The Screengrab : hal ashby

DVD Digest for May 26, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

In advance of the upcoming shuttering of The Screengrab- just four more days, folks!- the DVD departments of Disney, Paramount, and Fox have graciously decided not to put out any recent releases this week in protest. Thanks for the support, guys!

Unfortunately, this boycott leaves us with precious little to report in regards to recent movies. Put it another way- when your highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the forgotten Renee Zellweger/Harry Connick Jr. rom-com New in Town (Lionsgate), the phrase “slow week” doesn’t quite cover it. If you’re looking for Asian fare, this week also brings Mamoru Oshii’s animated The Sky Crawlers (Sony, also Blu-Ray), as well as two Wayne Wang indies, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Magnolia) and Princess of Nebraska (Magnolia). And let’s not overlook the much-anticipated How to Give Pleasure to a Woman by a Woman (Pacific Media).

Thankfully, there’s a little more of interest in the classics department, although that’s kind of a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that Warner is releasing titles from Michelangelo Antonioni, David Cronenberg, John Boorman, Hal Ashby, and Hugh Hudson. The bad news is that this week’s releases include some of these estimable auteurs’ worst films. Now, I’m aware that Zabriskie Point and M. Butterfly have their defenders. However, I’m not sure people were exactly clamoring for a DVD of Beyond Rangoon or director’s cuts of Revolution and Lookin’ to Get Out, no matter how excited Jon Voight is about the latter. At least they’re not in a box set, so you Zabriskie fans can finally watch stuff blow up real good at the end without having to buy a DVD of Al Pacino fighting the Redcoats as well. Also this week: Falling Down Deluxe Edition (Warner).

Now that Hollywood has seen fit to make Land of the Lost into an expensive summer movie, it was inevitable that Land of the Lost: The Complete Series (Universal) would be hitting stores in advance of that. Or if you’re more into the whole cop-show thing, this week also sees the release of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: The Ninth Year (Universal) and The Closer: Season 4 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only slate includes perhaps the “man”-liest triple feature around, with new Blu-Rays of Children of Men (Universal), Cinderella Man (Universal), and Inside Man (Universal) hitting stores today. Also this week: Field of Dreams (Universal), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Extended Cut (Warner), Seabiscuit (Universal), Spy Game (Universal), and True Romance Unrated Cut (Warner).

In the words of Annette Hanshaw, “that’s all.”

In Other Blogs Goes to Hawaii

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule previews the summer movie schedule. “But even with the proof, in Star Trek, that my expectations could be so fundamentally off-base, it’s still hard for me to get excited, as Entertainment Weekly insists I should, about this summer’s big-ass slate of films. I thumbed through that 'Summer Movie Preview' issue with 'all the buzz on over 80 new films' and was bored stiff by the time I turned the page into the month of July. Really, am I supposed to care that Stephen Sommers, perpetrator of Van Helsing, has a new action blockbuster based on a toy I was bored with in 1967? Am I supposed to get all squirmy with excitement at seeing shots of a sweaty Megan Fox intercut with heavy-metal images from Michael Bay’s new movie about toys I was at least 15 years too old for when they were first popular? And despite my fondness for McG and the first Charlie’s Angels feature (about as zesty and giddily exciting as any pre-fab confection could be), that new Terminator movie just looks so goddamn glum and desperate, and overly familiar.”

GreenCine Daily’s DVD of the Week is Wise Blood. “Otherworldly in its characterizations (did I forget to mention the naïve, hyperactive 18-year-old obsessed with both a shrunken mummy and some guy in a bear suit?) but too sad or realistically perverse—even during a violent act late in the film—to be written off as a grotesque carnival, Wise Blood is not the tale of redemption or maybe accidental martyrdom that the final scenes superficially symbolize. It's about the powerlessness of existence, which is both as terrifying and absurd as that sounds.”

Beyond the Multiplex argues the importance of the original Star Trek. “For me, Star Trek and the Rolling Stones, as much as they might appear to be polar opposites -- one supremely American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the other Dionysian and pessimistic -- were the cultural phenomena that made the pre-punk-rock early '70s tolerable. A person interested in those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or Happy Days, had conceivably read a book not required by teachers and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson ponders whether one bad shot can ruin a movie. “I'm not among those who think the final shot of Hal Ashby's Being There takes a marvelously sustained balancing act and kicks it to the ground. But I can understand how somebody might feel that way. But how can just one bad decision -- maybe on screen for just a second or two -- deflate a full-length motion picture? Well, roughly the same way a pinprick in a balloon can, I guess. It can puncture the thin membrane that's sustaining the thing. Without shape and purpose, there's nothing to keep it aloft any longer.”

Finally in List-o-Mania, Spoutblog offers 10 Lost Theories Inspired by the Movies. Back to the Future Part III, anyone? “When that bright flash of light ended the episode, the Losties trapped in 1977 were returned to the present time. Or, that’s what a number of the show’s fans are predicting today. But if anyone’s been paying close attention, they’ll know that Lost has taken some cues from the Back to the Future franchise this season. So, logically, by looking at that trilogy, we know that Lost must have its denouement in the 1800s, just as the BTTF series does with Part III.”

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Forum celebrates the life and career of director Jules Dassin, an American expatriate who died last year, at the age of 96. With such pictures as the French heist picture Rififi (1955), the prison picture Brute Force (1947), and the 1948 tribute to the virtues of on-location filming The Naked City, Dassin can claim a lot of the credit for shaping the evolution of the crime genre during its ripest years; the schedule also includes everybody's favorite underappreciated Dassin film, the 1950 LOndon-set cult classic Night and the City, with Richard Widmark giving the performance of his career as an ambitious grifter whose inability to put a cap on his ingenious schemes proves the downfall of everyone around him, himself included. Also included are such rarities and oddities as the truckers' noir Thieves Highway (1949) with Richard Conte and Jack Oakie and the 1968 Up Tight, a remake of The Informer that transposes the story to the black militant scene in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Rounding things out are more than half a dozen of the films that Dassin made starring his wife, Melina Mercouri (Never on Sunday, Topkapi).

Today marks the beginning of the annual New Directors/New Films festival, which among New York film freaks marks the first real day of spring. This year's schedule begins with Amreeka, Cherien Dabis's film about a Palestinian family who immigrate to America at the time of the invasion of Iraq. The closing night attraction, on April 5, is We Live in Public, director Ondi Timoner's long-awaited follow-up to her 2004 documentary DiG!

FLORIDA: The 11th Annual Sarasota Film Festival runs March 27 through April 5. This year's festival includes a retrospective tribute to director Hal Ashby, with screenings of The Landlord, Shampoo, The Last Detail, Harold and Maude, Bound for Glory, and others, and with appearances by Ashby biographer Nick Dawson, Illeana Douglas, Norman Jewison, and Jon Voight. There's also a complete retrospective of films that document the work of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who will also appear at a Q & A.

PHILADELPHIA: There's also the Philadelphia Film Festival and Cinefest 09, starting tomorrow and running through April 6. The opening night attraction is the comedy (500) Days of Summer. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Let's assume that you're already in Philadelphia. What the hell else do you need to know?

Bound for Gory: David Carradine Takes No Prisoners in Rep Screening Appearance

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week's Mickey Rourke Award for the crazy man on the comeback trail goes to David Carradine, though in Carradine's case, the emphasis is a lot stronger on the "crazy man" part. Last Wednesday, Carradine was at the American Cinematheque for a screening of the 1976 Hal Ashby film Bound for Glory, in which he played Woody Guthrie. Carradine kept up a running commentary throughout much of the film, then jumped up on stage, guitar at the ready, to participate in a Q & A with film critic Kevin Thomas. They were joined by Carradine'ss co-star Ronny Cox and the movie's legendary, 87-year-old cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who Thomas spotted in the audience. The movie was showing as part of series of personal favorites hand-picked by Thomas, but as Carradine got wound up, it became clear that he and Cox were just along for the ride.

In what is shaping up as the definitive account of this well-blogged-about event, Chris Willman writes that Carradine immediately commandeered the microphone and that his flood of anecdotes was "entertaining as all-get-out, in a had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way." There were signs of friction, though, when Carradine said that when he got cast as Guthrie, he knew nothing about the singer except that he'd written "Goodnight, Irene", and Wexler, who may or may not have been stepping on one of the star's jokes, helpfully piped up to say that "Goodnight, Irene" was actually written by Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. But then Carradine said that labor unions don't serve the same purpose they did in Guthrie's day, and the wheels started to come off the wagon. This earned him some gentle chiding from the other people on stage, and then a woman in the audience began to holler at him. In his present-tense account, Willman writes: "Carradine starts shouting back, which might've been okay if he wasn't yelling right into the microphone, and it doesn't sound pretty. The woman doesn't let up, either, so for about two minutes both of them are going at it at once. She's the more obnoxious one, but because he's five times as loud, he's coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up while others angrily holler 'Let her speak!' A couple guys in my vicinity start shouting 'Let's hear from Haskell Wexler !' About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this--one of them, almost unnoticed, being Cox, who makes the smoothest getaway of all time." As for Wexler, the director of Medium Cool and Latino demurred that he wasn't there to talk about politics, which has to be an all-time first and may be interpreted by some biblical scholars as a sign of the coming end of days. Carradine finally tried to get the crowd back on his side by showing his willingness to engage in debate by throwing the microphone to the woman in the audience. Unfortunately, it turns out that there's a reason why Carradine was never cast as Sandy Koufax. The pitch went short and the mike bounced off the head of Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber--"fortunately for Carradine," notes Willman, "...probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge."

When the subject turned to the look of the film, Wexler got to listen to Carradine declare that the D.P. "got an Academy Award for ruining my movie." He mentions that this is one of his all-time favorite lines, just in case Wexler doesn't know that he's been springing it on people at every opportunity lo these past three decades. (No doubt it really broke up the crew on The Warrior and the Sorceress.) Carradine complained that Wexler made the Depression look too pretty and asserts that Ashby wanted to fire him--a charge calculated to really get under Wexler's skin, since Bound for Glory marked an upturn in his fortunes after he was fired from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Jeffrey Wells has posted an mp3 of part of the discussion at his Hollywood Elsewhere blog; there, you can hear Wexler, sounding a little more pissed-off than a man his age maybe ought to get, insist that any difficulties he had with Hal Ashby were temporary and fueled by the director's coke habit. Carradine shrugs that all this proves is that Wexler is "a little down on people that snorted cocaine." He then goes into a reverie about what a titanic coke fiend Ashby was, then says that "Even Quentin Tarantino doesn't beat Hal Ashby...", and you can hear the crowd tense up, thinking that he's about to say something to the effect that Ashby was an even bigger coke addict that QT. Much to the room's collective relief, Carradine instead finishes, "...in my list of my favorite directors." Then he adds, "And Quentin is incredible. And he's a big cocaine freak, too!"

In the end, Carradine and Wexler found it in themselves to give each other a goodbye hug, even after Wexler pointed out that for all his supposed trespasses against the ideal look of the Woody Guthrie story, he worked with Ashby on three other movies--unlike Carradine, who never worked with him again. (However, a couple of those movies were Second Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out, two films that sealed the fate of Ashby's later career by having trouble getting released at all, with good reason. For his part, Carradine, in the course of extolling Ashby as a "fucking genius", declared that the director had never made a single movie that couldn't be described as "one of the best fucking movies ever made," then reeled off a list of titles that seemed to be based on the idea that Ashby's career ended in the 1970s.) Snapping awake, Kevin Thomas called the evening to a close by thanking the distinguished gentlemen for having provided him with "some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking."

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

The Curse of the Rolling Stones

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

My profuse apologies for the lame Harry Potter prank. Here’s your actual Scorsese news of the day, concerning a movie that does exist: the new Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light. Scorsese, as you may know, is no stranger to the rock and roll music. An editor on Woodstock, director of both the quintessential concert film The Last Waltz and the acclaimed Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Scorsese was also an early adopter of the wall-to-wall classic rock approach to movie scoring, for better or for worse. His frequent use of Rolling Stones music, in particular “Gimme Shelter,” has become something of a running joke, with Mick Jagger noting that Shine a Light may be the first Scorsese movie that doesn’t feature the 1969 track.

“I'm not really that knowledgeable about how music is put together,” Scorsese told the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview from the set of his upcoming adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island. “I love music. I wish I could write or perform music. I can't do it. I love it, and it's one of my main sources of information. I was fascinated that if Jagger would sing a line in lyrics, Keith (Richards) would respond with two notes on his guitar or a strum. I found I wanted to capture all that. I wanted to capture the look on Keith's face when he decided to respond to that lyric.”

The project may seem a tad redundant to anyone familiar with the cinematic history of the Stones. A number of concert films precede Shine a Light, and as the L.A. Times notes, most of them have been touched by controversy and even tragedy. “Most infamously, the 1970 film Gimme Shelter by the Maysles brothers documented the nightmarish scene the previous year at Altamont Speedway, where the Hells Angels were hired as security but went on a rampage. One 18-year-old concert-goer was stabbed and stomped to death. There had been other dark tinges to the film library. The Rock and Roll Circus (recorded in 1968 but not released until 1996), directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, turned out to be a grim time capsule as the last public performance of Stones guitarist Brian Jones. The politically ominous Sympathy for the Devil (filmed in 1968 and released in 1970) was beset by a studio fire, the arrest of Jones on drug charges and a dispute between director Jean-Luc Godard and the producer that climaxed with a fistfight at the premiere. Then there was Let's Spend the Night Together, directed by Hollywood rebel Hal Ashby, who filmed the band in 1981 at Arizona's Sun Devil Stadium and then hours later was wheeled out of the band's hotel on an ambulance gurney after slumping into a drug overdose."

You’d think the senior citizen Stones would have put all that behind them, but even Shine a Light fell victim to the Stones movie curse. No, we’re not talking about the mysterious appearance by Christina Aguilera (“I'm still not sure who that is,” says Keith Richards), but the death of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who stumbled backstage and hit his head, never to recover. “I loved him,” says Richards. “But you know, what better way to go? Backstage at a Stones show? That's how I wanna go.”

Stones, Scorsese Rock the Berlin Film Festival

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's movie about the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light, has opened the Berlin Film Festival, marking "the first time a major film festival has dared to open with a non-fiction movie." Scorsese has been auditioning for this job for a long time. He worked on as an editor on such earlier rock docs as Woodstock, The Medicine Ball Caravan, and Elvis on Tour long before redefining the use of rock music in narrative movies in Mean Streets (where Robert De Niro's crazy badass Johnny Boy makes a show-boating entrance gliding into a bar to the tune of "Jumpin' Jack Flash") and perfecting the concert-documentary form with the 1978 The Last Waltz. As for the Stones, this project represents something of a return to one of their old habits — linking up with a name filmmaker to perhaps capture the "definitive" Rolling Stones experience on film — that for most of the past several years has been sublimated by Pay-Per-View TV gigs. (Classic examples include Jean-Luc Godard's studio-set Sympathy for the Devil, the Maysles brothers' end-of-the-60s Gimme Shelter, and Hal Ashby's 1983 Let's Spend the Night Together, which turned out as an accidental record of why the 1980s would not be remembered as the creative high point of either the Stones' or Hal Ashby's careers. The most notable of all these films is probably Robert Frank's 1972 Cocksucker Blues, which Mick Jagger had legally suppressed, thus giving it automatic street cred.) The new movie, which reportedly brought the house down in Berlin, was filmed over the course of two days at New York City's Beacon Theater in 2006, with guest appearances by Jack White, Buddy Guy, and Christina Aguilera, by an all-star camera crew headed by Robert Richardson. (The performance footage is intercut with highlights from decades' worth of Stones interviews. Questioner: What do you do before going on stage? Keith Richards: "I wake up." Not at a couple of shows I've seen, you didn't. Hiiiiiii-oh!) In addition to giving audiences the chance to see the band perform some of its standard numbers on a big screen, the movie also gave Scorsese the chance to preserve one of his standard numbers: it opens with him having a high-pitched meltdown because nobody will give him a finalized song list, and without it, he can't be sure that he'll have one of his seventeen cameras pointed right where he wants it for the first shot.

The Rep Report (November 27 - December 4)

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene, who died last summer, gets his first major posthumous respective at Film Forum from November 30 to December 12. The series kicks off with Xala, the 1974 satire that climaxes with a memorably ghastly, well, spitting scene, and includes the early works that put Sembene on the map (Black Girl, Emitai) as well as the more recent films (Faat-Kine and his last movie, Moolaade) that showed that he was still in strapping form. This is a rare chance not just to pay tribute to a fallen master but to catch up with the work of a major filmmaker who remains sorely underrepresented on DVD.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has been dead for a good long time now, but doesn't seem to have become much less controversial, an accomplishment that might have put a smile on his face. The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 28 – December 4) covers his career from the neo-realist debut film Accattone to the hyper-scandalous, posthumously released Salo. On December 4, Lincoln Center also presents the U.S. premiere of Accattone in Jazz, a live presentation in which "Pasolini's celebrated screenplay for Accattone is revisited by Italian movie star Valerio Mastandrea, as he weaves a unique interplay of words and music together with Italian jazz legends and longtime collaborators Roberto Gatto and Danilo Rea."

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's twelve-film Max Ophuls retrospective begins on November 28 with a week-long run of a new print of the 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, the best work done in Hollywood by an artist who got too few opportunities to work at anything like his full capacities. It ain't The Earrings of Madame de. . . , but boy, will it do. . .

SAN FRANCISCO: From November 27-30, the Castro salutes director Hal Ashby, with three nights of double features, starting with the 1979 Being There, paired with the cult classic Harold and Maude. The real keeper may be on the 30th, when the theater shows the masterful, Robert Towne-scripted Shampoo and Ashby's amazing, unavailable-on-DVD debut film, The Landlord (1970).

— Phil Nugent