15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

We Be Jaman

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:45:00 GMT

With bandwidth cheaper than ever, the international tech market booming, and investors eager to find some new tax shelter in which to dump their millions, the internet is in the midst of a multimedia boom not seen since the late 1990s. And hey, we all know how well that ended, right? Yes, there's probably another massive crash coming, but that doesn't mean that in the meantime, office drones can't kill those long empty hours between lunch and five o'clock with exciting new ventures like Hulu and now Jaman.

Founded by Indian-American enterpreneur Gaurav Dhillon and backed by Hearst money, Jaman is an online on-demand video rental service, similar to those offered by Apple and Netflix, but focusing on an entirely different market. Jaman will, with the exception of a few Golden Age blockbusters that were out of copyright control (like Audrey Hepburn's Charade) focus on independent films for an English-speaking audience, and foreign-language titles -- espeically the wildly popular Bollywood genre so beloved by a growing Indian diaspora -- for the audience it's hoping to reach overseas. Hoping to tap into the underserved markets in tech-savvy countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, where most people rely on DVD pirates for most of their movie needs, Dhillon is focusing on foreign language movies as both a source of cheap profit and a means towards building an audience. To help build that audience, they're set to offer an introductory deal that will applie to indie fans everywhere in the U.S. as well: free (well, ad-supported) access to a library of over a thousand indie films via the site's streaming browser windows.

Lest anyone get too excited over the prospect, Jaman is also hard-selling the 'social networking' aspect of their site, using those magical words, speaking of the 1990s, that everyone seems to find necessary but no one seems to have thought up a way to make money with so far. Still, the prospect of at-will callups of hundreds of inde flicks will keep us interested in the site...until the Great Crash of 2010, anyway.

The Screengrab : charade

15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

We Be Jaman