The Screengrab : evita

Reviews By Request: Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)

Paul Clark — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, voting for my next Reviews By Request column can be found at the end of this review.

The conventional wisdom regarding cinematic plot twists is that they be unexpected. This means that either the audience shouldn’t see that a twist is coming, or that they shouldn’t anticipate the particular twist that the movie has in store. So what to make of a movie like Angel Heart? Here is a movie that more or less announces from the beginning that nothing is what it seems, and the film is filled with clues that are somewhat less than subtle. Yet at the same time, it’s entertaining and stylish enough that it entertained me even as I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I more or less guessed where it was headed, but I had a good time getting there.

Consider an early scene in the film, in which the detective protagonist Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) meets his mysterious retainer Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) to discuss the case Harry has been investigating. In most detective movies, Cyphre would be portrayed in a way that makes him seem slightly off, but wouldn’t hint at his dark secrets. But rather than trying to hide Cyphre’s true nature, director Alan Parker almost dares us to guess, as he tempts Harry by offering him $5,000 to take the case (a pretty good sum for a fifties-era gumshoe), then uses his elegant long nails to peel one of the hard-boiled eggs on his plate. Angel knows something is afoot, but he’s so anxious (both by Cyphre and the eggs, since he’s “got a thing about chickens”), and in thrall to the money being offered that he doesn’t even try to guess what. But it becomes pretty clear to the audience who Cyphre really is by the time he mentions that eggs are seen by some cultures as symbols of the soul then takes a big bite from one of his eggs, a sinister glare in his eye. It’s almost like… Parker wants us to guess.

Really, the whole movie is like this. And while as a mystery Angel Heart leaves something to be desired, it’s much more successful as an exercise in lurid style. Parker, who first worked as a commercial director, has always been more comfortable with visuals than with substantial narratives, which torpedoed serious efforts like Angela’s Ashes and The Life of David Gale, but was well-suited to more stylized and less plot-driven fare like Pink Floyd: The Wall (Evita straddled the line, making mincemeat of plot and character development but providing thrilling, almost Riefenstahl-esque lighting and choreography for the production numbers). Angel Heart fits into the second category, which goes a long way toward explaining why this is one of the director’s more interesting films.

If Parker doesn’t seem especially interested in making a whodunit, that’s because they’re largely a setup for the story’s seamier trappings- the dingy home of a morphine-addicted doctor, the shadowy back alleys of old New Orleans, the ornate choreography of a late-night pagan ritual. Likewise, Parker’s use of blood makes the movie feel almost like an old-school giallo in parts, complete with leering closeups of freshly disembodied corpses and the various organs that were removed in the process. And the notorious sex scene between Rourke and Lisa Bonet is one of the more memorable of Parker’s career, so frenzied and over the top that it must be seen to be believed. That the scene in its current form was actually edited down so that the film was get an R rating just goes to show how far Parker was willing to go to get his effects.

However, the movie would be nothing more than empty style without the assured lead performance by Rourke. Even prior to his nineties career meltdown, Rourke excelled at playing down-and-out guys who thought they were smarter and more charming than they actually were, and the role of Harry Angel was a perfect fit. While many actors would have turned Harry into a retro-cool archetype, Rourke’s performance is eccentric (look at the way he reacts whenever he spies a chicken) and emphasizes his deep-seated anxieties and preoccupations. Rourke isn’t afraid to highlight Harry’s less capable side- for a detective he can sometimes be pretty slow to pick up on things, and he occasionally makes some pretty big mistakes out of carelessness. Yet he’s so engaging in his rumpled, careworn way that it’s hard not to like the guy, and to feel sorry for him once the story has painted him into a corner.

In the climactic scene of Angel Heart, Rourke faces off against DeNiro for the final time, as Harry finds out not only Louis Cyphre’s secret but also his own. DeNiro was still in the full flower of his talent at the time, not yet having become a bloated parody of himself. But it’s Rourke who shines in this scene, as he cries out “I know who I am!” again and again. As the scene continues, Rourke wrings one emotion after another from this line- first defiant, then pathetic, then resigned- and it’s a reminder of what a fine actor he was back before we nearly lost him to his own self-destructive impulses. When I saw The Wrestler this past winter, I knew that it was designed to be Rourke’s comeback vehicle, but I had only a limited exposure to the early years of his career. Now that I’ve seen Angel Heart, I’m eager to see more.

For my final Reviews By Request column here at Screengrab, I’d like to pay tribute to one of the Screengrab’s favorite sites, The Onion A.V. Club. One of the A.V. Club’s most interesting regular columns is The New Cult Canon, a weekly feature written by the talented Scott Tobias. Every week, Scott takes on a fairly recent cult-friendly movie, and he was gracious enough to recommend five of his favorite New Cult Canon selections for this column. Which of the following should I review next?

Online Surveys & Market Research

In case you’re having trouble reading the poll, the choices are: Bitter Moon (Polanski), I Am Cuba (Kalatozov), King of New York (Ferrara), Married to the Mob (Demme), and Millennium Actress (Kon). And remember, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:30:00 GMT

EVITA (1996)

The Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice pop-rock opera tells the story of a breathtakingly ambitious woman who sleeps her way to the top, then demands to be taken seriously (to the point of deification), yet no amount of money, power or adulation can ever satisfy her ravenous ego. For some reason, Madonna thought she’d be perfect for the part, and even learned to sing (fifteen years into her career as a singer) to hit the high notes of theater geek staples like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Unfortunately, the Material Girl’s participation in the project didn’t end with acting: while the Broadway production was about a flawed despot’s wife who embodies style-over-substance “truthiness" (imagining herself as a savior of the common people while really serving no one but herself), Madonna apparently insisted on scrubbing away her character’s flaws, transforming the story into a historically dissonant La Isla Bonita version of A Star Is Born, featuring a scrappy, sexy gal who uses her moxie to make it big (and wear a lot of swanky ‘40s fashion), robbing the musical of most of its thematic purpose and resonance and rendering Antonio Banderas’ role as Evita’s antagonist essentially pointless.

HAMLET (1969)

The movie versions of John Osborne's "angry young man" plays Look Back in Anger (starring Richard Burton) and The Entertainer (starring Laurence Olivier) -- plays that Richardson himself had staged in the theater -- are marred by clumsy film technique and the deadness one associates with inept efforts to "open out" stage plays, but they remain valuable records of great performances by legendary actors working with material that changed the face of theater. But Richardson's Hamlet, which wears its staginess on its sleeve and stars Nicol Williamson in the title role, is an embarrassing relic of its moment: a disastrous attempt to make Shakespeare relevant to the 1960s by pimping it out with sexual overtones (some of them supplied by Marianne Faithfull, who plays Ophelia, and who comes across as sweet, hard-working, and very confused) while emphasizing the generation gap angle (despite the casting, as Hamlet's stepfather and mother, of performers, Anthony Hopkins and Judy Parfitt, who were younger than Williamson). Williamson's performance itself is some kind of landmark in bad Shakespearean acting: too self-contained to connect with the other performers and wearing a fresh layer of varnish on his popping eyeballs, he gives a demonstration of how it's possible to use the lines to show off the speed of one's word rate and the showiness of one's delivery without using the words to express a thing. From several years' perspective, the whole thing may be best seen as an inside joke done in preparation for Williamson's performance, two decades later, as John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet. Which had its own problems.

KING LEAR (1971)

Peter Brooks' controversial, celebrated 1960s production was reportedly modeled on Samuel Beckett, with a resigned attitude towards the horrors that befall Lear and the other characters, and with the star, Paul Scofield, employing what Susan Sontag described as "arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines." "Deadened" is an accurate term for the production as it comes across in this black-and-white movie version, which seems to be an attempt to "modernize" the text by making it as far from moving as possible.

MACBETH (1948)

In his greatest Shakespeare movies, Chimes at Midnight and Othello, Orson Welles managed to draw inspiration for striking and powerful images from the desperation caused by his lack of funds, but he came a cropper here, working on too tight a budget and shooting schedule for Republic Pictures. In his cutting and reshaping of the text, Welles sometimes made dramatic logic subservient to his requisite Big Idea, that the witches and their cat's-paw, Macbeth, represented a barbaric, Druidic religion at war with the coming of Christianity. (He didn't do himself or the ears of his audience any favors with his other big idea, that the actors should attempt Scottish accents.) Other problems were beyond his control, such as the cheapo costumes that Republic supplied him with: the movie may be most notorious for its headgear, especially the sight of Welles in a "crown" that looks like a square box with three triangular points glued to the side, which Welles himself acknowledged made him look like he was playing the Statue of Liberty. It must be said that, as befits a play with a curse on it, Macbeth has probably inspired more rotten movie adaptations than any other great play, the most recent being a 2006 Australian movie, directed by Geofrey Wright, which was set among modern drug dealers in Melbourne, with leads who might have stepped out of a photo spread in Maxim; it plays like Miami Vice spoken in verse, with an Aussie accent. And that's not even taking into account all the movies that dump the bard's dialogue while, with a wink to the audience, using his plot. (These include the 1990 gangster movie Men of Respect, starring John Turturro and his wife Katherine Borowitz, and the godawful Scotland, Pa., in which James Le Gros and Maura Tierney attempt to rise in the fast-food industry by feeding their boss, Duncan, into the deep-fat fryer.)

LOVES LABOUR'S LOST (2000)

When Kenneth Branagh's Henry V opened months after the death of Laurence Olivier, critics rushed to embrace its young director-star as Olivier's heir apparent. But though Branagh has certainly had his moments since then, his directing career has been heavier on the Princess and the Showgirls than on the Hamlets. Bad as his attempts to experiment outside his Shakespeare roots (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Peter's Friends) have been, he really found the worst of both worlds with the first-ever movie version of this Shakespeare comedy, staged as a musical and crammed with actors who lacked experience in both classical theater and singing and dancing. Miramax Studios took one look at the results and flushed its three-picture deal with Branagh down the toilet, thus establishing once and for all that Harvey Weinstein is a Friend of the Theater.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

Norman Jewison is a lousy director, and his thoroughly inept Fiddler On The Roof (source material I don't really care about one way or the other) did me a great service when I was a teenager by demonstrating (years before I'd seen Kevin Smith movies) exactly what inept mise-en-scene looks like. Early on, Topol is dancing in the barn. The frame is widescreen, and Jewison has so little idea of how to fill it that one half of the screen is Topol; the other half is a cow's ass. This is one of the crowning insults in the long history of rejected visual innovations on-screen. Why, if only I could find an amateur video of a Japanese stage production, even that would be an improvement. Oh wait, there it is!

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

Madonna On Film: Screengrab Celebrates Her Top Ten "Best" and Worst Performances (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

And now...the stinkers.

6. Marie in Shadows and Fog (1992), Elspeth in Four Rooms (1995)

As noted in Part One, Madonna works best in movies when used as spice in a cameo...except, of course, when the cameo is lousy. Yet, though these two performances are, in fact, terrible, it’s hard to judge Ms. Ciccone too harshly for either of them, given the fact that Lily Tomlin, Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates hardly fare much better in Woody Allen’s limp, pretentious Shadows and Fog, and nobody but the lucky actors in Robert Rodriguez’s section of the misbegotten omnibus film Four Rooms bothered to give a coherent performance, either.

7. Abbie Reynolds, The Next Best Thing (2000)

The only movie in Madonna’s filmography where she attempts to play a completely “normal,” contemporary human being (as opposed to a 1940s ballplayer, an S&M obsessed murder suspect, a tightrope walker, an elfin princess, a witch, an Argentine dictator, a kooky East Village free spirit, etc.), Ms. Ciccone earns low points here if only for somehow finding a way to make the song “American Pie” even more annoying than it already was. To be fair, I never saw this movie either, but my lovely Polish bride informs me that Madonna's performance here as a straight woman in a custody battle with her gay baby daddy features exactly one funny sight gag involving the Material Boobs, but otherwise earns its #7 spot fair and square, given Madge's complete lack of chemistry with friend and co-star Rupert Everett and the fact that she seems "like an automaton” throughout “like she always is.”

8. Eva Peron in Evita (1996)

While Ms. Ciccone may have worked harder on this role than any other in her cinematic career (even finally learning to sing after more than a decade as a successful recording artist) it is, in many ways, her most annoying performance, partly because she’s clearly so impressed with herself, partly because so many critics played along with the charade (even going so far as to award her efforts with a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical), but mostly because she transformed an ironic cautionary tale of the rise and fall of a dictator’s wife into a triumphant love story about the rise and rise of a plucky, ambitious gal (not unlike – hey! – Madonna herself!), all the while downplaying the nastier side of Peron’s (and her own) egomaniacal megalomania and its often toxic effect on the peasants who love her...thus deliberately undercutting the plot and theme of her own movie (not to mention Antonio Banderas’ role as spokesman for the downtrodden and future t-shirt model Che Guevara who, with no antagonist to play against, merely comes across like a whiny little bitch).

9. Rebecca Carlson in Body of Evidence (1993)

For all her onstage masturbation, conical Gauliter bras and nude photo shoots, Madonna has never really had a handle on sex. For her, the beast with two backs has nothing to do with joy, love, pleasure or fun, which makes this so-called “erotic” thriller such a complete slog as she fucks Willem Dafoe on shards of broken glass (hot!!!), spits out Razzie-winning lines like “Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank?” and reminds us that, apparently, being Sharon Stone isn’t quite as easy as it looks.

10. Gloria Tatlock, Shanghai Surprise (1986), Amber Leighton, Swept Away (2002)

For some reason, both of Madonna’s husbands (co-star Sean Penn and director Guy Ritchie) managed to distill all of Ms. Ciccone’s worst cinematic instincts into a pair of monumentally shrill, annoying, wooden performances in two of the worst movies ever made. Penn at least had the excuse of being drunk throughout production of Shanghai Surprise (though, sadly, I wasn’t drunk or stoned or, even better, unconscious while sitting through it), and I’m not sure what Guy Ritchie’s excuse was for making Swept Away, unless (as with his short BMW promotional film “Star”) he simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to publicly humiliate his beloved spouse. Given her total lack of chemistry with nearly every co-star in her career (except Rosie O'Donnell and, of course, her own reflection), it’s no surprise Ms. Ciccone fares no better with Penn in Shanghai or Adriano Giannini in Swept Away, which my wife summed up with a quote that could apply to any number of Madonna’s past and future cinematic blunders: “Painfully unfunny...another joyless performance.”

Click here for Part One

That Guy!: Jonathan Pryce

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater. An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures. Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today. A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

Pryce (the son of a Welsh shopkeeper, and originally named Price; the reason for the name change is murky and doubtless irrelevant) still keeps extremely busy with stagework, and even his big-screen roles maintain elements of the theatrical: one of the few times he broke away from his normal roles as precise and deliberate, almost timid, characters is when he played Argentine strongman Juan Peron opposite Madonna in the 1996 big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. But despite the moneymaking blockbuster roles he takes, and the occasional foray into television work, he still wins his highest praise for independent or 'little movie' screen work, and in 1995, he received what he's described as one of the highest honors of his storied career, winning the Best Actor award at the Cannes film festival for his sensitive, powerful and emotional portrayal of British novelist Lytton Strachey in director Christopher Hampton's little-seen Carrington. Recently, Pryce got the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and portray Sherlock Holmes on British television, but he's been taking less work recently to spend time with his family. He'll be appearing (as the president of the United States, no less!) in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie, although his devotees are much more excited about next year's My Zinc Bed, where he'll be playing the lead in a new David Hare adaptation. Pryce just recently turned sixty, and with a few more choice roles (and, well, a few less G.I. Joes, he's still got a good chance at following in Olivier's footsteps as a Grand Old Man of British cinema.

Where to see Jonathan Pryce at his best:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983)

Though it wasn't the breakout role that would come his way two years later, Pryce's performance as the sinister Mr. Dark in this spotty but entertaining adaptation of a Ray Bradbury novel is incredibly compelling. As the proprietor and ringleader of a curious and somewhat menacing circus that comes to visit a small town, Pryce strikes a perfect balance of sophistication and terror; throughout his entire time on screen, it's hard to take your eyes off of him, and he swills Bradbury's ripe dialogue around in his mouth like a fine wine, making the moments when he loses control all the more effective. A stunning performance from a nearly forgotten film.

BRAZIL (1985)

The movie that really thrust Jonathan Pryce into the public eye was his performance as the hapless and ultimately hopeless Sam Lowry, best described as Winston Smith with even more British repression. It would be the first of many collaborations between Pryce and Terry Gilliam, and while it made quite clear the reasons why he wasn't cut out to be a typical romantic lead, it was a brilliant piece of acting, aided and abetted by the clever and theatrical scripting of Tom Stoppard. Gilliam and Pryce would work together several more times, from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to The Brothers Grimm, but it would never be this magical again.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

As the terrified and uncertain would-be real estate investor James Lingk, Jonathan Pryce not only gets the chance to act in one of the most powerhouse ensemble casts in recent memory (including getting to play the majority of his scenes off of Al Pacino at the very last moment in his career when he did any actual acting, as opposed to just yelling at things), but he also played the unusual role of the film's moral center, getting to act like a normal human being among these amoral Type-A monsters. Curiously enough, Pryce went on to play Shelley "The Machine" Levene -- portrayed here by Jack Lemmon -- in a London revival of the David Mamet play.