The Screengrab : dead man

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: April 25-May 1, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Hi, it’s Vince with Screengrab and you’re gonna be in a great mood all day cuz you’ll be grabbin’ your troubles away with Screengrab. Ya like lists? We got lists. How about Great Beginnings: Screengrab’s Favorite Opening Scenes of All Time? We got Parts One, Two and Three. But come on, that’s not good enough. Tell ya what, we’ll throw in Parts Four and Five, no extra charge. Now you’re cookin’ with gas.

How about reviews? Everyone likes movie reviews, right? We got Winnebago Man. We got The Limits of Control, how ‘bout that? You throw your Eldorado in there, you mix it with your Perestroika – come on, you’re not gonna get this at Ain’t It Cool News, am I right?

I’m just getting started here, folks. Watch this – you’re gonna love my posts:

25 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Better Zmed Than Red

Precursors: Dead Man (1995)

Screengrab Death Watch: Day One

Getting Darrined: When the Sequel Doesn’t Need You

Forgotten Films: "Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson" (1993)

Robert De Niro’s Pantyhose and Other Treasures

Screengrab Review: "The Limits of Control"

Nick Schager — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Having already combined samurai and noir cinema in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jim Jarmusch begins his latest, The Limits of Control, with none-too-subtle nods to Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime-saga masterpiece Le Samouraï. Shot with gliding, hallucinatory grace by Christopher Doyle, Jarmusch’s film fixates on the preternaturally stoic countenance of a nameless loner (Isaach De Bankolé) as he lies silently in bed (the day turning to night as his eyes remain open), practices his morning Tai Chi, gets a business assignment from two unidentified men in an airport terminal, and travels to Spain, where he follows a schedule of sitting at an outdoor café each day and ordering two espressos. The ritual is the thing for this mysterious agent, whose comportment suggests a criminal vocation but whose motivations remain doggedly opaque, obscurity which Jarmusch, working from his own script (which begins with a Rimbaud quote), amplifies by lacing his set-up with import-heavy declarations like “Everything is subjective” and “Reality is arbitrary.” The mood is Point Blank by way of Jarmusch’s own Dead Man, the action quickly taking on the guise of a dreamscape in which every action, every gesture, every utterance seems a telling, emblem-laced clue.

What begins as an intriguingly symbolic gangster-saga-turned-spiritual head-trip, however, quickly turns into a slab of inert pretentiousness. Jarmusch has always had a tremendous gift for blending genres and moods, for mixing off-the-cuff cool with piercing action and heady profundity. But with The Limits of Control, he almost completely loses the thread – or, rather, clings too firmly to his story’s lifeless atmosphere, refusing for an instant to modulate his one-note tone. With a torpor that’s supposed to imply weightiness, Jarmusch’s film follows De Bankolé’s protagonist from one Spanish locale to another, where he meets a kooky contact – Tilda Swinton in a blonde wig and tan cowboy outfit; John Hurt as a scruffy weirdo; Gael García Bernal’s anonymous nobody – and exchanges boxer-decorated matchbooks that conceal ciphered instructions about his next destination, as well as sleeps with (but does not bed) a nude beauty (Paz de la Huerta). Each pit stop is typified by recurring coded dialogue (“You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”) and bits of ruminative jibber-jabber (about old movies, or about the molecular structure of wood), all delivered with an expressionless solemnity that strives to posit the proceedings as a cerebral trip down the psychological rabbit hole, yet elicits mostly exasperated eye-rolling.

There’s little doubt that Jarmusch intends his saga to represent something profound. Unlike the aforementioned Point Blank or Le Samouraï, however, he neither makes his encompassing point remotely clear, nor attempts to couch his thematic arguments via an engaging, exciting genre vehicle. The Limits of Control plods along with a self-seriousness that borders on parody, far too convinced of its own grave philosophical significance to offer anything approaching a thrill or an alleviating moment of levity, much less a sly wink that would reposition the film as a self-referential riff on affected crime cinema. Do the overhead shots of De Bankolé’s two espressos speak to life’s symmetry? Or are they meant to evoke eyes, which in turn are the “windows to the soul”? And what of the fact that De Bankolé’s ultimate target is a businessman (Bill Murray) ensconced in a soundproof hillside office bunker who – signifier alert! – rests his toupee on top of a skull? Is he a Dick Cheney stand-in? Jarmusch’s oblique story provides no tantalizing hints, a situation that will surely lead some to tenaciously parse the underlying meaning of the director’s self-important rumination, but for most others, will simply test the limits of their patience.

Precursors: Dead Man (1995)

Nick Schager — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Given its inevitable mention in countless forthcoming reviews of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control – including mine, appearing here at The Screengrab later this morning – Dead Man is this week’s required viewing, not only as preparation for Jarmusch’s latest but also as a welcome antidote. Though the two share a formal exquisiteness, dissonant score, dreamlike atmosphere and stoic protagonist traversing a foreign locale, Dead Man exhibits little of the ponderous obliqueness and self-satisfied self-consciousness of Limits of Control, coasting on a mood of existentialist dread as it tracks Cleveland accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) to the town of Machine where he kills a man in self-defense and, after being hit by a bullet that can’t be extracted, is forced to flee west. His flight, aided by a Native American guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer) and set to the hauntingly dissonant sounds of Neil Young’s electric guitar, is one with obvious historical overtones. Yet although Jarmusch clearly intends his tale to resonate as a nightmarishly lyrical saga of American expansion and white male hegemony, he never unduly strains such concerns by resorting to dull exposition or indulgent allegorical gestures. Instead, Dead Man’s cultural-political concerns are left to naturally spring forth from Blake’s odyssey, which – thanks to Depp’s beautifully deadpan performance – also functions as an evocative portrait of an alienated man learning to understand himself and the world around him during the course of a journey into hell.

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Caden Cotard believes that he is dying. In a way, he is right. This is as true of him as it is of anyone who's ever drawn breath. Time slips away in a very special way for Cotard, though. He awakes one morning in September, but by the time he gets coffee, there's kids in Halloween masks running around. His wife takes his daughter to Europe for a short trip. His crush is flirting with him later, trying to get him to come home with her. He can't, he says, his wife is only gone for a week. "Caden, it's been a year!," she tells him. Some around him age at a startling rate, while others never seem to get a day older. Time is cheating Cotard. It's hard to describe how slippery time is in this movie, because it's utterly different than any other movie I can recall. I sat breathlessly waiting for the movie to start for a good hour, not realizing that this anticipation is itself the point. Life slips away while you focus on the future or the past. You are in a race against time - we all are - but how can a person get his or her head in the race when there are so many issues that need handling elsewhere? Dylan sang that he not busy being born is busy dying. Cotard is in a constant state of trying, and failing, to be born anew. With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, he sets out to prove that he's worthy of the money and prestige, launching an enormous production that seeks to mirror life itself. But time pulls away at him here, too. Years pass with startling swiftness while we watch the production grow. Cotard keeps suggesting new names, new ways to launch his play. But the future he looks towards is always holding hands with the past, as his life is constantly popping up in his production, actors speaking his inner thoughts to each other, and Cotard no closer to understanding that his life is happening now, right there, not in front of his eyes, but in him. The play he is staging at the beginning of the movie is Death Of A Salesman, the great 20th century play about a man who cannot live his life because of his dreams. Synecdoche, New York is the 21st century answer, a retelling of Death Of A Salesman with the classic Charlie Kaufman Borgesian mindfuck. But it's also one of the most nakedly emotional movies of his - or anyone's - career. I thought he would have trouble again scaling the heights of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but Synecdoche, New York goes right over the top, taking Eternal Sunshine's bittersweet mix of love and frailty and adding the sure knowledge that time is the enemy, indifferent to heart and soul and fair gamesmanship. Time will win in the end, and all that will be left of us are the structures we build, real and metaphorical. Leave something worthwhile. (HC)

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

The car chase scene in The French Connection is less a race against time than a race against a hijacked train. But let's not be nit-picky. You find yourself egging Doyle, Gene Hackman's obsessed cop on as he drives like the wind under the elevated tracks in Brooklyn, subway train speeding on above him. Why doesn't he just blast right through that mom and her stroller? Just put the pedal to the metal and out-drive all those damn squares for crying out loud. Who cares about regular folk when there is a mission to accomplish? But folks: Don't try this at home. In real life the subway always beats a car in New York City. (SCS)

VANISHING POINT (1971)

1971 was a good year for crazed lonely guys indulging in car chases. Vanishing Point is sort of like a porno. It does away with any extraneous exposition or dialogue, all that remains is a race against time for the pettiest of reasons. Footing the bill for a handful of amphetamines. Long stretches of open road and a car to propel the protagonist forward. The only way to beat this arm-rest clutching experience would be to actually race your own car across the continent. (SCS)

DEAD MAN (1995)

Being a fan of Two-Lane Blacktop, I like my races against time like I like my own race towards death: molasses-slow, meandering, and hallucinatory. Dead Man excels at these criteria. Many Westerns are morality tales, stories about people addressing conflicting ethical concerns out where the law doesn't apply, but Jim Jarmusch's Western is about learning to find your own soul before death takes you. Johnny Depp plays an accountant named William Blake. His parents are dead and he has nothing but the clothes on his back as he crosses out of civilization into the wild frontier town of Machine, somewhere in the Dakotas. The job promised him has dried up, and, despondent, he takes up with a beautiful woman. But her lover shows up and shoots her, and then waits, almost dispassionately, for Blake to do the expected thing and finish him off. Blake heads out into the woods, gut-shot and dying. This is where we begin. The first person to find Blake is an outcast Native American who calls himself Nobody (which he prefers to He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing). Nobody has been educated in Europe and believes Blake to be his namesake, the 18th century poet and painter. The two travel towards the sea, sowing death and destruction along the way. Rarely, however, do they encounter or kill someone who doesn't deserve it in some way. Out there beyond the grasp of civilization, all men are in a race towards death. Only Blake knows how close death hovers at his shoulder, and only Blake knows the preciousness of time. (HC)

Five seconds to Click Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five, McGruber!!!!!

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Trailer Review: The Limits of Control

Paul Clark — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As a longtime fan of the films of Jim Jarmusch, I sometimes find it difficult to pin down what exactly it is that draws me to his work. Perhaps it has something to do with the melting-pot nature of his stories, which throw together seemingly incompatible elements as a way of testing whether they’ll fit. How else to explain the fusion of samurai lore and sub-GoodFellas mafia movie that is Ghost Dog, or the William Blake-infused meta-Western Dead Man? With his latest, The Limits of Control, Jarmusch appears to be returning to Ghost Dog territory, with the story of a lone-gunman type (Jarmusch regular Isaach de Bankolé) who finds himself embroiled in… well, some kind of intrigue. Rather than going into much detail on the plot, this trailer seems primarily to work as a way of conveying a spiritual, fatalistic vibe and showing off the super-cool supporting cast (Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal, John Hurt, Bill Murray, not to mention unnamed favorites like Hiam Abbass and Alex Descas). Beyond that, I have no idea what to expect from The Limits of Control- I just know that I can’t wait to see more.

OST: "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If you've been following the "OST" feature here at the Screengrab for a while, or even if you're just familiar with the kind of chicanery that goes on in the music business under the guise of protecting intellectual property, you'll know that an astonishingly large number of movie soundtracks present you with a product that's wildly -- even borderline fraudulently -- different from what you encountered in the movie. The difficulty and cost of obtaining clearance rights to music, especially for small, cash-poor independent films, and the greed and short-sightedness of record companies (or just their willingness to butt heads with equally greedy movie companies over the size of their slice of the pie) has sunk many a soundtrack. Jim Jarmusch's inventive, compelling Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ran afoul of this very problem, but with a curious endgame: there are, in fact, two available records affiliated with the movie -- one best described as a soundtrack, and the other a score. Both are extremely worthwhile, but neither is completely successful on its own; both are very different in character, although they were written by the same person; and both feature material from the film as well as material that never appeared in it, though only one is available in the United States.

It should come as no surprise that Jarmusch's 1999 pseudo-remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's fantastic Le Samourai features a terrific soundtrack. As befits his image as a New York hipster filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch's movies have always placed music in a prominent position; from the haunting, unnerving guitar wails of Neil Young that formed the basis of the soundtrack to Dead Man to the exotic, emotionally powerful jazz-funk of Ethiopian composer Mulatu Astaque that was featured in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch is one of a handful of directors -- others include Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola -- who can be counted on to take as much care with the soundtrack as they do with the film itself. After reading that Italian-American mafiosi were fond of gangsta rap, and consulting with his star Forest Whitaker, Jarmusch decided to bring in the RZA, producer and mastermind behind the hugely influential Wu-Tang Clan, to write both the score and the soundtrack to Ghost Dog. This began a collaboration between the two that became deeper and more profound than either had anticipated; the RZA ended up consulting with Jarmusch on some of the language of the street hustlers in the film, helped out with the design and costuming, and even appears briefly in the film (as do Timbo King and a handful of the Wu-Tang Killa Bees auxiliary). The movie and the music are gorgeously integrated on every level, reflecting a realness that couldn't have come about if any other director and any other musician had been behind it: scenes are perfectly broken up by the intrusion of killer hip-hop tracks (all of which the RZA wrote, produced, or both); the scenes themselves feature gorgeous nighttime driving shots of Whitaker's lethal but loyal assassin, accompanied by evocative, skeletal beats also made by the RZA.

Unfortunately, things went awry, as things often do. Epic, which then had a stranglehold of a contract on the RZA's work, saw the release of the film -- which they couldn't have cared less about -- as nothing more than an opportunity to release new RZA-penned singles to the hip-hop market. They saw no value whatsoever in the instrumental score he'd worked so hard on, and which so perfectly complemented the film. As a result, when the licensing deal was penned with Razor Sharp, the company that released the soundtrack, Epic gave them permission only to use the hip-hop songs the RZA produced, and none of the instrumental score. Eventually, an alternate version of the soundtrack -- this time featuring a number of excellent selections from the score -- was released, but only in Japan. The result is the unsatisfying split alluded to above: here in America, the only version of the soundtrack you're likely to find is the one featuring the rap songs -- which, make no mistake, are almost uniformly excellent, but suffer from a lack of completeness. If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, or shell out extra money to import the version available there, you'll get parts of the score -- at the cost of the great rap singles. So, in the end, the Ghost Dog soundtracks remain two imperfect halves of an incredible whole, and are likely to remain so as long as greed gets in the way. Or, to put it another way, forever.

BEST TRACKS: Assuming you're either unable or unwilling to get hold of the Japanese version of the soundtrack to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, we'll assume that you're listening to the American version, illustrated above. (The score segments are replaced by rather useless "samurai code quotes" from the movie.) Don't despair, though; while you aren't hearing the whole picture, you're still getting some amazing RZA-penned hip-hop. Some of the best tracks here include the Wu-Tang's featured track, "Fast Shadow", a raw-sounding, desperate slice of urban paranoia; "Strange Eyes", a groovy, expressive effort by the Wu spinoff group Sunz of Man; and, especially, "Don't Test/Wu Stallion", an evocative, insinuating dub groove by underrated Jamaican toaster Suga Bang Bang, which slithers from one pole to another over a killer minimalist beat by the RZA, which suggests the score that you're missing.

Related Posts:

OST: Krush Groove

OST: He Got Game

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Desmond Llewelyn, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Despite a pretty decent theme song, The World Is Not Enough hardly qualifies as a great film (or even a particularly great Bond film), but it earns a spot on this list for one perfect scene. Desmond Llewelyn first appeared as the cranky go-to guy for state-of-the-art British spy paraphernalia in 1963’s From Russia With Love and returned in every subsequent 007 installment (except for 1973’s Live and Let Die) thereafter, outlasting Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton before finally teaming with Pierce Brosnan for three late ‘90s adventures. In his final big screen appearance, the aging Q is seen schooling his protégé (and eventual replacement) R, played by John Cleese, before disappearing from view with the classic exit line, “Never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan.” Sadly, Llewelyn died shortly after the production wrapped, not of old age (he was 85), but in a car crash, on his way home to his beloved wife of 61 years after dinner with a friend...not, as my dad pointed out, the worst way to go, especially after spending your life as a beloved cinema icon (who once said he’d play his signature role “as long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn't").

Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (1996)

Most of Robert Mitchum's contemporaries from the Golden Age made their onscreen farewells as frail shadows of their former selves (as we'll explore in-depth next week). Not Big Bad Bob. There could be no greater contrast between the classic Hollywood tough guys and the man-children of today's cinema than Mitchum's brief scene with Johnny Depp near the beginning of Dead Man. Even pushing 80, Mitchum looks like he could snap Depp in half like a breadstick. As John Dickinson, owner of a steelworks in the Old West town of Machine, Mitchum has a mane of white hair, an ever-present shotgun, and a life-sized self-portrait lurking behind him as if he is already in the process of passing into legend. When he hires a band of bounty hunters to track down Depp's William Blake, he can hardly bring himself to acknowledge their existence, instead addressing his initial remarks to the stuffed grizzly bear mounted in the corner of his office. It's as if he can only relate to the one other larger than life creature in the room.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)

Born in 1977, the legendary great director and provocateur Luis Bunuel cashed out with this minor classic, in which the rage and audience-baiting tricks of his early work seemed to have been replaced by a serene but sly playfulness. He gives the impression here that he's just enjoying the company of one of his favorite actors (Fernando Rey) and a couple of beautiful women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) as he uses them to jauntily illustrate his story about a gentleman who is driven half mad with frustration by a young woman who alternately invites and repels his advances. (The women is played by both of the lead actresses; a great deal of ink has been spent by critics speculating on what this device means, though it could have been something as simple as Bouquet having quit or been fired from the production and Bunuel deciding that he didn't feel like reshooting her scenes.) Having enjoyed one final round of good reviews and hossanahs, Bunuel settled in for a few years of drinking, studying insects, and working on his autobiography, My Last Sigh, which appeared not long before his death in 1983.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Three

When Good Directors Go Bad: Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For almost three decades now, Jim Jarmusch has been one of the heroes of American independent cinema. The deadpan humor and multicultural vibe of his best works have influenced directors worldwide, and his maverick sensibility has practically defined the term “independent filmmaker.” While this sensibility hasn’t endeared him to the Hollywood bigwigs (his insistence that he retain the rights to the negatives of all his films would be a dealbreaker for most studios) it’s made him something of a hero to followers of indie-film, because he’s a director who gets away with making whatever he damn pleases.

Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece Dead Man marked his first collaboration with legendary rocker Neil Young, of whom Jarmusch was a longtime fan. Young’s mindbending score was divisive- Roger Ebert famously likened the sound to Young dropping his guitar over and over- but the film cemented a friendship between the two artists. So for his next film Jarmusch decided to go on the road with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with the goal of making the concert film Year of the Horse. It was Jarmusch’s first documentary.

A few weeks ago I spotlighted in this column The Dark Wind, the sole fiction feature from master documentarian Errol Morris. For Jarmusch, Year of the Horse is no less misbegotten. Now, I don’t begrudge filmmakers- least of all gifted, independent-minded ones like Jarmusch- their attempts to break out of their filmmaking comfort zones. However, with Year of the Horse, Jarmusch shows almost no affinity for the documentary form.

In its opening credits, Year of the Horse proclaims that it was “proudly made in Super-8,” and the film is suffused with a lo-fi aesthetic that’s similar to most of Young’s best work. However, in such films as Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man, Jarmusch’s style is tight and deliberate, with little room for the kinds of accidents that one normally finds in a documentary of this sort. As a result, the film feels less like a charmingly hardscrabble Young work than a sloppy, amateurish mess.

Part of the problem is the music in the film. While I prefer Young’s rootsy albums like Harvest to his Crazy Horse work, the songs in the film are pretty solid. However, their concert performances have a tendency to drag on (and on and on), with lots of onstage improvisation between Young and his bandmates. While jamming can make for a great concert experience, it’s tough to make it interesting to those who aren’t actually in attendance, and Jarmusch never figures out how to make it work. Rather than focusing on the audience’s reaction to the music or really zeroing in on the musical chemistry between the band, Jarmusch too often cuts away from the concert to often random and usually uncompelling images.

Some of these images are merely distracting, as when Jarmusch intercuts footage of clouds or a passing train into the songs. But others are downright puzzling, as when the film cuts away from an onstage performance of “Fuckin’ Up” to show some decades-old footage of Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot shoplifting and getting arrested, a hamfisted attempt on Jarmusch’s part to turn the song into a music video, another form he isn’t particularly good at. Either way, the cutaways don’t help. Whereas Jarmusch seems to intend them to add interest to the stage performance, they merely serve to remind us of how the song is dragging on well past its logical end (one number finishes with the band playing the same chord nearly two dozen times). The only time the cutaways actually serve their intended purpose is when Jarmusch juxtaposes the 1996 concert performance of “Like a Hurricane” with footage of the same song taken from their 1986 tour. In this footage, in which Young already looks haggard, Jarmusch comes closest to illustrating the idea of how long Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been in the game.

At several times during the (mostly superfluous) band interviews in Year of the Horse, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro remarks that Jarmusch will never be able to compress three decades of Crazy Horse history into a documentary. However, based on the evidence on display in the film, two hours seems far too long. I’m sure there were plenty of vivid experiences in the history of the band, but few of them appear to have been “proudly filmed on Super-8.” Seeing as how the most memorable thing that happens offstage in Year of the Horse is a floral centerpiece catching on fire, perhaps Jarmusch would have been better off sticking to the music itself.

But as I said, he’s always marched to his own drummer, and fortunately for his fans his next film was 1999’s fascinating Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, that wonderful one-of-a-kind combination of aging wiseguys and Hagakure-reading lone gunmen. In other words, definitely a step in the right direction. Jarmusch’s next film, The Limits of Control, is currently on track for a 2009 premiere.