The Screengrab : election

Morning Deal Report: Reese Witherspoon to Get Naughty in “Nice”?

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

The tween demographic was once again in control of the weekend box office, as Zac Efron in 17 Again topped the charts with $24.1 million. Apparently they’ve already had their fill of Hannah Montana, which slipped to fourth place with $12.7. Enough adults turned up at the multiplex to secure a second place finish for State of Play with $14.1 million. Monsters vs. Aliens and Fast & Furious rounded out the top five.

Is Reese Witherspoon finally sick of the rom-com carousel? Witherspoon may get back to her black comedy roots with Nice, about “a magazine writer who accidentally kills her boyfriend. She finds a way to get rid of the body and discovers that killing boyfriends is easier than breaking up with them,” Variety reports. Witherspoon is not yet signed, but those of us who miss the spitfire of Freeway and Election are hoping it happens.

Felicity Jones has been cast as the female lead in The Men at the Pru, the “1970s insurance-world dramedy” from Ricky Gervais. “Jones will play Julie, who is led to believe by the men around her that a woman should focus on raising a family but who wants to break out and pursue a career in photography,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Giamatti and Witherspoon Are Downsizing
Truth or Date with Ricky Gervais

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 28-March 6, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Look, I get it. I do have a sense of humor, you know. If I got to choose my own superpower, it wouldn’t be freakin’ gills, that’s for sure. And I understand that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of crime going on underwater – although did you ever stop to ask yourself why? My stats don’t lie. Besides, you wait until those polar ice caps start to melt and you’re wading hip-deep down Fifth Avenue. You’ll be wishing you had ol’ Aquaman on speed-dial then.

So, yeah, I knew I wasn’t going to see my name on Screengrab Salutes the Best & Worst Comic Book Movies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six). And I knew I was gonna get sick of all the Watchmen hype: the Screengrab Review, the Other Screengrab Review, The Final Countdown, Saturday Morning Watchmen, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen, The Science of Watchmen and on and on it goes. But I sure as hell wasn’t expecting this. I mean, come on! Who do I have to blowfish to get a movie deal already?

While I have your attention, I’d like to point out that my underwater internet connection is spotty at times. I almost missed out on Unwatchable week, featuring Lawnmower Man 2, Laserblast, Cool as Ice, Creepshow 3, and 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. And I almost missed this stuff, too:

Screengrab Reviews: Sherman’s Way, Tokyo!, Everlasting Moments and Reunion

Catching Up with the Lynches, David and Jennifer

Screengrab Q&A: Mark Webber, director of Explicit Ills

Watch It For Free: Sita Sings the Blues (2008, Nina Paley)

The Continuing Political Life of Election's Tracey Flick

Faking Farts with Olivia Thirlby

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).

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984) & THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)

I’m no sociologist, but I’ll nevertheless hazard the following thesis: no matter how good any particular teen film may be, there’s nothing that compares with the high school movies you saw while you were actually IN high school. And so, no matter how good, say, American Graffiti or The Last Picture Show or Rushmore or American Pie may be (and yes, Commenters, we know we left all these ultra-worthy contenders off this week’s list, and apologize profusely!), they’ll never hold the same hallowed place in my heart as Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, which I saw during my junior and (best of all) senior years at good ol’ M.H.S., home of the Middleboro Marching 100 and the Speech & Theater Workshop...GO SACHEMS!!!! WOO-HOO!!!! CLASS OF ’85 RULES!!!! Writer/director John Hughes also ruled way back then, before he tumbled into the bottomless vat of Cheez Whiz better known as his post-‘80s directing career. But, just like your goofy yearbook photo, his two best films are eternal: Molly Ringwald as wised-up, self-conscious everygirl Sam and Anthony Michael Hall’s noble Geek are Clearasil icons for the ages in the endlessly quotable '84 classic that established many if not most of the future clichés of the modern teen movie: the ironic, pop culture post-modernism, the clueless but caring parent/guardian and, of course, the climactic cast-of-thousands suburban blow-out. But as good as Sixteen Candles is, The Breakfast Club seemed even better at the time, if only because it gave my senior class “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” as our official swan song. Even when I was squarely in Hughes’ demographic, of course, I recognized the occasional pretentious, simplistic and overwrought moments of the '85 dramedy, and Ally Sheedy’s conversion from cool Goth to Emilio Estevez’s boring prep girlfriend still rankles...but looking back now, I can’t help feeling nostalgic for an era when teens could be still be captivated by a talky character study that played like a one-set, seven-character off-Broadway show with no gratuitous violence or nudity (except for the second big screen close-up of Molly Ringwald’s panties in as many years). Hey...hey...hey...hey!

HIGH SCHOOL (1969)

The cinema-verite documentarian Frederick Wiseman has spent the bulk of his career boiling down one American institution after another -- often in movies with generic-label titles such as Hospital, Juvenile Court, Basic Training, and Domestic Violence -- to reveal the lives being helplessly fed into the bureaucratic grinder. It stands to figure that high school would have been one of the earliest subjects on his list. This film, which was shot at Philadelphia's Northeast High School, conveys the experience of being trapped there for a typical day, and in the process pins to the wall the regimented drills, the impatience with nonconformity, imagination, or anything else that might take things off their carefully scheduled course, the seething resentment of the authority figures trying to hammer the kids into well-behaved, smiling cannon fodder. It was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry in the third year of that list's existence, but it might be a greater tribute to it that it was banned in Philadelphia for years because it made the educational process look dehumanizing and depressing.

LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966)

Probably many will automatically nominate Molly Ringwald or Winona Ryder for the title of high school movies' definitive prom queen, but for some of us, Tuesday Weld blows them all out of the water. The Drew Barrymore of her time -- besides having the weird name to have to explain to people, she was a veteran actress-model, supporting her family while coping with a drinking problem and a nervous breakdown, all before she was thirteen -- she was also a white-hot talent, an inventive actress who was both sexy and affecting even in the cheesy, early rock and roll exploitation pictures that served as her entry point into the movie business. She was twenty-three but still looked like a teen queen when she starred in this bizarre satire, directed by George Axelrod. She plays Barbara Ann Greene, a child of divorce (back when that was still supposed to be shameful) who wants to be loved by everyone but can't even crash the important girls' club she needs to join to take her first steps towards school-wide popularity, because she can't afford the twelve angora sweaters that are a non-negotiable requirement of establishing any girl's true worth. Luckily, she attracts the admiring attentions of Alan (Roddy MacDowell), who begins greasing the wheels for her steady ascent, by whatever means necessary: he's something between a wish-fulfilling genie and a psycho on the make. Before graduating forever from high-school age roles, Weld would follow Duck up with another cult classic, 1968's Pretty Poison, in which the roles were reversed: in that one, her frustrated young miss hooks up with a lonely young man (Anthony Perkins) with a history of emotional disturbance, who realizes too late that she's ensnared him in a murder plot. Once again, Weld demonstrates her ability to do the near-impossible by making her character believable and seductive while managing to make Tony Perkins look like the sane one.

ELECTION (1999)

Alexander Payne's movie, closely adapted from Tom Perrotta's slim, sharp novel, may be the best of all attempts to use high school life as a metaphorical testing ground for everything that comes after it. Matthew Broderick explodes his Ferris Bueller persona as the upstanding, much-admired high school teacher who preaches the virtues of democracy until it becomes clear that, unless checked, democracy is going to make a terrible mistake and reward Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the superachiever student who is the personification of everything that he hates and thinks is wrong with the world (i.e., everything that makes other people more successful than him). Broderick hasn't had a role half as good since, and neither Witherspoon nor Chris Klein (as the sweet golden boy dope of a jock who's Tracy's natural enemy in spite of himself) has ever been better, but a special Screengrab Missing in Action shout-out goes to Jessica Campbell, the young actress (sixteen at the time) who gives a wonderful performance as Klein's lonely, frustrated lesbian sister, whose acting out turns her into the anarchist heroine of the student body elections, and who, except for a couple of low-profile TV and movie roles, hasn't been seen since.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it. With Andrew Osborne posting his favorite films of the first six months of 2008 last week, and Paul Clark doing the same only yesterday, who am I to drop the ball? This list, already heavily revised just since last week thanks to some illuminating July 4th viewing, will no doubt undergo serious revision before anything on it makes it to a Best of 2008 list; living in a city where first-run movies are hard to come by unless they're American and released by a mainstream production company, I've come to reply quite heavly on home video releases, film festivals, and other avenues of distribution that make assessments of this sort quite difficult so early in the year. That said, here's what's flicked my switches so far in a year that follows one of the best in recent memory.

My top five:

1. WALL*E - They say that the studio system is dead, and that the releasing company no longer tells you anything about the quality of the film. That's true to an extent, but Pixar is a glorious exception to the rule. The computer animation studio has hardly released a single film during its entire existence, and their latest, concerning a robot whose job is to clean up the detritus of a dead world, has raised the wrath of conservatives while managing to be perhaps the greatest movie Pixar has yet made. Especially daring because it largely abandons the clever dialogue of previous releases, it instead gives the eyes a feast like they've never seen before throughout its long periods of silence. An astonishingly successful film with heart, spirit and intelligence, proving that great art can be commercial. Or vice versa.

2. Shine A Light - Is it a testament to Martin Scorsese's skill as a filmmaker, or the Rolling Stones' skill as musicians and personalities, that his documentary about them has proven to be one of my favorite movies of the year, despite the fact that I long ago lost interest in them as a band, and wouldn't go see them in concert if you paid me? Perhaps that's not so surprising -- Scorsese, after all, has been following and filming the band for decades, and much of the appeal of Shine a Light comes from the effortless way he edits together his own footage of the Stones and old archival material taken by himself and others. To top it all off, he blends this compelling historical material with a contemporary performance so overwhelming that it almost convinces a skeptic like me that the Rolling Stones are still a band that matters.

3. Iron Man - As a lifetime comic book nerd, I had to sit through decades of neglect, followed by decades of failure, for Hollywood to start getting superhero movies right. While I've always been partial to DC comics, Marvel was the first to get it right, with the two initial X-Men movies; then, with the first two Spider-Man films, I was able to relax and say, finally, somebody gets it. With this year's release of Iron Man, Marvel -- now producing their own product with the Marvel Films studio -- continues to get it right: it's a near-perfect superhero film by a director (Jon Favreau) who clearly adores his source material but knows what to jettison to make it work on screen. Add tons of humor, exhilarating action scenes, and an incredibly charismatic lead performance by Robert Downey Jr., and you have one of the best movies of the year.

4. Assassination of a High School President - Yes, one of my favorite movies of 2008 has Mischa Barton in it. Believe me, I'm as surprised as you are. Not yet in wide release, this clever satire, disguised as a teen comedy, Brett Simon's clever, twisting neo-noir travels some of the same paths as obvious predecessors like Brick, Election and Rushmore, but does so with an intricate and well-carried-out plot and an overall thematic twist that's a lot more cutting than it appears to be on the surface. Not a perfect film by any means, Assassination's reach exceeds its grasp, and it has some clunky tonal problems throughout. But a game cast, some terrific dialogue, and a funny, confident presentation does a lot to compensate for its flaws, making it one of the better festival finds of 2008.

5. Bigger, Stronger, Faster*- I've probably seen more documentaries this year than I have narrative feature films, and one of the standouts, both in terms of subject and execution, is Chris Bell's Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (asterisk in the original). Bell, a former steroid user himself and one of a family of three brothers, all of whom are juicers, has made a movie where the real villain isn't the concrete thing of steroids (which, in fact, are shown, if not as beneficial, at least as not nearly as harmful as TV 'experts' and their drummed-up hysteria would have us believe), but the abstraction of a country that will forgive anything if it ends in victory. Filled with images both inspiring and grotesque, it does what good documentaries do: presents us with the situation and lets us decide what it means and what to make of it.

RUNNER-UP: The surprisingly great first two-thirds of The Strangers.

MADE IN 2007, BUT NOW PLAYING: My Winnipeg; The Band's Visit; and, especially, Paranoid Park.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Finding Amanda"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One function of film festivals is to provide a home for movies made by well-placed industry insiders who are under the mistaken impression that we're waiting to see what they'll do when they "stretch." Festivals give them a chance to show off their little art projects to a receptive or at least indulgent audience, including fellow insiders and aspirants to insiderdom who will at least make a big show of getting the in-jokes. ("That gross, disgusting security guard character--do you think it was supposed to be Harvey!?") Finding Amanda was written and directed by Peter Tolan, who wrote Analyze This, co-wrote America's Sweethearts, worked on various TV series (Murphy Brown), and is the creator and co-producer of Rescue Me, a crime against humanity that is sometimes miscategorized as a TV show. His new movie stars Matthew Broderick, whose opportunities for leading movie roles are contracting as his neck expands, as a once-promising TV writer who smashed his career up on the shoals of a triumvirate of addictions (drugs, booze, and gambling) and has now managed to crawl back to a job writing a third-rate sitcom. (The at-work scenes come complete with a self-deprecating cameo appearance by Ed Begley, Jr.) The plot kicks into gear when Broderick, whose control over his gambling jones turns out to be notional at best, finds out that his niece Amanda (Elizabeth Rice) is down in Las Vegas turning tricks for drug money. Broderick's long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) has just discovered a wad of betting slips that he inexplicably stuffed into the glove compartment of their car after spending an afternoon at the track, so since the time he had set aside to work on his marriage has just been freed up, he decides to swing over to Vegas and persuade Amanda of the joys of rehab.

Casting Broderick in a role like this--a variant of the kind of wild-man character that Tolan has been writing for Denis Leary on TV--is a bigger gamble than some of the bets made in Vegas by people who were last seen being escorted out to the desert by men shaped like monster trucks. I don't guess there's any hard and fast rule that states that an out-of-control thrillseeker with an addictive personality can't also be a finicky little dweeb with an unearned sense of entitlement, but who would want to watch such a creature? The best of Broderick's recent movies--Election, which, come to think of it, wasn't really all that recent--exploited his movie past by suggesting that fifteen-odd years of wear and tear had turned Ferris Bueller into his old arch-nemesis, the high school principal. Finding Amanda takes advantage of his stage background as Neil Simon's youthful alter ego, if you can call that an advantage. His comedy-writer character trudges through the movie spitting out a steady stream of unfunny, mechanical one-liners and sorry excuses for smart-ass remarks. If this is a deliberate method of showing what years of self-abuse have done to the guy's talent, the fact remains that it's the audience that's stuck listening to them. Finding Amanda never gets enough of a handle on its unlikable hero--it's not clear whether he's meant to be as big an unrepentant asshole as he seems to be, or even whether he really cares about the niece or just wants a chance to go on a Vegas spree while telling himself that he's on a quest. Most of the best work in the movie is done by people, like Tierney, whose roles are so small that its as if they were pressed into service after dropping by the set because they heard the catering was really good. Steve Coogan turns up for a couple of scenes as a casino manager who describes one of Broderick's past indiscretions as "a minor non-event," and that's about the most accurate self-description that Finding Amanda could hope for.

The Rep Report (October 17 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Now, here's what I'm talking about: the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates the successful completion of the New York Film Festival by firing its guns in the air with 10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema (October 17 - 25). The program ranges from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together and 2046 to a very welcome helping of action master Johnnie To, whose steady refining of his technique and stubborn reluctance to bolt for Hollywood give his recent work a last-man-standing quality. (He is represented here by the The Mission, the 1999 brothers-in-arms shoot-em-up that was of no small help to its star, Anthony Wong, in his quest to be crowned World's Coolest Actor, and the more recent Election and its companion piece, Triad Election.) The newer offerings include Triangle, a caper flick co-directed by the three Hong Kong amigos, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, and films by the team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, whose Infernal Affairs is perhaps (if unjustly) best known in the U.S. as the original version of Scorsese's The Departed.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents its sixth annual selection of highlights from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (October 18 - 21). The program, which plunders the vaults of the Danish studio Nordisk, includes documentary footage of the German front lines during World War I, as well as fanciful adventures involving trips to Mars, runaway meteors and the ever-present fight against the white slave trade. Film preservationist Serge Bromberg will also be on hand with yet another of his personal selections of precious silent rarities. Most screenings will feature live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of War and Peace, which is playing the Film Forum in a seven-hour cut (shown in two parts, with a separate admission for each) from October 19 through November 1, is somewhere between a great lost film and a towering curiosity. As much an example of technological competition between the Cold War powers as the space race, it was in production for seven years and cost $100,000,000 in 1968, which makes it still the most expensive movie ever made. Yet it's not just an historical oddity. Bondarchuk, who first gained celebrity as an actor (he plays Pierre in the film), was a greatly gifted director clearly drunk on the possibilities of filmmaking. There are many stunning moments and a striking, dynamic use of the camera that take the film out of the Masterpiece Theater/Merchant-Ivory category of embalmed classics; despite the impossibility of fully capturing the novel on film, it's not a negligible achievement. This was only Bondarchuk's second movie, and he never got to follow it up; after it won him an international acclaim and an Academy Award, he blew his reputation on the 1970 English-language bomb Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon, then came crawling back to Mother Russia, only to spend the rest of his career snarled up in the compromises and political confusion of the post-Khrushchev, pre-glasnost era. He died in 1994. To now see the one film that forms the bulk of his career is to marvel at what driven and talented people are capable of putting on the screen, and what the strain of doing it, and the desire to do it again, can sometimes do to their lives.

BOSTON: When Martin Scorsese's great concert film The Last Waltz came out in 1978, one of the most talked about moments in it was the single, unbroken shot for most of Muddy Waters' performance of "Mannish Boy." On the DVD commentary, we learned it's a wonder that Muddy got into the movie at all. Scorsese had gotten his song list mixed up and given the camera crew a break, and then when the blues legend strolled out onstage, the director, thinking that no one was recording the moment, had a fit collosal even by his standards. The reason that one sustained shot exists is that one of the star cinematographers working on the project, Laszlo Kovacs, didn't know that he was supposed to be on a break; he had taken his headset off because he had somehow grown weary of the sweet music of Martin Scorsese screaming in his ear. Kovacs died last July, and the Brattle pays tribute to the work he did in his career prime with Seventies Shooter: A Tribute To Laszlo Kovacs, running through the 25th. And since the series begins with such films as Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider and then winds down with one of the earliest requiems for the 1960s, Shampoo, and the rough-housing, "un-P.C." cop comedy Freebie and the Bean, it doubles as a rare chance to see the counterculture rise and fall in the space of a week's worth of films.

— Phil Nugent