The Screengrab : glenn kenny

Trailer Review: The Girlfriend Experience

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

One of the most fascinating things about Steven Soderbergh’s career is the way he switches back and forth between ambitious studio fare and smaller-scaled indies, trusting those who care about his work to follow him between the two extremes. Ever since this first screened at Sundance this year, everything about this has intrigued me- the casting of a porn star (Sasha Grey) and a film critic (Screengrab favorite Glenn Kenny) in key roles, the awesome poster that premiered a few weeks ago, and now this trailer. Soderbergh’s films often have cool trailers- the Bubble teaser is a classic of the form- and this is one of Soderbergh’s better trailers thusfar. One thing that’s interesting is that Soderbergh seems to foreground the money aspect of this story rather than the sex- Out of Sight aside, Soderbergh has never had much interest in eroticism, and I’m curious to see his reasons for casting someone like Grey in the lead role. Also, this looks pretty bloody gorgeous- Peter Andrews is just getting better and better as a cinematographer, and if I didn’t know who he was I’d suggest that he work with other filmmakers. I can’t be the only who’d be amused by a film that was shot by Peter Andrews and cut by Roderick Jaynes, can I?

In Other Blogs: Defending the New Classics

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, our own Paul Clark took a few well-deserved shots at Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 New Classics. At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny offers up a (weak) defense. “Let's begin with a fundamental fact: lists are bullshit. Lists are such blatant bullshit that any magazine person will admit to you that they're bullshit. Some might need to have had a couple of drinks first, others might be more effectively cajoled by having you complain for the millionth time in the course of a conversation about how your own favorite cultural artifact was left off some list or another, but they'll admit it… ‘Glenn,’ I hear you asking, ‘if lists are such bullshit, why do magazines and websites do them almost all the frickin' time?’ Well, because lists are putatively ‘fun.’ People notice them, argue about them. They take them fairly seriously, pretty much regardless of what their sources are...oddly enough. For a magazine in particular, a list is a potential goldmine of publicity. It gets your product noticed. TV news, radio outlets, they LOVE lists.” As list-lovers ourselves, we can’t argue with this – our weekly top 10 (or 15 or 20) offerings are inevitably our most popular posts, and just as inevitably attract the most “Hey bozos, you forgot Ernest Scared Stupid!” type comments. Heck, that’s why we do ’em! Try as we might, though, we can’t actually find the part where Kenny defends the EW list. Maybe it’s in code.

At Scanners, Jim Emerson offers his own take on the list. “From the last quarter century, EW chose Pulp Fiction as its #1 classic, calling it ‘a time-warping, mind-bending work of movie-mad genius.... Its revolutionary structure (John Travolta dies... then lives!) opened a new universe of mainstream storytelling, but the eternal joy of Pulp Fiction is that it recast the future of movies by living, so thrillingly, in the moment." I can't really argue with that, though it doesn't take into consideration what I see as the movie's flaws (I hate all the chewy, self-consciously pop-aware dialog), its negative influences (we're still suffering the ‘Tarantinian’ fallout from wannabes far less talented than QT), and its overemphasized novelty (the structure wasn't really revolutionary -- it just didn't tell you the order in which its chapters were arranged, so you could be surprised to recounter characters in an unforseen context). But I'm not going to begrudge Pulp Fiction the top slot…No, the bizarre choices on the list for me (in addition to several of the ones cited in the third paragraph above) include Moulin Rouge (#10), Pretty Woman (#37), Gladiator (#43), Rain Man (#45), Dirty Dancing (#65), All About My Mother (#69), Thelma & Louise (#72)... but I detect my own gender bias in the selection. Some of these were hits, some of them won Oscars, some had star-making performances (Julia Roberts, Patrick Swayze, Brad Pitt)... but, even if you liked 'em at the time, do you feel like watching them anymore?”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir warns that the indie film is dying – unless it isn’t. “Even as the potential moviegoing public has become distracted by an explosion of electronic options and devices unimagined a generation ago, the marketplace has been swamped by a poisonous glut of new movies. As Gill explains, in 1993, the Sundance Film Festival received roughly 500 submissions. For 2008, that number had swollen to more than 5,000. The reasons for that are various: The cost of producing a small-budget motion picture has fallen sharply in the digital age, and the success of a handful of indies in the late '90s and early 2000s drew investors large and small to pour countless billions of dollars into filmmaking. It hasn't turned out to be a sensible investment. Gill calculates the odds of losing all your money on an independent film at 99.95 percent. Most of those 5,000 movies, in his words, are ‘pre-ordained flops,’ made by people ‘who forgot that their odds would have been better if they'd converted their money into quarters and taken the all-night party bus to Vegas’… Then there's the fact that while enthusiasm, access to technology and an eagerness to become famous may be widespread, talent and craftsmanship are not. As anybody who's ever served on a film-festival selection committee learns the hard way, most of those movies should never have been made in the first place and definitely should not be inflicted upon the public. There has indeed been an explosion of ultra-low-budget filmmaking -- just try to wade through the self-produced movies available on YouTube -- but so far it has not revealed a nation full of unheralded Orson Welleses in embryo.”

And finally, speaking of “lists are bullshit,” this week’s List-o-Mania entry comes from the MuchMusic blog: it’s allegedly the Top 10 Music Moments in Movies. I know it’s hard to argue with a list containing both Adventures in Babysitting and Napoleon Dynamite, but really – the Wayne’s World "Bohemian Rhapsody" sing-along is the greatest music moment in movie history? Not.

Related:
EW Makes Great Movies List, Screengrab Points, Laughs
EW Makes List of Vile Villains, Isn't as Cool as Screengrab Lists

In Other Blogs: Critical Condition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As regular readers of this column know, we like to single out blog posts that bring a fresh perspective to these pictures we call motion; finely crafted, passionate posts that allow us all to see cinema through new eyes. But more than that, we love a good pissing contest.

This latest one began with another lamentation over the position of the modern film critic – otherwise known as the unemployment line. A piece called “Where Have All the Film Critics Gone?” from The Brooklyn Rail quoted several notable film bloggists, like Matt Zoller Seitz who said, “I think we’re fast approaching the point where criticism will become, for the most part, a devotion rather than a job.” And then there was Michael Atkinson, who wrote on his Zero For Conduct blog: ““[T]he existence of full-time staff film reviewers is a nutty aberration in the history of periodical publishing…I’d love to see every magazine employ an army of full-time culture reviewers, and pay them millions, but it doesn’t make very much sense, for the simple reason that it’s not truly a full-time job.”

That didn’t sit well with Glenn Kenny, who recently lost his own full-time job with Premiere. At his “own bought-and-paid-for-blog, thank you very g-ddamn much,” Some Came Running, Kenny responds, “Gee, thanks, Michael. Whether you know it or not—and I rather suspect you do—you've just given a long belt of ammunition to the Sam Zells of the world. The gutters, the "cost-cutters," the content-haters, the obscenely rich resenters who think this whole "journalism" thing is a racket enacted by a bunch of smarty-pants elitist slackers. Way to be, pal. And while we're at it, define ‘full time.’ ‘I've done the job. I know how much time it takes,’ you puff to Rossmeir. (And um, just when did you turn into John fucking Milius, anyway?) What was it Red Smith said? ‘Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.’ I know, Michael, I know—Red Smith was probably some kind of pussy…You told Rossmeir that you didn't think critics who only work 10 to 12 hours a week should be paid like other professionals who work 40. Well, you know, that's why there's freelance journalism, which pays by the word, or by the piece. Generally speaking, if you're a staff member at a magazine, the amount of time you spend at your job is compounded merely by the fact that you're a staff member. NYT critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis aren't woolgathering when they're not writing reviews. Frequently, they're writing other pieces, for Arts and Leisure or for the magazine. Scott does video reviews. Both do on-line stuff. And both partake in the culture of being a staff member, that is, they go to meetings and such.” I’ve been a freelance movie reviewer for years, and used to yearn for a staff job, but – they go to meetings? Forget it!

At Scanners, Jim Emerson weighs in on the kerfuffle. (Yes, I’m officially dubbing it a kerfuffle.) “I've never had to support myself by working at a weekly or a monthly, and I don't know what Atkinson's situation was at the Voice, but if all he had to do as a staff critic was see ‘three or four movies a week’ and then knock out ‘1,000 or 1,500 words’ (apiece? altogether?) -- and he could live on the money he made from doing that -- then, wow, that's a really sweet gig and I don't blame him for feeling that he was running a scam. Somebody was. Because, in my experience, those numbers don't come close to adding up. Three or four movies a week wouldn't even cover major-studio wide releases. Who covers the rest (four? eight? a dozen?) for the week, the ‘art house,’ revival house, museum and nonprofit venue pictures that rely on reviews to find an audience? And since when do writers of any kind get paid by the hour? You're cashing checks just for the time you spend actually sitting at a keyboard, but for all the things you have to do in order to enable you to write. So a salary for a writer, reporter and/or film critic (and all three job descriptions fit the ‘critic’ designation) isn't exactly an hourly job, nor is it the equivalent of tenure. It's more like a retainer, for your work and what goes into producing it, but also for your availability. What's actually published is just the tail end of a much larger and longer process.”

David Poland at The Hot Button gets in on the action. “Yes, writers are valued in a different way than the people who print the papers, sell the papers, and even, to some degree, edit the papers. The work of a daily Metro writer or a daily political writer is something else. A daily byline is a special kind of grind that is more like a traditional job. But that’s not the part I have a problem with. What Atkinson misunderstands – and by dint of his own exit from the print work, understandably as an ego protection – is that ‘writers' availability and flow of copy’ is every bit as valued today as it ever was. What is quite different is that publishers expect to see some cause and effect from those they keep on board. If you are a film critic or highly paid entertainment journalist at a print outlet, you better have a following that cares about what you say – which doesn’t necessarily translate to ticket sales – or you are dead.”

Okay, enough about that. Let’s wrap it up with List-o-Mania, circling back to Glenn Kenny’s former place of employment, Premiere, for a special Father’s Day feature: The 10 Maddest, Baddest Daddies in Film. We’d never quibble with the inclusion of Jack Torrance from The Shining or Terry O’Quinn’s Stepfather, but whither Christopher Walken from At Close Range?

In Other Blogs: Kill-Face Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week we began with the shuttering of In the Company of Glenn, former Premiere editor Glenn Kenny’s shop on movie blog row. As it turns out, Kenny has wasted no time in opening up in a new location: Some Came Running, named after the Rat Pack movie you need to see right now if you never have. “I'll be posting like mad shortly, as this blog will be one of possibly several outlets for which I'll be covering Cannes. The reorganization of staff at Premiere coming at this particular time put even more of a whammy on my head than it might have otherwise, but I thought I'd best get myself out there anyway. Stay in the game, as it were (Jeff Wells will be proud of me, I trust), although what I'd like more than anything at the moment is a bit of a rest…First, though, I post to thank everyone who rang in with compliments, concern, and coverage in the wake of my termination. I felt a little like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral...except far more moved, and incredibly grateful.”

The PopMatters blog Short Ends and a Leader offers a manifesto of sorts, an Open Letter to the Online Critic. “The time is now. It’s our moment to put up or forever shut up. Print is dying, there’s no two ways about it, and those left rummaging for readership are turning to the old fashioned wire services for their rote, by the book copy. As a community, we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to shine, to show that we are just as legitimate as the men and women who dictated filmic fashion for the last 60 years. New technology may mean a new way of communication, but frankly, we’re doing a piss poor job of getting our point across - that is, when we can come up with a cogent and coherent argument to begin with. It’s time to cast off the amateurish aura given off by what many of us do and recognize the role we will play in the next decade.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir asks what would happen if Austin Powers were French and funny – and then answers his own question. “Let me direct you to the hit French comedy OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, featuring explosively weird Gallic comic Jean Dujardin as its eponymous super-spy, an unhinged cross-Channel cousin of Sean Connery's 007. (In his original, more straight-faced incarnation, OSS 117 was the hero of more than 250 French pulp novels and several 1950s and '60s films.) Director Michel Hazanavicius captures the jet-age atmosphere, form-fitting wardrobes, jazz-ethnic soundtrack and bouffant hairdos of JFK/de Gaulle-era espionage films in perfect detail, but it's Dujardin's performance as the suave, confident and utterly clueless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (to Francophones, a name that drips with phony aristocratic pretension) that gives OSS 117 its edge.”

At the House Next Door, Sarah D. Bunting revisits Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders and concludes that it works better with the sound off. “A first-time watcher of The Outsiders could easily follow and appreciate the plot without having to listen to the dialogue; everything is telegraphed visually, whether by the director and cinematographer (here, and on Rumble Fish, Stephen H. Burum) or by the actors. This will probably come as a relief to those of you who would maybe like to watch it again, but remember the dialogue as embarrassingly earnest, which it is. In fact, it's as sugary and purple as an Easter Peep, and while Coppola's fidelity to the source material is quite striking in some ways (more on that later), the blame for lines like the oft (and correctly) pilloried ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’ lies squarely with S.E. Hinton's original. ‘Let's do it for Johnny, maaaaan,’ ‘Sure, little buddy, we ain't gonna fight no more’—they land like balloons filled with ricotta.”

And finally, here’s a gallery of “kill faces” courtesy of Arbogast on Film, guaranteed to get your Friday off to a rip-roaring start.

In Other Blogs: Gloom and Doom Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

What will happen to “In Other Blogs” when all the other blogs disappear? There’s probably no danger of that happening anytime soon, but another week brings another one of our regular sources to an end, or at least an uncertain future. In the Company of Glenn, Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny’s hangout, is now in limbo as Kenny has lost his job. “I've just been informed that my position at Premiere.com is being terminated. What this means for this blog is still up in the air; I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions. I very much hope to keep this blog going...and get some good freelance work, quick.”

Beyond the Multiplex laments this turn of events, along with other doom and gloom for indie film fans. “I am not the first to ask what the doggone heck the point of that site is without Kenny on it. And Warner Bros. announced, also on Thursday, that it will close down both Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures, its two semi-autonomous ‘specialty’ divisions…Kenny is one of the finest, most erudite and funniest commentators in the business, and I can't imagine he'll remain unemployed for long. (I consider Glenn a buddy, though we don't hang out away from our interlocking professional lives.) But this is clearly another illustration of the precarious status of film criticism, and all other forms of independent critical intelligence, in a rapidly changing -- and perhaps rapidly imploding -- media universe. It's too early to evaluate the effects of the Warner news, but it ain't good.”

The House Next Door, now under new management, has an account of legendary screenwriter Robert Towne’s appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival. “Still sharp as a shiv and filled with ideas for projects, he is nevertheless weary of the way things have changed since ‘the old days,’ and, following frustrating experiences directing his most personal projects, has apparently accepted the role of Hollywood’s resident script-doctor. The clip reel preceding the interview tells the tale: Spiky, expansive dialogue in iconoclastic films (a sort of pungent poetry voiced by Jack Nicholson as a sewer-mouthed sailor or as a shamus digging for rot) segueing into tidy jobs in Tom Cruise blockbusters (included in the montage is, tellingly, a passage from Mission: Impossible with barely a word in it).”

This week in List-o-mania, Cinematical has a sort of cousin to our own TV-to-movie list; it’s the Cinematical Seven: When an Animated Series Goes Live Action ... and Gets it Right. Honestly, I wouldn’t touch most of the movies on the list with a ten foot pole, but it’s always nice to see Popeye get some love. “Robert Altman's offbeat ode to the famous Fleisher cartoon starring the spinach-eating strongman and his darling Olive Oil is the great misunderstood work of the director's career. Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall manage to bring utterly ridiculous characters into a realm of believability that you could never imagine when watching the show. Suddenly, Popeye made sense -- goofy, almost surreal sense, but sense nonetheless -- in the real world.”

Finally, a call to action! If you have a favorite film blog you feel we’ve been neglecting, even if it’s your own blog, let us know in the comments. After all, if our usual resources keep shutting down, pretty soon we’re going to have to devote this column to mushroom blogs.

Trailer Review: The Life Before Her Eyes

Paul Clark — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Well, it appears that it's Changed Title Week here at Trailer Review, first with Monday's Starship Meet Dave, and now this one, which was originally titled In Bloom. It was under this title that the film premiered to lukewarm reviews at last year's Toronto Film Festival, where Premiere's Glenn Kenny called it "basically Sophie's Choice meets Incident at Owl Creek Bridge meets Columbine." The trailer conveys this pretty effectively, with a sudden flash-forward from the teenage protagonist driving to the adult version behind the wheel. But what I have a hard time stomaching is the film's grief-porn aspect, for lack of a better word. Yes, a school shooting is a tragedy, but the film looks less like a complex examination of the psychological fallout from this central incident than a wallow in the heroine's misery. And in what universe does Evan Rachel Wood grow up into Uma Thurman without, uh, surgical enhancement? Just sayin'.

Arthur Bremer Killed Jesse James

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Friday's AP report that Arthur H. Bremer, George Wallace's would-be assassin, was being released after serving 35 years out of his 53-year sentence for good behavior brings out the best in Glenn Kenny, who responds with a curious point you could probably make in the blogosphere without getting angry, ill-informed letters: Bremer's the biggest pop culture influence you never thought about. "Paul Schrader's revelations about the creation of the screenplay of Taxi Driver show us that the screenplay and, by extension, the film, would never have existed had not Schrader melded his own personal torment with the diaries of Bremer," Kenny notes, going on to draw out how that, in turn, might have inspired John Hinckley's far more warped, Jodie Foster-worshipping attempt on Reagan — and how Bremer is probably unaware of how his attempt (generally remembered after successful assassinations on more beloved types like Robert Kennedy and MLK) has warped the culture. I'd go Kenny one better — without Bremer and Hinckley, we lose the assassin-as-scorned-fan template. If you haven't seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford yet, now might be a good time. — Vadim Rizov