The Screengrab : douglas sirk

The Rep Report (January 30 - Feburary 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Positif, affectionately known as "the other French film magazine" for its often confrontational stance in regard to the institution that is Cahiers du Cinema, has its say about that matters in the American indie canon with "Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema", January 30 - February 5. The program, curated by the magazine's longtime editor Michel Climent, includes such cultish provocations as James Toback's directorial debut Fingers (1978); Paul Schrader's working-man dirge Blue Collar (1978); the living-tabloid The Honeymoon Killers (1970), the sole directing job by Leonard Kastle (who took over from the original hire, Martin Scorsese); Wanda (1971), a character drama written and directed by its star, Barbara Loden, a heartbreakingly gifted actress perhaps better known for having been married to Elia Kazan; the presecient my-camera-ate-my-life mock-documentary David Holzman's Diary (1967); and the little-seen 1989 Reunion, starring Jason Robards and directed by Jerry Schatberg from a script by Harold Pinter. Climent will introduce many of the screenings and also host discussions with such special guests as Toback and director Larry Clark.

If all that only serves to whet your appetite for vintage American indies, The Panic in the Needle Park, the 1971 New York City junkie drama that boasts Al Pacino's first starring role, checks into the Film Forum for a week starting today. Directed by the aforementioned Jerry Schatzberg, from a script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and produced by Dunne's brother (and Didion's brother-in-law) Dominick Dunne before he began his own writing career, the movie is a well-made downer that has special historical value for its location shooting, which captures Fun City at its most rat-infested and raggedy--and which is augmented by an impressively grungy-looking supporting cast that includes Richard Bright, Raul Julia, Kiel Martin, Warren Finnerty, Joe Santos, Alan Vint, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Sully Boyar, and a tubby young Paul Sorvino in a bit as a cop--and of course for the first starring movie appearance by Pacino, 31 years old and a year away from The Godfather. He plays a scuffling heroin addict who falls in love with a young slummer played by Kitty Winn and sucks her into his vortex. The movie played at the Cannes Film Festival, where, surprisingly, it was Winn who came home with a prize for her performance. She would go on to play the assistant of the mother of the possessed little girl in both The Exorcist and Exorcist II: The Heretic, and disappear from the radar a few years later.

Douglas Sirk's 1950's films Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life would go on to win him a high-toned critical reputation as some kind of subversive master of stormy, hyperbolic melodrama and an inspiration to later filmmakers ranging from Fassbinder to Todd Haynes. Meanwhile, the older studio director John M. Stahl is known as, well, somebody who made a batch of movies that were later remade by Douglas Sirk. (In addition to the original Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, Stahl directed the 1939 When Tomorrow Comes, which Sirk remade in 1957 as Interlude. But many old-movie lovers maintain that Stahl's originals are unself-conscious, well-wrought classics that have been unfairly overshadowed by Sirk's versions, and Anthology Film Archives is giving viewers a rare chance to compare them side by side with screenings this weekend of all six movies. Just on the basis of the on-screen talent, the 1934 Imitation, co-starring Claudette Colbert and the great black actress Louise Beavers, may have a clear edge.

DVD Digest for January 20, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With the recent deep freeze that has stricken much of the country, now’s the perfect time to curl up in front of the television and watch a DVD. And don’t think the studios don’t know it.

DVD of the Week: The cream of this week’s DVD releases looks to be the snazzy new Criterion edition of Gregory Nava’s breakthrough film El Norte. This lovely mini-epic about a pair of Guatemalan refugees venturing north to America, Nava’s film told a too-common story that hadn’t been successfully dramatized in movies before. Shooting the film largely on the fly, Nava and his wife/collaborator Anna Thomas helped to kick-start the American independent film movement by redefining the sorts of movies could be made with limited means. Both the standard edition and the Blu-Ray edition include a new commentary track by Nava, interviews with Nava, Thomas, and the film’s principal actors, Nava’s 1972 student film The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva, and more. At a time when “Sundance movies” have practically become a formula unto themselves, El Norte is a reminder that independent film can be more than just a cliché.

Also this week in classics is Criterion’s standard-format edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, which also includes a remastered version of the 1935 John M. Stahl original. Or if you like your weepies more contemporary, there’s always The Notebook Limited Edition Gift Set (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s slate of recent releases coming to DVD is headlined Saw V (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest entry in a series that will surely continue as long as there are people willing to come up with convoluted ways to kill off characters. Also this week: Mark Wahlberg in the video game adaptation Max Payne (Fox, also Blu-Ray), the story of Heisman winner Ernie Davis in The Express (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the family films Igor (MGM, also Blu-Ray) and City of Ember (Fox), Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in the “a white man shall free them” drama The Children of Huang Shi (Sony), the cult-ready musical gorefest Repo!: The Genetic Opera (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), and the direct-to-DVD horror movie Amusement (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD, this week brings The Rockford Files Season 6 (Universal), Emergency! Season 5 (Universal), and Moonlight: The Complete Series (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only titles is highlighted by the enduring classic This Is Spinal Tap (MGM), in an edition that boasts all of the extras from MGM’s standard-format edition. Also this week: Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 (Sony), Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher (Fox), Tony Scott’s Domino (Warner) (for my money, the most underappreciated movie of the decade so far), Alexander Payne’s Election (Paramount), Steve Martin making an ass of himself in The Pink Panther (Sony), and Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Unfaithful (Fox).

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Three)

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

3 WOMEN (1977), Not Directed By David Lynch

Like any number of David Lynch films, 3 Women starts in one genre, telling one story about a certain group of characters, then at some point the acid kicks in, reality shifts, and if you went out to get popcorn or go to the bathroom, you’d be forgiven for coming back in and thinking you’d wandered into the wrong theater (or living room) given the batshit craziness that’s replaced whatever movie you'd previously been watching. In this Altman phantasmagoria, inspired, like many if not all of Lynch’s films, by a dream, Shelley Duvall plays a chirpy sanitarium worker who makes the mistake of taking in spooky, Carrie-era co-worker Sissy Spacek as a roommate, only to see her previously unexamined life unravel as she and Spacek swap personalities with each other (and maybe even a few other people, possibly including the third of the 3 Women, a mysterious desert mural artist played by Janice Rule). Things get trippier in the final twenty minutes than Quintet and Popeye combined (or, for that matter, any other Altman film I can think of), and if none of it seems to make a lick of sense, well, Altman didn’t entirely understand the ending either, though apparently he had a “theory,” possibly involving all the film's recurring twins and triplets, the red lampshade, the Cowboy, the homeless man behind the Winkie’s, the family of rabbits, the creepy, white-faced specter of Robert Blake and...wait...what was I talking about? Oh no...it...is...happening...again...

CHOOSE ME (1984), Not Directed By Robert Altman

After a beginner's period in the early 1970s directing low-budget horror pictures with titles such as Barn of the Screaming Dead, Alan Rudolph was born again working as assistant director to Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville. After working on the screenplay for Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Rudolph resumed his career as a writer-director with 1977's Welcome to L.A., a movie made very much in the shadow of Altman. (The script was spun off from a "suite" of rock songs by Richard Baskin, who worked on the songs in Nashville and had a small role in that movie.) Since then, Rudolph has worked prettily steadily, sometimes writing his own material and sometimes not, often proudly displaying his Altman influence and not infrequently tripped up by it. This sex comedy, which uses Teddy Pendergrass (a big, big improvement on Richard Baskin) on the soundtrack and joins the visual lyricism of 3 Women to a fairly bouncy romantic-entanglement plot, is most likely his proudest achievement -- except for the less Altmanesque Songwriter, a beautifully directed movie which had the advantage of being written by somebody else. Both films were completed and shown in certain parts of the country in 1984, but didn't branch out distribution-wise until 1985...which means that 1985 was definitely Rudolph's year, especially considering that the Altman movie made by Altman himself that year was O. C. and Stiggs.

CRIMEWAVE (1985), Not Directed by The Coen Brothers

A pair of marginally competent criminals. A minor crime that balloons into a bloody, out-of-control mess. Cartoonish, overblown physical gags balanced by cerebral filmmaking and hilarious, quotable dialogue. Loopy, incongruous accents. Characters named Helene Trend, Arthur Coddish and Renaldo the Heel. The presence of cult and character actors like Paul Smith, Brion James, Edward Pressman, Antonio Fargas and – of course – Bruce Campbell. This has to be a Coen Brothers movie, right? Well, yes and no. Made in 1985, just after Joel and Ethan Coen wrapped Blood Simple and just before they started working on Raising Arizona, the underrated and hard-to-find Crimewave was actually directed by their good friend, frequent collaborator and college buddy Sam Raimi. The Coens wrote the screenplay, but despite the presence of some highly explosive camerawork (by Robert Primes) and the presence in the cast of a number of future Coen Brothers regulars (including Frances McDormand and Ted Raimi, Sam's brother), the direction is all Sam Raimi, who at one point seemed like an anarchic offshoot of the Coen sensibility more than the middle-of-the-road blockbuster director he later became. If nothing else, the movie stands as a unique curiosity: the only movie written by the Coen Brothers that they didn't also direct.

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), Not Directed by Douglas Sirk or Ranier Werner Fassbinder

Douglas Sirk was born to direct Far from Heaven. Its combination of lush, stylish visuals, soap-opera-style emotional fireworks, and ever-present societal pressure was right in his wheelhouse – it was the sort of movie he'd built his reputation upon making. Unfortunately for the movie's producers, Sirk was unavailable to make the movie, having unfortunately died fifteen years prior. The next logical step would be to hire a fellow German director who was, in many ways, Sirk's inheritor, both in terms of high drama, visual flair, and expertise at making tangible the invisible pressures exerted by society. In a further bit of bad luck, it turned out that Ranier Werner Fassbinder was also dead, having perished some twenty years before. In the end, they had to go with the guy who had written the movie in the first place: the pioneering queercore director Todd Haynes, who, even since his first student films, had seemed like an exceptionally talented amalgam of both Sirk and Fassbinder. For years, he had talked about how the two German filmmakers had influenced him, from their elegant visual styles to their focus on the taboo, but it wasn't until he did the positively retro Far from Heaven (which was dedicated to the memory of Douglas Sirk) that the influence turned into an outright homage. Setting its story of repressed homosexuality and interracial love smack dab in the middle of Sirk's 1950s, and infusing Sirk's forbidden romantic obsessions with Fassbinder's much more explicit treatments of racism and homophobia, Todd Haynes managed to create something that comes across as exactly the movie Sirk or Fassbinder would have made, were they able to escape death and the tenor of their times.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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

DVD Digest for February 5, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week: some recent favorites premiere on DVD, numerous classic films arrive in new editions, and I double back to cover a new release we overlooked last week.

DVD Ripoff of the Week: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was one of the best-reviewed films of 2007 and garnered Oscar nominations for Casey Affleck and cinematographer Roger Deakins. However, the film performed well below expectations at the box office, due in no small part to Warner Brothers completely bumbling its theatrical rollout. Due to its low gross and artsy rep, the brainiacs at Warner Home Video will release the film this week in a bare-bones edition. How bare-bones are we talking? Try these features on for size: widescreen, subtitle and language options, and 5.1 audio. And that's all, folks.

Not.

Even.

A.

Trailer.

You know, seems to me the DVD companies have it all backwards. It's mainly the hits that get splashy, extras-packed special editions, when it's the ambitious flops that could really benefit from them. Honestly, does a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean really need a boatload of bonus features to sell more DVDs? I don't think so. But The Assassination of Jesse James might attract more buyers if the DVD had commentary, some interesting featurettes, and so forth. At least the Blu-Ray edition has a documentary. How hard would it have been to put that on the regular DVD as well?

Of course, we know what this release really means: Warner is trying to make some quick bucks from opening-week impulse buyers, with the possibility of a super-sweet edition later on, possibly with Andrew Dominik's cut of the film included as well. Really, it's like they're not even trying to disguise it anymore. It's as though we're back in VHS days, when the studios would release tapes at higher prices to be sold primarily for rental, then lower the prices later on for buyers. The difference is that DVD is much more of a buyers' medium, thus collectors would piss and moan if they had to spend $100 on a new DVD. It's a money-grubbing ploy, but it must be working or else the studios wouldn't keep doing it, right?

Other new releases coming to DVD include: Jodie Foster in Neil Jordan's The Brave One (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Julie Taymor's Beatles-scored folly Across the Universe (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Cate Blanchett-starring disaster Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal, also HD-DVD [!]), the Julie Delpy-directed 2 Days in Paris (Fox), Robert Benton's Feast of Love (MGM), and The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Because when I think of the folks who own Blu-Ray players, I think Jane Austen.

No noteworthy classic films coming to DVD for the first time this week, but quite a few new editions of previously released films, including: Midnight Express: 30th Anniversary Edition (Sony), The Apartment Collector's Edition (Universal), The Aristocats Special Edition (Disney), The Wiz: 30th Anniversary Edition (Universal), Tootsie: 25th Anniversary Edition (Sony), and You've Got Mail: The Deluxe Edition (Warner). Fox is also releasing a two-disc set featuring both versions of Imitations of Life, for those of you who crave a Stahl vs. Sirk showdown. In addition, this week sees Blu-Ray only releases of Crimson Tide (Buena Vista), Me, Myself & Irene and Wall Street (both Fox).

Finally, I can't believe I neglected to mention in last week's column the second DVD release from our friends at Benten Films, Quiet City and Dance Party USA: Two Films By Aaron Katz. Founded last year, Benten is a decidedly small operation specializing in non-mainstream fare. Katz's work is a good match for the Benten label- a DIY filmmaker, Katz has been acclaimed by many as the most talented of the director comprising the movement that's usually labeled "mumblecore." With DVD mastering becoming cheaper and more widespread, there are many mom'n'pop DVD operations that have popped up on the scene, but Benten feels special to me, not least because founders Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis are online cinephiles of long standing. Here's hoping for many successful years for the Benten team.