The Screengrab : eyes without a face

Maurice Jarre, 1924 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

In the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Maurice Jarre, who died Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 84, composed some of the best-known music ever to grace a film soundtrack. Jarre, who had studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, began his film career with the score for George Franju's 1952 documentary Hôtel des Invalides. In the next ten years, he would work on some thirty pictures in his native France, including Franju's horror classic Eyes without a Face (1960), his celebrated version of Thérèse Desqueyroux,, and, later, his 1963 Judex, as well as The Olive Trees of Justice (1962), made in Algeria by the American independent filmmaker James Blue. Jarre's real big break came when producer Sam Spiegel hired him to apply the appropriate symphonic sweep to David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The Lawrence score won Jarre an Academy Award, and Jarre became one of Lean's regular collaborators, writing the music for Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984), both of which also won him Academy Awards, and Ryan's Daughter (1970). His success with Lawrence also inspired other Hollywood producers to swing open their doors, and he was soon working on movies by such directors as Fred Zinneman (Behold a Pale Horse, 1964), John Frankenheimer (The Train, 1964; Grand Prix, 1966; The Fixer, 1968), William Wyler (The Collector, 1965), Richard Brooks (The Professionals, 1966), and Alfred Hitchcock (Topaz, 1969).

Jarre continued to work steadily through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, doing especially memorable work for John Huston on The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Peter Weir on The Year of Living Dangerously (1975), and racking up Oscar nominations for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Witness (1985), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Ghost (1990), and the controverisal The Message (1976). He also won ASCAP Awards for Ghost, Fatal Attraction (1987), and Dead Poets Society (1989); in 1993, the society bestowed upon him its Lifetime Achievement Award, though his lifetime achievement in film scoring still had a ways to go: he would continue to work into the new millennium with his final movie score, I Dreamed of Africa (2000), followed by the score for the 2001 TV film Uprising. The father of the production designer Stéfanie Jarre, the screenwriter Kevin Jarre (Tombstone, Glory), and the popular electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre. Already famous for his tendency to incorporate exotic and native instruments into his scores, Jarre himself began to favor electronic scores over full symphonic music in the '80s, a development that he assured anyone who would listen had nothing to do with his finding the process any easier. He is survived by his fourth wife, Fong F. Khong, who he married in 1984.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

This 1985 instant-midnight-movie classic just about killed off the concept of the underground-horror-cult-item by being too perfect; a beautifully executed, straight-faced H.P. Lovecraft update with farce timing and gory slapstick, it hit its marks with such stunning aplomb that it's hard to think of a similar film that wouldn't be embarrassed to be compared to it. That includes pretty much every subsequent attempt by the first time filmmaker Stuart Gordon, previously known as founding director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, to follow it up, though its star, Jeffrey Combs, has managed to keep the spirit of Herbert West alive through his performances in other movies -- especially Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, where his deranged, ghostbusting FBI agent is a scene-stealing fusion of Dr. West, Fox Mulder, and Hazel Motes.

19. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959)

Georges Franju's nightmare classic was first released in the U.S. in 1962 in a re-edited, English-language version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. In a time when foreign films really had to fight for American distribution, this was a peculiar kind of triumph that demonstrated that it was possible for certain special films to bridge the audiences that responded to the critical theories of Andre Bazin and those who were more at home with Joe Bob Briggs. The restored version that has since become the standard text even here makes it clearer that the movie (about a mad doctor's attempts to restore the once-beautiful, then damaged and now slate-blank face of his daughter) is an attack on unthinking scientific experimentation that draws on the deliberate tapping-into-the-irrational of the Surrealists and such films as Cocteau's Orpheus -- but it's still a movie about a guy whose hobby is stripping the kissers off kidnapped women until he gets eaten by his own attack dogs.

18. MARTIN (1977)

After many failed attempts to successfully follow up on Night of the Living Dead, and two years before returning to the zombie well with Dawn of the Dead, George Romero made this riff on the vampire genre in his beloved Pittsburgh. The title character, played by twenty-six-year-old John Amplas, is a forlorn, alienated young man who appears to be a serial killer and wishes he were a vampire. In its own odd way, Martin, more than any other film of its time, anticipates the Goth subculture of Anne Rice and the post-punk concept of vampires as creatures of morbid romantic fantasy, though it's an ironic comment on that kind of attraction, not a celebration of it: at key moments, Romero shows us Martin's fantasies of himself as a suave, literal lady killer with seductive powers, before staging his murders as the unpleasant messes they actually are. Romero himself turns up in a cameo as a priest who, sought for guidance by an Old World relative of Martin's, turns out to be less interested in hearing the man out than in raving about The Exorcist.

17. ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

If Charles Grodin doesn’t exactly spring to mind when you think of the great stars of horror, then you’ve never seen Rosemary’s Baby. Kicking off the 1970s devil movie craze two years before the start of that morally ambiguous decade (and one year before director Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the minions of real life demon Charles Manson), Mia Farrow dramatized the worst-case-scenario fears of young mothers everywhere as the title character in a defiantly downbeat movie where motherhood is perverted, the fetus is the villain, the bad guys win and we get to see Ruth Gordon naked for the first (but, thanks to Bud Cort and Hal Ashby, certainly not the last) time in her distinguished career.

16. THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

These days Leatherface is just another lovable lunk in the horror franchise Hall of Fame, right up there with Jason and Freddy Krueger, but despite all the sequels and remakes, the impact of his 1974 debut is undiminished. There's nothing complicated about the plot: five young people traveling across Texas in a van happen upon a seemingly deserted farmhouse where they make the sudden and violent acquaintance of the hulking butcher and cross-dresser Leatherface and the rest of the demented Sawyer clan. Tobe Hooper's film derives much of its power from its grimy, snuff-film authenticity; it looks as though it may have been discovered moldering in the attic of the decaying Sawyer farmhouse. When Leatherface revs his chainsaw while closing in on a victim in the deep, dark woods, you can only think, yep, that would certainly scare the living shit out of me. Leatherface's final dance of death in the early morning rays of the sun is perhaps the seminal image of hillbilly horror. Much has been made of the movie as metaphor for any number of things – Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, the collapse of the counterculture, the dissolution of the nuclear family and possibly the 1973 World Series for all I know – but as flat-out unrelenting exploitation of the modern suburbanite's fear of backwoods people, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has few peers.

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

Contributors: Phil BOOOOO!-gent, Andrew OsBurning-in-Hell, Baron Scott Von Frankendoviak

Set Your DVR!: October 13 - October 20, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Here’s upcoming Movies of Interest in the next week! I realized that last week’s entry gave all times in Central Time. From here on out, I’ll do the Central/Eastern thing. I will also spill things over to the following Monday, because several great movies show on Sunday night. Finally, let me know in comments if you see something I missed!

Other than that, the rules are the same: I’m trying to avoid recommending obvious movies, but I know you’re a knowledgeable reader, so some of the ones here might seem large and unsubtle to you. But that’s alright. I’m using an in-law test: I’ll stick with movies that my in-laws have most likely never heard of. And no premium channels, because I’m too broke to afford them.

Mon, Oct 13:

10:30/11:30 am: The Circus Queen Murder on TCM. Pre-code murder mystery starring Adolphe Menjou. Not available on DVD.

11:00 am/12:00 pm: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 4:15/5:15 pm and again on 10/14 at 4:30/5:30 am). Slow and thoughtful take on African-American youths in a go-nowhere Southern town directed by the guy who made Pineapple Express. Obvious influences: Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett.

2:00/3:00 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC. The lesser of the two great existential car movies of 1971 (Two-Lane Blacktop is the other). This one’s still a pop culture point-of-reference, especially for Tarantino movies. Definitely worth a viewing.

5:00/6:00 pm: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. As mentioned last week, this one is a fun and light take on the concert film, directed by Michel Gondry and built around Dave Chappelle’s general awesomeness.

7:00/8:00 pm: My Man Godfrey on TCM. Now that we’re headed into a genuine financial depression, take a moment to consider one of the great films about the repercussions of the Great one.

Tues, Oct 14:

5:15/6:15 pm: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 7:45/8:45 am and 12:45/1:45 pm). I mentioned this one last week, too. And I think it’s on again next week. No matter, though, because it’s just brilliant. Since I mentioned it last, Scott Tobias at the AV Club wrote a great article on it.

Wed, Oct 15:

12:00/1:00 am: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. on TCM. Dr. Seuss’s live-action insanity. Check it out!

5:00/6:00 am: Shall We Dance on TCM. Fred & Ginger. Score by the Gershwins. A dance scene on roller skates.

10:00/11:00 am: The Legend of Drunken Master (aka Drunken Master II) on G4 (repeat 10/16 at 1:00/2:00 am). It seems hard to believe now, but long before teaming up with Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan made movies that were actually funny. I mean, there’s ass-kicking galore, but the gags he stole from Buster Keaton are just delightful.

10:30/11:30 am: Carefree on TCM. More Fred & Ginger. More dancing. More joking around.

12:00/1:00 pm: Room Service on TCM. Not a bad movie for delving a little deeper into the Marx Brothers.

5:00/6:00 pm: Swing Time on TCM. And even more Fred & Ginger!

Th, Oct 16:

Got nothing for today. Go to the park!

Fri, Oct 17:

1:00/2:00 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Film noir classic with a great turn by Richard Widmark.

Sat, Oct 18:

3:00/4:00 am: Them! on CHILLER. I don’t know what CHILLER is, but apparently it is a channel I have. Them! is a classic monster movie, complete with proto-environmentalist themes, officious foolishness from the authorities, and monsters deserving of a pronoun and an exclamation point and nothing more.

6:30/7:30 am: Gods and Monsters on LOGO (repeat at 1:00/2:00 pm). Lots of biopics want to wallop you over the head with their themes (hey, did you catch that drugs and womanizing might have affected Ray Charles’s life? I wonder if his brother’s death had anything to do with that), but Gods and Monsters, which is about the horror film director James Whale, has a lighter touch.

7:00/8:00 am: Samurai 3 on IFC. The apex of the Samurai trilogy, also known as Duel on Ganryu Island. Toshiro Mifune is in top form, and the climactic battle is the template for Quentin Tarantino’s understanding of Japanese cool.

12:30/1:30 pm: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC. Y’know, fuck Keanu Reeves. Go to the source.

11:00 pm/12:00 am: Dick on Oxygen. I mentioned last week that this movie is hilarious. It still is.

11:45 pm/12:45 am: Crash on IFC. This isn’t the noxious Oscar-bait Crash, but the deeply perverse Cronenberg movie based on the J.G. Ballard story.

Sun, Oct 19:

11:00 pm/12:00 am: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) on TCM. The silent version starring Lon Chaney. Yes, indeed.

Mon, Oct 20 (the overnight spillover):

1:00/2:00 am: Eyes Without A Face on TCM. Georges Franju’s horror classic that is guaranteed to give you the creeping heebie-jeebies. It's also well-written, well-shot, and well-acted, so what are you waiting for?

5:00/6:00 am: Kongo on TCM. Pre-Hayes Code movie that must be seen to be believed. A celebration of depravity loosely based on Conrad’s The Heart Of Darkness. As envisioned by Michel Houellebecq. There’s no DVD, so watch it while you can.

6:45/7:45 am: Ghost Ship on TCM. A Val Lewton production, this little horror film was on the losing end of a lawsuit that kept it out of the public eye for most of the last century. N.B. This is not the CGI craptacular from a few years back.

8:00/9:00 am: The Seventh Victim on TCM. Another Val Lewton production. I’ve never seen this one, but I know the Lewton name means it’s a moody little no-budget horror film that will stick with you for days.

1:30/2:30 pm: The Haunting on TCM. My good friend David Smay (author of the 33 1/3 book on Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones album, which you should buy and read and, preferably, love [plug!]), notes that when I mentioned this movie last week, I failed to include the following information, all of which increases your need to see it: (a) the coolness of Claire Bloom's sapphic sexy psychic, and (b) that she was lovers with Philip Roth for a long time (and then briefly married him). Also, if you've never seen her in James Joyce's Women then you should, because her performance of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is AWESOME. Thanks, David! I will!

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This weekend marks the opening of The Eye, starring Jessica Alba as a blind young woman who regains her sight thanks to corneal transplant surgery. Unfortunately, this happy situation brings her to grief when her new peepers start feeding her frightening, apocalyptic visions. If the plot sounds familiar, if may be because The Eye is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong film by the Pang brothers. But it might also have something to do with the fact that, from the 1960 French horror classic Eyes Without a Face to more recent films such as the 1991 Body Parts (itself based on a French novel called Choice Cuts), it's easy to think of other movies where experimental transplant surgery has had unhappy side effects for the lucky beneficiary. (Steven Spielberg's first professional directing gig was "Eyes", one of the segments of the 1969 pilot for the horror anthology series Night Gallery, in which the fates play a cruel joke on a nasty eye transplant patient, played by Joan Crawford.) Although a great many movie doctors have plied their trade wisely and humanely, saving many fake lives in the process, it's still true that there have been a great many ambitious medical breakthroughs in the movies that have yielded questionable results, and worse. To wit:

THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971)

Case in point. This low-budget horror movie really nails the potential dangers of reckless and unregulated transplant surgery. Or maybe it really nails the potential dangers of giving Bruce Dern a medical license. Dern plays an unprincipled, deranged — dare we say, Dernesque — mad genius who's squatting out in the desert, idly sticking extra heads on raccoons. When a drooling, murderous sex maniac stops by to ask Dern how's tricks, our hero sees his chance and grafts the head of this leering cretin onto the oversized body of the pure-hearted village half-wit. It turns out that the pervert, by virtue of his stronger will and general alpha maleness, gains control of the shared body, a development that leads to scenes where helpless innocents are killed and molested by the monster, scenes that are intercut with close-ups of the actor playing the meanie resting his head on the shoulder of the actor playing the sweet idiot; the latter moans, rolls his eyes, and generally registers his disapproval, while the former sniggers and makes Billy Idol faces. Dern and his creation are destroyed at the end of the movie, but a year later, some exploitation film scientists who somehow got ahold of his notes grafted Ray Milland's head onto the body of Rosey Grier in The Thing with Two Heads. It can easily be distinguished from this movie because the scientists who perform the operation on Grier and Milland do not have a concerned best friend played by Casey Kasem.

JUNIOR (1994)

For some of us, the disappointments related to this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle began with the news that he was not playing the Peter Bagge comics character of the same name. Instead, the future Governor of California plays a gynaecological scientist (check) who specializes in fertilization medication (double check) who, in order to draw attention to the effectiveness of his new super-drug, doses himself with progesterone, estrogen, and his own meds, has an egg that's been fertilized with his own sperm implanted in his abdominal cavity, and conceives a child which he then decides to carry to term, because it will make him a better person (with you so far), much as cross-dressing did for Dustin Hoffman. The fellow scientist who anonymously supplies the egg is played by Emma Thompson, who comes to love Arnold and looks forward to raising the child with him — and that's where I get off the boat. It should be noted that Schwarzenegger was not the first man to give birth in a Hollywood comedy; the same thing happened to Billy Crystal in the 1977 Rabbit Test which comprises the entirety of Joan Rivers's directing career. But that movie made no attempt to explain or justify its plot scientifically: Crystal's pregnancy was best explained as a miracle, though Crystal probably thinks that the only miracle related to Rabbit Test is the fact that he was ever able to find work again.

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN (1963)

If saving the brain of a man widely considered to be history’s greatest monster doesn’t count as the very definition of a bad application of medical technology. Worse still, they don’t just save Hitler’s brain — they save his whole head, so we don’t even get any respite from that annoying push-broom ‘stache of his. No, he just sits there, looking as evil as a stand-in who doesn’t actually look all that much like Hitler can possibly look, burbling around in his jar, waiting for someone to invent Futurama and hatching many a nefarious scheme. By the time this movie came out, Hitler was well on his way to becoming less a sinister historical figure and more of a Dr. Octopus type, a comic-opera supervillain trotted out every time someone wrote a cheap take-over-the-world screenplay. And screenplays don’t come any cheaper than the one in this doozy, which is actually two almost completely unrelated movies (check out the different hairstyles, car models, even film stock from scene to scene) crammed together and broadcast more or less as a TV timefiller in the mid-‘60s. Not since the Golden Age of Ed Wood have there been so many bad special effects, so much terrible acting, so many egregious continuity errors. We here at the Screengrab don’t pretend to be experts on the psychology of Adolf Hitler, and we certainly don’t say this to excuse the man or his lifetime of evil deeds, but we feel quite certain that if someone did bring his head back to life in the confines of an electrified jar, that disembodied, unholy head in a jar could make a better movie than this.

FLATLINERS (1990)

Flatliners was meant to be an intelligent, provocative, moody thriller that blurred the line between good and evil. Unfortunately, they gave it to Joel Schumacher to direct, and so it instead turned out to be yet another object lesson in the ongoing saga of Schumacher’s incredible ability to destroy anything with which he is even remotely involved. In the film, a bunch of medical students decide to take a break from getting drunk and complaining to subject themselves to clinical death in order to determine if stories of what lie beyond the veil of mortality are really true. Each time, they experience more and more of the other side before being resuscitated; and each time, they become whinier and poutier until Kevin Bacon, In his most Judd Nelsonish performance to date, starts bitching and moaning to a stained glass window like it was his mom and it had just told him he was grounded on prom night. Indeed, while the characters in the film channel the eerie experiences of a world beyond death, the actors who play them – including Bacon, Julia Roberts, and a delightfully pissy Kiefer Sutherland – do an amazing job of channeling the relentless unpleasantness of the Brat Pack. We won’t give anything away for those who have yet to see this misbegotten pile of Schumakings, but rest assured, it won’t be long that you’ll be praying for the entire cast to die for real.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992)

It is a little-known but nonetheless completely true fact that sometime after the Vietnam War, the United States military developed secret technology that would allow them to bring dead people back to life and turn them into ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines. Unfortunately, the technology only seemed to work on heavily muscled men of northern European origin, which is how we ended up sending both Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme to the Persian Gulf to blow up terrorists. There were practical reasons not to use these two (they are both terribly bad actors, and at times, the screen threatens to fold in on itself like a quantum singularity at the sheer blankness of their personalities) as well as psychological ones (if you’re going to send two ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines on a top secret mission together, why would you pick two guys who hated each other so much that they essentially murdered each other the last time they were paired up), but none of that makes any difference when there’s towelhead ass to be kicked, so off they go on one of the most overblown, ridiculous 1980s action movies to not actually be made in the 1980s. Apparently, the medical technology that allows people to be brought back from the dead and turned into murderous cyborgs can do nothing to prevent their tendency to smirk, pose shirtless, and make terrible puns at the drop of a hat, which is probably why the program was ultimately abandoned. This rank cheeseball of a picture was directed by Roland Emmerich, who would later inflict such god-awful stinkbombs as Independence Day and the 1999 Godzilla remake on the world. How anyone could sit through Universal Soldier and come out of it thinking “You know what that guy needs is a MUCH BIGGER BUDGET” is itself a medical miracle.

DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Many of the medical breakthroughs on this list are included because they're just plain inexplicable. After all, who in his right mind would think grafting a second head onto a human body constitutes scientific progress? But there is a different strain of movies of this sort, in which the researchers' goals are admirable but the experiments themselves are misguided at best. Perhaps the best example of this kind of movie is Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea. Now, anyone who has ever lost a loved one to Alzheimer's Disease will be sympathetic to the aims of the project headed by Saffron Burrows' Dr. Susan McCallister. But when she discovers that sharks maintain a constant level of brain activity even in advanced age, she hits upon the brilliant crazy-ass idea of creating giant mutant sharks with giant mutated brains that she can harvest in the hope of finding a cure. Trouble is, she neglects to give the sharks a healthy, socially productive outlet for their increased mental capacities, no doubt because with all the time her research demands, she has no time left to teach her subjects underwater chess or to translate Proust into shark language. So the giant mutant geniussharks do what giant mutant genius sharks are prone to doing- they escape and chow down on all nearby humans, most memorably the project's chief investor, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Happily, the sharks go down in the end, a setback for Alzheimer's research but a victory for human mental superiority. How else to explain the genius-fish being vanquished by the likes of LL Cool J and the future star of Homeless Dad?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2!