The Screengrab : dennis quaid

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I was a younger man, summer vacations seemed to last 100 years and every day was at least 24 hours long.

Now, as an old geezer, I can’t help but notice how time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future at an alarming rate. Summers, at best, tend to flash by in a matter of days -- and my days, like everything else, have apparently been downsized...

...or at least that’s how it feels here beneath the mountain of overdue assignments, unfinished projects and blown deadlines I find myself tunneling through of late, with less than a week remaining to file that damn “married filing jointly” 1040 form I haven’t even started yet...

...tick...tick...tick...

...but even as the clock ticks down to the April 15th tax deadline (not to mention the end of the Mayan calendar -- AND THE WORLD!!!!! -- in 2012), we here at the Screengrab figured we could spare a few seconds to salute THE BEST RACE AGAINST TIME FLICKS OF ALL...uh...TIME!

D.O.A. (1950)

This sweaty, 83-minute noir is pretty much all gimmick, but it's the ultimate in race-against-time gimmicks. Edmund O'Brien, who barks out his lines as if trying to reach the pork chop hanging around his neck, plays an accountant who hits San Francisco for a working vacation and discovers that he's been slipped a dose of a "luminous poison" for which there is no antidote. Given no more than a few days to live, O'Brien blows off the guided tour of Alcatraz and tears around the city, doing his unsubtle best to solve his own impending murder and wreak vengeance on his murderer before it's tag-on-the-toe time. The 1988 sequel, directed by Max Headroom creators Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and starring Dennis Quaid, feels padded at 93 minutes, but it does have a couple of witty strokes in relocating the action to the world of academia -- Quaid plays a lapsed novelist and college professor whose motto of "publish or perish" is used against him by someone who has taken it a little too literally -- and setting it on a sweltering Texas college campus at Christmas time, thus giving Quaid an excuse to sweat even more profusely than Edmund O'Brien even with holiday decorations in the background. (PN)

HIGH NOON (1952)

Fred Zinnemann takes all the suspense out of the race against time; there’s no question of escaping the consequences, only of how they’re going to be dealt with. No one doubts that a gang of badmen are going to arrive in town at high noon, and that they’re going to call out Gary Cooper’s marshal, Will Kane, and seek revenge for him sending them up. Everyone knows what’s going to happen. So why is it one of the most tense Westerns ever made? That’s a testament to Zinnemann’s skill as a director: he manages to work endless amounts of tension, suspense and discomfort out of something we all know is going to happen. The only question is: will the townsfolk stand with Kane, who has protected them before, or will they abandon him in hopes of safety? That’s what makes the passage of time so excruciating in High Noon, and nowhere is it more explicit than in the famous scene where the clock ticks down, inexorably, in a stunning montage accompanied by Dmitri Tiomkin’s pitiless score, and the thing we all knew was going to happen finally happens. It’s one of the best examples in classic Hollywood of wrenching tension out of the inevitable. (LP)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

Many years and many outbreaks of paranoia later, John Frankenheimer's satirical yet stirring Cold War thriller is still the gold standard for political-assassination fantasies. Among its other virtues, it remains one of the most blackly funny movies ever to come out of Hollywood, but the laughter dies as the noose tightens and Frank Sinatra, losing faith that things will work out, races through the traffic-clogged streets to arrive at the convention hall, just in time to see Laurence Harvey finally earn his Medal of Honor. (PN)

RUN LOLA RUN (1999)

Run Lola Run, about Lola’s (Franka Potente) efforts to save her boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu) from death by procuring 100,000 deutschmarks in 20 minutes, is a tour de force of blistering kineticism that predictably achieved cult canon status the moment it hit theaters in 1999. Yet what elevates Tom Tykwer’s debut above so many other beat-the-clock sagas is its aesthetic flair and inventiveness, its storytelling and visual intricacy, and its deft use of its unique style in the service of a subtly thoughtful meditation on time and fate. Segmented into three sections, each of which finds Lola attempting to achieve her goal, Run Lola Run’s race-against-time narrative presents a free will-vs.-determinism debate in the guise of a frenzied videogame, one in which Lola must use her allotted three lives to figure out how to complete her mission. Playfully philosophical without being pretentious, and excessively flashy without being shallow, Tykwer’s film delivers edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster thrills as well as enough sly substance to warrant coming back for a return ride. (NS)

Hurry!!!! Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Five 3-D-tastic Films

Nick Schager — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

What’s better than a night out at the movies? A night spent having the movies come right out at you! In honor of today’s release of Henry Selick’s dark, enchanting stop-motion 3-D fantasy Coraline, here are five films that take thrilling and/or unintentionally hilarious advantage of the gimmicky special effects process.

Creature From the Black Lagoon

As a child, Creature From the Black Lagoon’s 3-D effects (viewed on TV) just about blew my mind. While that likely wouldn’t happen today, Jack Arnold’s 1954 three-dimensional horror show remains a classic of its time, thanks largely to its iconic fiend. His likeness imitated many times (I’m looking at you, Monster Squad) but never quite surpassed for pure aquatic creepiness, the Black Lagoon’s gilled villain is one of Universal’s finest (and most unheralded) movie monsters, and the cheesy terror he spreads in this memorable scare-fest – and, to a far lesser extent, in 1955’s sequel Revenge of the Creature (which featured Clint Eastwood’s big-screen debut) – is definitely amplified by the illusion that he’s coming. Right. Off. The. Screen.

Amityville 3-D and Friday the 13th Part 3

In the ‘80s, quite a few horror films attempted to augment their scares via 3-D, and failed miserably. Two of the most amusing examples of the genre’s use of the technology for cheap, corny chills were the third installments of the Amityville and Friday the 13th franchises – and, a few years later, the sixth Nightmare on Elm St. as well – which both figured that a few shots of spears, eyeballs and candles jutting out at the viewer were enough to electrify audiences, as well as overshadow embarrassingly tossed-off threequel stories. In fairness, though, at least Friday the 13th’s 3-D installment has something else going for it, as it stands as the series’ first to feature Jason in his signature hockey mask.

Jaws 3-D

“The third dimension…is terror” proclaims the trailer for 1983’s Jaws 3-D. Really? I seem to remember it being pretty silly in this case, but then, I was only seven at the time of the film’s theatrical release, and probably didn’t understand why the sight of a young Dennis Quaid trying to flush his career down the toilet with this watery dreck was so frightening. Despite the needlessness of a Jaws without Roy Scheider, much less one that required red-and-blue glasses, Joe Alves’ film does use its 3-D for one great climactic shot, in which the great white shark bursts through a control room’s plate glass barrier and directly into your lap.

House of Wax

A 3-D pioneer, André De Toth’s 1953 gem was the film that solidified Vincent Price’s status as the master of the macabre, as well as featured a young Charles Bronson as the evil Professor Jarrod’s (Price) deaf-mute man-servant, Igor. In an ironic twist, despite expertly helming the project, De Toth was blind in one eye and thus couldn’t properly experience the project's special effects. His handicap, however, didn’t hinder his ability to create a handful of memorable three-dimensional moments, from the superlative final sequence inside Jarrod’s melting museum of horrors, to the long, kicking legs of a can-canning dance troupe.

DVD Digest for August 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

After last week’s thin selection of new DVDs, this week brings a number of high-quality releases.

DVDs of the Week: DVDs couldn’t be much different than this week’s two most notable new releases, the Criterion release of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and the final season of The Wire (HBO). But in its own way, each is pretty indispensible. Maddin’s film is, like his entire body of work, indescribable to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, but for those who are on his wavelength, it’s magical. That Criterion has finally embraced this most movie-drunk of filmmakers is exciting enough. But they’ve also gathered half a dozen different narration tracks for the sake of variety, including narration by Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, and Maddin himself. In addition, there’s a new documentary on the director, plus two new short films by Maddin, made especially for this release. So yeah, good news.

But if anything, the release of Season 5 of The Wire is even more of a cause for celebration. The groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed HBO series has been praised to the heavens in venues both classier and more authoritative than this one, so I’ll refrain from heaping still more effusive praise on a series that hardly needs it. All I can say is, if you haven’t experienced The Wire yet, you’ve got some great times ahead of you. And if you have, you don’t need me to convince you to buy the final season on DVD.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Dennis Quaid and Ellen Page in Smart People (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Stephen Chow’s cockeyed kids’ movie CJ7 (Sony, also Blu-Ray); and Val Kilmer and Stephen Dorff in Felon (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also, three DVDs by Lech Majewski: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Glass Lips, and The Gospel According to Harry (all Kino), the last of which features a young Viggo Mortensen.

In TV on DVD, this week brings South Park Season 11 (Paramount), Prison Break Season 3 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and Caroline in the City Season 1 (Paramount).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only news, the week’s big release almost certainly has to be Sony’s “Action” Box Set, which includes Jean Claude Van Damme in Maximum Risk, Steven Seagal in Half Past Dead, Wesley Snipes in 7 Seconds, and Ice Cube in xXx: State of the Union. I mean, come on- Van Damme, Seagal, and Snipes all in one box set? The 1993 version of me is stoked. Also this week: The Doors (Lionsgate) and Belly (Lionsgate), in case you were wondering.

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s Gay Pride Month, the 10th Annual Provincetown Film Festival kicks off this weekend and George “Mr. Sulu” Takei and Ellen DeGeneres are getting married (though not to each other, of course) in California (hooray California! And what’s taking you so long, New York and Vermont and Washington and Hawaii and Illinois and...y’know, all the rest of the country?)...

...so, anyway, to help celebrate, we here at the Screengrab thought it would be a good time to salute some of the highpoints in gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender) cinema with our very own rainbow collection of Queer Nation classics (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003)

"Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute!" the purists among you may cry. “I thought this was a list of Gay Pride films, not TV shows!” Well, for starters, Mike Nichols’ all-star, six-hour, multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winning adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning rumination on homosexuality, homophobia and the better angels of human nature wasn’t TV...it was HBO. But more importantly, in a media landscape of generally low ambitions, lowered expectations and lowest common denominator multiplex landfill, it’s hard to ignore a six-hour celluloid phantasmagoria of staggering audacity, master class filmmaking, sharp dialogue, potent visuals, timely thematic resonance and knockout performances (including a multi-tasking Meryl Streep, future Weeds costars Justin Kirk and Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Patrick Wilson, Emma Thompson, James Cromwell, Ben Shenkman and Al Pacino, using his late-career bluster to good effect as prototypical self-hating conservative closet case Roy Cohn). Sure, it gets a little silly sometimes, but who would've thought a movie about the AIDS pandemic (as depicted through intertwining tales of two infected men haunted by ghosts and other celestial messengers) would find time for so much humor, imagination and hope...and, as opposed to, say, a certain lengthy, operatic, sometimes silly (but Oscar-winning) big-screen multi-part epic about heroic bravery in the face of faceless evil, lethal apathy and looming death, the cultural and political battles depicted in Angels in America are no fantasy, and continue to rage on and on and on...

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

The most original film musical of the decade began as a drag act at Squeezebox!, a weekly gay performance event in mid-90s New York City. Performer and creator John Cameron Mitchell based his iconic character Hedwig on details from his own life: his childhood in East Berlin, his idenitification with queer rock stars, his struggles with being the gay son of a military general. The crux of Hedwig's character is both a fiction and a metaphorical truth: she is the victim of a botched sex change operation, leaving her a little bit male and a little bit female. Fueled by the anti-showtunes of Stephen Trask and Mitchell's gender-bending charisma, the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a glam-rock spirit quest: Hedwig begins as a self-loathing wannabe rock star looking to complete herself through sex, and by the end of the story, she is walking naked into the world, stripped of makeup and bitterness, finally learning to love herself. If that's not pride, then what is?

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)

Though he’d established himself since Poison, his first major feature, as the most talented director to come out of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the 1990s, it wasn’t until Far From Heaven that Todd Haynes' talents were recognized by the mainstream media. His previous films had been too controversial, too oblique, too postmodern; but with this 1950s period piece, Haynes finally gained widespread acceptance and, with it, four Oscar nominations. Ironically for one of the most original filmmakers in Hollywood, the movie that gained him this recognition was a pure throwback. With its high melodrama, ginger treatment of interracial relations, and gorgeous color palette, it was unmistakably reminiscent of the films of the melodrama king of the fifties, Douglas Sirk; and with its highly stylized acting, uncomfortable emotional weight and unapologetic addressing of gay sexual desire, it likewise conjured the films of Sirk’s most famous devotee, Ranier Werner Fassbinder. In a way that blends the fantastic, romantic sensibilities of Sirk and the gritty, rich realism of Fassbinder – and with a freedom to frankly address issues of racism and homosexuality that were denied to them both – Haynes manages to make a film that’s both moving and incredibly frustrating. Always able to coax winning performances out of his actors, he also gets Dennis Quaid to deliver an exceptionally sensitive performance in a role where both understatement and overreaching could have been a disaster.

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

For obvious reasons, European cinema was several decades ahead of the curve when it came to addressing homosexuality (or, for that matter, any sexuality) on screen. It’s impossible to even conceive of an American film in 1985 – let alone one with the relative high profile of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette – being as frank, and as frankly erotic, about a gay couple. Like Far From Heaven, it succeeded largely by not making its focus too narrow; the story of young Pakistani Omar and his white lover, a former skinhead played with verve by a young Daniel Day Lewis, is made especially lively and vital by placing it within the context of a broader story of the British immigrant experience at the peak of Thatcherism. Deftly blending issues of race, class, culture and economics with a star-crossed romance, My Beautiful Laundrette owes much to a top-shelf script by Hanif Kureishi; but what shouldn’t be overlooked is its intensely erotic scenes, which were among the first in mainstream film to illustrate that gay sex on the big screen could pack as much power as its heterosexual counterpart. Gordon Warnecke as Omar is a real find in his big screen debut, and Daniel Day Lewis, in only his third film, already shows signs of being the titanic actor he would eventually become.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus van Sant has always specialized, at least in his personal films (that he finances with tripe like the Psycho remake and Good Will Hunting), in convincingly portraying the sad, proud lives of lowlifes, drifters and people with no real home to go to, whether by choice or by circumstance. He also has a particular talent for showing us characters who desperately need the love of someone, but who are none too wise in selecting who that someone should be. Those two themes come together with audacity and depth in My Own Private Idaho, the story of two hustlers – the poverty-stricken, vulnerable, narcoleptic Mike Waters (played by the late River Phoenix) and the slumming, proud, arrogant Scott Favor (played by Keanu Reeves who, God bless him, at least seems to be trying). For a movie so charged with homosexual love, it’s strangely lacking in sex, and not in the self-denying, passionless way that’s required from most gay characters on the big screen: rather, sex for the two of them is a largely joyless professional operation reserved for the making of money or the killing of time. This doesn’t mean they don’t need love, though, and therein lies the movie’s great tragedy: Mike wants the love of only Steve, and Steve wants the love of only his estranged, wealthy father. All of this plays out with an aesthetic derived not from Warhol’s cool surface gayness, or Fassbinder’s melodramatic near-camp: it’s given a thick sheen of the classics, drawing directly from Shakespeare. This can be both its damnation (several of the openly Shakespearian scenes come across as contrived and hokey) and its salvation (framing the entire struggle in the trappings of real tragedy gives it dramatic depth and resonance it might otherwise lack), but it’s a movie that certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition, and whatever its flaws, it’s a worthy step forward in the mainstreaming of gay characters in American cinema.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Gwynne Watkins, Leonard Pierce

Smart Person Mark Poirier: How to Become a Hot Screenwriter Sort of by Accident

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

“I didn’t even start writing until I was in graduate school,” says Mark Poirier, “and it took me a really long time to call myself a writer. I thought it sounded pretentious.” Poirier, who has published two novels and two short story collections, says that he'd now best like to think of himself as a short story writer. But when he wrote the script for Smart People, a new movie starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Thomas Haden Church, what he mainly was, was hungry. Poirier had received the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship at Paramount Pictures, but “I kind of applied out of desperation, not out of any passion to write screenplays. I’d been teaching at Portland State, in Oregon, and my contract didn’t get renewed, and I was, like: ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to eat?’ ” The movie, a story about a stalled, middle-aged academic (Quaid) in which, as its author puts it, "nothing really happens," didn't even begin as a movie. It "had been living in my head for a couple of years as the novel I was going to write next. And when I couldn’t think of anything to write for a screenplay, I figured, what the hell, let’s try this.”

Now Poirier, who studied writing at the Iowa Writers' Workship, and at John Hopkins, Georgetown, and Stanford Universities, is working on film treatments based on both of his published novels, as well as a story by Alice Munro and a novel by Douglas Copeland, among other projects. The suggestion that he may presently be closer to being a working screenwriter than anything else does make him wince. But a lot of people who've labored long and hard and struggled to make connections with the idea of being able to call themselves "screenwriters" with a straight face must wish that they could run him over with a semi. I don't care how professorial you are by nature, that ought to feel kind of good.

Trailer Review: Smart People

Paul Clark — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's almost gotten to the point where these quirkily articulate off-Hollywood comedies practically write themselves. Hard-working single dad has trouble relating to his children? Check. A domestic crisis that puts him back in touch with a sibling with whom he has a decidedly strained relationship? Check. An unlikely romance between our hero and an attractive woman, preferably one who first meets our protagonist in a professional capacity? Yeah, that's here too. Hell, there's even a comically tense dinner-table scene involving all of the film's principal players. Smart People isn't nothing we haven't seen before, so the film must sink or swim on its performances, and if nothing else the film's cast is pretty solid. I worry that Ellen Page might get herself stuck in a dry-sarcasm rut, but Dennis Quaid is proving to be more interesting in middle-aged character roles than he ever was as a leading man. Meanwhile, Thomas Haden Church continues to remind me of my uncle, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Forgotten Films: "Caveman" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The new release 10,000 B.C. revives a genre that some of us thought was long past reviving, the dawn-of-man cave people melodrama. The new movie's director, Roland Emmerich, is a technophile size freak who probably thinks that the latest developments in computer animation and other special effects make it a great time to visualize a chaotic, untamed planet overrun with strange forms of wildlife threatening actors who are modeling proposed hair styles for Rob Zombie — though my recollection is that, in the past, the whole point of these movies was to showcase a rising performer (such as Victor Mature, star of the 1940 One Million B.C., or Raquel Welch, star of its 1966 remake) who seems made to be photographed wearing a loincloth. Anyway, this genre received its knockout blow more than twenty-five years ago, in Caveman, filmed in Mexico by the director Carl Gottlieb, who also co-wrote the script with Rudy DeLuca. Gottlieb is a well-travelled show business jack-of-all-trades whose career includes a stint with the '60s improv-comedy troupe the Committee, various acting gigs, and partial authorship of the script of Jaws (as well as full authorship of its making-of book). Gottlieb made his film directing debut with the 1977 Steve Martin short The Absent-Minded Waiter, but Caveman was his first time behind the camera on a feature film. It remains his only feature, maybe because he's yet to find a project that might count as a worthy follow-up to directing a cast, all speaking "prehistoric" gibberish, that included Ringo Starr, John Matuszak, and a stoned Tyrannosaurus rex.

Ringo plays Atouk, the sad-sack misfit of a tribe of cave folk led by — or, rather, bullied and pushed around by — Tonda, played by the towering, fiercely bearded Matuszak. Atouk graduates from loser to outcast when he enrages Tonda by lusting after the big guy's lady, Barbara Bach. (This was the movie where Ringo and Bach met. They were married before it was released to theaters, and in a month they'll be celebrating their twenty-seventh anniversary. Tip your hats, people.) The resourceful Ringo takes advantage of his new freedom to assemble his own rival tribe, which includes Dennis Quaid, Carl Lumbly, the great Jack Gilford and, as Gilford's daughter and Ringo's eventual love interest, a very charming, pre-Cheers Shelley Long. He also discovers fire, music, advanced weaponry, and the pleasures of standing upright. (He proceeds to convert his friends, grabbing them from behind as if administering the Heimlich maneuver and yanking their spines straight to the accompaniment of a terrific cracking noise.) The whole thing has a playful, friendly quality, and the good guys are pretty close to irresistable. The bad guys are no slouches themselves; the late Matuszak gets to demonstrate an all-out slapstick aplomb that Hollywood seldom bothered to tap during his acting career, and Bach, strutting about in her fur bikini, was accurately described by one reviewer, Michael Sragow, as looking like a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life. Mixed in among the people are a quartet of stop-motion dinosaurs, including the aforementioned T-rex, who are very ready for their close-ups. Will 10,000 B.C. reveal that its makers have learned anything from Ringo and company? It remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that if Roland Emmerich understood anything about the appeal of stop-motion dinosaurs, he never would have made Godzilla.

Jurassic Classics: Ringo Starr Demands a Recount

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Much as it pains us to admit this, the Screengrab is not the only online source of movie lists. Certainly we're the best, but occasionally someone else on the world wide Interweb will take a crack at it. With the release of Roland Emmerich's 10,000 BC looming, MSNBC's Christopher Bahn has assembled a list of 11 great prehistoric flicks.

Right off the bat, we've got to call shenanigans on Bahn's inclusion of Land of the Lost. While it's true that Will Ferrell is about to begin shooting a big-screen remake of said property (will his '70s obsession never end?), the fact remains that Land of the Lost is a television show. Not only that, but it contains Sleestaks. Now, granted, we haven't done a great deal of research on prehistoric times, but while we're willing to accept cavemen living side-by-side with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, we're fairly confident there is no existing fossil record of Sleestaks. Therefore, Land of the Lost is disqualified.

We're willing to accept the rest of the list — although including Clan of the Cave Bear certainly pushes the definition of "great" to its limits — but there is one tragic omission we cannot overlook. It is, of course, 1981's Caveman, starring Ringo Starr, Shelley Long and a boyish Dennis Quaid. Watch this scene, depicting the creation of music in painstaking historical detail, and we think you'll agree.

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.

Forgotten Films: "All Night Long" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Gene Hackman turned seventy-eight this past week. Though he seems to have eased into semi-retirement — his last movie appearance was in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport with Ray Romano, a teaming that I assume was a thrill for at least one of them — for decades Hackman was as sturdily dependable as any hard-working character lead turned unlikely movie star in Hollywood history. His birthday provides as good an excuse as any to dig out one of his best performances, in one of his best, and least-appreciated movies, the 1981 comedy All Night Long. It's also a terrific movie to discover at the dawn of a still-new year, because it's about a man who seems to be used up and past the point the point of no return taking the reins and making a new world for himself, by learning in the nick of time to cast off what no longer works for him and doing, and going after, whatever the hell he wants.

Hackman plays George Dupler, whose twenty years of service to the corporate behemoth have driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. One day, his stress becomes notable enough that he's encouraged to express what's bothering him, and a chair goes flying through the shiny glass wall of his company's building. A dead man walking, George is shuttled off to serve out his days as night manager of an enormous twenty-four-hour Los Angeles drugstore. The screenwriter, W. D. Richter, apparently took his inspiration from a magazine article about nocturnal urban living as the last great frontier. George has to cross that frontier to build himself a new life; it starts with him adjusting his internal clock to his new working hours, expands to his taking up with the mistress of his teenage son (Dennis Quaid), and winds up with him moving into a loft and embarking on a career as an inventor. His first invention is a new kind of mirror. It doesn't reverse the image of what you're seeing: it gives the user the chance to see what others actually behold when they look at him, the poor sap.

All Night Long has its own eccentric humor and a cool, liberating tone, and it actually got several admiring notices when it was released early in 1981. Unfortunately, it got caught up in internal Hollywood politics and bad marketing decisions, all of them related to the actress who plays George's new squeeze: Barbra Streisand. The movie was directed by the Belgian Jean-Claude Tramont, who was married to the semi-legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who at the time had Streisand as a star client. The movie had headed into production with the actress Lisa Eichhorn set to play the female lead, but somebody must have thought that having Streisand on board would be good for something, with the result that she was nudged into the role, the film's budget ballooned accordingly, and the finished product was released with an ad campaign that seemed designed to call up memories of previous comic horrors such as For Pete's Sake and The Main Event. Tramont's career never recovered from the movie's high-profile commercial failure; he would direct only once more — As Summers Die, a 1986 TV film with Bette Davis, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Scott Glenn — before dying in 1996. The funny thing is that Streisand neither makes nor sinks the movie; her quirky-mouse performance is amusing — you can see her consciously trying not to come across as a diva — but she and Hackman have zero chemistry. Their romance just seems like a fling he uses to cushion his fall as he transitions into a new life; you can't imagine they'll be together for long after the final credits roll. But if All Night Long is compromised as a love story, as a tribute to a loser who didn't know how to lie down, it's richly satisfying. Tramont, Richter, and Hackman started out with the quirky tools of classic screwball comedy and applied them with so much heartfelt grace and imagination that they constructed a comedy worthy of Rilke's dictum, "You must change your life!"

Afternoon Deal Report: A Fitting Tribute to Hasbro's Tradition of Quality

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:20:00 GMT

Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have joined the cast of G.I. Joe. This seems apt, given Tatum's startlingly realistic face.

Julianne Moore will star in the supernatural thriller Shelter.

After (ahem) a monstrous opening, Cloverfield has dropped 68% at the box office. Course, when you're up against an aesthetic triumph like Meet the Spartans, which made $18 million last weekend. . .

Crash is becoming a series on Starz. That's the ensemble drama Crash, not the Cronenberg flick about car-fucking, unfortunately.

Luc Besson's next project will be a three-film adaptation of Aventures, a beloved French comic about a novelist in World War I-era Paris.

Trailer Roundup: Vantage Point, Midnight Meat Train, Mama's Boy

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Vantage Point

This trailer has actually been floating around for a while now, but I’ve only now gotten around to writing it up because I’ve been a little unsure how I feel about it. Namely, I questioned the use of an attempted assassination as a central plot point, much as I questioned the wisdom of same in such forgettable mid-'90s fare as The Jackal and Murder at 1600. But then I realized that similar stuff goes on every week on 24, and if it’s OK for Jack Bauer to do it on television than movies are surely fair game. And make no mistake — Vantage Point looks like nothing so much as a feature-length episode of 24, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And the cast is fairly impressive, anchored by Dennis Quaid, who has become the new Harrison Ford — the no-nonsense middle-aged man of action — now that Ford himself can barely be bothered anymore.

Midnight Meat Train

It was only a matter of time before someone would attempt to fuse a gruesome gorefest in the Hostel vein with a more conventional serial-killer storyline, without the gimmick-riddled feel of the Saw movies. And in that respect, I’m curious to see what screenwriter Clive Barker and director Ryuhei Kitamura are up to here. However, the Kitamura name gives me pause. I know that the guy’s work has a certain cult following, but in my opinion his best-known film, Versus, is a classic case of the fans responding to the flashier elements and overlooking Kitamura’s lack of directorial chops. I fear that the same may happen here, although depending on how much input Barker has in the project it could go either way.

Mama’s Boy

Question after question springs to mind: How much longer can Jon Heder coast on goodwill from Napoleon Dynamite like an ex-child star living off residuals? Has the word "no" disappeared from Diane Keaton’s vocabulary? Why is it that after every fine performance Jeff Daniels has given recently (The Squid and the Whale, The Lookout), he’s immediately turned around and appeared in garbage like this and RV? When will people start casting Anna Faris in movies that aren’t stupid comedies? How old is Eli Wallach nowadays? And how bad does a movie have to look to make me pine for comparatively sublime films like Failure to Launch and even Grandma’s Boy, which wasn’t good but at least had Jonah Hill?

— Paul Clark