The Screengrab : brian de palma

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, in case you somehow missed the news, our beloved little blog will be ending at the end of the month, meaning THIS (sniff...sniff...) will be the very LAST of Screengrab’s Thursday lists.

Yet, in the classic words of Supersonic (heavy-rotationed into my very DNA by the good people of alternative radio), “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end,” which means that while this blog will be pushing up daisies soon, you’ll still be able to get your fix of the Screengrab All-Stars at our new blog, Screengrab-In-Exile, featuring new (if somewhat less frequent) writing and links to writing from the usual gang of idiots...we may even pop up from time to time hereabouts writing for Nerve.com. Meanwhile, all your favorite Screengrab posts will be preserved in amber for future generations at www.thescreengrab.com (and stay tuned for the end of today’s list for links to all our individual websites).

Anyway, I have to say I’ll miss the ol’ place, and I’ve really enjoyed organizing and contributing to these lists. Heck, I’ll even miss getting called a douche by anonymous internet hecklers.

But all good things must come to an end, so once more for auld lang syne, let’s fade out together with THE BEST & WORST ENDINGS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Last week we saluted Slim Pickens’ whooping death trip aboard a nuclear bomb, but of course, that was only the beginning of the end of Dr. Strangelove. There’s no pie fight as Stanley Kubrick had originally planned, but we do get to see the great minds of the War Room contemplating the bright side of nuclear annihilation (10 women for every man!), the continuation of Cold War tension through the end of the world and beyond, and of course, the song we hope will be playing in your head as the Screengrab fades to black: We’ll meet again…don’t know where, don’t know when... (SVD)

THE PASSENGER (1975)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s ennui-drenched cinema reached something of an apex with The Passenger, the tale of a reporter (Jack Nicholson) who, while in Africa on assignment, assumes a dead stranger’s identity to escape the soul-crushing disaffection of his own life. It’s a beguiling pseudo-noir that culminates with one of cinema’s most awe-inspiring shots, a 7-minute single take – in which the camera magically passes through a room’s iron-barred window and then rotates 180-degrees – that expresses the film’s faith-and-philosophy-tinged portrait of the folly of dreaming about escape. (NS)

CARRIE (1976)

The shock ending of Brian De Palma's horror classic provides a hint as to how De Palma got the reputation in some quarters as a rip-off artist: it's a direct steal from the ending of John Boorman's Deliverance, from just four years earlier. But it's also a clear indicator of how De Palma, in the quarters that matter, earned the reputation of a master director: his execution smokes Boorman, whose scene was a bit of a botch. By contrast, De Palma's makes audiences jump as high as anyone has ever managed without installing ejector seats in the theater. (PN)

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Just a quick word to acknowledge how clever Spielberg was to have the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest of holies, the subject of all of this strife and death, crated and boxed away in an anonymous government warehouse, presumably one of thousands of forgotten treasures. That's a wry sense of humor there. (HC)

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)

The best movie endings are the ones that come at great cost, the ones that make us feel that we’ve lived with these characters and that their eventual fate, whatever it is, has been earned. The greatest recent example of this is Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After a truly epic sequence of events, changes of scenery and direction, life, death, moral redirection, and any number of other twists and turns, the young lovers Jen and Lo, hiding out at the Wudan temple, fondly recall their time together in the forbidding, barbaric deserts, where their love had first blossomed. “Make a wish, Lo,” says Jen, in one of the most perfect deliveries of a movie line in modern memory; “I wish that we’ll be in the desert together again,” he replies. Jen then silently hurls herself off the edge of the temple, into the clouds below, suspended first and then flying, calling back to a legend they’d discussed during their desert idyll as Tan Dun’s majestic, gorgeous music plays us to the credits. It’s one of the most romantic endings imaginable, and guaranteed to raise a lump in the throat of all but the coldest viewer – a scene that’s truly earned. (LP)

25TH HOUR (2002)

For most of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, Monty Brogan (played by Edward Norton) is shown coming to grips with his upcoming incarceration -- saying goodbye to his loved ones, trying to determine who sold him up the river, even asking his best friends to beat the snot out of him so he won’t look like an easy target for prison rape. But just when Monty has more or less accepted his fate, the morning he’s scheduled to make the trip up to prison, his dad James (Brian Cox) meets him for the trip with an alternative -- to escape and start a new life. Over the next ten minutes, James paints a beautiful picture of this way out -- go West, find a little town in the desert, get a new identity, and so on -- and with Terence Blanchard’s elegiac score playing behind him, the plan is as tempting as it is far-fetched. But there’s a steep price for this escape, as Monty could never return to his old life. And so, the central theme of the movie snaps sharply into focus -- the choices we all must make in life. James is prepared for the possibility of never seeing his son again as long as he knows he’ll be okay, but is Monty ready to give up everything he knows for freedom? As we see him passing all those New Yorkers he once railed against, now smiling at him and seeing him off, we wonder if he can sacrifice his past to save his future. And just when he’s come to the end of his imagined life, all of a sudden he snaps back to his real one, back in the car on the road to destiny, and Lee’s camera lingers once again on Norton’s face. The choice is yours, Monty. (PC)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Precursors: Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Nick Schager — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Those interested in fully readying themselves for this Friday’s Star Trek would be wise to bypass the franchise’s myriad small- and big-screen iterations and instead take a second look at Mission: Impossible III, the first and most recent franchise to get a vigorous kick in the behind from J.J. Abrams. Unfairly dismissed during its summer 2006 release because of star Tom Cruise’s couch-hopping antics and crazy comments about psychology and anti-depressants, the third Mission: Impossible remains the series’ most accessible and breathlessly exciting, characteristics mainly attributable to its director, who took on the project without any prior experience helming a tentpole extravaganza, and yet provided the no-nonsense adrenalized excitement absent from Brian De Palma’s intricate first and John Woo’s embarrassingly flamboyant second installments. Abrams borrows liberally from his TV series Alias as well as countless other sources for his story about IMF agent Ethan Hunt’s efforts to hunt down a Maguffin from a master criminal (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s kidnapped his new wife (Michelle Monaghan). And to be sure, not all of the narrative works, most notably with regards to its efforts to humanize the more-or-less superhuman Hunt. Still, Hoffman’s villain is excellent, and Abrams’ action-and-espionage centerpiece sequences have a visceral, invigorating electricity that one hopes Star Trek – which I’ll be reviewing here at The Screengrab later this week – also possesses.

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Let's say the opening sequence in The Wild Bunch runs through the moment when they escape their first gun battle of the movie. During the credits, the Bunch rides into town in stolen uniforms, passing teetotalers and children who have tossed scorpions in among angry ants. The enormous and lethal scorpions being brought down by millions of ants? That's less a metaphor than foreshadowing. The Bunch heads into a bank, where they quickly begin to execute their plan to rob it. And the first line from The Bunch's leader, Pike, is "if they move, kill 'em."

Soon the Bunch becomes aware that they're trapped, with gunmen hired by the railroad lining the rooftops across the street. They decide to use the passing parade of teetotalers to create confusion while they make their getaway. In the ensuing shootout, lots of innocent people die. And that's how we meet our anti-heroes, crooks lined up against the even-more-crooked railroad, bad men in bad times. The shootout is both exciting and horrific, both meant to titillate and disgust the viewer, much like the film as a whole. Sam Peckinpah knew that audiences have bloodlust, because having bloodlust is just part of being human. And he reveled in that bloodlust because he also knew that it never leads anywhere good. You want violence?, he seems to ask, well, what do you think of the leading man's horse trampling a woman? How about a man being shot full of holes in front of a couple of kids? Violence only begets violence in Peckinpah's eye. And there's no escape from it. In this movie, released at the height of the Vietnam War, Peckinpah is asking: is this the world that you want? Is your only choice whether to be a scorpion or an ant? (HC)

BLOW OUT (1981)

Throughout the 1970s, Brian DePalma positioned himself as Hollywood’s latest “Master of the Macabre”, a self-appointed heir to the mantle of Hitchcock. And in this vein, the first few minutes of Blow Out feel like a logical progression of his career -- a DePalma-esque pastiche of a fly-by-night coed slasher picture, complete with a subjective camera straight out of Halloween. What’s sort of surprising is how right DePalma gets the feel of these movies, from the clumsy camera movements (no confident Steadicam in this scene) to the oppressive cut-rate synth score and sound effects, to the nameless actresses cast entirely for their taut physiques. Gradually it dawns on the audience that this scene is a joke, and a damn good one too. But DePalma saves his best joke for last, as the killer infiltrates the shower room, draws his knife and pulls back the curtain to reveal a blonde who turns to the camera and… well, “screams” isn’t quite the word for it. “What cat did you have to strangle to get that?” asks the mixer to the sound guy, played by John Travolta. DePalma has always been fascinated with the nuts and bolts of making cinema, and he’s never been shy about sharing them with the audience, with Blow Out being perhaps the best example of this tendency. But even more important is the way DePalma uses the opening scene to set up the film’s finale, in which Travolta finally gets the right scream, albeit in the worst way imaginable. The way DePalma sets up this goal for his protagonist and then lets him back into accomplishing it would be clever and funny if it wasn’t so unbearably sad. (PC)

GOODFELLAS (1990)

Like most great directors, Martin Scorsese knows the value of starting a movie off right, in order to reel the audience into the story he’s telling. But while most of his films have pretty killer openings, nothing he’s done before or since has topped the first few minutes of GoodFellas. Instead of starting at the beginning of the story -- the early years of his protagonist Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) -- he begins in media res, with Henry and his crew, Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci), driving down the highway in the middle of the night. Suddenly, there’s a knocking sound coming from behind them, and they eventually discover that it’s the bloodied body in the trunk, not quite as dead as they’d thought it was. As hooks go, this one’s a doozy -- who are these guys, and who’s the ill-fated man in the trunk? But look also at how Scorsese uses the situation to efficiently establish the three men’s personalities -- Jimmy the cool customer, Tommy the violent hothead, and Henry the follower, standing back and taking it all in. A more conventional film might have begun with the glamorous trappings of the gangster lifestyle, but Scorsese begins with the violence and doubles back to the fun stuff, so that while we watch Henry and pals living the high life, we’ve already seen them doing the dirty deeds it took to get them there. And it’s telling that when Henry’s voiceover starts up, stating that “as far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a gangster” before Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches” kicks in, the image we see onscreen is Henry’s weary face, numbed to the brutal spectacle taking place before his eyes. (PC)

DEAD MAN (1995)

In less than 8 minutes, Jim Jarmusch has Johnny Depp's William Blake leave the relative comfort of late-19th century civilization and travel by train backwards into savagery. The landscape outside grows more and more brutal, as do his fellow passengers. When Crispin Glover's train fireman comes to undercut his assumptions (i.e., spout weirdness at him, this being Crispin Glover), Blake gets his first glimpse of just how far outside of his world he has traveled. Glover says that he "wouldn't trust no words on no paper" and Blake should realize right there how fucked he is. He doesn't, though. He really has no choice but to follow through, even if that mean staring down Robert Mitchum and his gun. Even as he speaks to Glover, his fellow passengers, hunters and trappers by their garb, leap up and start firing out of the train at buffalo, denying their meat to the Native Americans, and dealing death without meaning to the majestic animals. Life and death don't carry the same weight out here, a lesson Blake will not learn until too late. (HC)

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Was it Oscar Wilde who said "talent borrows, genius steals"? No one knows this better than Quentin Tarantino. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman stands motionless on an LAX conveyor belt while "Sound of Silence" plays in the background. In Jackie Brown, Pam Grier starts out on a conveyor belt at the more low rent Long Beach airport. Queue Bobby Womack's "110th Street." We see her in her bright blue airhostess uniform, nicely matching the mosaic background. Cut to x-ray images showing the insides of a few — is that a gun, or am I imagining things? A security guard's metal detector floats over some woman's white-pantsed crotch. Meanwhile Jackie glides through security with her bag and uniform, walks then picks up and runs, making it to her job at the gate just in time to greet passengers with a friendly airhostess smile. What more do you need to let you know you're in for sex, drugs, and desperation to get out of a dead-end job, just barely under the surface in sunny California? (SCS)

And finally...

JAWS (1975) & STAR WARS (1977)

A naked woman disappears in the water at night, devoured by a terrifying unseen monster, effectively terrifying generations of beach enthusiasts within minutes...a massive starship soars over my pubescent head, which very nearly explodes in sheer, geeky excitement...I don't really have much new to say about either film or their iconic, totally kick-ass opening sequences...but, damn, we couldn't really end our list of all-time great beginnings without them, now could we? (AO)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Andrew Osborne

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

SWEET & LOWDOWN (1999)

Woody Allen phones in a lot of half-cooked shit and Sean Penn frequently comes across as a self-important knob, but every few years, both men remind us why it is we liked them in the first place (and put up with them all the rest of the time). With Sweet & Lowdown, the stars aligned so both Allen and Penn were ascendant simultaneously (effortlessly restoring faith in both after late 20th century missteps like Celebrity and U-Turn, respectively). Penn earned an Oscar nomination for his tall-tale, faux-biopic portrayal of Emmett Ray, a selfish lout redeemed only by his outstanding talent as one of the world’s best guitarists (second only to Django Reinhardt) and an occasional awareness of his own flawed character. The enigma of humanity’s capacity for timeless beauty and mindless cruelty has always fascinated Allen, and here he explores the specific dichotomy of musicians (and, presumably, filmmakers) who are capable of great art, but also truly shitty behavior like, say, running off with a girlfriend’s adopted daughter...or, in Ray’s case, mistreating a sweet, adoring mute girl, played to perfection by Samantha Morton, who also received an Academy nomination for her efforts).

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)

Brothers of the Head is a ludicrous story, a faux-documentary about a protopunk band fronted by conjoined twins. However, despite the absurdity of the premise (someone is forming a novelty act with conjoined twins and allowed Ken Freakin' Russell on the grounds with a camera?), the movie does its level best to play the story out with a straight, and often tragic, face. The music is not bad and the sexual connotations are almost as clever as the sex in Velvet Goldmine. But the whole seems to be a little less than the sum of its parts. The twin themes seem pulled from Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. The dissolute rock lifestyle seems to be based on the Stones in Gimme Shelter and Cocksucker Blues. In some scenes, the twins appear to be exhausted by the constant filming, aching for some privacy. In other scenes, the documentary premise slides away, unneeded at the moment. Not a bad way to spend 90 minutes, but not the best way, either. Check out the reference materials first.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974)

This wacked-out midnight spectacle, which was released and re-released between 1974 and 1976 without ever finding much of an audience, was written and directed by Brian De Palma, at a transitional period between his early satirical comedies (Greetings, Hi Mom!) and the horror movies that would make him bankable. The plot, which scavenges a shelfload of classic scare movies, involves a composer who runs afoul of a Phil Spector-like pop svengali (played by the mutant music and TV celebrity Paul Williams, who also wrote the score) and, after being robbed of his face and voice, returns to haunt the mogul's palace as a masked ghoul. De Palma uses this pretzel of a narrative as an excuse for an explosion of visual flash, with the kind of humor usually found only in classic MAD comics.

PERFORMANCE (1970)

This film, which marked the joint directorial debuts of Donald Cammell (who also wrote the script) and Nicolas Roeg (who did the cinematography), was originally finished in 1968 but so badly freaked out the studio, Warner Bros., that they sat on it for two years before exposing it to the light of day, probably in the hopes that it would have the same effect on it as Dracula. James Fox plays a gangster who is forced to take it on the lam and ends up bunking in a big house with Mick Jagger as a burned-out rock star and his playmates, played by Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton. The movie had no end of trouble just getting made so that it could horrify the studio brass. It was part of the deal to get it made that it include a new Jagger/Richards composition to be performed by Jagger, but rumor has it that Jagger and Pallenberg got carried away during their love scenes and actually got down on the set, despite the fact that the filming coincided with Pallenberg's time as Richards' inamorata, with the result that Richards became sulky and was in no mood to do his usual collaborative songwriting work with his lead singer. Ry Cooder was reportedly pressed into service to help Jagger pound out "Memo from Turner", which he performs in a fantasy sequence that's the high point of the film -- an electrifying moment made all the more fascinating by the fact that for most of the film, Jaggger is a cipher with next to no screen presence. (As for Fox, he did his part for the movie's mystique by converting to evangelical Christianity and retiring from acting for a decade, inspiring rumors that the decadence of the experience had broken him like a dry twig in a hurricane. Brutal, unsettling, eye-popping and impenetrable, the movie remains one of the few true '60s head trips, like the movie version of the greatest acid-rock album covers you've ever seen.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Review: "Gomorrah"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

There's a popular nitwit theory that movies like The Godfather and TV series like The Sopranos "glamorize" Mafia life and make it look attractive. Again and again, the point may get made that Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano and the people in their orbit are ruthless moral idiots who actually grow less and less loyal to their closest associates the longer they have to endure the sight of them, but the idea seems to be that as long as they're treated as fascinating characters, people worthy of the audience's interest, somebody's going to look at their way of life and think, it doesn't look half bad. The new Italian movie Gomorrah may be less likely than any crime movie ever made to be accused of romanticizing gangsterism. The movie, which runs two hours and fifteen minutes, uses Robert Saviano's nonfiction book about the Neapolitan-based criminal organization known as "the Camorra" (which means, simply, the gang) as its jumping-off point. The book is fiercely angry about what the Camorra and its corrupting influence does to innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. The movie, which was directed by Matteo Garrone, provides grounds for anger, though its own emotional temperature is basically even and steady, even frigid. It cuts back and forth among several characters, most of them barely blips on the Camorra's radar screen: a bookkeeper who works distributing money to the families of clan members who are in prison; a mobbed-up tailor; a thirteen-year-old boy just beginning to get his bearings in the crooked world in which he'll be growing up; a couple of teenage meatheads who, unlike the professional big boys, see themselves as romantic outlaws and run around with guns causing so much aggravation that they'll eventually have to be put down. (To better make the point about what kind of movie this isn't, the knuckleheads shout lines from Brian De Palma's Scarface as they play cowboys and Indians.) There are also some guys who work in "toxic waste management", which translates into directing trucks full of poisonous materials to out-of-the-way sites where they can be dumped or buried. Thus the Camorra's influence extends to literally despoiling the land itself, adding one more thoughtful conceit to a movie already groaning with them.

Gomorrah has been highly praised for its stubbornly unexciting handling of this potentially shocking material, but for Matteo, that may be the choice of a director who doesn't have many other options. His previous movies, the dysfunctional love story Primo Amore (2004) and The Embalmer (2002), about a dwarfish taxidermist who is employed by the Camorra to hook up a corpse so that it can serve as a drug mule, also treated sensational material in a flat, affectless way that minimized the viewer's ability to connect with whatever was going on. He either doen't know how to involve the audience or consciously rejects involving them because he's aiming for something more challenging and cerebral. He mostly winds up with something flatter and deader. He's not above using violence and noise to get a rise out of you; the movie opens with a bloody mass execution carried out in a tanning salon, and Matteo makes a point of never making it clear who the victims were or why their were killed. Because the movie never invites you to care about its characters beyond the level of seeing them as faceless victims of a corrupt society, the frequent violent explosions serve the same purpose they do in the sleaziest kind of exploitation films: they nudge you awake between the lapses into total boredom.

Any movie that deals with power and crime that doesn't acknowledge the attractions of those things is as much a lie as a movie that makes a gangster's life seem noble. When Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, he didn't think he had to make the Corleones both colorless and unrelentingly disgusting to prevent viewers from thinking he was making a campaign commercial for the Mafia, because he assumed that most people have more sense than that. Gomorrah is being congratulated for assuming that people don't, and that a gangster movie's moral intelligence can best be judged by how hard it is to sit through it. The first step towards constructing a meaningful condemnation of organized crime might be to examine why people are drawn to it, but in Gomorrah, the reasons seem boiled down to: there's no resisting it. Nobody wants it, but if you try to stand up to it or even live apart from it, you'll get your head blown off. A lifeless depiction of a hopeless world, Gomorrah is an epic shrug of resignation.

Ozsploitation! “Roadgames” (1981)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

Richard Franklin’s Roadgames is like Rear Window on wheels. I wish I could take credit for that observation, but I cribbed it from the director himself. Franklin is a self-proclaimed Hitchcock buff; he directed Psycho II, but Roadgames is actually the more Hitchcockian achievement – a zesty soufflé of humor, action, suspense and a dollop of ambiguity. (I stole “soufflé” from Franklin, too – what can I say, the man is an astute appraiser of his own work.) It’s such a fun little flick, I have no idea why I’d never seen it before now.

Stacy Keach reveals a playful side that has eluded me until now as truck driver (or “truckie” as those whimsical Aussies call him) Patrick Quid. Driving a load of pork across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth, Quid has no one to talk to except his dingo Boswell. He manages to amuse himself nonetheless, playing harmonica and inventing stories about his fellow travelers of the only highway around. (Because there’s no other route across the continent, he’s always catching up to the same vehicles he’s seen at diners and gas stations along the way.) He’s particular intrigued by a man driving a green van, who he spots poking around a motel garbage dumpster in the wee hours of the morning.

We know something Quid doesn’t, as we’ve already seen this man put on a pair of racing gloves and strangle a naked woman in his motel room. Quid’s suspicions are heightened by a radio broadcast warning of a serial killer in the area. Although regulations forbid him from picking up hitchhikers, he can’t resist. His first passenger, a chatty middle-aged woman, soon develops her own suspicions about Quid. His second, attractive young Pamela (Jamie Lee Curtis), proves to be his match in the realm of serial killer theorizing. As they close in on the mystery man in the van, however, she may turn out to be his next victim.

The long road across the Nullarbor is marked by spectacular scenery, small pockets of civilization and a gaggle of oddball characters. Aside from a brief campfire interlude, Franklin keeps the pedal to the metal; memorable set pieces include a game of chicken between Quid and an inexplicably aggressive motorist hauling a boat trailer, as well as the finale in which truck, van and police car all converge in very tight quarters. Curtis, who was still the Queen of Scream at this point in her career, is fine in what turns out to be a fairly small part, but this is Keach’s show all the way – it may be his liveliest, most charismatic performance. As Hitchcock riffs go, I’ll take this one over most of the De Palma catalogue any day.

Previously on Ozsploitation!:
Long Weekend
Turkey Shoot

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Nov. 15-21, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

I have no wacky character to introduce this week’s Highlight Reel. I have only this goofy photo of Ginger Spice in a Wonder Woman costume. But really, shouldn’t that be enough? After all, Spice World is one of the entries in our survey of Guilty Pleasures (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six). And comic book movies are all the rage, I am told. Besides, I’ve run out of story – just like Hollywood! So I might as well just tell you about the highlights from the week and Screengrab and be on my way:

We welcome back Vadim Rizov, who wonders Why Action Heroes Must Have Manly Haircuts

Despite my physician’s warnings, the Unwatchable project continues with Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie and Carry On Columbus

Phil Nugent explores The Short Career and Strange Legacy of Tom Graeff and explains Why Cinemark Shouldn’t Get Your “Milk” Money

Paul Clark reveals how Brian De Palma went bad with Bonfire of the Vanities and revisits Thunderball and Moonraker

Leonard Pierce cranks up Rushmore: OST and Hayden Childs gives us The View Through the View-Master: Iron Giant

Kate Winslet Allows Leo DiCaprio to Strangle Her until She Passes Out

Film Threat Unveils Frigid 50 of 2008

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

14. CARRIE (1976)

Brian De Palma's purest and best horror movie is also the most potent of the horror genre's many essays on just how close high school is to hell on Earth. Sissy Spacek, at 26, turns in a phenomenal performance as the outcast who has to contend with mean girls at school and a mean mother of a Jesus freak (Piper Laurie) at home. Given the chance to shine for the first time in her life, she winds up onstage dripping with pig's blood in front of her jeering adolescent tormentors, who don't know that she's telekinetic and is about to stick the local tacky-jewelry manufacturer with a whole lot of unclaimed class ring. If you can watch the ensuing carnage without rooting for her, you must have been a cheerleader.

13. AUDITION (1999)

Ringu, a.k.a. The Ring, kicked off an American hunger for the weird eyes and dark, stringy hair of the ghosts of Japanese horror, but even more scary than a ghoul that crawls out of your TV set (a highly frightening but fairly uncommon occurrence) is an actual living woman who wants to do terrible, terrible things to you with needles. Sure, Sadako’s victims in The Ring may have a bad week and die, but the victims of shy, pretty, bat-shit crazy Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) wind up with no feet or tongue in a burlap sack for a much longer time. And then die. What makes the film even more disturbing is that it starts out like a carefree romantic comedy, until suddenly...not so much, kinda like Sleepless In Seattle with torture.

12. THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Shot in the woods of Tennessee over the course of almost a year and half on a budget of less than $400,000, and slowly released to the public over an even longer span of time, Sam Raimi's gore-drenched take on the lost-out-here-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-weird-shit-going-on genre looks like the work of some enthusiastic kids who'd stayed up late watching junk like Equinox on TV and went a little crazy making their own home-movie version of it -- except that these kids had talent, as well as the rare determination to see their little art therapy project/get rich quick scheme through to the end. Some connoisseurs see this early, primitive effort as just a stepping-stone to the slapstick wonders of the openly parodic Evil Dead II, but the raw energy of this thing, which is often funny and just as often genuinely scary, is a testament to how well primitivism can work in the horror genre.

11. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)

Jack Finney’s classic novel of (literal) social alienation was first brought to the screen in 1956, and since then it’s been officially remade three times (not counting rip-offs and “homages"). And, while the original Don Siegel adaptation has its rightful defenders, I’ve always been partial to the 1978 version starring Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy and, of course, the incomparable Donald Sutherland. Naturally, I’m biased: I saw this version on the big screen at an impressionable age, and it was the first movie I’d ever experienced where the good guys didn’t win...making me wonder if I could really trust the other people in the theater with me (or even my parents) and giving me an early taste of the existential angst I would become a lot more familiar with in my adolescent and adult life. Best of all, the movie inspired a game in my neighborhood where one pod person would go around infecting everyone else until there was only one “human” left. Trust me, you don’t know terror until you’re the last survivor on your street, waiting for the end as a dozen weirdly screaming pre-teen aliens slowly surround your hiding place.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Unborn; The Vengeful Ghost of Phil Nugent

Reviews By (Sorta) Request: Tenebrae (1982, Dario Argento)

Paul Clark — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Due to an untimely Netflix issue, I wasn’t able to watch and review your selected film, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, in time for this week’s Reviews By Request. Instead, I’ve written about the film that received the second-highest number of votes, Dario Argento’s Tenebrae. I’ll be writing about Let Sleeping Corpses at a later date, as soon as I’m able to view it. Thanks for understanding.

In addition, I’ll be polling you to determine the film for my November 14 Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the bottom of this review.

One of my fondest memories as a moviegoer was attending the semi-legendary world premiere of Dario Argento’s The Mother of Tears at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival. The movie itself was only so-so, but what made the experience such a thrill was that Argento himself was in attendance. While most filmmaker Q&As are pretty buttoned-up affairs, Argento’s was anything but. There was an irreverent, almost party-like (since it was his birthday, we even sang to him) atmosphere that filled the room, and Argento, crazy eyes beaming as he took the stage, presided over it all. As he answered question after question in his own inimitable way- even discussing his urge to cast lesbians with no pubic hair as witches- one thing was clear: It was Dario’s happening, baby, and it freaked him out.

I mention this experience not to brag or to be a name-dropper but to make it clear that, above all else, Dario Argento is a showman, something that comes through in all of his best-known work. And of all the Argento films I’ve seen to date, none has demonstrated this so clearly as Tenebrae. In Tenebrae, Argento uses all of the filmmaking tricks in his arsenal to keep his audience entertained. The result is intoxicating.

The movie begins as a fairly standard-issue whodunit. The story focuses on Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), a best-selling author who specializes in violent mysteries. After he arrives in Rome, people begin getting killed in gruesome ways. A woman, her throat slashed, is found with Neal’s latest page-turner- entitled Tenebrae, of course- stuffed into her mouth. The police get involved, and Neal begins receiving letters from the killer. As is par for the course in murder mysteries, Neal is surrounded by plenty of likely suspects, nearly all of whom are picked off, one by one, by the actual killer. As bodies begin to pile up, it’s up to Neal and the police to figure out who, shall we say, dunit.

As I said before, the setup is nothing special. But Argento is too much of a showman to make a simple- albeit extremely bloody- murder mystery, which the second half of the movie makes abundantly clear. Around the time Neal- and the audience- has figured out the most likely suspect in the case, the suspect is brutally and decisively murdered. Yet the killing is far from over. From that point on, the key color is red- the color of both the herrings and the blood that flows liberally up until the very end of the movie. At one point, Neal quotes Arthur Conan Doyle, saying, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” One of the chief pleasures of Tenebrae is just how improbable Argento is willing to make his storyline in the service of his crazed, brilliant vision.

As one would expect from Argento, the killing scenes are worth the price of admission- not merely the manner of death itself, but also the way Argento directs them. Clearly, Argento means to entertain the audience with the carnage, and while that might not wash with those who tut-tut the use of violence as entertainment (Michael Haneke would certainly not approve), the sheer excessiveness of Argento’s style makes them shamelessly thrilling. There’s an undeniable naughty-boy glee to be derived from seeing the convoluted ways in which Argento steers his characters to the slaughter, coupled with liberal uses of Grand Guignol-style lighting, complex camera movements, and of course, that Goblin score. And now, having seen Argento in person, it’s impossible not to imagine him sitting next to the camera and reveling in the bloody deliciousness of it all.

Perhaps most delicious of all, to my eyes, is the way Argento teases us with the identity of the film’s killer. At several points in the story, Argento intercuts a flashback sequence involving the murder of a beautiful woman, but fails to tell us who’s having the flashback. Eventually, when the woman’s red shoes turn up again on the feet of another character, Argento tantalizes us with by making us wonder what the connection might be. It goes without saying that the killing of this character and the revelation of the killer will go more or less hand in hand, but when Argento makes it happen in one of the most spectacularly bloody scenes I’ve ever witnessed, the result actually surpassed all my expectations.

In the past, I’ve enjoyed a number of Dario Argento’s films, especially Suspiria and Inferno, but none has ever really clicked for me the way Tenebrae does. In many ways, Argento’s classic-period films are fairly similar. But I’d say that what puts Tenebrae over the top is that it’s goes, well, over the top. More than any other Argento film I’ve seen, Tenebrae injects the style that won Argento legions of fans with an irresistible kind of wretched excess. And, to quote a film by another famously stylish contemporary of Argento’s, “nothing exceeds like excess.”

As before, I’m using a poll to select my next Review By Request. This time around, I’ve included two titles from a previous poll along with three new choices, which have nothing in common but for the fact that I’ve never seen them. The choice is yours:

What should I watch next? | BuzzDash polls

Again, feel free to use the comments to stump for your favorites of this lot, to suggest possible future titles, or simply to agree with me about how awesome Tenebrae is.

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)

Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

19. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

When Truffaut delivered his famed advice about the impossibility of anti-war film, he might as well have been talking about movies like The Great Escape. Not that it’s anything even remotely like an anti-war film: though its final moments contain some of the futility and brutality of war, they’re aimed squarely at the enemy, and the movie itself is a pure, unvarnished celebration of movie-style heroism and the fighting man at his best. But when Truffaut noted that action argues only for itself, this is the sort of thing he meant: even the ultimate futility of the real-life escape attempt fictionalized by John Sturges in this WWII classic is swept away on the back of all the thrilling set pieces, cunning scenes of calculation, defiant acts of heroism, and sheer thrilling action. Even if you know what’s going to happen to the individual escapees in the end, you can’t help but get caught up in the excitement of it all again and again, borne along by Elmer Bernstein’s unforgettable score and some larger-than-life performances by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve “Hey, Guys, Let’s Throw a Motorcycle Chase Scene in Here, Why Not?” McQueen. Even the poster knew what it was selling, tagging the movie as “THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT,” putting a good-times spin on the 30-years-later words of a rapper who issued his grim tales of ghetto warfare under the telling title Your Entertainment, My Reality. The Great Escape even spawned a genre of epic war pictures that clung to its formal elements: the dangerous-secret-mission plot, the all-star cast arrayed on boxes on the poster, all given colorful nicknames, the overblown heist-movie action elements. But the lousy quality of most of its imitators shouldn’t be held against it: its ‘reality’ may have been pure fantasy, but you can’t watch despairing anti-war pictures all the time.

18. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

This awesomely well-executed slab of 1950s melodrama is based on the first novel by soldier turned writer James Jones, and it isn't actually set in wartime: it chronicles the frustrations and tensions that are building among the men killing time at a military base in Hawaii in 1941, which will explode when the Japanese attack on December 7. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's scene on the beach deserves an automatic inclusion in any montage of legendary screen make-out scenes, and Frank Sinatra's supporting performance as the uncontainable Maggio more than justified both his career comeback and the gangsters-got-him-that-job rumors that were set in stone in the early scenes of The Godfather. (Even though, sadly, the rumors probably weren't true; it's more likely that Ava Gardner got him that job.) But the movie belongs to Montgomery Clift's beautiful performance as the doomed bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, who loves the army and can only say, when it's pointed out that the army is making his life miserable, "A man loves a thing, that don't mean it's gotta love him back." Which is pretty good advice no matter what you love, especially if it's the movies.

17. BEFORE THE RAIN (1994)

This Macedonian film, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, shows how the passions that war thrives on spill over uncontainably into the lives of people who want no part of them. The Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija plays a burned out war photographer who, after being affected by a violent ourburst in supposedly civilized London, goes home to retire in the Macedonian countryside and finds that the remote village that represents peace and tranquility to him has been split by civil war and the woman he left behind lives in fear for her daughter's life. The powerful-looking, bearded Šerbedžija does about as good a job as any actor ever has at suggesting an intelligently troubled man's desire for a peaceful life, and his feeling that no alternative could be worth living.

16. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)

(See #11)

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Almost indisputably the ur-document of teenage cinema, Nicholas Ray's explosive Rebel without a Cause did it all: it made a huge star out of Natalie Wood, and turned James Dean into something even huger than that – an icon. It proved eerily predictive in its on-screen depiction of poor doomed Sal Mineo. It was made at the exact moment in American history when teenagers were making the transformation from an age category to a demographic, and it became the blueprint for a million movies about how parents just don't understand. It became such an essential part of the culture that it falls under that rare category of movies that you know back to front even if you haven’t seen them. Oh, and incidentally, it's a great movie, with electrifying performances by all three leads, and an often-neglected directing job by the masterful Nicholas Ray. Dean's Jim Stark is the archetype of angry, alienated teenagers, and so perfectly does he inhabit the role that it could fairly be said that pretty much every alienated teenager in film history – in fact, every alienated teenager in reality – is just a copy of him. Most of all, Rebel Without a Cause does something quite magical: while never breaking the tensely emotional shell in which it surrounds its characters, while making their emotions as real and weighty as our own, it manages to give the sensation and perspective utterly lacking from their lives, and the lives of every teenager who would ever watch them: that this too would pass, and that the problems that seemed like – and, indeed, were – matters of life and death during high school would seem weightless as a cloud from the perspective of adulthood.

CARRIE (1976)

There are those who think Brian De Palma is a genius and those who find his "operatic" style overwrought and often downright silly, and 99 times out of 100 you can put me in the latter camp. Yet there was at least one occasion when De Palma's hyper-melodramatic emotionalism perfectly matched the source material: Stephen King's seminal "revenge of the nerd" tale Carrie. In high school, after all, every little slight, snub, or misunderstanding feels like a matter of life and death, and our most embarrassing moments seem to go on for hours – at least for those of us who weren't born to be the quarterback or the prom queen. De Palma conveys that hormones-gone-mad sensibility as if he's undergone some kind of regression therapy, particularly in the movie's two most famous set-pieces. The opening, set in the girls' locker room, transitions from woozy wet dreamland to literal bloody terror without missing a beat, while the pigs-blood prom sequence holds every agonizing note of a symphony of mortification before giving way to Carrie's deadly (but undeniably cathartic) retribution. It's the ultimate high-school-as-horror movie – because when you're 16 or so, it's hard to think of six more terrifying words than "They're all gonna laugh at you."

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

This late-summer teen comedy was released into the teeth of critics who regarded it as a mall-filler and promotional device for the soundtrack album, a judgment that was probably shared by the studio that released it. It quickly rode to cult status on the strength of its genuine affection for its young characters and the gentle but incisive touch of director Amy Heckerling and her screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, as well as a sprawling, talented ensemble cast. At the time, it was seen as the movie that made Sean Penn a star, and his Jeff Spicoli -- Shaggy with a surfboard instead of a crime-solving dog and a Volkswagen Microbus with a well-toasted aroma -- remains a classic comic stoner archetype. Now, though, the movie looks like one of those pictures that in one sweep introduced a generation's worth of new faces, including Forest Whitaker (as the token black football player who one kid assumes they just chauffeur in for the games), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, in a teensy feature debut, an actor with a long face and good family connections who for the first and only time in his career was billed "Nicolas Coppola." Heavy rotation on HBO proceeded to practically burn it into the DNA of '80s kids, who used their new VCRs to make a close study of Reinhold's masturbation fantasy of a topless Phoebe Cates emerging from the swimming pool, a sequence that made budding cineastes of many an appreciative young male.

HEATHERS (1989)

"Dear Diary," writes Ronnie Sawyer in her journal, in the goth-comedy that launched a thousand imitators, "my teen angst has a body count." That's as good a way as any to describe Heathers, the surprisingly subversive – and even more surprisingly successful – teen comedy that made a huge star of Winona Ryder (and threatened to do the same for Christian Slater, until he had the good taste to appear in several more movies so we could all see how ridiculous it was for him to go around claiming to be an actor). Ryder's character just wants to fit in with her high school's elite (the titular Heathers), but she's got a nasty independent streak and a Bud Cortish hobby of faking suicide, so it looks like she might be caught between her own desires and the intractable social demands of high school forever – until the dreamy Jason Dean shows up, determined to cut the Gordian knot of teen angst, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. Heathers has plenty of problems, from its highly improbable plot to its pat ending to, well, basically everything involving Christian Slater; but the reason it grabbed us then is the reason it holds up now. It's an unsparing look at the ludicrously overblown and arbitrary pressures of high school social life, wrapped up in an extremely funny package courtesy of screenwriter Daniel Waters. It may not be as deep as it thinks it is, but it's got a nasty attitude and it's got tons of great lines, and once you're actually out of high school, and you realize life doesn't really depend on being cool, that's enough.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

OST: "Psycho"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time. One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered. He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last). But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho. The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels: with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s. Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so. Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily. He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way. Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score: the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

Luckily for generations of moviegoers, Bernard Herrmann chose to completely disregard this directive, and, when Hitchcock raised a stink, Herrmann insisted that he view the scene with the music he'd written intact. If Hitchcock didn't agree that the music improved the scene instead of distracting from it, then he'd relent. Hitchcock agreed, and, as has been every one of the tens of millions who have seen Psycho since then, he was blown away by how perfect was the juxtaposition of music and visuals. Since then, it's become one of the true classics in the history of movie scoring; Herrmann's brilliant decision to use only the string section of his orchestra for the music, with the only low-end being provided by bass and cello, was inspired and set the standard for high-pitched, shrieking instrumentation as the default for horror films. It also spawned hosts of imitators and 'tributes' over the years (and none proved more determined than Brian De Palma, who, mirroring his own obsession with Hitchcock, used subtle variants of the music in both Carrie and Dressed to Kill). Very few soundtracks in motion picture history so reflect the personality of their creator than does Bernard Herrmann's work -- unnerving, brilliant, raw, and determined -- than does Psycho.

BEST TRACKS: It's impossible to even discuss Psycho -- the movie or the soundtrack -- without discussing the music from the notorious shower scene. (It's called "The Murder", by the way.) As other critics have mentioned, it's almost unfair to call it a piece of music; it's just the sound made by every string section in every orchestra in the world as they warm up. And yet by placing it in context, Herrmann transforms this ordinary sound into one of the most chilling pieces of music in history, and sets the tone for hundreds, maybe thousands, of future citematic murders. Not bad for a piece of music that's barely a minute long; and it's even more astonishing when you consider that, on an album of dozens of short pieces, it virtually defines the score's less-is-more aesthetic by being one of the longer pieces on the album! Still, this wouldn't be one of the greatest film scores of all time if it was simply one minute-long piece of genius; there's much more to love here, including the memorable title track ("Prelude", in which eerie swirls of strings leap and tangle with one another over the unforgettable Saul Bass title sequence), which is so well-loved that Stuart Gordon lifted it wholesale for the opening to Re-Animator. Other strong tracks include the tragic, melancholy "The Body"; the creepy, tense "Cabin 10", and the wailing, cacaphonous avant-gardeism of "The Cellar". A must-have score from a movie where almost all participants were at the tops of their games.

Video of the Day: Hitchcock in Hitchcock

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Strange as it may seem, Brian De Palma is not the most slavish imitator of Alfred Hitchcock in the movie business today. That title now belongs to M. Night Shyamalan, who has long since proved that anything Hitchcock could do, he could do bigger -- and worse. His twist endings are more predictable and disappointing; his plots are more pulpish and implausible; his thrills are sparser and fewer between; and even his cameos are more pompous and alienating than Hitch could ever have dreamed. Of course, where Hitchcock could never hope to equal Shyamalan's groundbreaking work in his own movies of annoying and distracting the viewer, what he lacked in chutzpah, he compensated for in sheer volume. Hitch appeared in some two dozen of his own films, including these 14 from the Hitchcock Collection DVD set.

Too bad this one doesn't contain Hitchcock's cleverly carried off cameo in Lifeboat. M. Night Shyamalan may be an egomaniac, but even he's not ballsy enough to give himself a cameo in a movie entirely set in a damaged life raft floating aimlessly around the Atlantic Ocean.

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve been taking reader suggestions for our Top Tens of late, and this week’s list, suggested via “electronic mail” by F.O.S. (Friend of Screengrab) Kaegan has the added advantage of being topical, what with the ten million recent reviews of Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen that cleverly elucidated how the film’s high school cliques and self-aware characters were just like something from a John Hughes movie...but for real! (And without any Wang Chung on the soundtrack).

Spurred by Kaegan, we henceforth present fifteen worthy homages and/or bad imitations, depending how you look at it (and NOT including Brian De Palma’s numerous Hitchcock rip-offs, which we’re saving for an upcoming list of, well, best and worse Hitchcock rip-offs...so stay tuned)!

FREEWAY (1996), Not Directed by John Waters

I’ve written about Freeway so recently that I’ll merely direct you to that write-up for my thoughts on Matthew Bright’s deranged cult classic...but, considering the film’s white trash milieu, indomitable characters, gleeful celebration of violence and depravity and startling against-type casting, it seemed fitting to kick off the list with the greatest Baltimore-of-the-West film the Prince of Puke never directed.

MIAMI BLUES (1990), Not Directed by Jonathan Demme

In the eighties, Jonathan Demme amassed a sizable following with his films Melvin & Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Each of these films showed a flair for offbeat comedy, as well as an affinity for marginalized characters. So when Miami Blues hit screens in 1990, the handful of people who actually paid to see it could have been forgiven for believing it was Demme’s latest directorial effort. Hell, it was produced by Demme and his usual producing team, shot by Demme’s usual cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, edited by Demme regular Craig McKay, and co-starred newly-hot leading man Alec Baldwin, who had a supporting role in Married to the Mob. But manning the director’s chair wasn’t Demme, but rather his old Roger Corman colleague George Armitage, whose most notable title up to that point had been 1971’s Private Duty Nurses. The style of Miami Blues bears definite resemblance to that of Demme’s work, but Armitage’s sense of humor is more twisted, as in the scene where Baldwin’s Fred Frenger (a Demme name if there ever was one) steals police detective Fred Ward’s gun and badge, plus his false teeth just to rub it in. But if Armitage’s brand of sick humor doesn’t exactly jive with his old pal’s more generous comedy, the two share an affection for characters who are essentially good, embodied here in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Suzie, a kind-hearted prostitute who gets stuck on Fred and comes off like the slower cousin of Something Wild’s Audrey. Once it begins to dawn on Suzie that Fred is far more dangerous than she’d anticipated, her answer is both quirky and heartbreaking: "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me."

THE THIRD MAN (1949), Not Directed by Orson Welles

It's easy to understand why people got the wrong idea about The Third Man. Orson Welles not only gives an electrifying performance as Harry Lime, but improvised various bits of the character's memorable dialogue, including his famous line about Swiss cuckoo clocks. (Indeed, he became so closely associated with the character that he went on to voice him in a radio show called The Lives of Harry Lime a few years later.) The film itself is infused with the kind of morally unhinged noir sensibility that Welles would later master in Touch of Evil, making it seem entirely plausible that his was the mind behind the film. Many of The Third Man's most daring shots, from the shadowy confrontations in the sewers of Vienna to the final, heartbreaking walk taken by Alida Valli, resemble Welles' visual pyrotechnics in his own films, and the overall dark tone of the movie, as well as little touches like the overlapping dialogue, the low-angled two-shots, and the interesting lighting, are all reminiscent of movies that Orson Welles really did direct. To top it all off, Welles was already a famous (or infamous) director when The Third Man opened in the U.S., while Carol Reed, though well-known in his native England, wasn't particular renowned here. But the all-too-common assumption that Orson Welles "really" directed the film does a disservice to the talented and innovative Reed, who, while not on his star's level of genius, was nonetheless a very dedicated, professional and skilled director. Indeed, in at least one way, it was Carol Reed who did Orson Welles' job and not the other way around: Harry Lime's hands reaching through the sewer grate near the movie's end belong to Reed and not Welles, who was gallivanting around Europe when the scene was filmed and hadn't even shown up on set yet.

INTERIORS (1978), Not Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Like a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is obsessed with the work of Ingmar Bergman. Unlike a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is actually capable of getting movies made and widely released across the country. For years, Allen – whose obsession with Bergman is arguably both wider and deeper than his understanding of Bergman – had been trying to get people to take him seriously, and with Interiors, he pulled the trigger in a big way, inspired by Bergman's stark, chilly tales of family unhappiness in everything from the photography to the poster design. Never had Diane Keaton stared so wistfully out of a poorly lit window; never had Woody Allen failed to appear in one of his own movies; and, most importantly, never had a film by America's leading comedic director been such a relentless bummer. Interiors proved to be a massive critical success, with only a few grouches wondering if someone so adept at comedy needed to be spending his time making second-rate imitations of art films by a Swedish director who was still alive and perfectly capable of making such films himself. (Indeed, Bergman managed to one-up Allen even in the casting department: Woody had wanted to use Ingrid Bergman for the role of Eve, but she was already committed to filming a movie in Europe with, you guessed it, Ingmar.) Regardless of whether or not you think of Interiors as a failed Bergman knock-off or a successful Bergman homage, one thing's for sure: it ain't funny. The "I liked your earlier, funnier work" has become a comic cliché of its own when applied to Woody Allen's movies; Interiors is the movie that set it all off.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Famous Last Words: Round 2, Week 9

Paul Clark — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I could almost hear the joyful noise coming from my Screengrab colleague Leonard Pierce due to my selection of last week’s Famous Last Words quote. The line came from William Peter Blatty’s irresistibly nutzoid The Ninth Configuration, a favorite of Leonard’s that he takes every opportunity he can to shoehorn into our weekly lists (of course, I’m one to talk, given the disproportionate number of Brian DePalma films that get included). Sadly, very few of the Screengrab readers appear to share Leonard’s enthusiasm for Blatty’s directorial debut, and that’s a shame. Based on Blatty’s novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, the film boasts a memorably intense lead performance by Stacy Keach, as well as a killer supporting cast headed by That Guy! extraordinaire Scott Wilson, who gives his all to memorably unhinged dialogue like “the man in the moon tried to fuck my sister!” If you haven’t seen it, Leonard and I both urge you to give it a look. Congrats to the few who got it.

This week’s quote comes from a film that’s about 180 degrees removed from The Ninth Configuration. Here’s the quote:

“Oh, if only you could have recognized what was always yours… could have found what was never lost…”

Name the film. Remember, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com no later than 11:59 PM Eastern on Wednesday. Good luck!

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“This used to be a hell of a good country,” Jack Nicholson’s pot-smoking lawyer George Hanson laments in 1969's Easy Rider. “I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it...”

He didn’t know the half of it.

And yet, even after seven-plus years of the Bush administration, the United States is still, for the most part, a hell of a good country, and next week, as the nation barbecues and cherry bombs itself into a frenzy of patriotism over the 4th of July weekend, we here at the Screengrab will join the celebration with a list of movies that show just exactly how and why America kicks ass.

But this week, partly in tribute to the passing of beloved comedian (and scathing social critic) George Carlin, we thought we’d take a cinematic tour of the nastier side of the American Empire. From slavery and the near-extermination of the nation’s indigenous population to rampant corporate greed, bigoted religious fanaticism and horrific military fiascos, the U.S. (and its citizens, including me and possibly you) have a lot of skeletons in our collective national closet.

Fortunately, we’ve also managed to (more or less) hang onto that whole freedom of speech thing, resulting in the following films (some by outsiders, but mostly homegrown) that, to paraphrase Toby Keith, put a boot in the American way.

THE WIRE (2002-2008)

Again, as with last week’s inclusion of Angels in America among the Gay Pride Top Twenty, I’m cheating a bit, since HBO’s epic, five-season dramatization of the death of the American working class, the devastation wrought by the “War on Drugs,” the failure of inner city public schools, the inherent corruption of organizations and the helplessness of the individuals trapped within them is, technically, “just” a TV show. But, taken as a single, sixty-hour cinematic exposé, David Simon’s epic, multi-layered, deeply human depiction of the drug dealers, junkies, cops, dockworkers, teachers, lawyers, politicians, reporters and regular civilians of modern day Baltimore (and, by extension, Anytown, U.S.A.) trumps just about any movie ever made in its unflinching depiction of the ways that Americans become trapped in their own delusions and systems of organization, allowing hacks and sociopaths (like Jamie Hector’s drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, Michael Kostroff’s sleazy lawyer Maurice Levy and corrupt cops Herc (Dominic Lombardozzi) and Burrell (Frankie Faison)) to flourish while system-bucking firebrands like Detective McNulty (Dominic West) and Michael K. Williams’ iconic stick-up artist Omar Little are marginalized or destroyed. But, unlike grim civics lessons like the recent slate of doomed Iraq films (typified by Robert Redford’s deadly earnest Lions for Lambs), The Wire (even at its most harrowing) was never a slog, thanks to the work's relentless humor, suspense, virtuoso writing, astonishing performances and, for all its pessimism, a crucial, inspiring sense of gratitude for the men and women (like Sonja Sohn and Wendell Pierce as “good police” Kima Greggs and “Bunk” Moreland, Deirdre Lovejoy’s tough, incorruptible state’s attorney Rhonda Pearlman and Jim True-Frost’s ex-cop turned schoolteacher “Prez” Pryzbylewski) who somehow manage to keep their heads down, plug away and, ultimately, hold the world together for the rest of us. (Now if only the not-racist-at-all Emmy voters would notice and finally honor The Wire with at least one friggin’ award.)

DOGVILLE (2003)

Lars Von Trier's Dogville (the first of his proposed – and still uncompleted – "U.S.A. – Land of Opportunities" trilogy) certainly got the job done in terms of provocation. Von Trier, already one of the most controversial and divisive directors working today, sure wasn't going to win a lot of friends on this side of the Atlantic when he announced, not long after September 11, 2001, his intention of making three films whose intent was to turn a gimlet eye on some of the ugliest aspects of American culture. And when Dogville was released, it had a polarizing effect almost immediately: for everyone who praised its uniformly excellent cast, its stark, eerie direction, and its brilliantly minimalist set design (which served as an unsettling visual reference to that most all-American of plays, Thornton Wilder's Our Town), there was someone who condemned its inflammatory rhetoric, its brutal tone, and its determination to poke at the festering sores of everything bad about America, from racism to sexism to crime to class inequity. Some critics – no names, no pack drill – apparently became so unhinged over the movie that they spoke of it in terms better suited to hate crimes, or even war crimes, than to movie reviews. But the deeply dividing effect that Dogville had on audiences and critics may have proven nothing more than the fact that the reaction Von Trier gets out of his movies is exactly the reaction that he wants.

ROGER AND ME (1989)

No list of films critical of America could be complete without a Michael Moore documentary (strangely enough, no one at Screengrab headquarters was lobbying for Canadian Bacon), so it was only a matter of choosing which one. In the end, there was no real choice. Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the most incendiary grenade Moore has lobbed, but it's marred with some cable access-level conspiracy mongering. In both The Big One and Bowling for Columbine, the messenger overwhelms the message. And I'll confess I haven't seen Sicko yet – I'm simply Michael Moore-d out. But that wasn't the case back in 1989, when Roger and Me arrived in theaters as a most unlikely breath of fresh air. How unlikely? Here was a film released by a major American corporation (Warner Bros.) openly criticizing another major American corporation (General Motors) for its outrageous treatment of its employees. Here was a movie about the economic devastation wrought on an American city by the closing of its auto plants – and it was funny. Moore hadn't worn out his welcome, because we didn't know who the hell he was; he was just this shambling schlub in a ballcap trying to get an audience with GM CEO Roger Smith to find out why his hometown of Flint was being put through the wringer. If his shtick has long since grown stale, it was fresh then, enlivened by such real-life characters as Deputy Fred (who tries to evict the newly unemployed in the friendliest possible way) and the woman who offers rabbits in two varieties: "Pets or Meat." We know now about the manipulations of chronology (Horrors! In a movie?) and many of us have soured on Moore's self-aggrandizing style, but the impact and influence of Roger and Me on documentary film – for better and for worse – cannot be overstated. And if you lost your job on the assembly line and nobody gave a shit, you'd probably be grateful to have a high-profile advocate – even a self-righteous schlub in a ballcap.

BLOW OUT (1981)

The critic J. Hoberman called Brian De Palma's conspiracy movie the last great film of the 1960s, even though it was released during the first summer of the Reagan administration -- a moment that it also memorializes quite well in its own sick way. Set in Philadelphia, De Palma's picture stars John Travolta as a motion picture sound man who inadvertently records the gunshot that sends a car containing a potential presidential candidate and a hooker (Nancy Allen) into a river, killing the politician. Another figure, a photographer played by Dennis Franz, claims to have recorded the crash in a series of photos that are published in a national magazine. Meanwhile, the man who shot out the tire -- Burke, played by John Lithgow -- is committing a series of murders so that he can take out the Nancy Allen character and make it look like the work of a serial killer the papers have dubbed "the Liberty Bell Strangler." Not satisfied with this amalgam of Chappaquiddick, the Zapruder film, and G. Gordon Liddy gone off the reservation, De Palma invented his own bogus patriotic holiday, "Liberty Day", so that he could show his hero failing to save the heroine against a backdrop of oblivious citizens garishly celebrating the country whose promise we in the audience can see openly turning to criminal rot.

THE CANDIDATE (1972)

Robert Redford uses his Kennedyesque qualities -- "Kennedyesque" having once been code for anyone really good-looking who might plausibly read his subscription copy of Newsweek -- as a double-edged sword in this collaboration between a director, Michael Ritchie, with a special knack for throwaway slapstick and bits of offbeat Americana and a screenwriter, Jeremy Larner, who was regarded as a walking mother lode of inside political knowledge from his having worked as a screenwriter for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. The film has plenty to say about the importance of money and image, at the expense of substance, in American politics, though what really sets it apart is the absolute hopelessness that comes attached to its cheerful, Zippy-like grin. Redford's Bill McKay is the son of an former governor and old-style pol (Melvyn Douglas) who, thanks to watching his father at work, knows that nothing can be achieved through conventional politics and so works as a liberal lawyer for good causes. He's talked into running against the despicable old conservative incumbent Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) so that he can shake up the campaign and bring attention to the real issues he favors; he signs on with the understanding that he can't possibly win. But when he does so badly that he risks becoming a joke, he agrees to let the handlers polish the rough edges on his campaign style, and damned if he doesn't end up winning -- after which he turns to his chief handler (Peter Boyle) and asks, in a state of mild panic, "What do we do now?" Other movies in this period, such as The Parallax View and Executive Action, jumped on the JFK-assassination-theory bandwagon and took it on faith that if anybody decent ever ran for office in this country, the big boys would have him whacked. The Candidate's Nader-esque attitude -- that politics is such a total shuck that nobody decent would ever get involved with and if, by some accident, they did, the compromises they'd have to agree to would reduce them to a dithering nothing -- seems less doom-laden on the surface but is actually much worse, if only because so many intelligent people find it irresistable as a reason for bowing out of political engagement altogether.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

EW Makes Great-Movies List; Screengrab Points, Laughs

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

With last week blessedly free of celebrities getting knocked up and/or being caught without underwear, Entertainment Weekly has seized upon this fallow period in entertainment news to unveil yet another list for your perusal. In this week’s double issue, EW’s writing staff unveiled their lists of “The New Classics” in a number of media, including their top 100 movies of the last quarter century. There were a few pleasant surprises- like #4 pick Blue Velvet making its second prominent appearance on a high-profile list in less than a week (after the latest AFI special)- and you can't really argue with Pulp Fiction at #1, but many of the choices left something to be desired. Put it another way- if you know both jack and shit about cinema, EW’s list is bound to feel pretty unsatisfactory, with a whopping six foreign-language films and two documentaries out of 100.

Of course, the makers of such lists are always prone to stating that their goal is to “stir up debate.” So in the proud Screengrab tradition of speaking truth (or at least strongly-worded fibs) to power, I’d like to go on record to state that a number of masterpieces of the past 25 years were ignominiously robbed in order to make way for the likes of Pretty Woman. On top of that, a few of the movies that made the list were so unceremoniously- and undeservingly- buried near the bottom that their inclusion is arguably even more of a disgrace when you consider the titles that outrank them. In keeping with EW’s format, I’ve kept the artsy-fartsy to a minimum- no shorts, no avant-garde, no mentions of Peter Watkins. Instead I’ve selected five pretty accessible movies (including a foreign-language pick) and one classic that deserved far better than EW wanted to give it.

But first, a note to EW’s webmaster: your online feature on the 26 greatest movie posters doesn’t want to scroll over to the poster for The Limey. Please fix this immediately. Thank you.

Now, my alternate selections, in no particular order:

The New World- to my eyes, the finest American film of the last 25 years. Should have qualified just by being one of the most beautiful films ever made, but there’s more to Terence Malick’s masterpiece than gorgeous cinematography and panoramic shots of nature. Malick’s re-creation of the founding of Virginia and the resulting “settlement” of the land is always completely convincing, transporting the viewer into the lifestyle (and mindsets) of the time in a way few period pieces can manage. But it’s also a heartrending love story of a particularly mature kind, as Pocahontas (the glowing Q’Orianka Kilcher) must learn to let go of her childish love in order to find sustainable happiness with another. The New World is a marvel, and I expect that we’ll be seeing it on plenty of lists in the decades to come.

Naked- Now, I can kind of understand leaving Malick off your list, since the guy’s only made two movies during the eligible period. But what’s your excuse when it comes to Mike Leigh? Even the Academy has caught on to Leigh’s greatness- witness the bevy of nominations for Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake- but for my money his best work to date is still Naked. Of course, it’s something of a bitter pill to swallow, with an almost painfully bleak view of human nature. And in the middle of it all is David Thewlis, giving one of the all-time great performances, as the compulsively verbal misanthrope Johnny, the kind of bastard whose sole redeeming virtue is that he knows exactly how much of a bastard he is. Thewlis owns the film, creating from the ground up a character so fascinating that we can’t help but watch him, mouth often agape, up through the film’s magnificent final shot.

Heavenly Creatures- Hey EW, you know that Peter Jackson guy? The one whose most famous films you’ve placed prominently at #2? Well, he did make movies before Lord of the Rings, and in its way Heavenly Creatures is just as good if not better. Beginning with a true-crime story that would in other hands have lent itself to sensationalism- teenage lesbian murderers!- Jackson instead crafted in alternately invigorating and harrowing movies about the seductiveness, and the dangers, of fantasy. As Pauline and Juliet (Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, in their breakthrough roles) grow ever more attached to their King-Arthur-meets-Ayn-Rand fairy tale land, they increasingly feel compelled to defend it against the encroachment of the everyday world, until the story commences in a sudden, shocking act of violence that sends these killer angels crashing back to Earth forever.

Once Upon a Time in America- Once again, Sergio Leone’s final masterwork is the odd man out among gangster dramas, with the EW writers forwarding the unfortunate notion that the genre began with The Godfather and ended with GoodFellas, with a brief stopover in Scarface Land. Leone’s film may not have the iconic status of Coppola, the seductiveness of Scorsese, or the gangsta cachet of DePalma, but as a cinematic achievement, it deserves respect, at least in its 227-minute long version. As a minor-key elegy for a crime culture that has long since passed, Once Upon a Time in America mops the floor with The Godfather, Part III, with as many classic moments as any film in Leone’s oeuvre. You’ll never look at a garbage truck the same way again.

Three Colors Trilogy- I debated including Decalogue on this list but decided against it because it premiered on television. But I had no such problem with Kieslowski’s trilogy, a wholly unique- yet entirely approachable- grand work in three parts. In telling three intimate stories, Kieslowski manages to capture a specific end-of-the-millennium worldview, as well as some surprising insights into human nature in general. But the film’s true power comes from their simplicity- Kieslowski tells us everything we need to know about these people and their lives, if only we know where (and how) to look. Beyond that, they’re just ravishing cinema, with the scores of Zbigniew Preisner ranking among the greatest ever written for the screen.

And finally…

Back to the Future- #91? Really? Working from perhaps the tightest and cleverest screenplay ever made into a Hollywood blockbuster, Robert Zemeckis and company turned what was essentially a comedic take on Americana into a genuine piece of Americana itself. How many movies of the past quarter century are this widely seen, or so beloved by all sectors of the moviegoing audience? Back to the Future is a textbook case of all the pieces lining up just so, as well as a testament to how wonderful a big-budget movie when the filmmakers trust their assembled elements enough to stay out of their own damn way. But hey, if you guys really think Shrek, Gladiator, Speed, Fatal Attraction, Scream, Beverly Hills Cop, Dirty Dancing (?!?!?), Out of Africa, and Napoleon Dynamite are all better than Back to the Future, I guess I don’t have anything left to say to you.

In Other Blogs: They Shoot Bloggers, Don’t They?

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Along with movie fans everywhere, film bloggers bid farewell to Sydney Pollack this week. Bright Lights After Dark sums up the prevailing sentiment in the title of this post: Good Director, Great Actor. “One of the best, certainly one of the most unusual, episodes of the half-hour anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was 1960's 'The Contest for Aaron Gold.' Directed by Norman Lloyd and based on a story by Philip Roth, it’s about a camp counselor, a teacher of ceramics, who observes a special talent in Aaron (Barry Gordon), one of the boys he is instructing in arts and crafts. While the other boys are using their clay to make crude snakes and pots, Aaron is making a finely detailed sculpture of a knight. But there’s a problem. The sculpture is missing an arm, and for some reason, Aaron refuses to complete it. The night before the boys’ parents are due to arrive, the counselor decides to complete the sculpture himself – with unexpected results. I recall this episode today, among other reasons, because of the extraordinary natural performance by the actor who played the camp counselor. It was the late Sydney Pollack, and to see him in this role is to wonder why he didn’t have the major acting career of a Hoffman or a De Niro. Instead, of course, Pollack became a director, and - not surprisingly - directing actors was one of his greatest strengths.”

Arbogast on Film offers a somewhat more pointed appreciation. “Sydney Pollack rates about half a dozen references in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, which means, I guess, that Biskind doesn't consider Pollack (who died yesterday at the age of 73) one of those saviors. Well, fuck Peter Biskind. I'm not knocking Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Paul Schrader or Brian DePalma - I like a lot of their movies, too - but at least Pollack never got high off his own supply and turned into a pathetic caricature of himself.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir has a post-Cannes wrap-up. “Along the Croisette, the enormous billboards for international co-productions that may never be made, let alone seen by the paying public, will quickly come down. This year's most ubiquitous and puzzling ad was pushing an Egyptian-made thriller (or something) called The Baby Doll Night, featuring a tank on a ruined street with a woman's slip hanging from its cannon. It asks: ‘Can one night of pleasure mend 60 years of pain?’ Well, I'm just not sure. Another total baffler was a film called The Seven of Daran: The Battle of Pareo Rock, which appears to feature a baby giraffe, two kids, a helicopter and the slogan: ‘A myth never been told.’ (Fellow blogger and Cannes drinking buddy Glenn Kenny prefers the tagline for the Jason Statham vehicle Transporter 3: ‘The rules remain the same. Except some changes.’)”

Cinema Styles proprietor Jonathan Lapper has put together a terrific movie clip montage called Frames of Reference. “I knew I wanted to take just one piece of music, and using no ambient sounds from the films themselves, edit together clips building a rhythm according to the natural rhythm of the music. I had another goal in mind as well. I did not want to move through film history chronologically, working from a hundred plus years back and moving forward or going in reverse, and I did not want to break it down into sections according to genre. What I wanted to do, and did, was take advantage of the language of film, the words and letters, and the fact that so many films, whether consciously or not, use the same shots, the same angles, the same movements when telling their story. And so the montage exploits these similarities and puts them to the rhythm of the music.” Watch it here.

And finally in List-o-Mania, ReezChannel commemorates the release of Sex and the City with a Tribute to Big-Screen Cougars, “that special breed of single woman, generally in her 30s or 40s, who tosses aside traditional notions of femininity with a bold, independent, sexually adventurous approach to life.” Has the world forgotten Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment? (The correct answer is “yes.”)

Yesterday's Hits: Fatal Attraction (1987, Adrian Lyne)

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Whenever I describe the idea of Yesterday’s Hits to someone who’s never read the column, I’m often asked, “why write about movies that aren’t popular anymore?” There are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest has always been a kind of anthropological fascination with the movies to which earlier generations gravitated. In some cases, the reasons behind the films’ blockbuster status are simple- because they craved good special effects, or because the stars were popular at the time. But in some cases, it goes deeper than that, because the film taps into a certain zeitgeist that makes it a must see. Simply put, it’s the right film at the right time. One example of this is Fatal Attraction.

What made Fatal Attraction a hit?: The 1980s were a profitable period for R-rated movies, and one of the prime beneficiaries of this was the erotic thriller genre. But while most movies of this kind were fairly disreputable, Fatal Attraction was different- a classy project pairing bankable leading man Michael Douglas with three-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close. Because of its pedigree, Fatal Attraction was able to attract a bigger audience than most films of the kind, becoming the second-biggest hit of 1987.

However, the film’s success was bigger than box-office grosses, with its title entering the popular lexicon. This was due in no small part to the way its screenplay (penned by James Dearden) tapped into two major issues of the day. First, after the advent of feminism, there was a certain degree of anxiety among many men about these newly independent and sexually powerful women, exemplified in the film by Glenn Close’s Alex. But also important- although less explicit in the film- was the sudden fear of sex which was caused by the discovery of AIDS earlier in the decade. Suddenly, the casual sex of the sixties and seventies carried with it deadly consequences. These two factors combined to make Fatal Attraction a topic of national conversation, with the film garnering six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Not bad for a project that had repeatedly been dismissed as a ripoff of Play Misty for Me and passed on by almost twenty filmmakers, including Brian DePalma and John Carpenter.

What happened?: While Fatal Attraction transcended the genre to which it ostensibly belonged, its box-office performance paved the way for an explosion of erotic thrillers, few of which were remotely as good, and almost none of which were as respectable. Most of the films that were made in its wake were sleazy and shameless, with filmmakers like screenwriter Joe Eszterhas aiming to outdo each other for kinky sexuality and elaborate deaths. In addition, there was a rise in direct-to-video erotic thrillers at the end of the eighties, occasioned in part by the home-video success of Fatal Attraction. For both of these reasons, and others besides, the erotic thriller genre had largely become a parody of itself even before Carl Reiner made his dire spoof Fatal Instinct in 1993.

Does Fatal Attraction still work?: Mostly, yes. For a movie of this kind, Fatal Attraction is pretty low-key for most of its duration. Dearden and director Adrian Lyne take time to properly establish the film’s characters and story rather than simply barreling through to the sex and violence. From the beginning, the film portrays Dan Gallagher’s (Douglas) life in detail- his beautiful wife Beth (Anne Archer), his little girl, his job as a high-powered lawyer, and his close friendships. It’s not until after we see what his everyday life is like that the film throws Alex into the mix, which allows us to see what he has before he does something that could cause him to lose it.

It’s because of this that the casting of Douglas is crucial. Most big stars of the period specialized in uncomplicated heroes, but Douglas was the exception, often playing flawed yuppie types with a dark side. Fatal Attraction gave him the one of his best roles, as a decent man who is almost done in by his arrogance- he cheats on his wife because he knows he’ll have fun, and he figures he’ll never get caught anyway, so where’s the harm? But of course, he does.

Also important is Close’s performance as Alex, who’s crazy all right, but also says some things that make a good amount of sense. After Dan unceremoniously dumps her, she calls him on it, saying he treats her like “some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage.” After she finds out she’s pregnant, she seeks him out and demands that he “accept his responsibilities.” Alex has her share of problems- she’s suicidal, for one thing- but most of her actions in the film’s first half are actually pretty reasonable. She’s been wronged, she’s pissed, and now she will. Not. Be. Ignored.

The first hour or so of Fatal Attraction works so well as a morality play, with Dan trying to figure out how to shake off Alex while dealing with his own guilt and keeping the truth from his wife, that it’s sort of disappointing when it moves into more traditional thriller territory. Some of the film’s most famous sequences- the boiled bunny, the kidnapping- still pack a punch, but they don’t fit very well with what came before. Mostly though, it feels too easy to turn Alex into a psycho. By making her a villain, it provides an easy opportunity for Dan to emerge as a hero working in the interest of protecting his family and saving his marriage. Compared to what came before, it’s far too tidy.

Especially damaging is the film’s climactic scene, in which Alex brandishes a butcher knife and tries to murder Beth. In Dearden’s original ending, Alex committed suicide in a manner that made it appear Dan had killed her, which led to him being arrested for her murder. However, after disastrous test screenings, the studio shot the new ending, which tested much better. But while turning Alex into a knife-wielding slasher helped the film’s box office, it hurt it quality-wise. With its original ending, not only do all of the Madame Butterfly references suddenly make sense, but the film becomes far more about Dan having to deal with the consequences of his affair and less about providing clear-cut violent catharsis for the audience. Sadly, a move like this is all too typical of Hollywood- so short-sighted that they’ll gladly torpedo a future classic in the interest of making the movie more bankable today. Of course, this is what made Fatal Attraction so ideal for Yesterday’s Hits. Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

READ PART I

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part I

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

For a movie that’s made so many people laugh for over 30 years, the people who made Monty Python and the Holy Grail didn’t have a very good time. The first big-screen effort from arguably the greatest sketch comedy group of all time was plagued with problems: they were frequently denied access to filming locations they thought they’d secured; Graham Chapman, playing the part of King Arthur, was plagued with psychological and physical problems as a result of his recovery from alcoholism; the entire production was plagued with budgetary problems and probably wouldn’t even have been made if members of Pink Floyd (huge fans of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV show) hadn’t have stepped in and pumped money into the film; the troupe was working on an incredibly strict filming deadline and nerves were frayed to the breaking point trying to get the production in on time; and much of the filming was done in locations that left the cast and crew cold, wet, and miserable much of the time, when they weren’t almost dying from falling off of a cliff. And in the end, what did they have to show for it? Nothing more than the purest distillation possible of their absurdist, kitchen-sink comic sensibilities. Decades of abuse at the hands of geeks who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone still haven’t managed to sink Monty Python and the Holy Grail or its hard-earned reputation as one of the funniest movies ever made. And if filming it was fraught with peril, that just means that it had even more in common with the original TV show: Monty Python’s Flying Circus faced censorship battles, ratings problems, drug and alcohol abuse from a cast who were often at each other’s throats, a network that completely failed to understand the show and scheduled it in the most ham-handed way possible, and, of course, a miniscule budget and a ruthless production timeline. So it’s no surprise that Holy Grail so effectively captures the postmodern comic brilliance of Flying Circus; they’d all been there before.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)

For all the hype that went into the release of the big-screen version of Our Favorite Family, you’d think something exceptionally earth-shaking was going to happen. But really, what was the big deal? It wasn’t the revival of a beloved but long-lost franchise; The Simpsons is still on the air and is likely to remain so until the apocalypse. It didn’t promise any major changes in continuity, since The Simpsons doesn’t have any. (They did kill off at least one supporting character, but it’s not like the entire future of the series hinged on the actions of Dr. Nick Riviera.) And with the exception of a hilarious “goddamn” from Marge and a brief glimpse at Bart’s hand-drawn doodle, it didn’t even take much advantage of the creative free space of a theatrical release. All it did was deliver, essentially, a triple-length episode of The Simpsons. But that’s pretty much what the show’s fans wanted, and the producers, writers and directors gave them an extremely high-quality triple-length episode for their money. The animation is terrific, and one of the few ways in which the filmmakers do take advantage of the big screen is in a gorgeous color palate and some cinematic storytelling that uses up every inch of the space allotted. The writing is top-notch, with tons of funny lines and despite a bit of a sag near the end, it’s one of the tightest comedies in recent memory; while the show’s latter seasons aren’t as dismal as some embittered fans would have you believe, measured against the product on TV, The Simpsons Movie is a lot funnier, more controlled, and better at what people value in the show. The gimmicky guest stars are (literally) disposed of early on, leaving Albert Brooks – a veteran of the series who’s provided some of its most memorable moments – to nearly steal the show from then on. Sure, it’s just a long episode of the show, but that’s good enough for me.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

The 1979 Star Trek--The Motion Picture was many years' worth of stops and starts in coming, and remains a very expensive project that no one involved with looks back on proudly. But despite its being regarded as a disappointment, it did make enough money that Paramount decided to burn off whatever good will remained among fans of the TV series by making a much less pricey sequel for the summer trade. It was actually the sequel that rejuvenated interest in the property and launched the long-running movie franchise. The writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who had previously demonstrated a flair for playing with other people's characters in his Sherlock Holmes novel and screenplay The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was brought in late and given a short window in which to prepare a shooting script, and managed to do it by cobbling together the best elements of the many already-discarded attempts by other writers—including the idea of a sequel to the old TV episode "Space Seed" with Ricardo Montalban reprising his role as the regal, megalomaniac villain Khan. He also had the masterstroke of supplying Leonard Nimoy with a gorgeous death scene as Mr. Spock, which was reportedly a key factor in persuading Nimoy to go back on his vow to never put his ears back on after the first movie. The results were greeted with rapturous gratitude by long-time fans and non-Trekkers alike despite attempts to sabotage the release by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, whose displeasure with something that someone wanted to do with his baby was almost infallible proof that it must be a step in the right direction.

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

Most "movies" spun off from still-current, ongoing TV series are just stretched-out TV episodes, sometimes with pricier special effects or guest stars. (The last straw may have been the over-hyped 1998 X-Files movie, which tarted up a subpar script from the series' "conspiracy" with a fireball explosion, a Martin Landau cameo, and the threat of the two leads kissing, then ended with a series-impacting plot twist designed to make those smart enough to have stayed at home feel left out when the fall TV season began.) The South Park movie, a genuine act of pop outrage with its mock-Disney-cartoon-musical score (written by series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and composer Marc Shaiman, who later brought Hairspray to Broadway) and its Colorforms-meets-Photoshop images of Saddam Hussein and a weirdly sympathetic Satan getting it on, is the rare example of someone bringing their hot, pre-sold property to the big screen and seeing it as a reason to step up their game. At a time when movies are getting smaller and smaller and moving more and more to TV and computer screens and even cell phones, Parker and Stone felt an old-fashioned obligation to enlarge their vision for the theater version. What's more, their discovery of just how much they could do with their little freak hit informed and improved the subsequent seasons of the TV version, now on its twelfth season and going strong. In fact, it was with the movie that South Park made its real transition from giggly fad to one of the cornerstones of our civilization.

MIAMI VICE (2006)

The '80s TV show co-created by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich was very much a product of its time, so much so that Manhunter, the 1986 movie that Mann made while the show was still on the air, looks a lot more like the movie called Miami Vice that he made twenty years later. The movie doesn't have the high-contrast visual scheme or the pastel threads or the distracting celebrity cameos of the series; it does have the tropical setting and some character names in common with the series, but what it mainly has is the hopeless-romantic atmosphere and the coiled-spring bursts of action that the show reached for in its proudest moments, executed by a gifted director who had had a couple of decades to work on his moves. The movie, which required significant rewriting to satisfy the whims of one of its stars, Jamie Foxx, has been released in a "director's cut" DVD version, and neither it nor the theatrical release can be said to be free of lulls or to consistently make a world of sense. But when it's at its most intoxicating--especially when Gong Li points her sad headlights at the camera as the cinematographer Dion Beebe is adjusting the light on the horizon just so while God, looking over his shoulder, takes notes--it can get you higher than all the coke in Colombia.

- Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

READ PART II

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Savage Grace"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The 1985 book Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, told the story of Barbara Daly, a social climbing beauty who married Brooks Baekeland, the heir to a plastics fortune, and her incestuous relationship with her damaged son, Tony, who wound up stabbing her to death in 1972. Coming out when it did, in the era of the Reagans and Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the book had a special appeal, especially since it was written mostly in the form of an oral history, with testimony from various observers and other interested parties. Tony's murder of his mother may have made it possible to file it neatly under "true crime", but what gave it is juice was the chance to sit in on what amounted to a seminar's worth of gossip about just how deeply twisted and fucked-up a very rich, very beautiful, very socially ambitious family really was. For maximum impact, the book ought to have been filmed not long after it came out, maybe with Brian De Palma or the Barbet Schroeder of Reversal of Fortune at the helm, but it might still be good sleazy fun if Tom Kalin hadn't gotten ahold of it.

As he demonstrated with his first film, the art-house train wreck Swoon, Kalin lacks, and may be completely uninterested in, certain attributes that are helpful to narrative filmmakers. He isn't very good at working with actors to develop characters, he can't shape his materials into a coherent story, and he has no ability to create a sense of believable life onscreen. What he mainly has is an interest--a chilly, academic interest--in "transgressive" behavior that, in Swoon, resulted in a movie that, to the extent that it was coherent at all, seemed to suggest that Leopold and Loeb were martyred victims of society because all they did was kill a kid, whereas everybody else was homophobic. Savage Grace seems taken with the idea of Barbara Daly Baekeland as heroic victim, a woman who's so much ;arger than life that the world can't possibly give her all the love and attention she requires. It's a choice that cuts off Julianne Moore's oxygen supply as an actress; instead of getting the chance to play the sacred monster of the book, she's stuck in a vaccuum, working her Mona Lisa smile. The movie begins with Barbara (Julianne Moore) and Brooks (Stephen Dillane, whose performance as a stiffly dashing natural aristocrat looks to have been researched by spending a few mornings studying Eric Braeden's Victor on The Young and the Restless) already married, and already practically sworn enemies. It's less interested in even comprehending how they wound up together than in charting the downward spiral of Barbara and Tony (played as an adult by Eddie Redmayne, a relative newcomer to movies who needs to learn that it's okay to just tell the camerman, "Look, don't light me so that I look like that guy in Napoloen Dynamite, okay?"), in each other's arms.

Even with Moore spouting such lines to her son as, "Will you still love me when my hair is gray and my tits are sagging?", the relationship is much closer and more tender than it was portrayed in the book; Barbara is no longer the kind of woman who'd ship her kid off to school to get him out of her way while she's planning to lay siege to the dinner-party circuit, and Tony is no longer a violent, angry boy whose final attack on his mother was just the last in a series. (The actual death scene is staged as a Sid and Nancy-style cop-out: Hey, let's go in the kitchen and act out hysterical scenes from old Joan Crawford movies, oh shit, look out for that knife!) It would seem odd if Tony did have a well of killing rage stored up against his mother in this version, because Moore's Barbara doesn't seem to cause him much pain; her social-climbing foolishness hurts no one but herself. Dishonest as it is, what really kills the movie is Kalin's simple inability to bring any of this stuff to life. His erotic images--Tony dancing on the beach with another boy to please a girl he likes; Barbara, at the wheel of a car with Tony and the girl in the back seat, swerving around to toss them into each other's arms; a little homage to Un Chant d'Amour with Tony's boyfriend from the beach delicately slipping a puff of cigarette smoke into his mouth-- have no excitement to them, and the most explicit sex scene, with Barbara coming to Brooks as a supplicant on her knees and he brutally taking her from behind, is mean-spirited in a way that does nothing but stress the dubious notion of Barbara as everybody's victim. She winds up alone in her big house, attempting suicide in between bouts of sex with gay men, including her son. Julianne Moore goes through her paces dutifully, but she might need to take a little break from representing scandalously rethought versions of maternal figures from earlier eras. The truth is that she doesn't get much of a chance here to do anything that doesn't set off echoes of things she's done before, and when you consider what she actually gets up to here, it's kind of scary to think that she's in a rut.

Trailer Review: The Spirit

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

With all the comic book movies coming out in the next few months you'd think it would be too early to start looking ahead to 2009's offerings. However, you would be wrong. Not being a reader of comics, I can't attest to how closely Frank Miller captures the style of Will Eisner's original vision. However, it does look like Miller, in his first solo directorial effort, is working in a similar style to his own Sin City. But what really sticks out is how relatively lighthearted (especially from a visual standpoint) this teaser feels compared to Sin City. Also, maybe it's just the DePalma fanboy in me talking, but I love the use of Ennio Morricone's theme from The Untouchables here, complementing its retro-stylish sense of fun. The film's still a long way off- there's sure to be at least one full-length trailer to spotlight the movie's hot female supporting cast (Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Paz Vega et al)- but I'm certainly curious now.

Sex Talk with Brian De Palma

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

It’s sex month at Premiere.com, and what better way to kick it off than an interview with the director of Redacted and Mission to Mars? OK, we can think of a few better ways too, but even De Palma detractors must admit the man has committed a steamy scene or two to celluloid in his day. “Who can forget his homage to Hitchcock in Dressed to Kill (1980) when the camera pans shortly after the film's opening credits onto Angie Dickenson's crotch as she lustfully masturbates in the steaming shower seconds before she's grabbed from behind by a shadowy male figure?” asks Karl Rozemeyer. And while I think we’re all aware that wasn’t actually Angie Dickenson’s body in the shower scene, the larger point still stands: memorable nudity enlivens even the silliest movie. And the silliest movie I can think of is De Palma’s Body Double.

The man himself doesn’t seem to be particularly comfortable discussing the subject. Favorite sex scene in a movie? “That's a good question. I think sex scenes are extremely difficult to do. I don't think I have ever really done a straightforward love scene. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo.” Please, everyone, try to keep your pants on.

“So much of shooting sex scenes in movies you a see are naked people sort of humping each other on a bed, shot in the most unflattering way just because they happen to be naked and mimicking making love. They don't really dramatize their particular sexual attraction to each other. And it's very difficult. You have to find a way, a visual way to approach scenes like that… I am trying to think of movies with really good... there must be some classics that spring to mind.”

Clearly De Palma requires further prodding on the issue, if you’ll pardon the terminology. “Maybe Blowup or Last Tango in Paris?” Rozemeyer offers. “Blowup? Yeah, yeah. Incredibly sexy. Who was it? Veruschka [von Lehndorff]? Incredibly stunning and beautiful.” Ah, now he’s coming around. But De Palma is finally forced to concede the whole love-sex-relationship thing just isn’t his style. “What draws me to make movies is more the visual design and that is why very emotional stories between two characters — loving, complicated, dramatic — is just something my particular aesthetic is not drawn to.” Fair enough…and with visual design like this, who can really complain?

Unfilmable: James Ellroy’s Hollywood Odyssey

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Dwight Garner once equated reading James Ellroy’s prose to “deciphering Morse code tapped out by a pair of barely sentient testicles.” Call me crazy, but that line has always stuck with me. The context of this vivid description was a review of the then-new movie adaptation of Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential. Ellroy and his publisher shared a good laugh when they sold those movie rights; they agreed that the book was essentially unfilmable.

“They were right, of course. And they were also wrong,” Scott Timberg writes in an L.A. Times profile of the hard-boiled crime writer and his filmography. “Only the most die-hard Ellroy fan resented that the film resembled his labyrinthine novel -- with its dozens of characters, thick historical context and overlapping subplots -- only slightly. It's considered one of the finest films of the '90s and one of the greatest film noirs since the genre's 1950s heyday. But since then, when it comes to movies, it's been more crying than laughing for Ellroy fans.”

Brian De Palma’s sodden take on The Black Dahlia was cause for much of that weeping, but there was also a little-known 1998 version of Brown’s Requiem starring Michael Rooker, and Ron Shelton’s so-so Dark Blue, based on an Ellroy story about police corruption in Los Angeles. Now Ellroy has taken his first shot at an original screenplay –Street Kings, another tale of L.A. cops gone bad. Opening this Friday, Kings stars Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker (recently seen treading this ground on The Shield), and according to Timberg, “its language, characters, sardonic morality and fast-reversing plot feel like an Ellroy novel.”

Ellroy isn’t talking, at least not to Timberg. (He’s been seen rubbing elbows with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies of late, talking up some golden oldies of L.A. noir.) Meanwhile, Joe Carnahan is still trying to get his adaptation of White Jazz off the ground, but finding it an uphill battle. Given the unholy mess that was Smokin’ Aces, that may not be a bad thing.

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

6. DR. EUDORA NESBITT FLETCHER (MIA FARROW) in ZELIG (1983)

For much of his film career, Woody Allen usually showed his full intensity when he applied himself to two kinds of scenes: those dealing with his search for the perfect woman, and those dealing with his search for the perfect therapist. He reached an apex of some sort in the parody documentary Zelig, where Allen's human-chameleon character finds the perfect woman in his psychiatrist, who helps him deal with his condition, and even rescues him from Nazi Germany. This paragon, who eventually marries her patient and lives happily ever after with him in wedded bliss, is of course played by Mia Farrow, who at the time was auditioning for the role of the director's idea of the perfect woman in real life.

7. DR. SIDNEY SCHAEFER (JAMES COBURN) in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

Dr. Schaefer is the embodiment of the hip shrink in the swinging '60s era, a strutting, phallic super-intellectual who is the psychiatrist as member of the Best and the Brightest. Lured away from his hepcat bachelor pad, he is brought into the halls of Washington power to serve his country as best he can--by giving the President of the United States someone to unburden himself to. Unfortunately, Dr. Schaefer grows increasingly paranoid as the president shares more and more secrets of his office with him in the course of his treatment. Even worse, it turns out that he's not paranoid at all: foreign powers are out to abduct him to find out what he knows, and government agents are ordered to assassinate him so that he won't be a potential threat. In the end, Schaefer endears himself to the smartest of the American agents (Godfrey Cambridge) and Russians (Severn Darden) on his trail by helping them deal with their neuroses, and together they bring down the ultimate threat, a sinister, monopolistic telephone company.

8. DR. ROBERT ELLIOTT (MICHAEL CAINE) in DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

In what's widely acknowledged to be the lamest and most interminable scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, psychiatrist Simon Oakland helpfully explains Norman Bates' split personality by positing that whenever Norman was aroused by a woman, the Mother side of his personality would take over and kill the object of his lust. Leave it to apt Hitchcock pupil Brian De Palma to turn this already perverse idea on its ear in his most Psycho-like film, Dressed to Kill. The pitch: "what if Norman Bates and Simon Oakland were really the same person?!?!?" By day, Dr. Robert Elliott is a psychiatrist catering mostly to bored Manhattanites. Dr. Elliott's couch-side manner is sound, somewhat distant but always professional, even when the occasional patient comes on to him. But all is not right in Dr. Elliott's life- he keeps getting menacing calls from a former patient named Bobbi, by his/her own admission "a woman trapped in a man's body." And what's happened to the doctor's straight razor? In case you hadn't guessed, Bobbi is Dr. Elliott, and vice versa, and like Norman Bates, the Bobbi personality takes over whenever Dr. Elliott gets turned on, like when hot-to-trot patient Angie Dickinson comes on to him. He deals with the situation by stalking her as she enjoys a hot afternoon with an anonymous pickup and knifing her to death in an elevator. Dr. Louis Judd would be regard the outcome as a welcome victory for his side.

9. DR. SIGMUND FREUD (ALAN ARKIN) in THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION (1976)

Herbert Ross’ appealing adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s winning novel is chock-full of tall orders in the casting department. Ross scored big right off the bat by getting Nicol Williamson to play the role of the world’s greatest detective in his revisionist Sherlock Holmes yarn, and followed it up by getting heavy hitters like Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave to round out the cast. But who would he feature as Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and the rogue physician to whom Holmes appeals to cure his insidious addiction to cocaine? Would you believe. . . Alan Arkin? And would you further believe that Arkin is damn near the best thing about the movie? It would have been easy enough to play his hand as one of the most towering cultural figures of the 20th century entirely as a goof, delivering some variant of his then-current New York sharpie persona. But instead, he’s downright charming, underplaying the man from Vienna nicely, which allows his interactions with the histrionically intense Williamson as Holmes to become wondrous little bits of acting. The movie’s plot is a bit woozy, but Arkin – who, twenty years later, would play a somewhat less adventurous shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank – is still a delight.

10. [TIE]: DR. STIRLING (ANNE HECHE) in PROZAC NATION (2001) and DR. GIBBON (MEL GIBSON) in THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003)

To tell the truth, these are both terrible movies — Prozac Nation didn't even get released theatrically — and neither of these characters is especially notable. But we just get a kick out of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to cast these particular actors as mental health professionals.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

Forgotten Films: "Demon Lover Diary" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

With George Romero's Diary of the Dead, the "horror movie as pseudo-home video artifact" category that already includes The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (and, in a way, Brian De Palma's Redacted) is an official subgenre, one that has been handled by spirited amateurs, old masters, and slick, gimmick-seeking pros. Yet the unacknowledged granddaddy of this type of film may be an actual documentary that, despite having developed a healthy cult status from festival appearances, has never been legally distributed or released on video. It's the 1980 Demon Lover Diary, a record of the making of a no-budget fright flick in the mid-1970s. That movie was released in 1976 and alternately known as The Devil Master and The Demon Lover. (Not to be confused with the 2002 Olivier Assayas film demonlover or the 1987 Scott Valentine vehicle My Demon Lover, though now that we mention it, does anybody know what ever happened to that movie's lead actress, Michele Little? She was cute as a bug's ear.) The documentary was shot by Joel DeMott, the girlfriend of Jeff Kreines, who had been hired to work on the horror picture as cinematographer. (DeMott and Kreines were both MIT grad students who had studied with documentarian Richard Leacock.)

Kreines and sound man Mark Rance were induced by director-writer Donald Jackson and his star and co-director and co-writer, Jeff Younkins, to sign on to help them realize their labor of love, partly with an agreement to allow DeMott to record the process. But it soon became clear that Jackson (who installed his new friends in a room at his mom's house) and Younkins were flying by the seat of their pants and that they didn't exactly love having their incompetence preserved on film for posterity. From what we're shown, Jackson and Younkins have no visible talent of understanding of the craft of film, but they do have something at least as important to anyone hoping to make a career in The Industry: a scary, mesmeric ability to get their way, at least temporarily. (The cast of their movie included Gunnar Hansen--"Leatherface" from the original Texas Chain Saw Masssacre--as a professor of the occult, and Marvel Comics artist Val Mayerik. They also somehow talked Ted Nugent --no relation, thanks for asking!-- into lending them the use of his house and some of his well-stocked arsenal.) Jackson appears the be the more convincing talker, but Younkins really puts the "labored" into "labor of love". His character in the movie wears a single black glove throughout his performance; it turns out that this is because he lost a finger in an industrial accident, which, it's strongly implied here, was staged deliberately so that he could plow the insurance money into the movie's budget.

The ghouls in The Demon Lover are pure plastic, but the galloping paranoia, delusion, personal resentments, and general sense of festering mania captured in Diary are the real thing. Anyone who's spent time around no-frills filmmaking sets will experience a shiver of recognition as the outsiders, who have ceased to hide their contempt for the true believers, hole up in their corner of the house where they are not welcome, begin to feel the effects of sleep deprivation, and snicker and giggle while chanting, "The Demon Lover sucks, The Demon Lover sucks, heigh-ho the derry-oh..." The movie ends with our heroes getting the hell out of Dodge, fleeing Ted Nugent's property by car and convincing themselves that they're being followed and can hear gunshots. The strangest thing about all this may be that it did not signal the end of the careers of the central players. More than half a dozen years later, DeMott and Kreines made Seventeen, a cinema-verite film about teenagers that was deemed too gritty for PBS, which had commissioned it, but which went on to win the Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival. More surprisingly, Donald Jackson has subsequently forged a long career for himself as a writer, producer, and director of movies with such eye-catching titles as Roller Blade Warriors, Lingerie Kickboxer, Rollergator, Guns of El Chupacabra and Hell Comes to Frogtown, which starred Rowdy Roddy Piper and Sandahl Bergman and which I once watched most of on USA Up All Night while blitzed out of my mind!. As for the nine-fingered Jeff Younkins, he is the author of the well-regarded Combat and Survival Knives: A User's Guide.