The Screengrab : dazed and confused

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

PARKER POSEY AS DARLA IN DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

The first time I ever saw Parker Posey on screen, a camera was swooping down on her ‘70s mean girl, Darla, as the dominatrix in bellbottoms screamed, “All right, you little freshman bit-ches!” in the midst of a bizarre Texas hazing ritual in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused...and for me, it was love at first sight, both for the character and the actress portraying her. Darla was the epitome of the smart, formidable high school queen bee nerds like me pretended to hate but secretly wished we were cool (or hot) enough to hang with...the sort of girl that fuels class reunion fantasies of all varieties. And Posey zaps every precious second of the character’s too-brief screen time with megawatt voltage, whether helping Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson keep L-I-V-I-N by grabbing a meaty handful of his aging stoner ass or advising some hapless underclassman to “wipe that face off your head, bitch!” Despite later good roles in the likes of Party Girl, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming and the Christopher Guest oeuvre, Posey was never quite this incandescent again...not unlike the real-life Darlas of the world, who eventually graduate and somehow never recapture that brilliant spark of absolute adolescent power. (AO)

SEAN PENN AS JEFF SPICOLI IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

There have been a lot of stoner comedy routines in movies, but nobody has ever acted being toasted with the Method intensity of Penn as Spicoli, while making it funny. Penn is the kind of actor who aims to convince you he's morphed into whoever he's playing, but as Spicoli, who's "been stoned since the third grade", he doesn't just transform himself physically and spiritually, he declares his emancipation from gravity. Sweetly pledging that all he needs in life are tasty waves and a cool buzz, he blurs the line between being out of it and being in a state of grace. (PN)

WALTER MATTHAU AS COACH BUTTERMAKER IN THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Few things are funnier in the movies (though not real life) than adults being mean to children. And, with the possible exception of Billy Bob Thornton’s bad Santa, no adult character has ever gotten more mileage out of behaving unsuitably around kids than Walter Matthau’s Coach Morris Buttermaker in Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears. An ex-minor league ballplayer who takes a job as the coach of a lousy little league squad, Buttermaker is the exact opposite of a role model, showing up to work hungover, endlessly smoking and drinking beer in front of his young charges, and putting them down with droll callousness. Of course, Buttermaker and the Bears’ story is an ultimately redemptive one, a narrative arc which presumably goes some way toward excusing the coach’s early, improper conduct. But people learning and growing isn’t why Ritchie’s film endures as a comedy classic; the sight of the peerlessly cranky Matthau passed out next to the pitching mound, empty beer cans lying nearby, is. (NS)

REX HARRISON AS SIR ALFRED DE CARTER IN UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948)

Who doesn't love a movie where the fool is the pompous highbrow? As pointed out in the excellent commentary in the attached clip (the only clip of this movie on youtube, sadly), Preston Sturges directs this one fairly close to the heart. Rex Harrison plays Sir Alfred de Carter (the "de" in the middle is an exquisite joke all on its own), a conductor who suspects his younger wife of infidelity. The movie proceeds with a fantastic comic plot: De Carter conducts three orchestral pieces, and in each imagines a different way of murdering his wife. In the final part of the movie, he heads home to put his nefarious plans into action, which is where the movie tips into some first-rate slapstick. That's what you call black comedy! Harrison plays an excellent upper-crust twit, being believably competent in his privileged artistic role but an inept bungler at the fairly simple crime of murder. There's hilariously great screwball dialogue throughout and a kneeslapper of an overwritten slice of purple cheese to cap off the movie. Skip the remake and go straight to the source for the good stuff. (HC)

MICHAEL SIMON AS BOUDU IN BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (1932)

Boudu is the holiest of holy fools, a vagrant who is unexpectedly drawn into a comfortable middle-class existence where he destroys every social rule he faces. It is a testament to the skill of Michel Simon, who played Boudu, that he remains a comic, and mostly sympathetic, force of nature even as his behavior ranges from merely obnoxious to outright felonious. Jean Renoir was a master of ripping asunder the veil of the French class system with the deftest of touches. Consider the scene above, in which Boudu eats sardines with his bare hands. The French public apparently rioted at this. And at the scene where he wiped shoe polish all over a fine bedroom. But the scene where he seduces/rapes his benefactor's wife? That left them unfazed. The movie ends with Boudu finding a way to yet again subvert his benefactor's attempts to give him the Eliza Doolittle treatment in a way that suggests that he never needed to be saved from drowning in the first place. Don't subject yourself to the awful remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills; stick to the original for the real comic masterpiece. (HC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SLACKER (1991) & CLERKS (1994)

I was struggling to extricate myself from college and move from Boston to L.A. when Richard Linklater's Slacker premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, reminding me that filmmaking wasn't just about Hollywood, but instead happened whenever and wherever a bunch of motivated creative types could get their hands on a camera. By painting Austin, Texas as a low-rent wonderland of hipsters and weirdos, Linklater inadvertently popularized the city and its filmmaking scene to the point where the rents got too high for most of the slackers (and businesses) depicted in the film. Nevertheless, despite attracting higher budgets and Hollywood friends thanks to the unexpected cult success of his debut (and the astonishing starmaking power of his follow-up, Dazed and Confused), Linklater stayed loyal to Austin, doing his best to Keep It Weird for the city's less famous residents.

A few years later, like much of Generation X, I was toiling on my own independent feature, dreaming of my own big Sundance debut when Clerks received the Filmmaker’s Trophy (and an acquisition deal from Miramax) in 1994...and so there was more than a little envy mixed in with my original lukewarm reaction to the Kevin Smith comedy. “It’s not THAT funny,” I thought, sitting in the Sunset 5 multiplex during the film’s theatrical run. “And the production values are crap!” Yet, in retrospect, the foul-mouthed riffing between cynical wage slaves Dante (Brian O’Halloran), Randal (Jeff Anderson) and national treasure Jason Mewes is, in fact, hilarious (reminiscent of John Waters’ “good” bad taste verbiage rather than just run-of-the-mill dick jokes). Moreover, like Linklater, Smith was and remains exactly the kind of Indiewood Horatio Alger even a bitter guy like me can’t begrudge. For one thing, he’s not a trust fund kid or the scion of Hollywood royalty: he filmed his movie at night in the very New Jersey convenience store where he toiled for pittance during the day, and if not for the good fortune of Sundance Advisory Committee member Bob Hawk seeing and liking the movie at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York, Smith might still be paying off the credit cards he used to finance his labor of love. Yet even after hitting the big time, Smith never went Hollywood (give or take his post-fame fling with Joey Lauren Adams and the occasional high profile screenwriting job): though sometimes uneven, his work since Clerks has remained idiosyncratic and personal, reflecting the sensibility of a smart, admirably humble working class jamoke who never got too big for his (admittedly gigantic) britches.

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

Sundance wasn't even Sundance yet when Blood Simple won the Grand Jury Prize in 1985; it was still known as the US Film Festival the year the low-budget Texas noir took top honors. As part of the first wave that led to the indie boom, Blood Simple is more notable for the careers that it launched than its own merits as an offbeat thriller, yet it still holds up remarkably well. Critics like Pauline Kael disdained the "camera whoop-de-do" at the time, but by today's standard, Blood Simple is a restrained piece of classical filmmaking. The plot is a sort of chess game where all the players are missing a few pieces, as a cuckolded bar owner (Dan Hedaya at his greasiest) hires a shady private eye (M. Emmet Walsh, ditto) to dispose of his wife and her lover. The wife is played by Frances McDormand making her motion picture debut, and the film not only marked the beginning of an impressive acting career, but also a remarkably long-lasting marriage (by show biz standards) as McDormand met her soon-to-be husband on the set. That was, of course, director Joel Coen, who along with brother, co-writer and producer Ethan Coen couldn't have known that Blood Simple was only the first chapter of one of the most storied filmographies of the past quarter-century. If not for Sundance, by any other name, it might never have happened.

SHERMAN'S MARCH (1986)

Ross McElwee's film -- subtitled "A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation" -- pulled triumph from disaster and constituted a bit of a landmark in the evolution of the "personal documentary." McElwee succeeded in taking a conceit that could have just been irritating -- providing a chronicle of his flailing love life in the course of showing how he managed to not deliver on a plan to make a film tracing the path of General Sherman's march through the South -- and dressing it with enough bittersweet humor and tart social observation to turn what could have been an act of self-exposure into a real picture of the times. (Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1987 festival.)

TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990)

Writer-director Charles Burnett's first feature Killer of Sheep would be selected for the National Film Registry, but this film, made a dozen years later, would finally earn Burnett his first play in real theaters. A blisteringly funny application of African-American folklore to a contemporary family, it is a cornucopia of wonders, not the least of them the performance of Danny Glover's career. It helped launch the steady simmer of Burnett's career that finally resulted in the restoration and theatrical and DVD release of Killer of Sheep last year, but ironically, To Sleep with Anger itself remains unavailable on home video and basically out of circulation. Burnett won a Special Jury Recognition prize when it was shown at the 1990 festival.

RESERVOIR DOGS (1992)

Quentin Tarantino's visceral debut has been ripped off so many times in the past fifteen years or so, it's probably safe by now to forgive Reservoir Dogs for being something of a ripoff in its own right. While Tarantino may have drawn a little too heavily on the likes of City on Fire and The Killing, it was clear from the opening scene – a roundtable discussion of the subtext of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" conducted by two-bit criminals in a crappy diner – that a distinctive new voice in American cinema had been discovered. And while that voice would occasionally grate over the years, its unique blend of profane tough-guy banter and geeky pop culture chatter found its purest expression in this time-twisting tale of that old reliable standby, the heist gone awry. In Tarantino's version, we never see the heist, but we get all the awry we can handle – in fact, more than some could handle in the case of the infamous "ear-slicing" scene. An unrivaled hard-boiled cast, including Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and a sublime Lawrence "You're not Mr. Purple!" Tierney, expertly navigates the sharp turns from raunchy humor to shocking violence, all to the beat of your Super Seventies Favorites. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Reservoir Dogs lost to Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup. As Phil Nugent could tell you, the judges might have missed the boat on that one.

HOOP DREAMS (1994)

Steve James's epic documentary about the role that high school basketball, and the promise of professional sports careers, plays in the lives of two black kids and their families is a prime example of what Sundance's dedication to good liberal causes is good for. The movie itself is the kind of project that either pays off big time for the people involved or amounts to a waste of years of effort, and it wasn't a waste. (Winner of the Audience Award at the 1994 festival)

CRUMB (1994)

Terry Zwigoff's great profile of the underground comics master Robert Crumb slipped a little dynamite into the often staid documentary category. Rich, hilarious, painful and spiky, it's a wake-up call for anyone who thinks the standard documentary form is played out; all you need, Zwigoff reveals, is a subject who fascinates on a kaleidoscopic variety of levels and a determination to spend years chasing him to ground. At the 1995 festival it took both the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, and also a prize for cinematographer Maryse Alberti.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak & Phil Nugent

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007)

I've been an Adam Goldberg enthusiast since Dazed and Confused, but if you don't appreciate the actor's neurotic, hyperarticulate humor, then 2 Days In Paris may not be your cup of Pernod. On the other hand, even Hebrew Hammer haters may find themselves charmed by Julie Delpy's performance (in a movie she wrote and directed) as the distaff half of a bi-national couple facing relationship meltdown during the titular 48-hour period. After all the France-bashing during the (still not over yet!) Bush administration, it's interesting to see Delpy's warts-and-all depiction of The City of Lights, while her lived-in, heartfelt insights into love and family breathe fresh life into the ill-used romantic comedy genre. But Goldberg is the fish-out-of-water focus here, in a performance for anyone who’s ever been sick and disoriented on vacation while desperately wishing for the comforts of home.

COMING TO AMERICA (1988)

Probably Eddie Murphy's finest moment. Also, one of those big box office-y 1980s comedies — like Back to the Future — that, while seemingly silly, get at the very heart of America. Hard to say how much of it is intentional but damn it, it works. Eddie Murphy doesn't just star as the pampered Prince Akeem of Zamunda ("The royal penis is clean your highness"). He also wrote the story. One imagines his train of thought went something like this: if the enslaved Africans brought to America were once kings and queens, then what would an African king seeking a wife in Queens think of America? Natch, hilarity ensues.

THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

The director-star Dennis Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider (1969) begins with a Hollywood crew shooting a Western in Peru. Hopper plays Kansas, a stunt man who continues to hang around after the movie wraps. The film is insanely overedited, and Hopper the auteur got more than a little carried away with the possibilities of movies within movies and illusion versus reality games. To the degree that the movie has a plot, it seems to involve the Peruvians getting so excited from having watched the moviemakers at work that they build their own (non-functioning) cameras and other equipment out of bamboo and use them as an excuse to stage violent scenes, which in turn may be real. Hopper himself seems to have rendered the movie unintelligible because, out there on location, he got so into the heady atmosphere (and, it's said, some of the local mushrooms) that he couldn't stop tinkering with his baby, cutting and re-cutting it and throwing more and more monkey wrenches into its motor. His movie about the deranging effects of a clash of cultures thus also became an example of it. Luigi Pirandello would be proud. Jeff Spicoli might want to tip his hat, too.

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Strangers in a strange land is something of a pet theme of Graham Greene, whether he's charting the course of the well-meaning but destructive title character of The Quiet American in Indochina or the crooked international financier of "Across the Bridge" who finds himself stranded in a dusty Mexican town. This classic may serve as his most enduring movie exploration of his mixed feelings about the good man -- in this case, American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) -- who thinks he's being a nobly stalwart hero when he's really just in way over his head. Martins arrives in Vienna after World War II, at a time when the city is divided into zones ruled over by representatives of four different countries and corruption runs rampant, only to be informed that the friend who summoned him there, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), was recently killed in a lorry accident. Naturally, Holly recognizes that something must be up and raises hell trying to find out what it is, until his friend, who faked his death to evade the consequences of his horrible crimes, comes out of the shadows and threatens his life. It would seem that Holly has been running himself ragged to avenge the death of a man he hadn't known at all. But the girls in Heavenly Creatures had his number.

PEPE LE MOKO (1937)

The strangers here are multiple: there's Pepe himself (Jean Gabin), a mythical French criminal hiding out in Algiers' Casbah, the police detectives sent over to track him down after his many successful years of hiding, the visiting woman Pepe seduces with a combination of his criminal allure and knowledge of an area off-limits to tourists, and — not least of all — director Julien Duvivier and his crew. Pepe Le Moko isn't entirely location-based, but there's very real exterior footage — especially in the opening sequence above — frequently from cameras far shakier and more obviously documentary and on-the-fly than most '30s narratives would allow themselves. Pepe is some kind of classic, at least in part because its relationship to its status as colonial filmmaking is constantly unsettled. "Algiers isn't Pigalle" announces a local cop before giving an overview of the area — including people "descended from barbarians, honest traditionalists but a mystery to us." Pepe's more at home with the natives than the French authorities pursuing him, and not in a way that's condescending or self-conscious either. Rough filmmaking at times, but containing more ideas than most movies know what to do with. Many of the same locations were used for The Battle of Algiers, if all that isn't weird enough for you; those traditionalists wouldn't remain a mystery for much longer.

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)

Albuquerque. NM: into town comes a man so urbane he reads a newspaper while sitting in the car he's being towed in. The man is Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a veteran reporter already fired from 11 metropolitan dailies. Tatum's here to give the sleepy little town the shot in the arm it needs and thereby rebuild his disgraced career, but Albuquerque won't give him the material for the yellow journalism he practices. Tatum's an urban hustler in the land of rural innocents — until a man's trapped in a cave and Tatum brings him to the world stage. Deliberately endangering Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) by needlessly delaying his rescue for a bigger story, Tatum transforms the area around the cave into the kind of oppportunistic carnival land of free-floating capitalistic enterprise and gaudy spectacle he's used to. Buried for years after its initial brutal reception, a recent restoration and release on Criterion have brought one of Billy Wilder's greatest films back into the spotlight it deserves.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:15:00 GMT

I grew up right next door to Thanksgiving Town, USA: Plymouth, Massachusetts, former home of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and future home of Plymouth Rock Studios and a nice big casino.

My next door neighbors used to work at Plimoth Plantation, where docent actors dress up in 17th century drag and mosey up and down the streets of a life-size replica Pilgrim settlement, discussing crops and Calvinism, while modern Native Americans in traditional buckskin attire give their side of the story in a nearby encampment.

So I like to think I know a thing or two about Thanksgiving. And let me tell you: it’s not all about the yams.

In fact, before the Macy’s Day Parade and the advent of that delicious Brundlefly monstrosity known as Turducken, the fourth Thursday of November was all about chowing down eel and corn and celebrating a bountiful harvest. In fact, as I learned on a recent visit to Plimoth Plantation, the name for the annual kick-off to the Christmas shopping season is actually a compound word that literally means “giving thanks”!

And so, as we here at the Screengrab prepare our traditional Turkey Day feast of pretzel sticks, jelly beans, two slices of toast and a handful of popcorn, we’d like to just take a few moments to express our gratitude for the people, places and movies that made us the full-on film geeks we are today.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM THE SCREENGRAB!

ANDREW OSBORNE IS THANKFUL FOR:

WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1950 & 1972)

Forget Mickey Mouse: Bugs Bunny was there from the start, teaching me the importance of carrots, proper directions to Albuquerque and a wised-up appreciation of life (for all its feathered frenemies, megalomaniacal Martians and gun-toting Fudds). So I was a bit disappointed when I realized What’s Up, Doc? (the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater) wasn’t a cartoon...but Peter Bogdanovich’s madcap screwball homage soon won me over with its igneous rocks and silly accents and, especially, that endless, blissful car chase through the streets, alleys and staircases of San Francisco (and, eventually, San Francisco Bay). All that (plus a gratifying act three cameo by Mr. Bunny himself!) made this goofy-smart romantic comedy my first favorite movie, and it only got better with time as I grew up and came to appreciate the chemistry of Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand (both at their cinematic finest) and the comedic brilliance of the irreplaceable Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton and Kenneth Mars. But the real reason this movie’s on the list is so I can say thank you to my film geek parents for always bringing me to whatever movie they went to go see on a Saturday night (even when it scared the bejesus out of me), thus instilling a life-long love of pop culture that’s guided my cinematic view of the world ever since. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

STAR WARS (1977)

I’ve already written an embarrassing number of posts about the life-changing religious experience of seeing this movie as an excitable, impressionable ten year old nerd, but looking back on it now, I can only say...George Lucas, all is forgiven. (And besides, what’s Thanksgiving without the Star Wars Holiday Special?)

THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Given the embarrassing Baby Boomer reverence for Lawrence Kasdan’s self-congratulatory, navel-gazing Love Generation touchstone of growing up and selling out (not to mention the way the film pretty much ruined all the songs on its mega-hit Motown soundtrack by making them go-to clichés for every subsequent entry in the “Diane Keaton dancing around a living room” genre), this one almost wound up on last week’s Guilty Pleasures list. But despite all the people who deride the film as just a shallow rip-off of John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven, I have no guilt and nothing but love for The Big Chill. I first saw it after a particularly painful orthodontist’s appointment in my junior year of high school, and though I may not have been the intended target audience, I took the movie instantly to heart, partly for its evocation of the sixties (an era I romanticized desperately in the Just Say No Reagan eighties), but mostly for its celebration of the enduring power of friendship.

JOHN WATERS & DIVINE

Then, after high school, I stopped Saying No and dove headfirst into the psychedelic wonderland of college, that freaky, institutionalized Rumspringa when America’s sons and daughters move away from home and go batshit crazy for a year or three. After spending the first eighteen years of my life as an upright goody two-shoes, I was itching to break bad and take a walk on the trashy side...and when it comes to desperate living, I quickly discovered there was no better tour guide than John Waters and his large and lovely muse, Divine. From Mondo Trasho to Hairspray, Baltimore’s favorite son and fake daughter warped my young adult mind with their glorious bad taste, healthy disrespect for convention and pre-punk aesthetic, while also serving as self-made role models of DIY ingenuity for those determined to live a life less ordinary.

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

In 1993, my then-girlfriend and I attended an L.A. cast and crew screening of Dazed and Confused (with, if memory serves, my future Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak). We didn’t know any of the soon-to-be-famous actors in the stellar ensemble cast (including Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey and Ben Affleck) when the lights went down, but when the lights came up, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by characters we’d only just met but felt like we’d known forever: hey, look! It’s O’Bannion and Darla! And over there! It’s Wooderson! (All right, all right, all right!) A few months later, I got dumped by the aforementioned girlfriend, but numerous subsequent screenings of Dazed and Confused helped to ease the pain, and today I remember Richard Linklater’s last day of school and first night of summer vacation at least as fondly as my actual high school experience.

PULP FICTION (1994)

Some movies you see and forget just as soon as the lights come up. Pulp Fiction was not one of those movies. In 1994, I spent every last dime I had (and a lot of dimes that I didn’t have) attempting to surf the Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes indie renaissance with my own no-budget 16mm production, Apocalypse Bop (starring the indomitable Mr. Von Doviak), which I’d spent the summer directing back in my home town near Thanksgiving Town, USA. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, and so when the movie wrapped, I decided to road trip back to the West Coast with a couple of friends from the Bop shoot. Stopping for breakfast in Austin, Texas, one of those friends met a girl and couldn’t stop thinking about her, so when we finally reached California, he called her up and asked if she wanted to go see Pulp Fiction with him on opening night. She said yes, and so he turned around and flew right back to Austin. Meanwhile, my return to L.A. woke me up from my filmmaking fandango to the cold, hard reality that I was unemployed, with no prospects and no money to pay my rent. I had exactly twenty dollars to my name. And I’m happy to say I spent that twenty dollars on popcorn and a ticket to go see the opening night of Pulp Fiction with my pals in the San Fernando Valley, while my other friend was watching the same movie on the same night on his cross-country date in The Lone Star State. He wound up staying in Austin for the next several years, and days after watching Jules and Vincent Vega strut across the screen to the strains of “Misirlou,” my own bacon got snatched from the brink of disaster by an out-of-the-blue offer to go work on a war movie in the Philippines. And so I’m eternally grateful to have once been young and foolish enough to have those kinds of adventures, living in extremis at exactly the right time and with exactly the right people the night Quentin Tarantino got medieval on our ass.

SXSW, THE PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL & THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS (2009)

And speaking of Austin, the city of Slacker has been, at different times, my literal and spiritual home away from home for years now, and never is it more glamorous (or crowded) than the middle of March, when the capitol of Texas plays host to the South-By-Southwest music and film festival, a fantastic collision of pop culture, booze and barbecue that makes Thanksgiving look like Arbor Day. Every spring, it renews my faith in the vaunted “indie film” spirit (even though I’m old enough to know better), and then every summer, I take another, mellower sip of the indie Kool-Aid (not to mention the world’s best Bloody Marys) at the Provincetown Film Festival, with John Waters presiding as patron saint in the same way Richard Linklater is the Mayor of South-By...and with all that friggin’ indie spirit washing over me, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed once again to its siren song, so I’ll just wrap up this list with thanks to my collaborators on The Meat City Beatniks, an indie film musical (co-written by me, Scott Von Doviak, Eric Jacobson and Jim Dryden) and starring Elliot Dort, Ben Gallant, Sheree Bass, Matthew Woodward, Rob McKim, Ms. Amar, Joe Gallo, Michael Sesling, Kellianne MacFarlane, Bill Christensen and Amy Jeglinski-Osborne...a production which (thankfully) I mostly managed to wrap in 2008 and which will (hopefully) premiere in 2009...so stay tuned! (And have a Happy Thanksgiving!)

Click Here For More Thanks From Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

In Other Blogs: Festivus!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:30:00 GMT

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir previews the New York Film Festival. “Like any institution closely identified with New York City -- the Yankees, the Times, the Metropolitan Museum, the scum-sucking financial establishment that has ruined all of our lives and our children's as well -- the New York Film Festival makes a pretty easy target for crusading anti-elitists of all stripes…What's far more interesting about the NYFF after all this time is that it remains remarkably successful at its self-assigned mission, anachronistic and undemocratic as that may appear. In programming relatively few features (28 this year) -- most of them drawn from the major European festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Venice -- and in insisting on a pre-pop-culture vision of cinema as an art form, festival director Richard Peña and his staff have, perversely enough, proven to be shrewd table-setters for the fall film marketplace.”

Erstwhile Screengrabber Mike D’Angelo already has a page of NYFF reviews up, and it sounds like you can scratch Tony Manero off your list. “For those not temperamentally inclined to celebrate uncompromising cine-machismo for its own sake, however, this is pretty thin gruel, deeply unpleasant without ever coming within spitting distance of enlightening. Once you've been startled by Raúl assisting an old woman home and then unexpectedly pummeling her to death for her TV set, and then seen him pawn the TV in order to fund a replica of the multicolored Saturday Night Fever dance floor, you're good to go, literally -- everything that follows is more of the same. American Psycho didn't really work as a movie, but at least Bret Easton Ellis had a coherent idea, in that you can readily see the connection between '80s materialism, Bateman's sadistic violence and the transformation of Genesis into a Phil Collins solo act. How exactly does living under Pinochet translate to disco fever? Why are we watching Tony Manero and not, say, Roy Neary or Luke Skywalker?”

Also weighing in on NYFF is Vadim Rizov at The House Next Door, who finds Gomorrah comes up wanting when compared to our favorite TV show. “The problem with Gomorrah is that it could start and end anywhere. The Wire runs full arcs, tying social problems to well-developed characters; the war never ends, but the characters move on. Gomorrah is representative types running through a loop: today's Scarface-emulating young sociopaths are tomorrow's dead meat, but there'll always be someone to replace them. All five stories in Gomorrah's hydra-headed monster have rough conclusions, but anyone expecting a movie about mob life to end in any kind of upbeat fashion a) needs to watch more movies b) needs, indeed, to read up a bit more. Gomorrah is exactly what I thought it would be, which means there's no surprises.”

Dazed and Confused and Waking Life star Wiley Wiggins was a regular fixture around Fantastic Fest, and as this entry at his blog It’s Not For Everyone shows, he’s down with the Ozsploitation. “Brian Trenchard-Smith, fresh from his appearance in Not Quite Hollywood, introduced and answered questions about one of his very early films, The Man From Hong Kong. As one might expect from an Australian Kung Fu movie, the driving sequences are better than the fight sequences, and the main car chase in the. Movie is actually one of the most impressive filmed, mainly for the demolition-derby ferocity with which the cars slam into one another and a sureness in the photography and editing during the chase. The acting and plotting are the most memorable when they flirt with self parody. The movie was a lot of fun, but pales in comparison to some of Trenchard-Smith's crazier films.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Filmbrain features Lost in the Sixties and Seventies: A Dozen I'd Kill to See. At number four is the 1971 obscurity You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat. “Easily the holiest of grails on the list, this is a film I originally heard about back in the early 80s, but only recently confirmed that it does indeed truly exist. Dig this: an anarchic anti-establishment comedy that skewers then-contemporary mores that stars Zalman King (yes, that one) as a young man trying to find his way in New York City. Add to that a cast that includes Allen Garfield, Richard Pryor, and Roz Kelly (Happy Days' Pinky Tuscadero), and features music by Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Oh yes, Wes Craven worked on the film as well. I have never met a single soul who can honestly claim to have seen this film, so if you have, please do speak up!”

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SAVED! (2004)

In the Red and Blue State era, America often feels more like a pair of hostile side-by-side nations than a single group of United States, but this scrappy little indie by writer/director Brian Dannelly (and producer Michael Stipe...yes, THAT Michael Stipe!) does its part to bridge the divide by showing that maybe, just maybe, liberal elitists and conservative family values/assault weapon enthusiasts aren’t really so very different after all. Saved! tells the remarkably charming story of a bunch of very nice young people at a Christian fundamentalist high school trying to be as moral and decent as possible while grappling with questions of faith and the harsh realities of life. Naturally, many actual Christian fundamentalists hated it, but the cast (featuring undervalued charmers like Jena Malone and Patrick Fugit, a great comedic performance by Mandy Moore and a surprisingly likeable and sardonic turn by Macaulay Culkin) is the most likeable bunch of adolescents this side of Freaks and Geeks. The story is both highly respectful of religious belief and hilariously perceptive about the frequent disconnect between piety and common decency (not to mention the freshly topical disconnect between abstinence education and elevated teen pregnancy rates).

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

I know, I know: this is a back-to-school list, and Dazed and Confused is the quintessential "last day of school" movie. But you poor souls facing down a whole new year of classes, teachers, schoolbooks and locker stuffings need something to dream on, and there's no better light at the end of the tunnel than the Richard Linklater ensemble comedy that launched a thousand careers. One of the all-time great up-all-night party movies, Dazed is like a favorite rock album; it's stuffed with greatest hits and no matter how many times I've seen it, I'm always up for another viewing. Dazed captures the giddiness of those final hours dealing with teachers' dirty looks as well as the anxieties of those on the threshold, either of high school (and hazing by sadistic seniors) or adulthood ("The older you do get, the more rules they're gonna try to get you to follow.") And unlike most high school movies with their rigid caste systems, Linklater's film finds that rare relaxed groove where the stoners overlap with the jocks and the geeks co-exist with the cheerleaders. And then there's Matthew McConaughey's immortal Wooderson, the cautionary tale/stoner sage still trying to ride that endless summer as far as it will take him. I don't ever want to go back to high school…except when I'm watching Dazed and Confused.

BATTLE ROYALE (2000)

The idea behind Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale – one of the highest-grossing films in Japanese motion picture history, and a stunning achievement in blending artistic elements with balls-out action – is so simple that it would have been an instant winner at a high-concept Hollywood pitch meeting: it's basically Beverly Hills 90210 meets Death Race 2000. Luckily, the movie was based on a hugely successful (if incredibly controversial) novel, and the Toei studio needed no convincing to greenlight it. The participation of the legendary Beat Takeshi – not as director, but acting as one of the schoolteachers – cemented the deal. The premise of the movie is simple: in the near future, economic woes and overpopulation combine to leave Japan facing a crisis: teenagers can't get jobs and so are easily drawn to street crime and terrorism. To thin out their ranks, the government forces all high school classes to participate in an annual kill-or-be-killed tournament: each class is dropped on a remote island with a handful of weapons and orders to wipe out anyone who gets in their way. Some choose not to participate at all; some have friendships tested and torn apart; some try to game the system, and others take to the game – which becomes a national sensation as a televised blood sport – all too readily. The appeal of the movie isn't as simple as the terrific, and often incredibly bloody, action sequences: it's also in the surprising performances (including a near-silent turn by Masanobu Ando as Kiriyama, the demonic villain, and a pre-Kill Bill Chiaki Kuriyama in a juicy role), the relationships that develop between the kids (which range from operatic to heartbreakingly realistic), and the way that, despite the outlandish trappings, Fukasaku never lets you forget these are supposed to be real kids, behaving like kids would behave. It's that element of realism amongst all the sci-fi craziness that makes Battle Royale so memorable.

CLUELESS (1995) & MEAN GIRLS (2004)

Amy Heckerling, director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, returned to her prime territory a dozen years later with Clueless, which for all practical purposes remains that brief, special moment known as Alicia Silverstone's movie career. Here we have the ideal satirical vision of the sunny side of adolescent girl power: Silverstone's Cher may be too socially adept and fashion-conscious not to seem shallow, but she hasn't got a trace of Heather in her, and she's determined to use her skills to help others and do her part for a series of good causes, from helping the environment to greater awareness of global hunger to getting Wallace Shawn laid, all of which ought to be woven into the Democratic Party's national platform. (Okay, maybe not getting Wallace Shawn laid.) Flip to side B and you've got Mean Girls, where the Heather virus has so thoroughly contaminated high school life that Lindsay Lohan, the home-schooled offspring of zoologists who didn't bring her in from the African bush until she was sixteen, is forced to pretend to be both stupid and bitchy in order to get close enough to her genetic peers in the Chicago educational system to study their strange, exotic ways. These two movies also serve as a double feature illustrating Hollywood's seeming ability to turn any source material at all into a commercial teenpic: Clueless is the least official but not the least (emotionally) faithful of the string of Jane Austen adaptations that flooded theaters in the mid-'90s, and Mean Girls was adapted by Tina Fey from Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction sociological study Queen Bees and Wannabees.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

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

Independent Film Festival of Boston: The Zellner Brothers & Goliath

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Goliath, a quasi-mumblecore tragi-comedy by the Zellner Brothers of Austin, TX plays this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The indie feature, about a man who loses both his wife and his beloved cat in the same harrowing year, was first reviewed here at The Screengrab by Scott Von Doviak during the 2008 South-by-Southwest Film Festival.

David Zellner and his brother, Nathan, have been crafting distinctive independent cinema since 1996, but I first became aware of them at a terrible film festival called 30th Parallel that leeched onto the back of the 1997 SXSW fest, analogous to the Slamdance/Sundance arrangement, but much shoddier (and short-lived, since 30th Parallel barely made it through its first and only installment).

I know about the 30th Parallel Fest, because it featured the Texas premiere of my own indie film, Apocalypse Bop. The whole misbegotten affair kicked off with a back room hotel reception marked by a sad tray of vegetables and the absence of any members of the 30th Parallel staff to greet us. This led to some awkward bonding among the invited filmmakers as we all stood around, confused, waiting for some information about what we were supposed to do. Then, eventually, we all left.

Because just about every movie theater, auditorium and/or other screening venue in Austin was booked for SXSW, 30th Parallel mostly screened its selections in the back rooms of bars, which wasn’t a terrible idea in theory. Unfortunately, the Zellner Brothers had the misfortune of premiering their surrealist mime masterpiece Plastic Utopia on “Melrose Monday” at some 6th Street dive, meaning that many of the 30th Parallel films screened that evening were drowned out by blaring Melrose Place-themed trivia questions from the front of the bar.

Additionally, the 30th Parallel projectors were seeming World War II-era relics that kept jamming and breaking down every few minutes...and, even when they worked, they often caused the projected films to stutter, blur and, occasionally, melt.

And yet, it is to the Zellner Brothers’ credit that, despite all the hellacious distractions, I not only sat through the entire, tortured screening of Plastic Utopia, but came away considering it one of the most brilliantly deranged independent films I’ve ever seen, a surrealistic cult classic that, sadly, has never inspired nearly the cult it deserves.

Yet, while not cult figures on the level of, say, John Waters, Kevin Smith or Jim Jones, the Zellners have slowly built a small, devoted following, in Austin and elsewhere, despite their tiny budgets and occasional peculiar experiments like 2001’s Frontier, a faux foreign film in a fake foreign language (Bulbovian) starring an older, puffier Wiley Wiggins (of Dazed and Confused fame).

Recently, the Zellners have devoted themselves to dry, absurdist short subjects which highlight the pair’s strengths: unexpected, offbeat writing and visuals combined with their own very likeable recurring screen personas: David, the excitable, put-upon cynic and Nathan, the mellower zen weirdo.

The shorts (available for viewing at ZellnerBros.com) opened the door to the influential Sundance Film Festival, which recently premiered their latest feature film, Goliath, once again starring David and Nathan, with cameos by Wiggins and mumblecore poster boy Andrew Bujalski.

The film, in terms of tone and subject matter, plays like the bastard child of Little Children and Year of the Dog. Goliath, the titular tiger-striped tabby owned by David Zellner’s protagonist, goes missing and his recently divorced owner goes more than a little insane, eventually scapegoating a neighborhood sex offender (played by Nathan) as the source of his troubles.

The film plays out in a deadpan naturalistic style that left me yearning for a little more of Plastic Utopia’s antic narrative drive and visual invention, yet nevertheless hooked me with its own peculiar rhythms, dry wit, occasional slapstick, Asian porno drumming (yeah, you heard me) and its sometimes harrowing depiction of the hazards of love and pet ownership...without giving too much away, I’ll just note here that if you’re a tender-hearted pet lover, this may not be the movie for you.

Your 4:20 Stoner Movie Symposium

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:20:00 GMT

In honor of Sunday’s national stoner holiday (4/20, dontcha know – see also the time of this post), Entertainment Weekly presents a roundtable discussion of the weedsploitation genre, with such luminaries as Seth Rogen (Pineapple Express), John Cho (the Harold and Kumar movies) and Tommy Chong (You know! CHONG!) pontificating on pot cinema. For those of you who have already sparked up and thus don’t have the attention span to get through the whole thing, we present a few selected highlights.

Everyone has their favorite stoner movie, of course. Rogen is a Friday proponent and Chong goes old school with Easy Rider, but we’ve got to side with Super High Me star Doug Benson on this matter. “I'd say for the sheer quality and vibe of it, Dazed and Confused. Whether you watch it stoned or not, it really delivers. I saw it in the theater and it appealed on a Freaks and Geeks kind of level, where it was really funny and realistic, but also reminded you of the s---tier aspects of being a kid. The only thing that takes away from the stoniness of it is the hazing element, but it does sort of represent the way that stoners are treated in general.”

Rogen knows what doesn’t work in stoner cinema, and that’s the obligatory anti-drug message Hollywood studios often insist upon. “That was something we did not want [for Pineapple Express]. Half Baked, I liked that movie, but the ending drove me crazy! The whole movie is for potheads, clearly, then at the end he stops smoking weed — so what the f--- am I doing? A lot of these weed movies shoot their core audience in the foot when they do that. We wanted to acknowledge that it's not a great idea to be stoned 24 hours a day, especially when there's guys trying to kill you, but we didn't want the ‘We should stop smoking weed’ moment.”

And then there’s...uh...hey, man, what was I writing about?

In Other Blogs: Good Friday Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

You may or may not have the day off, but rest assured, In Other Blogs never rests.

Cinematical commemorates the release of Drillbit Taylor with the Big-Screen Bullies You Love to Hate. Our personal favorite, O’Bannion from Dazed and Confused, comes in third, with top honors going to Marty McFly’s nemesis from the Back to the Future series. “The ultimate jerk, Biff Tannen is everything you'd ever want in an on-screen bully all wrapped up into one tall, dumb-looking knucklehead.”

Beyond the Multiplex offers up some Cannes gossip. The official selections won’t be announced for a couple of weeks, but Andrew O’Hehir isn’t buying rumors that the Coens’ Burn After Reading or the latest Indiana Jones movie will be opening the festival. “I wish I felt the same skepticism about the rumor recently floated by Hollywood Reporter blogger Steven Zeitchik to the effect that Michael Patrick King's likely-to-be-misbegotten Sex and the City: The Movie may wind up as opening-night fare at the Palais des Festivals. Unfortunately, it all fits: modest star power, wide international appeal and a certain vapid pretense at sophistication and cultural significance.”

Scanners takes a look at Las Vegas, as seen in the movies. “Like Disney World, it's hard to imagine anybody actually living there. For most, it represents a transitory state, impossible to sustain. Few care to wonder what happens to all that money, all that lust, any more than they wonder how much of that water from pools and fountains simply evaporates into the desert air. Win or lose, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

A couple of weeks back we gave praise to the mysteriously eloquent blog title Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. With baseball season just a few days away, proprietor Dennis Cozzalio offers a sort of explanation disguised as a fantasia of attending a ballgame with the Fistful of Dollars director. “He looks at me like I’m crazy. The old man has come to see, in this accelerated afternoon, a microcosm of the world on the field, in its orderly procedures and open-ended framework, a game that takes as long as it takes to play out to the end, sometimes nine innings, sometimes more. Does not the infield fly rule negate some of the possibility of unpredictability in a game that otherwise thrives on it, a game where any number of things can happen in any given moment, despite its apparently rigorous structure? If Tuco can shoot intruders with a gun half-submerged in a filthy bathtub, then why cannot a shortstop pretend to bobble a ball and lure a runner into a trap?”

Finally, Slashfilm presents a gallery of film geek graffiti.

Will Ferrell and the Retro Boys

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

The Associated Press just got the memo: the 1970s are funny! "Platform shoes, leisure suits, fondue, fro picks. What used to be cool is now the stuff of comedy. When it comes to period comedies, the '70s are the equivalent of Victorian-era costume drama. While serious-minded filmmakers are forever reaching back to the time of royalty clad in waistcoats and dressing gowns, comedians are more likely to cull from the less halcyon days of disco and sideburns."

The AP article runs through the history of Me Decade-based comedy, from movie parodies like I'm Gonna Git You Sucka! to the long-running sitcom That '70s Show to the one movie that really got it right, Dazed and Confused. Not surprisingly, Will Ferrell is singled out as one of the movement's leaders, given his retro roles in Anchorman and now Semi-Pro. "Whenever I look back at old photos and this and that, it just seems like such an alien time," Ferrell said. "The '80s are funny too, and I guess we'll look back and the '90s will be funny too, but the '70s are holding strong."

While we're all waiting for that wave of hilarious '90s-based humor, we might as well point out the obvious reason Ferrell and his cohorts are so fascinated with the '70s: that's when they grew up. (Farrell even confesses "I was so into the bicentennial. No joke. I bought a Liberty Bell necklace that was pewter. It was like a prized possession.") The new issue of Sight and Sound takes a look at Farrell and his somewhat more respectable contemporaries in "Indiewood" or "The Frat Pack" — Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, etc. — and finds the '70s influence alive and well.

"Many of them had emerged from Sundance in the mid-1990s and they shared that elusive 'indie sensibility' even as they moved into studio production; there were rumours that, like the much-mythologised Movie Brats of the 1970s, these guys hung out together. . . The comparison, and the self-consciousness, were almost inevitable since the rebels arrived on the backlot at the peak of 1970s retro — in music and fashion as well as in film culture." The piece goes on to note that Indiewood was influenced not only by the Movie Brats, but MTV and SNL in equal measure, which is where Ferrell comes in. Indeed, the Semi-Pro star finds an unlikely defender in the notoriously prickly David O. Russell, who served as an executive producer on Anchorman: "I am a comedy snob, and Will Ferrell is sublime." We think he means "groovy."

Trailer Review: Fool's Gold

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Was anybody really clamoring for a Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson reunion vehicle? Yet here they are, hoping to re-capture that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days magic and to make us forget that they're largely coasting on the goodwill from their single signature roles from years ago — Hudson in Almost Famous, McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. As for the movie itself, it looks pretty awful, the standard Hollywood claptrap about how women, deep down, really want exciting-if-unreliable men with whom they can have sexy adventures. McConaughey and Hudson getting back together is such a foregone conclusion here that the trailer doesn't even bother showing the requisite "other guy," Hudson's more sensible and modestly-handsome rebound boyfriend who will serve as a placeholder until she realizes that McConaughey is the only man vapid enough to make her happy. Only funny part of this trailer is Hudson talking about going back to school to get her Ph.D., since I'd guess that without a script handy Hudson would have a hard time spelling Ph.D. Oh, and Ray Winstone — WHY????