The Screengrab : eraserhead

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)

Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

8. Double feature: JULES AND JIM (1962) & BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)

The intellectual wild men of the French New Wave, in revolt against their country's "tradition of quality" and taking sustenance from the grungier products of the Hollywood dream factory, took their cameras to the streets and proved that, so long as they were left alone to get their movies made as best they could, the improvisational high spirits and smarts and humor and excitement and heady romance of their finest work would remain ever fresh. Then, after a few masterpieces, one of these directors settled down and practically turned into a one-man Tradition of Quality, while the other dependably went him own way, albeit with a destination pass that was frequently stamped "CRAZYTOWN." The fact that it all somehow resulted in an American movie culture where a movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis made for eight and a half million dollars could count as a triumph for independent filmmaking is actually one of pop culture history's better jokes.

9. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Apocalypse now, and then some.

10. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)

By the time Buster Keaton hit Hollywood, he had been performing in vaudeville since he was three, the son of comics who incorporated him into their act. No man has, by his very example, provided a more stirring argument against the child labor laws. Keaton was a simple sort of man for a great artist: he just happened to be someone who, by the time he grew to adulthood, had mastered every skill that might be helpful to the creation of physical comedy and then, having taught himself the mechanics of filmmaking, turned out to have as strong an eye as anyone who's ever lived at staging physical comedy for maximum effectiveness on camera. It is dizzying to imagine what he might have achieved--on top of what he did achieve, which make no mistake about it, was a titanic body of work--if there had been no studio to get in his way.

11. Double feature: CITIZEN KANE (1941) & CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1967)

People call Citizen Kane, the debut film that Orson Welles directed when he was 25, a young man's movie, and it is, though in a way that not everybody may fully appreciate. It is an exercise in high-spirited flamboyance, but it is also, crucially, a movie made by a man who doesn't care about burning his bridges behind him, a self-styled "man of the theater" who, as a lark and a fund-raising expedition, decided to take a movie studio up on its offer of "creative control" and make one of those talking picture dealies, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that he'd generate a lot of publicity and a wad of cash that he could then plow into the stage career that he did care about. It is a movie made by a man who thought he'd be spending his life and doing his real work elsewhere, and so whose attitude towards the faded press baron whose face he was dunking in mud, and the scaredy-cat old studio heads who so dreaded what the press baron might still be able to do to them that they tried to pool their resources to buy and burn the film, was: Bring it on. Chimes at Midnight, made a little more than 25 years and many, many lifetimes later, is a movie made by a man who, in the course of burning those bridges, fell so completely in love with the medium that he would do anything to make another one, patching a film together with whatever spindly resources he could pull together. Strange as it may be that the cocky young bastard and the inspired old wizard were the same guy, we were lucky to have ever had either one.

12. Double feature: ERASERHEAD (1977) & BLUE VELVET (1986)

David Lynch arrived just as the American moviemaking renaissance of the 1970s was winding down, with a $20,000 movie that he'd been working on, off and on, over the course of some five years and that looked as if he'd been quietly reinventing moviemaking, starting with the period of silent experimental film and moving on from there, in blissful innocence of anything else going on in the world. Almost a decade later, everybody's favorite homegrown Surrealist achieved his apotheosis with a movie that was released at a time when indie filmmakers were asking to be congratulated on keeping things safely small and lo-fi and film geeks were catching up on what had come before through the miracle of VCRs hooked to small screens, and served notice that some dreams demand to be appreciated on the biggest screens available, with Dennis Hopper's heavy breathing tickling your ear in Dolby while the lushest nightmare on record unfolded before your eyes. Nowadays, David checks in from time to time via his website, and has responded to the digital information age with Inland Empire, which loses nothing when viewed as a YouTube video, and in fact practically demands to be seen that way. Time for somebody else to step up.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: David Lynch and Mark Frost's "One Saliva Bubble"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Few movie artists who've emerged in the last thirty or so years excite so much curiosity about what they're working on--and about what they've worked on in the past and been forced to abandon--as David Lynch. And none are more vocal about their mixed feelings, or worse, about that kind of curiosity. Lynch, who famously abhors the inclusion of directors' commentaries and even chapter stops on DVDs, wants his work to be experienced only in its final, polished form, and he doesn't appreciate having cultists root around in the tangle of his false starts and wrong turns. When someone in the audience of a live Q & A asked Lynch about an early version of the script for Blue Velvet that he'd come across, which ended with Dorothy Vallens jumping off a roof, Lynch curtly responded that the question showed why all the copies of all the early drafts of anything ought to be burned. The true Lynch fanatic is likely to end up feeling a little like Max Brod wrestling with Kafka's instructions to him to destroy his letters and other unpublished writings, torn between wanting to respect the great man's wishes and the desire to know and share as much as possible about what been up to. Because Lynch is principally a movie director, that includes whatever traces we have of what he might have done if he'd had not just more time but all the funding opportunities in the world.

For Lynch freaks, the great white whale of unproduced Lynch projects is Ronnie Rocket, a script that goes back to the late 1970s. Described by Lynch as being "about a three-foot tall guy with red hair and physical problems, and about 60-cycle alternating current electricity", the project was originally intended as Lynch's follow-up to Eraserhead. When that didn't work out, it was going to be his follow-up to The Elephant Man, and then his follow-up to Blue Velvet. After Twin Peaks, he began to talk about it as a starring vehicle for Michael Anderson, the dwarf actor who played The Man from Another Place in that series and later appeared in Mulholland Drive. Lynch has rewritten and rewritten the script, and at that same Q & A, he told Elvis Mitchell that after every project he completes, he tries to get Ronnie Rocket a green light. Some people, though, think that the movie will never get made because Lynch is past the point of being able to make it. It might be one of those long-deferred dream projects that directors sometimes fuss over and fantasize about until it takes up permanent residence in some remote corner of their minds, from which it can never be successful dislodged. And some of us who used to anticipate what the director of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet's ultimate dream project might look like are less excited about the prospect of seeing it made now by the director of Inland Empire, the man who, in interviews, seems less interested in pushing the boundaries of the audio-visual possibilities of film than in embracing new technology that mainly offers him the pleasures of greater convenience.

Ronnie Rocket is Lynch at his most intensely personal. One Saliva Bubble, which was written in 1987, around the same time that Lynch was reportedly close to making Ronnie with a cast that would have included Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Brad Dourif, and Jack Nance--the Blue Velvet All-Stars--is a relic of a very different phase in Lynch's career, a period when he teamed up with Mark Frost, a writer best known for his work on Hill Street Blues and the 1987 horror movie The Believers, and tried to meet the mainstream halfway. Based on the results, the idea behind the partnership must have been something like this: the two of them would work bring their weird conceits to the table and decide on which ones they both liked, after which Frost would press them into some commercially viable form that might get the green light from a studio or network, after which Lynch would wrap them in Style. Before hitting pay dirt with Twin Peaks, Frost and Lynch worked on The Lemurians, a projected TV series with roots in a variant of the Atlantis myth that figured in the cosmos of Madame Blavatsky, and Goddess, a movie spun from the notion that Robert Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe rubbed out, but only One Saliva Bubble is known to have made it to the completed screenplay stage. At the point where it seemed likeliest that it might get beyond that, it had Steve Martin and Martin Short attached for the leads.

The script begins in "a top-secret, experimental, offensive/defensive military installation hidden away in the countryside outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." In the first scene, some scientists are exposing the innards of a computer system while a trio of security guards "who appear to be refugees from the Neolithic period" stand off to the side, exchanging crude jokes. The title refers to Frost and Lynch's version of the butterfly effect: one of the guards blows a raspberry, and in the process "jettisons a perfect saliva bubble" which floats "past the unknowing, refined, well-groomed Scientists and down into the microscopic copper wires, creating a tiny, seemingly insignificant electrical short circuit," which in turn causes some kind of satellite missile-defense system to emit a beam that strikes the small town of Newtonville, Kansas. The effect of the beam is to cause several citizens to trade bodies, or merge their personalities, or something like that with other citizens. A gang of rowdy, out-of-shape Texans swap places with a troupe of Chinese acrobats; a Britishy matron takes over the body of a black blues musician. And the hero, Wally, "a forty year old milquetoast salesman", trades places with Horton, a ferocious hit man. This is '80s high concept, Lynch style.

Part of what makes it Lynchian is that everybody in Newtonville, and outside it too, seems buggy and warped even before the transformation takes place. It's also marked by a strange mixture of sweetness and darkness. When Wally is trundling around in Horton's menacing form, his love life and overall place in the scheme if things improves, but--and this is probably the most winning idea in the whole script--the bloodthirsty Horton steps into Wally's life and discovers that he loves being a family man, especially since his wife and son love the new, scary version of their family provider. The warmest, and just about the wordiest, passage in the script comes when Horton has to deal with a bully who's been messing with junior. "I know what a hard life you've lived," he tells the kid, "what with your folks divorce and your father's alcoholism. It wasn't so long ago that I didn't know the meaning of a family either. Victor, I know about the loneliness, lying awake at night, feeling like no one in the world cares for you. I know what this can do to you; the rage and frustration. And I just want you to understand you've got a friend here and his name is Wally Newton. By the time he's finished, there isn't a dry eye in the schoolroom. Meanwhile, the military is discussing whether to cover the whole mess up by going with a plan to "reduce Newtonville to a smoking pile of ash, litter the area with sheep with their eyes sewn shut and blame it on UFO's."

One Saliva Bubble reads as if it must have been fun to write. It has an antic, anything-goes tone, "anything" including comical Chinese who say things like,"Herro, Gentremen, how may I herp you?", animated-cartoon tricks involving dogs freezing in the air in mid-pounce and doors that fling themselves open at the sight of the fearsome Horton, cute comic gangsters, broadly drawn cariactures of blustery generals that would strike Buck Turgidsen as a tad much, and an ending that is unintentionally summed up by the stage direction: "The crowd is totally bewildered." Humor has always been a major element in Lynch's work; certainly it had a lot to do with the success of Twin Peaks, especially in the first season, when it was easier to separate the intentionally funny from the other kind. There, the funny moments arose naturally out the characters and situations. But, trying to write a comedy, he seems less interested in story or character than in piling silliness upon silliness. And because Lynch can't seem to help himself from minting a strange, idiosyncratic world even when he populates it with silly accents and fart jokes, there's an abstract, weirdly cerebral feel to the whole thing, like seeing a star MIT student's experimental design for the world's greatest homemade beer bong. Although the film was never made, there may be a clue as to what it would have looked like in Lynch and Frost's follow-up TV series, the short-lived behind-the-scenes radio sitcom On the Air, where the farcical plot turns and slapstick pratfalls were so unfunny they were borderline creepy. The show played like charades night at the Black Lodge. (In turn, Saliva Bubble may provide hints of what might have been in store for us if Lynch had realized another of his ideas for a comedy: Dream of the Bovine, which would have starred Harry Dean Stanton as one of three cows who are reincarnated as people but still think of themselves as cattle.)

With the early, phenomenal success of Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost proved that there was a mass audience for a crowd-pleasing serial entertainment served up with the kind of craft, visual imagination, and double-edged with that Lynch brought to the project. But they also wound up demonstrating the corrupting influence of mass success, a corruption that in their case was self-defeating. If they had fulfilled the expectations they'd set up and solved the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder in that first season, they might have been unable to lure their audience back for whatever they did next, but they could have gone out in glory; instead, by trying to extend the plotline beyond the breaking point, they wore out their welcome with the audience and betrayed their implicit pledge to keep Twin Peaks from turning into just another TV show, playing by the same nothing-ever-really-changes rules. After On the Air and the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me (on which Frost had an executive producer credit but no input on the script), they went their separate ways, and it would take Lynch a while to regain his bearings. In his collaborations with Frost and also in Wild at Heart, the movie that was released between the first and second seasons of Twin Peaks, he had begun showing the strain of trying to match up to the way the industry seemed to see him: not as a major artist trying to capture his own way of seeing on film, but as some guy standing by the side of the road holding up a hand-lettered sign reading, "WILL WRITE WEIRD SHIT FOR FOOD."

Unwatchable #54: “Meatballs 4”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Note to aspiring filmmakers: if the success of your movie is dependent on the audience perceiving a character played by Corey Feldman as “the cool guy,” you have already failed.

There’s a sort of reverse Darwinism at work in the Meatballs series when it comes to the cool guy; the original 1979 Meatballs may not be a comedy classic for the ages, but it does feature Bill Murray as the cool guy, and I think we can all accept that. I’ve never seen 1984’s Meatballs, Part II, but as far as I can tell, its cool guy is John Mengatti as Armand “Flash” Carducci. Mengatti also played Salami’s cousin Nick Vitaglia on The White Shadow. I don’t remember the character or the actor, but for the sake of argument, let’s say John Mengatti is slightly less cool than Bill Murray. Next up is Meatballs III: Summer Job, also unseen by me, which doesn’t seem to have a cool guy at all. It does have Patrick Dempsey, and I know today he’s TV’s heartthrob McDreamy, but believe me, in 1986 no one on this planet thought he was cool.

This brings us to Meatballs 4 and the aforementioned Feldman, who plays Ricky Wade, the super cool activities director for the Lakeside Water Ski Camp. Ricky has recently been lured from Twin Oaks, the rival camp across the lake, by Lakeside owner Neil Peterson (Jack Nance, the poor bastard). Lakeside is facing bankruptcy, which is hard for me to understand, since most of its enrolled campers are apparently vacationing Hooters waitresses with clothing allergies. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t think camps like this actually exist. If they do, please send me a brochure.

Anyway, it’s up to Rick to whip all the campers into shape – including the shy fat guy – for the big waterskiing showdown with Twin Oaks. Feldman brings not only a smarmy low-grade sarcasm to the role (it would not surprise me to learn that he rewrote much of his own part, tailoring it to his perceived strengths), but also his faux-Michael Jackson dance moves. I didn’t think much of the supporting cast’s acting chops until I saw them successfully pretending to be impressed by this crap.

There’s not much more to say about Meatballs 4 itself, so let me tell you a couple of behind-the-scenes stories. You may have read the first one, which concerns poor Jack Nance, in the late, occasionally lamented Premiere magazine. Nance, best known as Eraserhead himself and Pete “She’s wrapped in plastic!” Martell from Twin Peaks, was married to Kelly Jean Van Dyke, daughter of Jerry “Coach” Van Dyke at the time of the Meatballs 4 shoot. Kelly Jean had a severe substance abuse problem and had begun working in porn and Nance was beginning to think the marriage was probably not going to work out. He explained this to her over the phone, she freaked out and said she’d kill herself if he hung up on her, and at that moment “the storm that had been raging outside killed the phone line.” And Kelly Jean did, in fact, kill herself. It was all downhill for Nance from there, and he died under mysterious circumstances in 1996. I’m not saying Meatballs 4 is entirely to blame, but facts is facts.

On a somewhat lighter note: When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1990, my first job in the movie biz was working an unpaid production assistant on a straight-to-cable Debbie Harry thriller called Intimate Stranger. Making her feature debut was an attractive young actress named Paige French. As the on-set scuttlebutt went, Ms. French was hired for the role with the understanding that nudity would be required at some point during the production. However, when the time of the nudity arrived, there was a prolonged delay as a result of a heated dispute over the veracity of this required nudity clause. At some point a compromise was reached involving sexy lingerie, but Ms. French’s wares remained under wraps.

Why am I telling you this? Only because now, 18 years later, I have finally seen Paige French’s boobies. She wouldn’t do it for a piece of crap like Intimate Stranger, but Meatballs 4…now that’s a whole other story! All kidding aside, it’s a bit depressing to see that Meatballs 4 was effectively the end of her brief movie career (though she did have a role on the short-lived George Carlin Show). She’s one of the few people in the movie to actually bear some resemblance to a genuine human being. And yet the Feldman persists.

Previously on Unwatchable:
55. A*P*E
56. Araf
57. Phat Girlz
58. Ed
59. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Marx Brothers

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In a provocative piece in the Guardian, Danny Leigh uses the ongoing "Punk 'n Pie" program at BAM to ask, where are the great punk movies? At BAM, as in many a retrospective or critical study, punk movies are movies that deal with punk music as a subject, whether as performance movies or biopics or documentaries or anthropological field trips, or movies that are populated by celebrities and hangers-on from the "scene", such as the now-forgotten Downtown detritus cranked out by '80s filmmakers such as Beth B. and Scott B. and the young Susan Seidelman. Leigh writes that "quite apart from the questionable merits of the films concerned, I've always thought there was something grimly pedestrian about the way such a firecracker cultural moment should be represented by something so drab as a canon at all. And yet wheeled out every so often for an audience of ebbing nostalgiacs are the same old dusty reels, those already mentioned joined by or interchanged with the grim Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, cosy Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, and/or the various filmic portraits of the Clash, principally the near-unwatchable curate's egg Rude Boy and the Joe Strummer tribute The Future Is Unwritten."

Mind you, it was ever thus with rock music, which in its first flush of exploitable excitement was packaged in a shelf's load of movies that collected performances ranging from the leading acts of the time, bound together with the flimsiest of connective tissue. To see what this kind of movie might look like if it were good--which is to say, if it were made by people who lacked contempt for the music and its audience--the world would have to wait for 1978's American Hot Wax, made at a time when its biggest names, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, were, in rock 'n' roll terms, practically senile. (In fact, one of the best ways to tell these movies apart from those made by the greatest punk bands is that the punks, coming along after the official invention of pop culture, tended to get involved with projects that were self-consciously, conceptually screwy. Not content to make a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, the Ramones agreed to make what was supposed to be a cheeky put-on of a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, though independent taste tests found it hard to tell it apart from the real, semi-spoofy thing. The idea behind Rude Boy, featuring the more politically minded the Clash, seems to have been to let the guys the fans wanted to see play second fiddle to uncharismatic roadie Ray Gange, the designated stand-in for all the little people out there to whom the band's music means so much. As the hilarious but seemingly well-intended Wikipedia entry for Gange notes, "In his one and only well-known film appearance, Gange displayed a variety of expressions, although some have pointed out that they all look somewhat similar to the one at the start of the film which shows him waking up and looking out the window.")

There are some great rock performance films, but it's hard not to feel a special affectionate respect for those movies that somehow come across as "rock movies" to their core because they seem to embody something essential to the spirit of the music, even if the music in the movies scarcely captures its essence. Thus Walter Hill's The Warriors is a better "rock movie" than Jailhouse Rock, even if nobody in his right mind thinks that Arnold McCullers's version of "Nowhere to Run" deserves to shine the shoes of Martha and the Vandellas'. And the '50s mutli-performer rock film that holds up best today is Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, not because Tashlin was especially sympathetic to the music but because a man who'd cut his teeth putting Bugs Bunny and Jerry Lewis through their paces had a built-in appreciation of that which was not culturally respectable. (Truth be told, the singing cast member who seems to elicit the highest degree of respect from the director is Julie London, who was more likely to be recruited by NASA than she is to ever be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Leigh argues that "if a film has any aspiration at all to being 'punk' then it cannot be about a band - any more than surrealist cinema can be represented only by biopics of Dalí and Breton...Indeed, it's one of the stranger aspects of British punk films that, if it's debatable whether any ever had anything genuinely punk about them, it's certain that none ever captured the sense of punk. Not punk as a mere footnote in the history of guitar rock, but punk as a democratic shifting underfoot best expressed by the misfits in the audience." As examples of films that do catch hold of that snarling spirit, Leigh nominates the Marx Brothers circa Horse Feathers (featuring Groucho's anarchist anthem "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"), Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue (which takes its title from Neil Young's tribute to Johnny Rotten, and which a not-yet-detoxed Hopper took over directing after being cast as the heroine's daughter), "the anti-corporate self-immolation of the Monkees' Head; the volatile brevity of Punch Drunk Love and the outsider portraiture of John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet." He also drops the name of Eraerhead, and there he will get no argument from me.

Punk shares affinities with the concept of "termite art" championed by the late Manny Farber, and traces of the stuff itself can be found in many of his favorites, from the ratty, volatile action films of such directors as Don Siegel and Sam Fuller to the art-conscious apocalypse of Godard's Weekend, which suggests both the splenetic fury of bands such as the Pistols and the icier, critical-intellectual stance of Gang of Four and Wire. (There are echoes of the latter approach in both Alan Clarke's Elephant and more recent films by Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes.) The Ramones recognized Todd Browning's Freaks as kindred spirits, leading the way to the pre-multiplex films of John Waters and also to Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Re-Animator, and all those midnight flicks that were born with one foot in the art house and one in the gutbucket. And of course the aforementioned Luis Bunuel anticipated punk both with the Surrealist shock effects of his earliest work and his unflinching depiction of those clinging to the bottom of society in such films as Los Olvidados. Although a movie that seems punk to its core still comes along every so often--Matthew Bright's Freeway leaps to mind--it's generally easier to think of movies that anticipate the movement than movies made since 1976 or so that reflect its ideals, probably because nothing kills the spirit quicker than deliberately straining to do it justice.

The case of Alex Cox, who probably worked as hard to create a punk cinema as any director working in the last twenty-five years or so, may be instructive. In his first feature, the 1984 Repo Man, he delivered the ultimate sick joke of Los Angeles punk, complete with a self-parodying appearance by the Circle Jerks and a tossed-off homage to Kiss Me Deadly. In Straight to Hell and Walker, he exposed the connections between punk filmmaking and the dusty fever dreams of Sergio Leone and the Sam Peckinpah of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a director who never saw a scene of blood-soaked carnage that he didn't figure could be improved with just a few more buzzing flies. But when Cox set out to deliberately recreate the hallelujah days of British punk in Sid and Nancy, he made a soft, nostalgic, dishonestly self-pitying film with speeches about the music's importance and Gary Oldman's sweetly sleepy, harmless Sid Vicious. His closest American counterpart may be Penelope Spheeris, whose Decline of Western Civilization documentaries had a sharp, smart edge entirely missing from her attempts to take punk mainstream in such films as Suburbia (1984), a standard-issue misunderstood youth film with a Mohawk, and the highly regrettable Dudes (1987), which set some kind of record for toxic obnoxiousness just by sticking Jon Cryer and Flea in the same film frame. Part of the thrill of punk is that it tends to pop its head out when and where you least expect it. Well, not literally where you absolutely least expect it, because there's not a lot of it in Spheeris's 1994 version of The Little Rascals.

DVD Digest for November 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, some of summer’s biggest hits arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season, along with a handful of choice classics.

DVD of the week: With all the care Pixar devotes to creating their theatrical releases, it’s amazing that they have any time left for their DVDs. However, Pixar’s DVD editions are almost invariably first-rate, and this week’s release of WALL-E would appear to be no exception. We begin, of course, with the razor-sharp transfer of the movie itself, which comes directly from the digital master, making it arguably crisper than could be found in the theatre. But that’s only the beginning, with two animated shorts (one seen in theatres, the other a DVD original), featurettes on the film’s sound design, visual design, music, character design, and more. Finally, there are a number of features on WALL-E that take viewers into the world of the film, including a documentary about the movie’s robotic cast, and short films about the nefarious “Buy N Large” corporation from its inception to their Earth Exit plan, and beyond. Needless to say, WALL-E is an ideal DVD for kids, but it’s also a must-have even if you don’t have a family to buy for this holiday season.

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week: Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire Tropic Thunder (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn and friends in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a quartet of acclaimed indie films- Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Image); the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia); Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (Genius); and Audrey Tautou in Priceless (First Look).

On the classics front, the big release this week is David Lynch: The Lime Green Box Set (Absurda), which includes the new-to-DVD Industrial Symphony No. 1, plus the remastered Eraserhead, a Lynch-approved 5.1-surround version of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, The Short Films of David Lynch, Dumbland, along with new extras for Elephant Man and Wild at Heart, the Eraserhead soundtrack, and a “Mystery Disc” full of exclusive Lynch goodies. Or if you’re looking for something a little more “classical”, pick up the new Criterion editions of Martin Ritt’s masterful adaptation of the John le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or the French swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Also worth mentioning is the release of Fred Schepisi’s long-unavailable classic of Australian cinema, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Ryko Distribution).

In a slow week for TV on DVD, the most noteworthy title is Bones Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week presents the most definitive argument that Blu-Ray has really arrived, with a plethora of mostly crappy Blu-Ray only releases. The exceptions are Curtis Hanson’s pretty-good Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (Universal) and the Neil Gaiman-scripted Mirrormask (Sony). But other than that, it’s looking pretty dire, with the Martin Lawrence double feature of Blue Streak (Sony) and National Security (Sony), Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (Sony), and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony), which if nothing else remains the most definitive cinematic statement about the ongoing war over teen horniness. I’m for decriminalization, by the way.

In Heaven: When David Lynch Met Devo

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

A new book with the long-ass title In Heaven Everything Is Fine: The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre by Josh Frank provides some insight into the early days of the Eraserhead cult. A musician and host of the underground cable show New Wave Theater, Ivers also wrote the song that supplies the first part of Frank’s book title. The Pixies have recorded it, Devo used to play it live, but it is best known as The Lady in the Radiator’s song from Eraserhead. (Ivers was murdered in 1983 – a case that remains unsolved.)

Eraserhead’s life as a midnight movie began in 1977 at the Nuart Theater in Santa Monica. In an excerpt from Frank’s book published in the LA Weekly, we learn that it was not an instant success. “The theater had picked up Eraserhead — the dark, surreal first film by a young David Lynch — for a Friday midnight slot. With the manic popularity of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the midnight-movie trend had blossomed into a full-fledged craze. In the year since it had reinvented itself as an art house, the Nuart Theatre had held down the Saturday midnight slot with Pink Flamingos, John Waters' cult raunchfest — including scenes of public urination, mother-son fellatio, consumption of dog feces, and the infamous ‘chicken fuck’ — whose success was measured by how many people threw up in the aisles of a given showing, and which, based on that measure, had been a consistent, raving success. Eraserhead,with its dark themes and obscure plot line, lacked the ready hooks of those films and was going to be a gamble for the theater.”

Nuart projectionist Steve Martin – not that one – was hooked immediately. “The movie haunted him. Its strange musical set piece was particularly evocative: A character known only as ‘The Lady in the Radiator’ — a platinum blonde in a shiny '50s-era dress, with strange, mufflery protrusions emanating from her cheeks — sings a song consisting mainly of five words repeated slowly and sweetly, to beautiful and incredibly unsettling effect.”

Martin was not the only one affected by Ivers’ song. “Devo arrived at Bob's Big Boy, and with everyone assembled, synapses began to fire. Peter and Lynch were clearly excited (and more than a little surprised) at the groundswell of interest Eraserhead had begun to generate in L.A. In Devo they recognized fellow travelers and were flattered by the band's request.” You can check out the rest of the story here, but meanwhile here’s The Lady in the Radiator:

Related:
David Lynch Enjoys Damn Fine Egg Salad Sandwich
David Lynch Calling

The Rep Report (May 22--26)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: The 34th Seattle International Film Festival opens tonight and runs through June 15. The opening night attraction is Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart "Mr. Charlize Theron" Townsend and starring an ensemble cast led by Charlize Theron. The movie is a "semi-fictionalized account" of the 1999 meeting in Seattle of representatives of the World Trade Organization, which was plagued by demonstrators who thought that globalization sucks, man. (As part of the movie's celebration of down-with-the -street anti-capitalist action, the festival organizers promise an "unforgettable opportunity to walk the red carpet with the stars" to be followed by a "fabulous gala party will follow with live entertainment, and complimentary champagne cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.") For more information and a lot of laughs, check out The Stranger's festival blog.
CAMBRIDGE: Of all movie genres, film noir may be the one that ascribes the most value to the low-rent and obscure and unloved, but by now the contents of the vaults have been through the sluice many times by wild-eyed men looking for the last hidden gold nugget of intense sleaze. So cultists are bound to impressed by the people who assembled Harvard Film Archives's Unseen Noir series (May 23-26) just for making good on their billing. It's a long weekend full of titles you may have heard of but probably haven't seen by directors you know you need to catch up on: Joseph H. Lewis's My Name Is Julia Ross with Nina Foch and Dame Mae Whitty; Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall with Brian Keith, Aldo Rey and a young Anne Bancroft; Andre' de Toth's Pitfall; and a double bill of Phil Karlson pictures: The Brothers Rico, starring Richard Conte in a loose adaptation of a Simenon novel, and 99 River Street, which has a great poster showing a rabid-looking John Payne apparently being restrained from chain-whipping a street sign that has the effrontery to bear the film's title.

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives celebrates Memorial Day with a four-day weekend's worth of Korean films about the Korean War and its aftereffects, from May 22 through the 25th. Included are Lee Man-Hui' The Marines Who Never Returned, the 1984 Warm Winter Was Gone, and 2000's Joint Security Area, directed by Chan-wook Park, who has since become best known in the West for the films in his "venegance trilogy", including Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

For those balmy summer nights, the IFC Center launches a series of Friday and Satuday midnight screenings of sci-fi cult classics, to run through June. Things kick off this weekend with the scientifically accurate Alien before taking a massive nosedive in the plausibility department with the original 1978 TV pilot-turned-"feature film" Battlestar Galactica and John Boorman's giggle-a-minute Zardoz. Also on tap: David Lynch's love letter to the city of Philadelphia Eraserhead (he didn't film it there, but it was his way of telling it that he wasn't coming back), Woody Allen's Sleeper, and the original, feral Mad Max.

Werner Herzog’s Very Bad Idea

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Werner Herzog is remaking The Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. I can’t stop him.

According to Variety, “Nicolas Cage will star in an updated version of 1992's Bad Lieutenant with Werner Herzog directing, Edward R. Pressman producing and Avi Lerner's Nu Image/Millennium Films financing.” How many red flags can you possibly cram into one sentence? First and foremost, Lerner is the schlockmeister behind the recent Al Pacino fiasco 88 Minutes and Pacino’s upcoming re-teaming with Robert De Niro, Righteous Kill, as well as the latest Rambo reboot. His slate of upcoming productions is crammed with remakes and sequels, including yet another Rambo, re-launchings of both Conan and Red Sonja, Undisputed 3 (there was an Undisputed 2?) and the long-anticipated-by-someone Poe biopic written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

He also produced The Wicker Man remake, which presumably is where Nicolas Cage comes into this. Well, I already knew Cage was shameless. I just want to know how Herzog got roped into the project. As described by Variety, the original 1992 Bad Lieutenant “followed the depraved New York police officer of the title, who was heavily involved in drugs, gambling, sex and stealing; the pic received an NC-17 rating.” That’s sort of putting it mildly. Love it or hate it, Lieutenant was an intensely personal vision from writer/director Abel Ferrera, with a truly out-on-a-limb performance from Harvey Keitel. It would hardly seem to be remake fodder, anymore than say, Eraserhead or Herzog’s own Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Would Herzog really be okay with Abel Ferrara remaking that? For all I know this project may have Ferrara’s blessing, and it’s not that I’m such a huge fan of his anyway, but something about this just reeks of crossing a line that ought not be crossed. This doesn’t help: “The new script's penned by Billy Finkelstein, a TV writer with credits on Murder One, Law & Order and NYPD Blue.”

Hopefully Herzog will have an announcement of his own soon. I’d love to know what he’s thinking.

Madonna Ruins Casablanca

John Constantine — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:44:00 GMT

It’s just a rumor right now but, according to the Daily Mail, Madonna is trying to get together a remake of Casablanca. A remake of Casablanca set in Iraq in which she plays Ilsa Lund. Go ahead, find something disposable to vomit in. You back? Now think of all her scenes in Dick Tracy. Bet you don’t remember eating those carrots. Now think of Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away remake. Alright, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry.

Thankfully, there’s no script or anything remotely tangible to confirm this horror yet but if anyone can get funding to make something terrible, it’s Madonna.

I apologize for earlier. Click on this. It’ll make you feel better.

Props to Buzz Sugar for warning us.

The Rep Report (March 7-14)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (born in December, 1908) made his first film in 1938 and managed to make a dozen more pictures over the course of the next forty years, but he started to buckle down in 1979, when he made his breakthrough with Doomed Love. He's made more than thirty works since then, and has churned out a movie a year since 1990. "The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira" (March 7-30) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is an ambitious retrospective salute to the remarkable career and little-seen work of this distinctive and filmmaker as he apprroaches his centennial.

BAM is also paying tribute this month to J. Hoberman, the brainy and idiosyncratic film writer, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his settling in at his regular perch at The Village Voice. Running from March 10 through April 3, the schedule begins with Eraserhead, the subject of Hoberman's first review for the Voice, and includes such "personal favorites" of the critic as King of Comedy, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuffle, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. (Pleased as punch, the Voice has posted Hoberman's 1992 review of Naked Lunch, a stellar example of the kind of fireworks that Hoberman can set off even when writing about a movie that many sane people wouldn't watch again if blindfolded.)

The Rep Report (January 15 - January 22)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to the actor who, with no small degree of justice, can claim to be the face of the French New Wave with "Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After" (January 18 - February 29). Leaud made his film debut at fifteen when Francois Truffaut cast him as Antoine Doinel, his youthful alter ago in the 1959 The 400 Blows. That would turn out to be a pretty steady gig, as he went on to reprise the character in three more features made between 1968's Stolen Kisses to the 1979 Love on the Run. All of them are included here, along with Truffaut's Day for Night and Two English Girls and Leaud's work for Godard (La Chinoise, Masculine Feminine, and Weekend, in which he has a cameo), Jacques Rivette (Out 1: Spectre), and Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore). The more recent films include Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep, which finds Leaud once again involved in making a movie within a movie, and another cameo appearance in La Vie de Boheme, arguably the funniest movie by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.

Also at PFA: "Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries" (January 15 - February 26) will include evenings devoted to the work of James Benning, Maryam Kashani, Rene Daalder, and the radical media collective Paper Tiger TV. On February 5, the program will also incorporate a presentation and booksigning by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, authors of the news study F Is for Phony.

LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art spends the weekend trying to get to the bottom of that sweet mystery of life that is David Lynch. Friday night, the museum screens Lynch's short films, while Saturday it celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Eraserhead with a showing of a restored print of the film, a bad dream we never get tired of hearing recounted. On both nights, they're showing the strange new documentary Lynch, in which our hero can be seen directing Inland Empire, explaining to Laura Dern why she should be flattered when he calls her "tidbit", talking about the bad old days in Philadelphia, and letting the cigarette butts pile up on the concrete floor of his office. Maybe if enough people show up, the museum will have a heart and buy the guy an ashtray.

NEW YORK: For two weeks starting January 18, Film Forum brings back Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, the icy, beautiful 1961 film that did its part to make European cinema seem like a stylish thing to puzzle over. A style-setter in the area of fashion as much as in filmmaking, it has the not inconsiderable distinction of being the only film to win both the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and inclusion in Harry and Michael Medved's The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.

Hair Today, Coen Tomorrow

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After largely triumphant tour of the festival circuit — it premiered at Cannes last spring and recently played at the New York Film Festival — the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men has now started trickling into commercial theaters. With a cast headed by Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and widely hailed as a "return to form" for the Coens after a couple of poorly received comedies (the doomed remake of The Ladykillers and the sharp, cruelly underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty) the picture does not lack for talent, cultural cachet, and the news hook. Yet from the very first reports from Cannes, one detail has tended to dominate the coverage: the hair helmet that Bardem sports in his role as the borderlands Terminator, Anton Chigurh. The first notices the movie received simply described it as a "pageboy haircut", which is accurate enough but fails the convey the full, shocking impact of the sight of the thing.

But the people who've been waiting these past months for the movie to open so they could weigh in on it have no intention of being left out. Paste magazine calls the character "splendidly coiffed", but that's either sarcasm or the minority opinion weighing in. More typically, Dana Stevens of Slate calls him "a bob-haired golem," while Jan Stuart of Newsday refers to his "forklift mop of hair." Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club, and David Edelstein of New York magazine have all invoked Prince Valiant, but Salon's Andrew O'Hehir thought Bardem looked more like Ringo Starr. In the Village Voice, Scott Foundas invoked Cousin Itt. (New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, a man with a literary background who understands the value of understatement, simply described Chigurh as "a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut.")

This is hardly the first time that a Coen brothers movie has attracted attention of a tonsorial nature. The corny-surreal tone of Raising Arizona was quickly established by Nicolas Cage's haircut, which suggested an attempted imitation of Kevin Bacon's tastefully spiky 'do as executed by an epileptic barber with the blind staggers. As the title character of Barton Fink, a leftist playwright who seemed to be a cartoon of Clifford Odets, John Turturro wore a pop-top hairdo that actually made him look more like George S. Kauffman by way of Eraserhead. We may never know for sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to make the Odets-like character seem more "universal" or if the hairdresser on the picture was working from a miscaptioned photograph. In The Big Lebowski, all the political and cultural battles of the 1960s seemed to have come down, decades later, to an uneasy truce between Jeff Bridges' hippie-burnout look and the squared-off cropping of Walter, the reactionary Vietnam vet played by John Goodman [and inspired by John Milius! — ed.], who looks like a cinder block wearing tinted shades. "I'm a hair actor and proud of it!" George Clooney once insisted, and maybe the Coens wish there were more performers out there willing to define their characters somewhere above their eyebrows. After all, it was the Coens who, in O Brother Where Art Thou?, established that George Clooney isn't just a fine actor, a major star, and the unashamed voice of show business liberalism: he's a Dapper Dan man! — Phil Nugent