictions under which Michael Radford had to work became the elements that made his film succeed. Brownell's demand that the movie not become a showcase for glitzy special effects led him to pursue a low-tech, rattle-trap look for the world of Oceania; everything was dysfunctional, broken down, cobbled together out of pre-war parts. (This same approach would be used a year later to great effect in Brazil.) Branson's demand that his pop stars du jour, the Eurythmics, be included in the soundtrack, infuriated Radford, but their ice-cool techno-pop sounds were actually oddly evocative of the friendly fascism peddled by Ingsoc. And his emphasis on psychology and character over plot resulted in some dynamite casting, including John Hurt as Winston Smith and a cruelly dignified Richard Burton as O'Brien.

WHAT IT LACKED: Suzanna Hamilton, fresh off of having to put up with a smirking Sting in Brimstone & Treacle, sometimes seemed outclassed as Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but that's understandable -- and forgivable -- given that she was surrounded by some major-league heavy hitters of British cinema. Radford's script put a lot of emphasis on tone and emotion, which works quite well and gives it a resonance, especially in the early scenes, that's as timeless as Orwell's novel, but it does wander a bit and gets lost in the forest of plot. And while no one is going to see this movie for an uplifting cinematic experience, Radford does pull off the frankly amazing trick of making the movie even more depressing, dirty and hopeless-seeming than the source material.

DID IT SUCCEED?: It's certainly the movie that launched Michael Radford's career, which, on the balance, is a good thing. It's Richard Burton's final screen appearance, and he couldn't have asked for a better epitaph. And it certainly succeeded in becoming the definitive big-screen version of Orwell's antifascist masterpiece, positively eradicating all memory of the abortive 1956 Edmond O'Brien version from the collective pop-cultural unconscious. But how does it hold up just on its own? It was hugely celebrated at the time of its initial release, but then -- again, partly because of the nasty in-fighting behind the scenes that spilled its way into the press -- it faded a bit, so that when the BAFTAs finally announced their 1984 selections, it barely made a dent. It did fairly good business in the U.S., and was well-received by stateside critics, but it was never considered a masterwork. And while it isn't the pure triumph of imagination and intent that the novel is, it shouldn't suffer by comparison; it did what it set out to do spectacularly well, and with no glaring missteps, it should be reevaluated as one of the more successful literary adaptations of its time.

Screengrab Review: City of Men

Peter Smith — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Review by Bryan Whitefield.

When City of God was released in 2002, it became an international sensation for its mix of stylized violence and gritty portrayal of life in the Brazilian favelas. It launched the career of director Fernando Mereilles, who used the same location and several of the non-professional actors from the film to create an episodic series for Brazilian TV called City of Men.

The show was much more light-hearted than the original film, following the day-to-day exploits of lovable teenagers Acerola and Laranjinha whose various schemes ranged from selling popsicles to losing their virginity. Capturing a more hopeful spirit while never turning a blind eye to violence and harsh conditions, the show also gave audiences a chance to watch the two boys literally grow up on camera. In many ways it covered similar territory to season four of HBO's The Wire — kids living under difficult circumstances with no guidance, failed by social institutions and finding an alternative in community-minded drug dealers who at least offer a path to money and mobility.

The film City of Men was written and directed by Paolo Morelli, who helmed several of the show's episodes, and maintains the show's looseness and vibrancy, highlighting the contradiction between Brazil's incredible beauty and nearly unimaginable poverty, crime and violence. Picking up where the show left off, we find the two friends forced to face an early adulthood. Acerola is now a father himself, while Laranjinha is consumed with uncovering the identity of the father he never knew. Because of the dire conditions that surround them, the story has a built-in drama and the characters are forced into difficult, even critical decisions. The movie plays more like a series finale than a stand-alone feature, but if it leads viewers back to the consistently excellent television series, it's valuable even just as an advertisement. — Bryan Whitefield

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Hudsucker Proxy

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

What went wrong: The popular rap against the Coens is that their films are stylish but soulless, which is definitely applicable to Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance. Leigh comes off as affected even in realistic roles, and playing girl reporter Amy Archer, she doesn't so much play a role as ape Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The mannerisms overwhelm the role, which makes sense when she's putting on a tough front for the boys, but once that front begins to fall, the character is meant to be the film's emotional center, and I wasn't feeling it. Compare Cate Blanchett's Hepburn to what Leigh's doing here and you'll see the difference between a fully-realized character and an explosion at the tic factory.

Fortunately, Leigh's misguided performance is hardly fatal, as there's a whole lot of other elements to love about The Hudsucker Proxy. Leigh aside, the performances are spot-on, beginning with Tim Robbins in the title role. As the naïve sap turned into Hudsucker Industries' puppet president, Robbins gives a comic performance that would have fight right into a Preston Sturges film, and his gangly physical presence and good-natured cluelessness recall Sturges' favorite leading man Eddie Bracken. Even Robbins' character name — Norville Barnes — could have been a Bracken character.

As usual in a Coen film, the film's supporting cast is dynamite, especially Paul Newman as the calculating vice president, forever answering questions with a gruff "sure-sure," and Jim True as the chatty, duplicitous elevator operator Buzz. Plus there's the famous stylized Coen dialogue, which might get distracting if it weren't so damned clever.

But the most notable aspect of The Hudsucker Proxy is the world the world the Coens have lovingly created, an Art Deco nightmare version of fifties New York. Norville's experiences in the mailroom wouldn't be out of place in Brazil, while the top-level offices and boardrooms owe a debt to Ayn Rand. Dennis Gassner's visionary production design, coupled with cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and a score by Coen stalwart Carter Burwell that makes liberal use of Aram Khachaturyan's "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia," make The Hudsucker Proxy the most visually stunning of the Coen brothers' films. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

The fallout: Clueless how to market the film, Warner Brothers dumped Hudsucker into a handful of theatres to middling reviews, although the film has its share of defenders today. The Coens left Hollywood to make the more modestly-budgeted Fargo, which won back their previous critical supporters and then some. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, opened earlier this month to ecstatic reviews. — Paul Clark