The Screengrab : bride of frankenstein

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

OLIVER & BARBARA ROSE, THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)

Danny DeVito’s black-heart Valentine may not be a great movie, but it’s still a pretty good one, a neat little primer of stereotypes (and uncomfortable truths) of sexual politics in the late 20th century (as well as an emetic corrective to the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan oeuvre of junk food Hollywood romance. In the midst of a contentious turf battle with his soon to be ex-wife, DeVito’s character warns his client, Oliver, that when it comes to divorce, “There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!” Naturally, Oliver doesn’t listen: not only is he arrogant and stubborn, but he’s also played by Michael Douglas, and so our sympathies at first are with his long-suffering spouse, Barbara (Kathleen Turner)...that is, until we realize Barbara is just as hateful in her cold, ruthless femininity as Oliver is in his chauvinist manhood. And so the couple’s mutual hostility escalates into an archetypal battle of the sexes where both sides are right and both sides are wrong: Barbara can’t stand her corporate asshole of a husband, yet feels entitled to the lavish house she transformed into a home with his corporate asshole money, prompting Oliver’s angry reminder, “It’s a lot easier to spend it than it is to make it, honeybun!” On the flip side of the gender equation, Oliver treats his wife like shit, yet naively expects her to keep providing love and validation (or, in Barbara’s words, “You expect me to keep reassuring you sexually even now when we disgust each other?”), leading to a grim moment of Pyrrhic victory in the movie’s final minutes that speaks volumes about the real balance of power in most American marriages.

BILL & ABBY & THE FARMER, DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

It’s a story as old as the Bible. Lovers on the run pretend to be siblings while in a land strange to them. She is beautiful, and the local patriarch is interested in her. She marries the guy -- what choice does she have? -- and here’s where the stories diverge. In one, her god is displeased and smites the land with a plague. In another, her god reveals the truth to her false husband in a dream, and he makes amends with extravagant gifts, even though he was the one deceived. In the last, her false husband catches her cavorting with her lover, and figures it all out. All three come to pass in Days of Heaven. Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are on the run after he’s killed his boss in a fight. They arrive in the extraordinarily lush and beautiful Texas fields (so lush, in fact, that they’re actually in Canada, not Texas) of The Farmer (Sam Shepard), where they pretend to be siblings so that no one will connect them with the murder back in Chicago. They put in a season’s worth of work, and the Farmer, smitten with Abby, asks her to stay. Bill encourages her to marry him because the Farmer is ill, and Bill can see salad days before them. She does indeed marry the Farmer, but not long after, the Farmer figures out the score between them. He gives Bill money to leave. While Bill’s gone, those plan falls apart: not only does the Farmer thrive, but Abby begins to love him. Abby is surprisingly passive throughout the movie. Maybe not too surprising, given that the story takes place in 1916, when Victorian morality still ran rampant through this country. But all she does is love. First Bill, then the Farmer. And from her innocent love will come only plague and death. After all, this isn't the Bible; it's Texas.

THE MONSTER & THE MONSTER’S MATE, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

It’s said by some that the closest, most loving couples act like they were made for each other. James Whale’s early horror classic proves how awful that can be in practice – at least when it’s taken literally. Of course, it’s a pretty fine distinction whether or not a married couple is better off when only one partner is made out of the stitched-together and reanimated hunks of deceased criminals or just one of them is; on the one hand, it’s good for a long-term couple to share the same interests, but on the other hand, there is such a thing as spending too much time together. In the sequel to Frankenstein, the creature makes a shocking return, and doesn’t have to bend Dr. Frankenstein and the overeager Dr. Pretorius’ arms too hard to get them to head into the lab and create for him a mate, in the form of the breathtaking Elsa Lanchester. Unfortunately, the Bride doesn’t quite react as well to her post-corpse existence as does the Modern Prometheus, and she’s even less pleased at the matchmaking that’s taken place without her consent. Her eerie, spastic behavior makes it clear to the Monster that wedded bliss is a remote possibility, and since there’s no divorce court for inhuman monsters (at least ones not rich enough to hire Raoul Felder), he decides to return to the sweet embrace of death, muttering a line that anticipates Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: “We belong dead.”

CHARLIE PARTANNA & IRENE WALKER, PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985)

“Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which of these things?” Jack Nicholson’s mafia hitman, Charlie Partanna, asks a question most potential bridegrooms never get around to asking themselves in this underrated John Huston black comedy about the dangers of mixing business with pleasure. In Prizzi’s Honor, Nicholson plays a high-ranking mob killer who meets the lovely Irene Walker (played by Kathleen Turner, who, as one of the modern era’s great femmes fatale, has played the distaff side of many great bloody screen couples), and, upon pursuing her, discovers that they share an uncommon occupation. Naturally it’s good to have things in common, as the calculating Maerose Prizzi (played to perfection by Anjelica Huston) points out while encouraging Charlie to wed Irene, but the perils of a couple working together are well-known to relationship counselors, and it’s particularly exacerbated when the work they do involves murdering people for profit. It’s no surprise that the movie sets up an eventual, and fatal, confrontation between the two killers, but how it arrives at that inexorable conclusion is a surprise and a delight for most of its running time, especially as Nicholson’s sometimes-befuddled traditionalist and Turner’s gregarious maverick play off one another.

BART TARE & ANNIE LAURIE STARR, GUN CRAZY (1950)

It’s a cliché that a gun is a phallic stand-in for some people, but few movies make that association more explicit – especially given the cinematic restrictions of the time – than Joseph H. Lewis’ terrific overheated noir thriller Gun Crazy. Tightly-wound, desperately alone John Dall as Bart Tare has only ever loved one thing: shooting. That all changes when he runs into trick shooter Annie Laurie Starr (a gorgeously ruined Peggy Cummins) at a touring carnival; after a notoriously sexy scene that sublimates carnal desire into gun-love in ways that Wayne LaPierre could only dream of, they’re hooked into each other for life. But while Bart only wants the love of the only woman who could ever outgun him, Annie, one of noir’s slickest femmes fatale, wants the good life, and she isn’t going to let anything, not even Bart’s reluctance to commit crimes, stand in her way. She’s been beaten down bad by life, and the way she figures it, it’s about time for life to get a taste of its own medicine. All noir films are saturated with a sense of doom, but Gun Crazy’s is downright oppressive, as Bart reluctantly embarks on a life of crime knowing he’s helpless in the face of his love for Annie. But while his course is set, his eyes are wide open, and there’s a terrifically revelatory scene after their last big caper ends up bloodier than anticipated: “Two people dead,” he spits at her, “just so we can live without working!” It’s too late, though, always too late, and in the end, Bart and Laurie, who go together like guns and ammunition, end up the only way they could, like cold spent shells on the ground.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

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

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

10. THE FLY (1986)

Horror movies, contrary to the claims of highfalutin critics like us, don’t necessarily have to be about anything. If they’re scary and well-made and don’t insult your intelligence, just being a good horror movie is enough. But when they are about something, especially in the hands of a storyteller of the depth and intelligence of David Cronenberg, they transcend genre and become something truly special. Cronenberg took a popular pulp story by George Langelaan, which had been filmed once before as a pretty straightforward monster movie in the 1950s, and remade it as a terrific modern-day horror flick, complete with terrifically suspenseful moments and plenty of nauseating fluids for the grindhouse crowd – but he also infused it with a powerful undercurrent of extremely personal terror. The Fly, carried on the hair-sprouting, wing-bearing back of Jeff Goldblum’s greatest performance, is one of the finest movies ever made about the betrayal of the body: in the story of a scientist who is transformed into an insect-like creature, Cronenberg manages to isolate not only the horror, but also the loneliness, the helplessness, and the frustration of the sick and the dying. When Brundlefly is finally dispatched at the movie’s end, the pervasive feeling isn’t one of revenge, or relief – it’s one of terrible sadness.

9. CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

Half a dozen years before George A. Romero went to work re-creating the movie zombie for all time, this film, directed on a shoestring budget by Herk Harvey (with members of a filmmaking team that the Lawrence, Kansas-based Harvey used in his principal business making educational and industrial films) just about invented the modern concept of the independent horror movie, as well as doing its bit to fuzz the line between art film and amateur hour. The first and just about the last film to feature its star, Candace Hilligoss, with Harvey as the most notable of the ghouls who begin to haunt her, it has a dreamy, disconnected quality that may not have been entirely planned but that is especially well-suited to a story that may or may not be happening, about a heroine who may or may not have survived the car accident that opens the film. In fact, parts of Carnival of Souls come as close as any pre-'70s film to anticipating the world of David Lynch -- which makes you wonder if it's a coincidence that Hilligoss' character's name, Mary Henry, contains the names of the central male and female characters of Eraserhead.

8. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

The 1931 Frankenstein wasn't the first film inspired by Mary Shelley's novel, and it sure wasn't the last, but its imagery was so perfect and powerful -- the shambling monster with the squared-off head, the boxy flat-top and the jacket with the sleeves too short -- that it imprinted itself on the imaginations of generations of viewers, so much so that no later version of the monster ever really looks quite right. This sequel was put together by the same key personnel who worked on the first film -- the director, James Whale, Boris Karloff as the monster and the high-strung Colin Clive as the mad scientist -- but Whale, a campy, stylish wit who would later be played by Ian McKellan in the 1998 Gods and Monsters, really let his dark sense of humor off the leash in this one, resulting in a film that sympathizes with the monster to such a degree that the creature's rallying cry, "I love dead! Hate living!" and his final kiss-off line, after his rejection at the hands of the title figure (Elsa Lanchester), "We belong dead," take on the quality of anthems. Underneath the film's knowing silliness is a genuine, tender regard for those who cannot find love or acceptance in this world, and what greater horror could there be?

7. THE EXORCIST (1973)

William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel isn’t the best movie on this list. The Shining is a greater artistic accomplishment; Psycho is a more important film; The Fly is more meaningful. But for my money, there’s no movie on this list that’s scarier, and isn’t that the whole point of a horror movie? The movie that utterly terrified me as an adolescent still has the potential to give me nightmares as an adult; Friedkin makes judicious use of timing and tone to keep you just interested enough to be alert when the real horror starts, and once it does, he keeps up a mood of sustained menace, ranging from the suggestive to the utterly brutal, that never lets up. In less competent hands, The Exorcist could have degenerated into a boring morass of overblown theatrics and incomprehensible theology – which is exactly what happened in the sequels – but here, with everything firing on all cylinders, the movie instills an almost religious sense of dread even in those who have never sat through a Catholic sermon on the horrors of hell. An extremely formidable cast, anchored by an intense Ellen Burstyn, an ironclad Max Von Sydow, a neurotically brilliant Jason Miller, and a killer one-two punch from Linda Blair and Mercedes McCambridge, helps fix your attention throughout the film, but it’s the handful of truly terrifying moments that keep this a classic. (The restored “Version You’ve Never Seen” only amplifies the constant sense of stress and unease, and if anything, is even more frightening than the original.) Small wonder that Billy Graham claimed that the movie was literally possessed by the Devil.

6. ALIEN (1979)

My parents took my brother and me to see Alien when we were 12 and 10, respectively. To the best of my recollection, my brother bailed for the safety of the lobby sometime around the time the baby “chest-burster” burst from John Hurt’s chest in the film’s iconic and notorious horror film moment, leading to Veronica Cartwright’s stunned and horrified, “Oh, God...” (because, really, what else does one say in such a situation)? I remember feeling very big brother smug about staying bravely in my seat as the ever smaller crew of the freighter Nostromo hunted H.R. Giger’s phallic dentata extraterrestrial through the claustrophobic cabins and corridors of their vessel...until, that is, the moment when sole survivor Ripley (and her cat) abandoned ship...AND THE ALIEN WAS IN THE ESCAPE POD WITH HER! Fuck this, I thought...I wasn’t gonna risk a pre-pubescent heart attack just because my folks thought it would be funny to scare the piss out of their children. Rushing out to join my brother in the lobby, I watched the rest of the movie through a window in the door of the theater, then probably went home and had a few hundred nightmares. In my adult life, I’m more a fan of James Cameron’s 1986 thrill-ride sequel than Ridley Scott’s relatively artsy, slow-moving original...but respect must be paid to any film with the power to induce actual childhood trauma.

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

Contributors: Pierced Leonard, Philled With Evil Nugent, Android Osborne

Set Your DVR!: October 27 - November 3, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Halloween week means more vintage horror! TCM in particular is even exceeding their own high standards this week, shoehorning in a night of Billy Wilder on Tuesday (nothing is recommended because everything is fairly well-known) and a few film noir classics on Wednesday before cranking up the scary on Thursday. As always, let me know in comments if you see something I shouldn’t have missed!

Mon, Oct 27:

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. As I said last week, it’s not a great movie, but it has a few iconic scenes.

Tues, Oct 28:

5/6 am: The Invisible Man on AMC. Based on Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of race in America... whoops, that’s not right. No one’s ever made that movie. This is James Whale’s classic horror film starring Claude Rains.

6:45/7:45 am: Bride of Frankenstein on AMC. And this is James Whale’s frankenlady movie.

7/8 am: The Desperate Hours on TCM. Neat little thriller about convicts on the lam starring Humphrey Bogart.

11 pm/12 am: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Wed, Oct 29:

1/2 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat. Last time I’m going to mention it, in fact.

7/8 pm: Murder, My Sweet on TCM. Killer adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

10:45/11:45 pm: Out of the Past on TCM. Film noir classic with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also made three of the Val Lewton-produced no-budget horror films we’re recommending this week.

Thurs, Oct 30:

12:30/1:30 am: They Live By Night on TCM. Earlier movie based on the same source material as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, which is one of his most underappreciated movies.

3/4 am: House of Wax on CHILLER. Vincent Price’s classic. Note: You will not see Paris Hilton in this movie.

3:45/4:45 am: The Thing From Another World on TCM. Howard Hawks directing an early sci-fi/horror movie. The John Carpenter movie The Thing was a remake.

6:30/7:30 am: The Beast with Five Fingers on TCM. FIVE WHOLE FINGERS! YAAAAAARGH!

7:30/8:30 am: 8 Women on LOGO. Francois Ozon assembles every major French actress of our time for a half-musical/half-murder mystery.

8/9 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Jacques Tourneur doing horror on a Val Lewton production.

9:15/10:15 am: Curse of the Demon on TCM. Recut version of the horror film Night of the Demon. Directed by Jacques Tourneur applying what he has learned from doing horror on Val Lewton productions.

10:45/11:45 am: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 4/5 pm and on 11/31 at 4:10/5:10 am). I just keep recommending it!

5:30/6:30 pm: House of Usher on TCM. Roger Corman! Vincent Price! Edgar Allan Poe! You might be surprised to learn that this is a tender romantic comedy.

7/8 pm: Dead of Night on TCM. Creepy little horror anthology from Ealing Studios. And no Sir Alec Guinness to be found!

Fri, Oct 31:

A quick note: TCM owns Halloween programming. You can’t go wrong with anything they’re showing all day.

1/2 am: Kwaidan on TCM. A beloved Japanese horror anthology.

3:45/4:45: Spirits of the Dead on TCM. A triptych of short films from Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini (which of these names is not like the others?). I’ve never seen it, but the cast of Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp, and Alain Delon sounds promising.

6:30/7:30 am: Cat People on TCM. More Lewton & Tourneur!

7/8 am: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC. Still brilliant, still vile.

8/9 am: Freaks on TCM.

8:30/9:30 am: Halloween on AMC. Halloween? Hasn’t everyone seen this? I suspect that some people have forgotten how effective it is with almost no budget and no special effects.

9:15/10:15 am: The Devil Doll on TCM. How many ways can I say “creepy”? This one’s directed by the creator of Freaks, Tod Browning.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Body Snatcher on TCM. More Val Lewton! With Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi!

4/5 pm: Bedlam on TCM. And even more Val Lewton! This one’s with just Karloff.

7/8 pm: The Host on G4. Korean horror movie with great special effects and a cruel sense of humor.

Sat, Nov 1:

1/2 am: The Host on G4 (repeats at 11/12 am).

1:30/2:30 am: Blood Feast on TCM. Things start getting ugly overnight at TCM. This is a challenger to Plan 9 From Outer Space for the coveted Worst Movie Ever award. Highly recommended! Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, whom you can read more about in our very own Scott Von Doviak’s excellent book Hick Flicks, which is a perfect stocking-stuffer for the film geek in your family.

2:45/3:45 am: 2,000 Maniacs on TCM. A follow-up to Blood Feast. I understand that the name is misleading, as Lewis only had to budget for 1,986 maniacs.

3/4 am: The Blob on CHILLER (Repeat at 6:00 am/7:00 am). Steve McQueen in the no-budget flick that might just be a parable about the insidious effects of CREEPING COMMUNISM! BOOGA BOOGA! Starring Barack Obama’s tax policies as The Blob and Sarah Palin as the small-town mayor who knows how to stop it. If only the people will listen!

5:15/6:15 am: Forbidden Planet on TCM. Ah, the horror is starting to subside. What better way to recover than a movie that puts Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space?

7/8 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. One of the finest classic Westerns of all time. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, this is a standard issue wuxia film in terms of plot and progression, but with Kurosawa’s unerring eye behind the lens, there’s moments of stunning beauty to be found. Unreleased on DVD, and a must for Kurosawa fanatics.

9:30/10:30 am: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat at 2:45/3:45 pm). Richard Chamberlain’s most shocking role (in which discernible acting can be detected!) about apocalyptic aboriginal weirdness in Australia. Directed by Peter Weir.

Sun, Nov 2:

Happy birthday to my mom and my brother-in-law Jeff!

7/8 am: Solaris on IFC. This is the Tarkovsky original, not the Soderbergh remake. A deeply sad, meditative movie about love and self and Otherness. I’m being purposely vague, but this review is only two sentences, and this movie deserves much more than that.

8:30/9:30 am: Macbeth on TCM. Orson Welles’s Macbeth with the bad accents and great filmmaking.

5:35/6:35 pm: The New World on IFC. Terrence Malick’s film about how struggle defines all human relationships, despite the transcendental indifference of nature. Did I just write that? This is easily one of the best films of the last decade, so just watch it.

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat on 11/3 at 1:15/2:15 am). John Hillcoat’s Aussie Western written by Nick Cave. It wants to be a Peckinpah movie, but it’s not even a Boetticher. That’s not to say it’s worthless, but it bites off more than it can chew. Hillcoat’s the director of the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I hope is better than this.

9:45/10:45 pm: The Year of Living Dangerously on TCM. Remember when Mel Gibson could act? Good times. Oh, ok. This is most definitely not a good time. Directed by Peter Weir.

11 pm/12 am (11/3): True Stories on VH1CL (repeat on 11/3 at 7/8 pm). It’s not a good movie, but it’s fun. This is David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures. The Talking Heads songs aren’t their best, but they’re pretty good, and pretty good looks good from here.

Mon, Nov 3:

3/4 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER. Another Val Lewton production! Why is it on after Halloween? Apparently CHILLER has started the Halloween 2009 season early.

5:05/6:05 am: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music on IFC (repeat at 12:30/1:30 pm). Delightful documentary about the man with the golden ear who flawlessly recorded some of the greats of 20th century music.

10:05/11:05 am: The New World on IFC. Repeat.

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of quirk, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

ED WOOD (1994)

Some idiots still go into the motion picture business to get rich...but the ones who stick around long after the dreams of fame and fortune have curdled into a nasty hangover of disappointment and massive credit card debt are the genuine addicts, driven by an overpowering, irrational desire to project their inner landscapes onto the real world in search of validation, a little fun and a taste of immortality. I’m guessing Tim Burton’s the type of guy who would’ve found a way to keep making movies even if his star had never risen over Hollywood and he’d wound up shooting cable access fantasias on his days off from Applebee’s. And without a budget, an art department or professional actors, his flaws as a director would have been more obvious, his obsessions would have seemed more silly, his distinctive aesthetic would have been reduced to cheesy, ticky-tack attempts at grandeur, easily mocked by a society incapable of distinguishing between talent and success. Ed Wood, Jr. was a similar addict, and it’s definitely arguable whether he would have eventually developed into a better director if he’d ever gotten the breaks and budgets he so desperately craved, but regardless of his ultimate worth as a filmmaker, Burton clearly recognized a kindred spirit in the cross-dressing auteur’s bizarrely inimitable proto-Goth sensibility, which (combined with a perfect storm of pitch-perfect career highpoints from Johnny Depp, Martin Landau and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, working from the fascinating Wood biography Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey) resulted in one of the greatest films ever made about the potential for transcendence in even the shittiest art.

GODS AND MONSTERS (1998)

For the most part, this beautifully imagined story about the last days of the great cult director James Whale (Ian McKellan) is set long after Whale had retired from that Hollywood silliness and stopped setting foot on soundstages. But it remains a fine tribute to the surprising lasting power of movie images, and it does have one terrific moviemaking scene, when Whale flashes back to the experience of directing Ernest Thesiger and company in The Bride of Frankenstein. No one in a movie has better captured the appeal of making movies than McKellan when he rhapsodizes about how much fun it was, "working with your friends." And Brendan Fraser, as Mr. Jimmy's hunky new friend, contributes one of his best screen performances ever when, having watched the movie with his razzing pals, he gently feels relief wash over him as Whale reassures him that, yes, parts of it are supposed to be funny.

BOMBSHELL (1933)

Jean Harlow was an usual critter in her day, a woman who, once she had a few hits to her name and a few scandals notched in her belt, was unimaginable as anything but a movie star. Compare her to Madonna or Angelina Jolie and now it's clear that she was decades ahead of her time, but in her own decade she must have seemed quite the freak. Luckily, she knew how to laugh at herself, and this early talkie, in which she plays a glamourpuss celebrity so seedy yet so artificial that she has the Wizard of Oz for a father, remains the classic template for Hollywood's satiric take on itself in the studio-contract era. Co-starring Lee Tracy, who in the talkie era was to reporters and press agents what Seth Rogen is today to scoring out of his league.

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (2003)

Thom Anderson's dense, meaningful masterpiece works on so many levels that, even at over three hours long, the more one sees it, the more one notices what is omitted as much as what is included. Incredibly ambitious, relentlessly formalist, and bearing both the eye of an artist and the soul of a documentarian committed to social justice, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost totally unique among modern films. Piecing together a century of Hollywood's portrayals of its own surroundings, from the gorgeous Art Deco-tinted luxury of early films to the deliberately hazy nostalgia of Chinatown to the socialist-realist depictions of filmmakers like Charles Burnette, it's a movie that not only presents an almost complete vision of a modern city – and presents that city with love, respect, disappointment and rage, as appropriate – but also manages to do something quite profound at the same time, which is to use film as a medium for portraying how film changes the way we think, perceive and remember a place. Legal issues will likely prevent Los Angeles Plays Itself from ever getting the wide theatrical release it so richly deserves – it features footage from hundreds of films and television shows, and the clearance rights would be ruinously expensive for any production company – but it turns up occasionally at festivals and academic screenings, and the entirely of the movie was, until recently, available on YouTube. (Keep checking -- the copyright cops work slow.) Not only one of the finest movies about filmmaking imaginable, but one of the most unique films ever made, period.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce