The Screengrab : i'm not there

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, as part of our ongoing coverage of the South-By-Southwest Film, Music & Interactive Festival, we decided to get our collective groove on with a list of our favorite movies about real-live musicians.

But who says musicians have to be real to be memorable? Sure, Mitch & Mickey may be fictional characters portrayed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Christopher Guest’s faux-folkumentary, A Mighty Wind...yet despite the fact the duo never really existed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my lovely Polish bride and I danced at our wedding reception to that non-existent classic hit of sweet, sweet romance, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow." And, sure, the real Sid Vicious was nice and all...but I have equally fond memories of Gary Oldman’s fictional version in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

To blur the lines of fiction and reality even further, this week’s list also includes movies about make-believe people affected by real musicians and real musicians transforming themselves into make-believe people as your pals at the Screengrab salute OUR FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC: FICTION EDITION!

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

Yes, we all know it's hilarious. But This Is Spinal Tap is a classic for more reasons than simple hilarity. This was one of the first major films to be classified a "mockumentary", and in order for the style to work at all, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had to get all the details down cold. This meant concocting an elaborate backstory involving multiple group names, format changes, and a parade of dozens of drummers who met their respective ends under bizarre circumstances. But beyond the more obvious references, Spinal Tap had to walk, talk, and play like a real aging rock band, from the principles writing and performing their own songs before actual crowds to the shorthand that the band members have with each other, as when Nigel (Guest) calls out "GSM" during rehearsal to signal that he wants to practice the song "Gimme Some Money." The gambit worked -- numerous moviegoers at the time were convinced that Spinal Tap was a real touring act, and the movie quickly became a favorite of legitimate rock acts, who identified with such scenes as the group getting lost on their way to the stage. Soon enough, life imitated farce, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer began touring as Spinal Tap, even releasing a second album in 1992 entitled Break Like the Wind. Even today, Spinal Tap endures, both in its cinematic form and its real-life incarnation, with a tour coming later this spring.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002)

Steve Coogan has a motor-mouthed smart-guy comedian's dream role as Tony Wilson, TV reporter, pop theorist, and the man behind Factory Records, which brought the sound of Manchester to a postpunk world. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie, which also provides plum roles for Shirley Henderson (as Wilson's first wife), Paddy Considine (as his sidekick Rob Gretton), Andy Serkis (as the deranged genius producer Martin Hannett), and Sean Hayes (as Ian Curtis), covers the first public performance by the Sex Pistols, the rise and end of Joy Division, the band's resurrection as New Order, the slaphappy career of the Happy Mondays and the coming of rave culture, and Factory's death throes, with Coogan's Wilson walking through it explaining himself and the culture he's part of, always talking a mile a minute. Coming from the cerebral Winterbottom, the movie itself could be called a sustained work of rock criticism, except that rock crit hasn't been this funny since Lester Bangs swigged his last bottle of Romilar.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

John Cameron Mitchell energetically transposed his hit off-Broadway show to celluloid with 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual punk rock goddess named Hedwig (Mitchell) who narrates her life story while travelling across the country playing second-rate venues, her shot at stardom stymied by a former lover and disciple (Michael Pitt) who became a music sensation by stealing her songs. Hedwig’s is a lunatic odyssey which begins in East Berlin where, as a young boy, she undergoes a sex change operation in order to marry her U.S. army lover and escape the Iron Curtain, and which is partially conveyed via a bevy of musical numbers and animated sequences that are striking in both their ingenuity and power. Bolstered by rollicking, blistering tunes that are as well suited for arenas as they are for the stage and screen, Mitchell’s film is rowdy, bombastic, idiosyncratic and heartfelt, a combination to which only a select few movie musicals can legitimately lay claim.

THE DOORS (1991)

A close friend once derided The Doors’ music as “bad poetry with keyboards,” and while I’m generally inclined to concur with his assessment, there’s nonetheless something transfixing about Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which has the type of on-the-edge, trippy-druggy dynamism that typified the director’s creatively fertile early-‘90s period. Stone’s anything-goes aesthetic showmanship is an ideal approach for a portrait of the L.A. band and, in particular, lead singer Jim Morrison, whose larger-than-life persona – drunken fool, callous bastard, earnest poet, sex god – naturally appealed to a filmmaker fascinated with mythologizing socio-political icons. The Doors oozes reverence without alienating those who might think the film’s subjects and their classic-rock canon fall somewhat short of greatness, due in part to uniformly superb performances led by Val Kilmer’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the lizard king, but mostly thanks to Stone’s lack of inhibition, his madman stylistic excesses (and yes, I’m including the Indian in the desert), supremely well-attuned to the careening rollercoaster energy of The Doors.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I'M NOT THERE (2007)

With these two films, Todd Haynes has produced the finest examples of fictional rock movies that I can imagine. Both have taken the lives of real rock musicians -- Bowie & Iggy in the former, Dylan in the latter -- and played up the mythic qualities to create a transcendent hyper-reality. No, Bowie and Iggy and Dylan didn't really live like this. But speaking from the point of view of poetry and mythology and literature, these are more true than mere reality can manage. That's what myths and stories are about: heightening everyday reality into a more universal truth. Most people's lives aren't up to the examples set by Ulysses or Hercules or even Ishmael or Natty Bumppo. But I think few would deny that there's a universal recognition of the truth in the lives of these wandering heroes. Celebrities sometimes play the role of real-life analog to idealized heroes. That's why so many urban myths leap up about the lives of celebrities; people need to believe in the extraordinariness of others. Rock musicians in particular often play the debauched Dionysian role of the glorious artistic mess, the pleasure-seeker who indulges in sex and drugs to feed his or her creative output. With these movies, Haynes pushes past the mere facts to feed the stories, and the results are fascinating, part narrative and part critique. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale plays a journalist in an Orwellian Britain of the late '80s. A series of events causes him to investigate -- and recall -- the heyday of glam rock and its figurehead Brian Slade, who is basically the Platonic ideal of David Bowie (with elements of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure) as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Slade's closest associate is Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is mostly Iggy with a little Lou Reed thrown in. The two are lovers, and Slade gleefully expresses his fluid sense of sexuality. So there's three layers right there: Orwellian future, permissive past, rockers as trangressors. But there's more. Haynes dares to suggest that the bisexual/creative impulse was a gift from aliens (or angels) to Oscar Wilde in the Victorian era, and has passed down through the ages to the instigators of glam. That's, well, audacious as all hell. Haynes specifically compares Slade to both Wilde and his horrendous creation Dorian Gray. So, that's at least two more layers, maybe more. So, yes: gay theory, rock theory, lit theory, treatises on repression and freedom combined with the cults of youth and beauty. There's a lot going on in this movie. And it rocks like hell.

In I'm Not There, Haynes similarly adopts all of the myths about Bob Dylan into a narrative that's both fractured and more meaningful than a straightforward film could convey. There are six Dylans in this film, which is fewer Dylans than real life has given us. But these six Dylans represent the greatest periods of his life. Marcus Carl Franklin, an 11-year-old African-American boy, represents the youngest Dylan myth, the farmboy who rides the rails calling himself Woody Guthrie, learning America's traditional folk and blues music along the way. Ben Whishaw plays the interior Dylan, the playful interviewee who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud and comments cryptically on the rest of Dylan's life. Christian Bale plays the young and sincere New York folksinger Dylan, the socially active songwriter who calls himself Jack Rollins and travels to the South to sing to Civil Rights workers in a field. Rollins will later morph into Pastor John, the born-again Christian Dylan of the late '70s and early '80s. Heath Ledger plays the actor Dylan, the one who is horrible to his beautiful wife and torn in two by their divorce. His name is Robbie Clark and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is Claire, and their story evokes the mid-'70s Dylan of Renaldo and Clara and Blood On The Tracks. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the rock star Dylan of the mid-'60s and Don't Look Back. Quinn is explicitly shown as dead from a motorcycle accident at the beginning of the movie, which references Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident which effectively killed off his Don't Look Back-era persona. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, who is the Dylan of The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Gere's Billy lives in Riddle County, where the carnivalesque/Old West/Old Testament world of the Basement Tapes springs to life. So, that's the shallowest overview I could provide, and it more or less ate up all my space. Layers and layers in these films. Watch 'em again. And again.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The problem with biopics, as most cineastes know, is the way they often tend to play like a greatest hits of their subjects’ lives, packed with historical moments and celebrity impersonations rather than realistic character development or any kind of specific story worth telling.

But Gus Van Sant’s Milk vaulted out of the specialty box office charts and into the mainstream top ten largely on the strength of a gripping, inspirational (and, sadly, still timely) story of persecution, triumph and tragedy, featuring a classic protagonist/antagonist duo embodied by Sean Penn’s crusading gay rights activist and Josh Brolin’s conflicted assassin.

And so, with Oscar buzz clinging to Van Sant, Penn and Brolin like...wait for it...yes, milk mustachios, we here at the Screengrab decided now would be the perfect time to Walk Hard through the positively true story of OUR FAVORITE BIOPICS OF ALL TIME!

ED WOOD (1994)

Tim Burton’s tribute to the so-called “worst director of all time” is a two-fer: while Johnny Depp’s relatively obscure title character is the focus, the Oscar-winning main attraction was Martin Landau’s portrayal of a lusty, foul-mouthed, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in the final years of his life, after Hollywood had kicked him to the curb and the once proud actor could only find work rolling around in a lake with a giant rubber octopus. Lugosi’s son, Béla Junior, initially criticized Burton’s film for its inaccuracies with regard to his father (who, for example, was married at the time of his death and rarely used profanity, at least according to friends like Forrest J. Ackerman, Ed Wood’s one-time “illiterary” agent). But what makes the film great is that docu-drama realism was never the point: we don’t necessarily see events as they happened, but rather the way Ed Wood, Jr. (and, to a certain extent, Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and cartoonist/old Hollywood enthusiast Drew Friedman) perceived them: in surreal, melodramatic black & white fantasias where an alcoholic transvestite wannabe could actually transcend death and live forever like his idol, Count Dracula.

I'M NOT THERE (2007)

If ever there was an artist who required no further mythologizing, it would have to be Bob Dylan. A conventional biopic of the Bard might well be unbearable, which is why it's a good thing Todd Haynes, World's Cleverest Film Student, signed on for the task. Haynes takes the well-known Dylan mythos, scrambles it all together and then bounces it off a series of funhouse mirrors, delighting in the ever more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors play six different versions of Dylan, among them Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), an 11-year-old African-American boy who rides the rails with hobos, spinning tall tales of a rambling youth with no direction home; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), an alternate universe troubadour whose Dylanesque career unfolds as scenes from a mockumentary in the mode of A Mighty Wind; and Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who is playing Jack Rollins in a conventional biopic called Grain of Sand. (Sample dialogue: "I'm only a pawn in their game!") The standout is Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for an Oscar for her eerie take on hipster-dandy Jude Quinn, supernova post-Beatles pop star. In appropriating and manipulating various filmmaking styles, Haynes is striving for a cinematic equivalent to the way Dylan adapted and exploded traditional folk forms in his music. The resulting surreal swirl recalls Dylan's most fertile creative period, his mid-60s "thin, wild mercury music" wherein characters ranging from Paul Revere to Jack the Ripper to Cecil B. DeMille could inhabit the same soundscape. Through these methods, Haynes is attempting a biography not so much of a man, but of an artistic sensibility. If I'm Not There is occasionally impenetrable, pretentious or overly impressed with its own cleverness, that only serves to make it a more accurate, warts-and-all portrait, without delving into tabloid trash. You may love it or hate it, but you get the feeling its subject wouldn't want it any other way.

LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1972)

This soapy treatment of the life of Billie Holiday is not beloved by jazz critics or historical purists, who recoil from its sloppy handling of the facts of the singer's life and gag on Diana Ross' pop stylings when she sings Holiday classics such as "Strange Fruit." But the movie remains highly enjoyable when taken on the terms that it set for itself in 1972: a chance for African-American audiences to wallow in the kind of old-Hollywood melodrama that had been spun from the lives of white celebrities such as Lillian Roth and Ruth Etting, with a dash of blaxploitation attitude for flavor. (It turns out that Billie needed a toxically blond white man to turn her onto heroin. Who knew?) Ross' singing here takes a back seat to her acting, which should have marked the start of a major movie career. She proved she had the talent, but once she'd tasted success in Hollywood, her diva gene ate her common sense alive. Her scenes with her piano man sidekick, Richard Pryor, have a special poignance today, because it's hard to remember that there was a time when Diana Ross and Richard Pryor occupied the same planet.

GENTLEMAN JIM (1942)

This affably sanitized life of heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett (Errol Flynn) is probably the most entertaining example of the boxer-biopic genre that Martin Scorsese was to bury for all time with Raging Bull. It also provided its star, Errol Flynn, with a rare chance to appear onscreen in street clothes instead of leggings or cowboy gear. The premise is that Corbett was the first brainiac who conquered his opponents by means of the "scientific" method, which enables him to whup such swaggering sides of beef as John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond). This allows Flynn to win his fights and still display a glib enough tongue to pitch woo at society gal Alexis Smith. This is also the movie that was in theaters when Flynn was dragged into court on hinky charges of statutory rape, a sideshow that turned out to do the movie not the least bit of harm at the box office.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)

In this updating of Love Me or Leave Me (the 1955 cult classic in which Doris Day, as singer Ruth Etting, was physically abused by James Cagney as her husband-manager), Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne play Ike and Tina Turner, from their days starting out together on the R & B touring circuit and the period when electrifying star performances on-stage alternated with one-sided sparring matches backstage to the day that Tina, having discovered the untapped strength at her core with the help of a chanting regimen, starting punching back. The closest thing to a flaw in Bassett's performance is that she didn't have Turner's legs, a problem that today would probably be corrected with the help of CGI; she compensates with her slugger's arms, which make the scenes of abuse easier to get through, since you can't help but anticipate the moment when this woman realizes that she can take care of herself. Fishburne may be even better, tapping into deep reserves of rage that a lesser actor would have been tempted to take out on the costume designer. This is probably the finest lead performance ever given by an actor who at one point is forced to don hot pants and a Prince Valiant haircut.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Review: “Synecdoche, New York”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:00:00 GMT

It’s not often that two monumental works of art fall in your lap within 24 hours (unless you’re a clumsy custodian at the Louvre), but something like that happened to me last week when I picked up Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8 the night before attending a screening of Synecdoche, New York. Other than this coincidence of timing, the two wouldn’t appear to have much to do with each other. The former is just a collection of outtakes in much the same way Moby Dick is just a fishing story, from an artist who has nothing left to prove but keeps proving it anyway. The latter is the most ambitious, challenging, frustrating and thrilling American movie since I’m Not There, which happened to be about Bob Dylan (see, it all comes full circle) – maybe even since Mulholland Drive. Those two films are good points of reference, actually; if you hated them both, Synecdoche probably isn’t a movie for you.

Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut shares with those movies a dreamworld logic, puzzle-like narrative, identity confusion and a filmmaking intelligence engaged with the material on a sub-atomic level. In each case I walked out of the theater feeling as if I was setting foot on a different world than the one I’d left two hours earlier. Some of the same qualities can be found in Tell Tale Signs, which has something else in common with Synecdoche: The specter of death looms large over many of the Dylan tracks – and permeates every frame of Kaufman’s film. Most American movies are comfort food, but not this one; it offers only the comfort of knowing we’re not alone in our own existential confusion.

If it seems like I’m putting off the plot summary, well, it’s sort of like John McCain’s debate line about nailing jello to a wall. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady, New York. Caden would seem to have it all: a fulfilling career (his production of Death of a Salesman has won praise for the innovative casting of young actors as old people), a wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), who is herself an accomplished artist, and an adorable four-year-old daughter Olive. Yet Caden exudes morbid dissatisfaction; when he opens the morning paper, he goes straight for the obituaries, and his health is deteriorating under the weight of numerous mysterious ailments. Soon it’s all falling apart. Adele decamps to Berlin for an art show, taking Olive with her, and seems unlikely ever to return. Time is slipping through Caden’s fingers, with months and even years passing in the blink of an eye. It’s time to make a statement – to leave a legacy.

Caden uses a genius grant to construct a massive set inside a New York City warehouse, where he will stage the most ambitious theatrical work ever conceived. The project never receives a proper title – Caden considers Simulacrum but not, to our knowledge, Synecdoche – but it sprawls on for many blocks and many years as Caden struggles to get a handle on it. Since he is compelled to put everything into the production, he needs to find someone to play himself, as well as his assistant and one-time lover Hazel (Samantha Morton). He casts Sammy (Tom Noonan), who has been following him for 20 years and thus already knows everything about him, and Tammy (Emily Watson), with whom he is soon having an affair. The production becomes even more complicated – and the line between artifice and reality further blurred –when, eventually, he must cast actors to play both Sammy and Tammy.

It sounds confusing, but I haven’t even scratched the surface. (It was especially confusing for me as I tend to mix up Samantha Morton and Emily Watson anyway.) For instance, what to make of the absurdist touches, ranging from green poop to a house perpetually on fire? One viewing hardly seems adequate, given the narrative and thematic layers upon layers. Yet Synecdoche, New York is not just an intellectual exercise or postmodern mind game. It’s clear that Caden is, on some level, a synecdoche for Kaufman, and that his would-be masterpiece wrestling with all the great questions finds its real-life equivalent in the movie we’re watching. (The major difference being that Kaufman actually finished his version.) But as frustrating and opaque as Synecdoche can sometimes be, its emotional impact is undeniable. Heartbreak, sorrow, dread and regret…these are not the ingredients of the feel-good movie of the year – just the best one.

Related:
Charlie Kaufman Gets Wired
Screengrab Exclusive: "Synecdoche, New York" Clip

Double Threats: Dylan in the Movies

Hayden Childs — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Here’s an idea I have for an ongoing series: Double Threats, in which I discuss the acting careers of people mostly known for other artistic endeavors. Or conversely, the other artistic endeavors of people primarily known as actors. Inspired by tonight’s debate between the quick-witted enigmatic younger man and the proverbial Mr. Jones who seemed unsure of what, exactly, was going on here, didn't he?... OK, I’m stretching at this point, aren’t I? Actually, I’ve just had Bob Dylan on the brain recently and thought he might be a good test subject for this idea.

The double-aughts have been pretty good for Dylan in the movies. The man who made a household phrase out of “the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” managed to baffle critics and audiences alike with 2003’s Masked And Anonymous, which (this may surprise you, unless you saw it) he wrote himself. Then Martin Scorsese made the epic 3+ hour documentary No Direction Home in 2005, which included footage that shocked and amazed rock fans, such as the famous “Judas” moment from the misnamed Royal Albert Hall Concert, Dylan at the March on Washington in 1963, or (and this blew my mind) contemporary gnomic-old-man Dylan cracking a smile. And then 2007 saw Todd Haynes’ brilliant I’m Not There, which created an alternate universe where all of Dylan’s mythologies sprang to life.

Masked And Anonymous wasn’t Dylan’s first acting role, of course. Prior to that movie, he appeared as a chauffeur in a 1999 movie called Paradise Cove. I confess that I’ve never seen it, and his role was apparently miniscule, so let’s move on. In 1989, he had an uncredited role in the Alan Smithee-directed Backtrack. The Smithee name is always a sign of quality -- and we’re all on the same page here, right? (“Quality” is my clever code word for “utter crap.”) Moving on. Two years before that was 1987’s Hearts of Fire, which starred Dylan as a rock star with the supernatural ability to bore everyone senseless. At least, that’s what my vague memory tells me. I also seem to recall that he turned into The Hulk at one point, so I’m willing to concede that I might have fallen asleep somewhere in there.

By now you’re wondering: has Dylan been in anything good? Well, there’s the four-hour Renaldo and Clara from 1978. I have a simple test to assess how much you’ll enjoy this movie: add up the number of Dylan albums you listen to regularly (and you’re free to define “regularly” as you and your maker see fit) and then divide that number by the total number of albums he’s released (32 studio albums, 13 live albums, 14 compilations, and a near-infinite number of bootlegs, but you don’t have to count them unless you feel so compelled). Should you hit somewhere around 40 percent, then you might like Renaldo and Clara. You’ve probably already seen it, though, so, uh, never mind. Finally, before Renaldo and Clara, Dylan was in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 great-on-the-square Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.

Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is a masterpiece, but it’s a messy one. I guess you could say the same thing about some of Dylan’s 70s albums, too. In the movie, Dylan plays Alias, a mostly wordless guy who hangs around Billy The Kid looking shockingly similar to a rock star named Bob Dylan. It’s not a big stretch for the man. But it is a pleasant, unassuming role that complements his sometimes-powerful, mostly-pleasant and unassuming soundtrack for the movie.

According to movie lore (and, uh, Wikipedia), Peckinpah had never heard of Dylan before the movie and had to be talked into meeting him by Rudy Wurlitzer (who wrote it) and Kris Kristofferson (who played Billy). Dylan was a fan of Peckinpah’s movies, especially the elegaic Ride The High Country. So Dylan played Peckinpah a couple of songs he’d written after reading the script, and Peckinpah, sentimental cuss that he was, was blown away. Peckinpah brought in Jerry Fielding to help Dylan score the movie. Fielding despised Dylan and everything he stood for and was thoroughly unimpressed with the music Dylan wrote for the death scene of Sheriff Colin Baker (spoiler!).

Baker, who was played by Slim Pickens, has a quite moving death scene, one of the most poignant in any Peckinpah movie, and that’s saying something. Fielding pushed and prodded Dylan to come up with something better, and Dylan responded with that obscure ditty “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” (Obscure? I kid, I kid.) Fielding, not exactly a man of the times, hated the song so much that he quit the production. Dylan toiled on without him. Later, as with so many Peckinpah movies, the studio took control away in editing, and the theatrical release chopped Dylan’s role down to not-much and cut his music into pieces. The 2005 DVD release restores the movie to its director’s cut and adds a different version that combines elements of the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, and previously unreleased scenes. None of these versions, however, expand Dylan’s role into anything major or even coherent, but they’re certainly worth a viewing. Apparently, most of Dylan's role was shot using a camera with a defective lens, so there wasn't much left for the movie. It’s a shame no one's brought his acting chops to cinema yet. That Dylan guy would have killed as the lead in Don’t Look Back.

Morning Deal Report: James Franco Will Howl

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

There aren’t too many roles suited to both David Cross and James Franco, but apparently the late beat poet Allen Ginsberg is one of them. Cross played Ginsberg in I’m Not There last year, and Franco will take over in the biopic Howl. “Telling Pictures documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman will make their narrative writing, producing and directing debut with the 1950s-era tale, focusing on the obscenity trial launched to censor Ginsberg's groundbreaking book-length poem,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Alan Alda, David Strathairn, Mary-Louise Parker and Jeff Daniels will also star.

The glut of upcoming time travel movies just got a little, er, gluttier. New Line has acquired the Richard Doetsch novel The Thirteenth Hour. “Described as a cross between The Bourne Identity and The Time Traveler's Wife, tome follows a man accused of brutally murdering his wife who is given a chance to save her by going back in time, in one-hour increments. He puts together clues to figure out not only who killed her but why,” Variety reports. Memento just called – it wants its gimmick back.

Spike Lee, who is also attached to a time travel movie, will also find time to squeeze in a sequel to Inside Man. The Hollywood Reporter says “Inside Man 2, as the project is tentatively being called, will pick up on the characters and dynamic but not the story line of the original.” Clint Eastwood was not available for comment.

Related:
Franco Enjoys Interview
Time Traveling with Spike Lee

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Don’t worry, Batfans, this isn’t another post picking on The Best Movie Ever – we’ve got that covered elsewhere. No, this is a post picking on dipshits who view anything that goes thermonuclear in the pop culture as validation of their political leanings. You’ve probably seen them by now – the “Batman is Bush” editorials, the most notable (and laughable) of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week under the byline of right-wing thriller author Andrew Klaven.

“There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war,” Klaven gasses. “Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.”

Klaven has plenty of evidence to support this seemingly dubious proposition. For instance, if you squint a little, the bat-signal looks a bit like a “W.” And…well, that’s about it, but then we have Andrew Bolt in the Australian Herald Sun, claiming that Christopher Nolan made a film proving Bush right, though he had to “disguise it a little, so journalists wouldn't freak and the film's more fashionable stars wouldn't walk.” Boy, I betcha Christian Bale feels silly now! Bolt has also noticed the bat-signal’s similarity to a W, and goes on to equate Batman beating the crap out of the Joker with waterboarding, claiming “Batman has resorted to the last hope to make this terrorist squeal, because only the Joker has the information the police need to save two goodies who have just minutes left to live.” This sort of ignores the fact that the Joker intended to reveal this information all along and that the police didn’t save those two “goodies” at all, but let’s bear with him. Bolt goes on to cite Batman’s surveillance of Gotham City’s cell phones as another telling similarity to Bush. Except, well, nobody ever elected Batman to any office, nor did he ever swear to defend the Constitution or uphold civil liberties. That’s sort of what makes him a vigilante, no? The movie knows what he’s doing is wrong because Morgan Freeman says so, and everybody knows Morgan Freeman is the voice of God (or the Magical Negro, if you must go there).

These theories really fall apart when the editorial writers equate the Joker to Osama bin Laden. Think about it – if The Dark Knight was really an allegory for the Bush administration, Batman would half-heartedly pursue the Joker for the first few minutes of the movie and then let him escape and spend the rest of his time dicking around in Metropolis looking for Mr. Mxyzptlk and his weapons of mass destruction. Yet I do think these numbnuts are onto something with the Batman/Bush parallel – just not in the way they think. See, Batman doesn’t particularly remind me of George W. Bush, but Bruce Wayne sure does. That is, the public Bruce Wayne – the drunk party boy, the son of privilege, the out-to-lunch executive falling asleep during important meetings. (And this is not even the first time Bale has reminded me of Bush – his accent in I’m Not There sounded like Dubya’s worst Dylan impression.) You could conceivably make the case that the movie is actually a mockery of ol’ 43…or you could just accept that all the “war on terror” overtones are intended to lend the movie some contemporary resonance – to make it a Batman for the 21st century – and not much more than that.

Related:
Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't as Good as You Think It Is
Screengrab Review: "The Dark Knight"

The Rep Report, May 9-15

Phil Nugent — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: One of America's finest cinematographers, and an artist notable both for his consistent record of excellence and a range so vast that he seems to have none of the overworked favorite tics that often make it easier for a cameraman to develop a reputation based on his easily identifiable "style", Ed Lachman gets his , running from May 9 through the 20th. The schedule, which includes Lachman's playful vision of downtown New York in the mid-1980s as a punk playground for Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan, his harder-edged view of the city in Paul Schrader's nocturnal Light Sleeper, David Byrne's tour of the malls of middle America True Stories, and the Dylan kaleidoscope I'm Not There, kicks off with a screening of one of Lachman's rare directing jobs (in collaboration with Larry Clark), the controversial 2002 Ken Park, which has never been picked up for distribution.

The 24th Annual Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival opened last night and runs through May 18 at the Museum of Fine Arts. Among the most buzzed-about films included in the 24 programs include Dominique Cardona and Laurie Albert’s Finn' Girl, the documentary Black, White + Grey, which profiles the photography buff and Robert Mapplethorpe patron Sam Wagstaff, and Russell Marleu's The Curiosity of Chance.

Screengrab’s “I’m Not There” Study Guide

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As you have already been informed, I’m Not There arrives on DVD today. For those of you in the “I’m sort of interested, but not really a big Dylan fan” camp, here are a few supplemental materials that may or may not enhance your appreciation of Todd Haynes’ unconventional biopic. Put away your notebooks, there will not be a test.

As you may have gleaned, I’m Not There is a cavalcade, a kaleidoscope, a veritable cinematic smoothie blending many eras and images from Dylan’s career. Mmm…smoothie. I’m sorry, where was I? Oh, yes. Throughout the film Haynes quotes, tweaks and otherwise references a number of original sources very familiar to Dylan fans but perhaps not to neophytes. Such as:

DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC (1965)

In one of the seminal moments of Dylan’s career, the one-time pride of the Greenwich Village folk scene plugged in his guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, alienating the purists in the audience and prompting Pete Seeger to announce he’d cut the power with an axe if he had one. (Haynes has some fun with this moment.) Dylan’s evolution from earnest folkie to hipster rocker can be seen in the recent documentary The Other Side of the Mirror, which collects his Newport performances from 1963 through 1965.

EAT THE DOCUMENT (1972)

Once intended as a straightforward follow-up to D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (which forms the basis of much of the Cate Blanchett segment of I’m Not There), this fragmented look at Dylan’s 1966 tour has no official release, but has been heavily bootlegged (and now, of course, YouTubed). Those seeking straightforward live concert footage are bound to be disappointed (though extended versions of many of the performances are available on the DVD of Martin Scorsese’s Dylan doc No Direction Home), but the film has its fascinations, notably footage of John Lennon sharing a car ride with a severely fucked-up Bobby D.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

This elegiac Sam Peckinpah western contains Dylan’s “acting” debut (as the mysterious outlaw Alias), but more importantly, his soundtrack composing debut, including the timeless “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which should always conjure images of Slim Pickens clutching his bloodied midsection. In the Richard Gere section of I’m Not There, Haynes creates a landscape of the Old Weird America that is equal parts Pat Garrett, The Basement Tapes and Dylan’s 1976 tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. (For more on Pat Garrett, check out Tom Block’s definitive appraisal at The High Hat.)

RENALDO AND CLARA (1978)

This one is for the completists only. In fact, I thought I was a completist and I’ve never completed it. Nearly 30 years before Haynes, Dylan himself did an impressionistic take on his own legend, with the assistance of Sam Shepherd. The nearly four hour result has long been regarded as a complete debacle, but here’s your chance to get on the ground floor of the re-evaluation. The whole thing is on YouTube if you have the stamina.

DVD Digest for May 6, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: One of the most acclaimed films of 2007 arrives to do battle with some of the most reviled releases so far in 2008. Who will prevail? Read on…

DVD of the Week: No one does musical biography like Todd Haynes. This should have been clear from his previous films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine, and his latest film, I’m Not There, lays any remaining doubts to rest. But then, when one is making a movie about Bob Dylan, how could it possibly fit into a neat little package? The Weinstein Company’s two-disc DVD of the film contains a wide variety of features, including a commentary track with Haynes, two deleted scenes, some audition tapes, a handful of documentaries, and a tribute to Heath Ledger. But most of all, there’s the film itself- I’m Not There is sometimes wondrous, sometimes frustrating, but always worthy of its subject, and this DVD should find a place in the collections of cinephiles and Dylan fans alike.

Alas, the other new arrivals on DVD aren’t nearly that noteworthy, sometimes aggressively counteracting the awesomeness of I’m Not There with their wholesale suckitude. More typical of this week’s crop is the universally detested The Hottie and the Nottie (Genius Products- how’s that for irony?), the latest attempt by its star- who I refuse to name here- to achieve total media domination. Also this week: Ice Cube and Tracy Jordan Morgan in First Sunday (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Hilary Swank in P.S. I Love You (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the long-awaited Eva Longoria Parker vehicle Over Her Dead Body (New Line); and 2006 TIFF Audience Award Winner Bella (Lions Gate). Also, this week brings the release of the heartwarming family-themed vagina dentata comedy Teeth, as well as Sony’s first step into the Bollywood market, Saawariya (also Blu-Ray). But while a few of these are worth seeing, I’d have to say this was probably the easiest week to pick a DVD of the Week in quite a while.

A few new editions of some already-on-DVD titles will be hitting stores this week as well, including: The Bridges of Madison County Deluxe Edition (Warner); Serial Mom Collector’s Edition (Focus); and a two-disc special edition of Twister (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Finally, this week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is the 2004 remake of Shall We Dance?

Sorry folks, that’s all I’ve got. Next week promises to bring more DVD goodness. Not a moment too soon, I say.

2008 Independent Spirits Award

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Independent Spirit Awards, designed as a counterpoint to the Academy Awards (and traditionally handed out the day before the Oscars ceremony) were distributed this past Saturday. It may say something about the current state of the movie industry that, at first glance, the list of nominees did not seem as glaringly different from the list of Oscar nominees as might have been expected, though if the two institutions tended to pick their nominees from basically the same talent pool, they tended to diverge in their selection of winners. Juno won for Best Picture, while its Oscar-garlanded screenwriter, Diablo Cody, took the prize for Best First Screenplay, and its star, Ellen Page, won for Best Actress. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor prize for his work in The Savages, whose writer-director, Tamara Jenkins, won for Best Screenplay. Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Actress went to Chiwetel Ejiofor (for Talk to Me) and Cate Blanchett, who dedicated her award to her I'm Not There co-star, Heath Ledger. Rounding out the major categories were Julian Schnabel's award as Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which was also honored for its cinematography, by Janusz Kaminski), John Carney's Once (winner for Best Foreign Film) and Scott Frank's The Lookout (Best First Film). The evening also marked the first appearance of a new award named in honor of the late, great Robert Altman, to honor the film that makes the most impressive use of its ensemble cast; it was given to Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. The movies got a little more independent, or at least a lot more obscure, a bit further down the list with John Eska's August Evening, winner of the John Cassavettes Award for best feature made for under $500,000. Among the hardcore independent filmmakers on hand, Eska did the best job of putting his place in the food chain, in relation to the Philip Seymour Hoffmans and the Cate Blanchetts, in pespective by taking the stage and saying that he wanted to thank his agent, the only problem being that he doesn't have one yet.

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Phil's Picks

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Let's make sure we're on the same page on this: if you bet money, household chores, or bragging rights on anything you're about to read in this post, you are out of your mind, and while I pity you, I will not admit in a court of law to ever having met you. I got off the Oscar train when I was eight years old and Sissy Spacek didn't win for Carrie; to have continued our relationship beyond that point would have been madness, madness! I claim no inside knowledge or deep understanding of how they decide these things, and the only thing I could tell you about the winners of recent years is that Jennifer Hudson won last year for Dreamgirls. (How do I know this? I was talking to someone on the phone when it was announced, and the woman I was talking to happened to have her TV set on. When Hudson's name was called out, the woman screamed. It turned out that it was a joyous scream, but until she calmed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on, my best guess was that she had just noticed that her couch was on fire.) Anyway, the only thing more completely charmless than the Oscars may be the ugly spectacle of a writer bragging about how little he cares about what he's paid to weigh in on, so now that we've just established that my opinion in this area counts for about as much as hair styling tips from Paul Wolfowitz, here goes:

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Diablo Cody takes Best Original for Juno because the voters have actually heard her name — it's not like, having come across it once, you can get it out of your head without laser surgery — and Paul Thomas Anderson takes it for Best Adaptation for There Will Be Blood, because that's what you get when you make a great movie but you aren't going to get Best Picture and the Best Director prize already taken.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Apparently this is going to go to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There, partly because Blanchett is also nominated for a Best Actress award that she is not getting to get and nominating her twice in one year without giving her anything would just seem silly. A good and sound bit of reasoning, and so I will of course reject it. And not only because I don't get the universally accepted logic by which this is agreed to be a "supporting" performance. Who the hell is she supposed to be supporting? The term ought to mean something other than "Big name actor in a role that is frequently off-screen." She's definitely the unquestioned star of her section of the movie, and while I didn't put a stop watch on it, I'll bet that she has as much screen time as any of the other Dylans. And if it turns out that Richard Gere, say, has a little more actual screen time, I'm not sure that the editor did him a favor by it. Until persuaded otherwise, I shall remain convinced that Blanchett's placement in this category is part of some conspiracy to screw over Amy Ryan, who wouldn't win anyway, because you only win an Oscar for playing a character as skanky as her Gone Baby Gone character if the Academy has already seen you in a bunch of glamour-puss roles and so knew for sure that you were acting. It's a moot point anyway, because I boldly predict that the winner will be Ruby Dee, because she has had a long and distinguished career, because she is 83 years old, because her late husband, Ossie Davis, is much missed, and because even though she didn't have much of a role in American Gangster, she did get to slap Denzel Washington, and he needed slapping.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Hal Holbrook has had a long and distinguished career and is now the same age as Ruby Dee, so if she doesn't win in her category, his chances automatically go up by 50%. But I really don't see it happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance in this category — he's a stone hoot in Charlie Wilson's War, which marks a rare example of an actor giving the Academy three different performances to select for nomination and the Academy choosing the right one. I'd think he had a real chance if it weren't for the fact that he already won not too long ago for Best Actor for Capote, which makes Javier Bardem the needier candidate. Bardem's trigger-happy, unstoppable psycho in a much-discussed hairstyle gave audiences all the fun of watching a Batman villain ply his trade, but it's in an officially certified, critically approved serious film with a literary pedigree, and for this he will be the recipient of much gratitude from voters whose wives dragged them to Atonement. He's already won more than a few awards for this performance, and he'll be throwing one more on the pile.

BEST ACTRESS:

Julie Christie in a lock. Next?

BEST ACTOR:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that this one belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood. I think that George Clooney has a shot for Michael Clayton, which is the kind of hard-hitting, tough-minded, yet still glamorous-looking movie that Hollywood wishes and expects America to take to its bosom. (Clooney looks worn-down and dissipated in it, and a gorgeous-looking man looking as much like hell as he can is the most glamorous thing in the world.) Some would argue that Clooney himself gave the award to Day-Lewis at a recent Newsweek-sponsored gathering where he serenaded his shy British colleague by saying that all actors "bow low to this motherfucker." Indeed, the whole of the media has been going wild these last couple of months about Day-Lewis's position as the great screen actor of our time. I do not disagree. But I happen to be one of those suspicious types who, when I hear conservative pundits on Fox News go on and on about how fearsome a candidate Barack Obama would be against a Republican challenger in November, and how they think that any Republican would just chew Hillary Clinton up and spit her out, I can't help thinking, Okay, would they say that out loud if they really believed it? Hasn't anyone ever heard the one about wanting to be thrown in the brier patch? So, on this baseless idiot notion, I have just decided the media have been building Day-Lewis up in preparation for the shocking upset to come when Clooney takes the prize. Remember, you read it here first! Unless I'm wrong, in which case you can just forget that I said anything.

BEST DIRECTOR:

The Coens, for No Country for Old Men, in a bigger lock than Julie Christie.

BEST PICTURE:

The big pictures here are obviously No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and I think they're going to cancel each other out. Both are impressive, violent movies that actually alienate as many potential voters as they attract. For the same reasons that I think George Clooney is an attractive candidate for Best Actor, his movie, Michael Clayton, has the smell of a loser to it. So the contrarian, can't-we-all-just-get-alone vote will go to putting either Juno or Atonement over the top. After it won at the Golden Globes, I thought that Atonement, with its period romance and literary prestige, was a shoo-in, but since then I have shifted over to favoring Juno, partly because I got bored with my previous position, partly because Juno is this year's Little Miss Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine lost last year. That means that the partisans of indie-flavored whimsy will be harder-driving this year. Also, it came out later in the year than Little Miss Sunshine, and is lucky in its timing: I calculate that the backlash against the backlash against Juno is now on a rising wave and will crest in time for the awards Sunday. It will flatten out the next morning and the papers will be full of "What were we thinking" pieces for the next two weeks.

Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In the aftermath of Heath Ledger’s death, we wondered whether the Terry Gilliam Curse had struck again. Ledger had completed only a few weeks of shooting on Gilliam’s latest phantasmagoric epic, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and it looked like the project was headed towards the same dead end as the director’s ill-fated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Perhaps inspired by the multiple Dylans of I’m Not There — one of which was played by Ledger — Gilliam has hit on an ingenious solution to his dilemma. According to Variety (which cites Ain’t It Cool News as its only source, so take it with however many grains of salt you feel necessary), Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell have all signed on to fill Ledger’s shoes. How will this work? Apparently "Ledger's character is transported into three separate dimensions in the fantasy pic; these new worlds, which Ledger accesses via a paranormal mirror, will now be inhabited by Depp, Law, and Farrell."

While I’m Not There may have sparked the idea, the above explanation calls to mind another possible inspiration: longtime BBC staple Doctor Who. As you may recall, the Doctor is a Time Lord with the convenient ability to regenerate into a new incarnation. Each time he does this, a new actor is cast in the role. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Gilliam running into one Doctor or another backstage at the BBC back in his Monty Python days. In fact, the late Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams wrote for both shows, so there’s your connection right there. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

The Rep Report (February 1-7)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Since last Thanksgiving, Village audiences have been turning out in force at the Film Forum for I'm Not There, so the theater shouldn't have too much trouble drawing an audience for a week-long showing (February 1-7) of D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, the documentary record of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of the United Kingdom, complete with Joan Baez singing away in her own little bubble, Dylan's notorious manager Albert Grossman auditioning for Tony Hendra's role in This Is Spinal Tap (and maybe Joe Pesci's role in GoodFellas), drop-in appearances by Donovan and Alan Price, and one of the all-time great pre-MTV music videos, with Dylan standing in the street flipping cue cards while Allen Ginsberg standing off to the sidelines looking as if he knows deep and ancient truths, even if he was really just wondering about the location of the buffet table. Released in 1967, Pennebaker's movie established Dylan as an icon of movie cool, much more effectively than his early attempts at actual movie "acting" (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Renaldo and Clara). If you've never seen it, you'll want to check it out to decide for yourself how the man himself compares with Cate Blanchett.

On February 1, as part of its "Golden Silents" program, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is hosting a special one-night event, a rare screening of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a 1927, sixty-seven-minute film by the men who made King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The simple story about a family farm in a jungle setting is a pretext for the exciting natural wildlife footage; the movie includes fights with big cats and a bang-up elephant stampede — make no mistake, animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. But its mixture of awe in the face of natural beauty and man-on-safari edginess will help you understand why everyone in Hollywood understood that the jungle-raping showman in King Kong was a Cooper self-portrait. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by the Alloy Orchestra.

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Oscar Nominations: Is the Egg Showin'?

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

So. . . what was it William Goldman said again? I suppose my predictions weren't too bad under the circumstances, but just like every other year, the Oscar nominations held plenty of surprises.

A full list of nominations can be found right here.

In no particular order:

- The almost total lack of love for Into the Wild. I figured that the acclaim for this true-life story, and the presence of Sean Penn — an actor they clearly love — in the director's chair, would make the film Academy catnip. Clearly, I was mistaken.

- On the other hand, they loved There Will Be Blood even more than I'd anticipated, looking past its darkness to see how flat-out brilliant it is (sorry, haters), giving PTA not only best director and adapted screenplay, but a best picture nomination as well. The Jonny Greenwood thing stung a bit, but the other technical nods — art direction, cinematography, sound design and editing — compensate pretty well. And Daniel Day-Lewis is looking pretty unstoppable for best actor at this point. All in all, Blood received eight nominations, tying it for the most-honored film with widely-acknowledged frontrunner No Country for Old Men.

- Atonement. Wait, this movie's chances for best picture were supposed to be more or less dead. Don't the voters read the prognosticators? Still, despite the film's considerable pedigree and handsome production values, Joe Wright was shut out of best director (in favor of Ivan Reitman's kid, no less), which leads me to believe this barely squeaked in. But you never know.

- Show of hands: who saw the best actor nod for Tommy Lee Jones coming? Certainly not me. I figured that he had a good chance for his supporting work in No Country for Old Men, but I'm surprised any of the voters actually remembered In the Valley of Elah. But I won't complain. As an avowed Crash hater, nobody was more surprised than me that Elah turned out to be pretty darn good, due in large part to Jones' great performance. I'll certainly take him over, say, John Travolta in a fat suit.

- The double dip for Cate Blanchett. Yes, she was a deserving nominee for playing the most fondly-remembered of Todd Haynes' menagerie of Dylans. But honoring Elizabeth: The Golden Age tells me that the voters ran out of suitable nominees. Lord knows I'm no fan of Angelina Jolie, but at least she tried to give a multilayered performance in A Mighty Heart, which is more than I can say about Blanchett in Nobody But Elizabeth Expects the Spanish Inquisition. Just. . . ugh.

- When I floated my best supporting actress theory — that in recent years, the great majority of nominees in this category appear in films opposite performers who also get nominated — I wasn't just blowing smoke. Seriously, look it up. But, probably just to confound me, the nominations bucked the trend this year, with only one of the nominees (Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton) appearing opposite another Oscar nominees. Just as unexpectedly, only Clayton managed more than one acting nomination, wrangling three for Swinton, George Clooney, and Tom Wilkinson.

- Three out of five Best Original Song nominations went to Enchanted. Either they really love Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz or it was a really slow year for original songs. Probably both. At least they were smart enough to nominate "Falling Slowly."

- Hey, did you know that people made documentaries this year that didn't deal with the war in Iraq? I only ask because three of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees were Iraq-themed, with only Michael Moore's Sicko and the Uganda-themed War/Dance tackling different subjects. The biggest disappointment is the snubbing of Tony Kaye's exhaustive, empathetic abortion documentary Lake of Fire, by my estimation the year's finest non-fiction film.

- Finally, I leave you with four horrifying words: "Academy Award Nominee Norbit." Sure, it's for best makeup, and considering that the makeup branch loves the hell out of Rick Baker it would've been madness NOT to predict him. But think about it: Norbit, possibly the most reviled film of 2007, received more Oscar nominations than Zodiac, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Knocked Up, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and Control. . . COMBINED. Hard to believe, but the makeup branch has actually managed to outdo last year's Click nomination.

Paul Clark Predicts the Oscar Nominees

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

"Nobody knows anything." Screenwriter William Goldman immortalized that phrase a few decades ago, and it's as true this Oscar season as it's always been. Perhaps even more so — not only are many Oscar races still wide-open, but the status of the ceremony itself is up in the air. But for now the show is still happening, which means the nominations are set to be announced tomorrow morning. Here are my hasty, shot-in-the-dark predictions in the top six categories:

Best Picture:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men

I think we can all agree that No Country is in, right? Beyond that, it's something of a crap shoot. Michael Clayton is the kind of classy star vehicle the Academy usually responds to, and audience favorite Juno has become too big a word of mouth phenomenon to ignore. At one point, Atonement was looking like a front-runner for the win, but its Oscar buzz has subsided. On the other side of the coin, There Will Be Blood may be too bleak for the voters to embrace — it would have a better chance were it the year's undisputed critical champ, but with No Country in the mix, PTA's masterpiece could be shut out here. Instead, I'm predicting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an acclaimed true-life story that's only gaining momentum, and Into the Wild, the year's most Oscar-baity film directed by a respected actor, which is something that tends to go over well with the actor-filled Academy membership.

Best Actor:
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Even if the Academy decides to overlook There Will Be Blood, they won't be able to deny the awesomeness of Day-Lewis' blazing performance as Plainview. Likewise, Clooney and Depp have recently become Academy favorites, and I dare say that had Sweeney Todd done more business Depp would've been the one to beat here. Hirsch is a bit iffier here given his age, but he carries Into the Wild on his capable shoulders, and if the film gets nominated I'm guessing he will be too. With the recent groundswell for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I think Matthieu Amalric should be seen as a contender here, although not nearly as much as if he was an American star. Instead, I'm going with Mortensen — Eastern Promises didn't exactly set the world on fire, but his performance was the highlight, and I think voters will take the opportunity to honor him not only for this role but also for his overlooked turns in A History of Violence and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Best Actress:
Amy Adams, Enchanted
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
Ellen Page, Juno

Throughout this awards season, three names kept popping up in this rare — Christie, Cotillard, and Page. So it's pretty safe to assume they'll make it in. That leaves us two spots in a relatively weak year for buzzed-about performances (sadly, Black Book's Carice Van Houten has no traction whatsoever). With very little competition, Jolie should make the cut — the film didn't make much of a dent, but her stardom has kept her in the race. The final spot is anyone's guess. High-profile star turns (Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age) have flopped at the box office, while respected performers in independent films (notably Laura Linney in The Savages) have been lost in the year-end shuffle. That leaves Amy Adams in Enchanted, a star-making performance by a previous nominee in a hit movie that's still fresh in people's minds.

Best Director:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Sean Penn, Into the Wild
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

At this point, Best Director is the Coens' to lose. Even if someone else takes home Best Picture, I think it's still their year in this category. I also think the Directors Branch will be impressed by Sean Penn's metamorphosis into serious filmmaker, as well as Schnabel's unconventional, inspired filmmaking choices in Diving Bell. For this year's semi-obligatory non-Best Picture-nominated director, I'm predicting Anderson, a respected maverick whose filmmaking chops in There Will Be Blood are undeniable even if the film itself is too much for some audiences. Of the two remaining Best Picture nominees, I think Gilroy has the edge over Juno's Jason Reitman for two reasons: (1) crowd-pleasing comedies tend to get shut out of this category, and (2) Gilroy is a veteran screenwriter makes an impressive directorial debut. But don't be surprised if another "lone director" — say, Sidney Lumet for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, or Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd — gets the nod instead.

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

In a year without Bardem, this race might have come down to Grand Old Actor Holbrook vs. veteran character actor Wilkinson. But Bardem casts a long shadow over this category, with Chigurh the creepiest villain in an Oscar-feted film since Hannibal Lecter. Charlie Wilson's War wasn't the Oscar juggernaut that it was predicted to be, but I still think Hoffman's scene-stealing turn will make it in. I think this year's biggest surprise will be the absence of Casey Affleck's performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Affleck's the only serious competition Bardem has had among the precursor awards, but Jesse James was a box-office flop and Affleck's performance could give voters the willies. Max Von Sydow's affecting turn in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might have had a chance here — as a means of honoring one of the world's most esteemed actors and, by extension, his recently-departed longtime collaborator Ingmar Bergman — except that he might not have enough screentime to be a contender. Instead, I'm giving the edge to Jones, an Academy favorite who came roaring back this year to give two acclaimed performances after a decade's worth of commercial crap.

Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Catherine Keener, Into the Wild
Kelly MacDonald, No Country for Old Men
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Once again, three names keep popping up in this category: Blanchett, Ryan, and Swinton. I think they'll all get nominated, though who will win remains to be seen (early shot-in-the-dark prediction: a Swinton upset). The other two spots are less certain. But consider that, more than any other category, the Best Supporting Actress nominees are largely composed of performers who starred opposite other Oscar nominees. In this respect, I think contenders such as Ruby Dee in American Gangster, Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and especially Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, are at a disadvantage here. Instead, I'm predicting the fourth spot to go to Catherine Keener, getting her third nomination in this category for her moving turn in Into the Wild. The final slot comes down to Jennifer Garner in Juno and Kelly MacDonald in No Country for Old Men. Despite Garner's greater name recognition, I'm giving the edge to MacDonald, both for No Country's frontrunner status and for playing one of Oscar's favorite characters, the supportive, long-suffering wife. But honestly, it could go either way.

Watch for the Oscar nominations tomorrow, January 22. And remember, nobody knows anything.

Globes Without Glitter

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:43:00 GMT

The 65th annual Golden Globes were announced last night, getting the awards season off to a wobbly start. After much speculation about whether No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood might be the front runner as the Oscar race heats up, the Golden Globe for Best Drama went to the Ian McEwan adaptation Atonement, a sturdy vote for respectable literary source material, period romance, and clipped accents in these confusing times. (Another perceived front-runner competition that's been heating up movie message boards, the one between Julie Christie in and Marion Cotillard in Ma Vie en Rose, was effectively defused in this round by the Globes' method of breaking up its movie categories into as many different sub-categories as possible: Christie won the award for Best Actress in a Drama, Cotillard won for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy.) Daniel Day-Lewis did won for Best Actor in a Drama for his work in There Will Be Blood, while No Country took home prizes for Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem) and for its Coen brothers screenplay. The Best Director award went to Julian Schabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which also won for Best Foreign Language Film. Rounding out the big winners were Sweeney Todd (Best Musical or Comedy) and its star, Johnny Depp (Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy), Cate Blanchett (Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There), and Ratatouille (Best Animated Feature Film).

Of course, as the strike by the Writers' Guild of America drags on into its third month, the big question was whether there would be any awards ceremony or not. NBC, which had the rights to this year's presentation, grimly held to its plans to broadcast something, but it wasn't until last Friday that it was announced that union picketers would not show up to protest the event. By that time, most celebrities who might otherwise have attended had made other plans. The awards were given out, but in a press-conference-style format presided over by announcers from entertainment-news shows such as and Inside Edition. The winners will have news of their glad tidings duly Incorporated into the ads for those movies that are still playing, but the general feeling is that, compared to the impact of previous years' awards ceremonies, the whole thing was a wash. Daniel Battsek, president of Miramax Films, laments that "you can’t replace having the clips and the people who made the films on television. It’s impossible to predict the impact of the lack of a full-on ceremony. But we are all in the same boat. No one will get an advantage.”

Top 10 of 2007: Bryan Whitefield

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While this was an undeniably good year for film, it was also a year in which smaller movies had a much harder time getting attention — or even into theaters at all. With big-name directors like Ang Lee, Sidney Lumet and Francis Ford Coppola clogging up art-house screens, there was less room this year for new names and faces. In fact, three movies (Reprise, Lost in Beijing and Never Forever) which played at various festivals throughout the year would have certainly made this list but were excluded only because they never got U.S. distribution, meaning only a handful of people were lucky enough to see them. That said, it’s hard to complain about a year that gave us such a high level of quality and creativity in such variety.

1. No Country For Old Men

Near perfection in every sense and far and away the best film I saw this year. The Coen Brothers cut down on the camera tricks and let the forward momentum of a chase thriller carry the difficult adaptation of a novel with almost zero description and in the process made what may very well be the best film of their heavyweight careers. The brothers also moved outside of their usual casting circles and used Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones to great effect. But it is Javier Bardem’s utterly creepy incarnation of Anton Chigurh that left a stamp on people’s psyche and will haunt their memories for years to come.

2. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

It took someone with an imagination as big as Julian Schnabel to envision great cinema from a book written by a man who could only blink one eyelid. From start to finish this is a celebration of art, film and life itself and the answers Schnabel found to the challenges of presenting this story make it a notable and lasting achievement.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Probably the year’s biggest surprise for me was going into a movie directed by Ben Affleck with a whole lot of preconception and coming out blown away by the sure-handed guidance he showed in his directorial debut. There are good, even great performances and top tier writing but in the end the film’s real strength lies in the decisions made every step of the way in how to present this material. For my money this was a step above both The Departed and Mystic River because almost nothing here is easy or done for show and the questions it forces you to ask yourself lead to complex, blurry and ambiguous emotional ground.

4. The Lives of Others

Overall quality is what continues to set this film apart from the field in my mind. An airtight script, informed performances detail-heavy production design and measured yet artful filmmaking that was able to explore the most serious of political ideas while thankfully sidestepping a Spielberg-style, right-vs-wrong, happy ending in favor of a much subtler conclusion.

5. I’m Not There

Blew the biopic model to pieces and was without question the most original and inventive film I saw this year. The much discussed six actors play one singer concept is interesting even as an idea but on screen it is often breathtaking to see the genius level of insight and imagination Todd Haynes exhibits in moving from one to the other in building this composite picture of a man so well known and yet still very much a mystery. The pure pleasure of watching very talented actors set free from the constriction of straight imitation as well as Haynes’ mastery of so many different looks and styles of filmmaking should not be underestimated either.

6. Zodiac

Attention to detail was overseen with an expert’s eye and director David Fincher even held back on some of the camera magic that made him famous in favor of a more mature, straight-forward presentation that fit the tone of the film perfectly. Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. were clearly at the top of their game and while the movie did run long at 3 hours with a story arc that went too high, too soon the amount of thought and craft behind this film made it one that should continue to hold up in what is generally a disposable and easily dated genre.

7. The Darjeeling Limited

People level the same criticism at Wes Anderson every time one of his films is released – they all look the same. And while there is no denying that he has a signature style I think it is also fair to say that he is constantly working to perfect it. While he may never again reach the classic status achieved with The Royal Tenanbaums or Rushmore, this is certainly a major upgrade over The Life Aquatic and while it is stylish and funny and a pleasure to watch it is also infused with some real emotional depth with writing and performances that go well beyond montages set to obscure 60’s rock songs. The accompanying short The Hotel Chevalier is Anderson in a capsule and a near perfect vignette.

8. The Boss of it All

Lars Von Trier veered off the road of emotional devastation straight into a comedy that was the first feature to employ Automavision, a software program that chooses the film’s shots and framing at random. The technique is initially jarring but makes the story of a spineless executive who has been blaming the company’s direction on an invisible “boss” and now, wishing to sell the company for his own profit, has hired a clueless actor to pose as said boss so that he can cash out guilt-free, even funnier. Von Trier is actually able to infuse the film with a layer of depth and make a social, political and moral statement while still having his audience laughing throughout, even with jokes told in subtitles.

9. Manda Bala (Send A Bullet)

Errol Morris protégé Jason Kohn followed in the master’s footsteps in continuing to turn the documentary film format on its head. The beautifully constructed film, which cannot be shown in Brazil because it is considered too dangerous, moves at a rapid fire pace, contrasting the warm sunshine of Brazil and Brazilian music with talk of severe violence and circumstances including several intense, look-away scenes. Using first hand interviews, found footage and fictional reenactments that move from frog farms to political corruption, grisly kidnapping stories to reconstructive surgery footage Kohn showed a masterful management of the material especially in the way its visual and conceptual metaphors built to a grand crescendo.

10. Knocked Up

With so many jokey, costume driven, idiot time spoof comedies out there it was nice to finally see one that was both laugh out loud funny and actually about real people. Okay maybe it’s not every day that some unemployed, pot smoking schlub scores with a gorgeous tv host but ignoring that fact this film featured sharp, insightful writing about the absurdity of real situations that still had people cracking up without the use of any chest waxing gimmicks and to me that’s a step in the right direction and an achievement in itself.

Top Ten of 2007: Paul Clark

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Note: Like Leonard, I don’t live in one of what Hollywood would consider a major cinematic market, so I have yet to see some of the year’s best-reviewed films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But I think it’s better to post this now rather than waiting until I’ve seen all the major movies, which for all I know won’t happen for months.

10. The Hunting Party

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again- 2007 was a damn fine year to be a movie lover. Because of this, there were probably a dozen films competing for the final spot on this list, but in the end I had to go with a sentimental favorite, one that deserves much more love than it’s gotten so far. Richard Shepard's darkly comic tale of three journalists (Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg) searching for a Bosnian warlord succeeds not so much because of its story as for its salty, unironic portrait of male friendship. As in Shepard’s last film The Matador, The Hunting Party is a story about men drawn to violence who booze and bond in outposts far off the beaten path. At a time when Brokeback Mountain is still a punchline, it takes real chutzpah to write a scene in which one man tells another, “that’s why I love you,” without going for a laugh.

9. Time

Korea’s prolific and controversial director Kim Ki-duk has become something of a whipping boy for the cinematic cognoscenti, but there’s no denying that the guy’s got skills. Time, his best film to date, appears on the surface to be a response to Korea’s plastic-surgery craze, but at its heart it’s a story of amour fou, like Seconds played for tragedy rather than thrills. In Kim’s hands, plastic surgery becomes a metaphor for how self-conscious we’ve become, so insecure in our skin that we’re no longer able to simply give ourselves over to others, not even those we love. Also, Kim’s gift for astonishing imagery is as keen as ever, especially in his use of a seaside sculpture park.

8. I’m Not There

The premise- six actors playing six different versions of Bob Dylan- sounds like an academic exercise only a semiotics major could love. But each onscreen Dylan is only a pawn in the game of director Todd Haynes, a piece of the puzzle that has become the Dylan mythos. With his ingenious structure, Haynes highlights the contradictions, tall tales, and outright fabrications of Dylan’s legend, revealing him to be less a self-conscious chameleon reinventing his image for the public as a lifelong searcher who cared little whether we wanted to follow. The wonder is that I'm Not There is so much fun- sometimes electrifying, sometimes goofy, but always fascinating.

7. Offside

The idea that Iranian women aren’t allowed to attend soccer games would seem to be the setup for a dour polemic, but director Jafar Panahi has other plans for their story. In Panahi’s eyes, the law isn’t so much an injustice as a colossal pain for all involved, and by highlighting the absurdity of the situation, Offside becomes the stuff of high comedy. And a rousing crowd-pleaser to boot- Panahi shot much of the film in the bowels of the stadium during an actual World Cup qualifying match, and even at a distance from the field, the energy is palpable. In the end, football is a uniter, not a divider, and once the detained women escape their captors to mingle with their celebrating countrymen, they’re able to share in the victory that their laws had tried to deny them.

6. Joshua

In a year that saw Rob Zombie’s Michael-heavy remake of Halloween, one might be excused for wondering what an evil-kid thriller was doing on my list. But George Ratliff’s Joshua is another breed altogether- a genre movie in the abstract, but a particularly chilly and thematically-rich one. Moreover, Joshua is very much an of-the-moment bad seed, not some pint-sized supernatural boogeyman but the product of ineffectual and indulgent parenting. Jacob Kogan is creepy in the title role, but the real revelation is Sam Rockwell, giving the performance of the year as his father, a man whose parenting skills are limited at best, and who is ill-equipped to deal with a son whose behavior goes so sharply against his own. When he finally realizes what he’s up against it’s too late to stop it, and thanks to Ratliff and Rockwell, this realization hits with the power of a gut punch.

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

In Assassination, director Andrew Dominik plays a tricky game- to make a Western that doesn’t so much de-mythologize the genre as re-mythologize it by making explicit the undercurrent of mythmaking that was always a part of the West. It could have been a disaster, but somehow it works beautifully, thanks not only to the beauty of the filmmaker but also the performances. Brad Pitt is fine as a Jesse James who is all too mindful of the larger-than-life figure he cut in the West, but the film belongs to Casey Affleck as Ford, the youngster whose boyish hero worship festered into violent obsession. Ford was foolish enough to believe that he could create his own legend, but all he did was to be swallowed up by Jesse’s, and because of Affleck’s performance this reviled figure becomes downright tragic.

4. The Host

The best giant monster to attack theatres this past year didn’t stomp Tokyo, but Seoul, in the superior Korean creature feature The Host. With a flair for showmanship and populist storytelling that nearly equal those of Spielberg in his Jaws days, director Bong Joon-ho has made a monster movie to stand alongside the greats in the genre. Part of the credit should go to the effects wizard who created the disgusting yet somehow lovable monster, but I dare say the movie wouldn’t work so well if not for the endearingly flawed family at the movie’s center. Even on a list this full of darkness and despair, there’s always a place for pure, unadulterated entertainment, and The Host gave me more sheer moviegoing pleasure than any film of 2007.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Most of the praise for Gone Baby Gone has centered on the film’s performances- especially the much-feted Amy Ryan- and the surprising amount of thematic resonance to be found in the film. But I think director Ben Affleck deserves a great deal more credit for how powerful this film is than he’s been getting. Most obviously, Affleck has a real feel for his setting- a working-class South Boston neighborhood- and the people who inhabit it. But while this location seems at first like backdrop to a mystery involving a kidnapped child, it eventually takes center stage in the story, which turns into an breathlessly compelling study in the consequences of tribalism. “Guys take pride in where they’re from, like it was something they did,” states protagonist Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck- again!) in the film’s opening voiceover. The tragedy is that Kenzie- thinks himself above it all- buys into this idea as much as anybody.

2. No Country for Old Men

For most of its running time, No Country for Old Men works primarily as an uncommonly exciting chase thriller, in which the overmatched Lewellyn Moss struggles to stay ahead of stone-cold killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem). But while first two acts of the film are enough to mark it as the Coen brothers’ best work in years, it’s the final act, which avoids the expected confrontation between Chigurh and Lewellyn in favor of something more philosophical, that the film to another level of greatness altogether. An observer for most of the story, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) suddenly comes face to face with the idea that even if you run from the evil that you fear may be hiding behind one door, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be waiting for you behind another. “You can’t stop what’s coming,” indeed.

1. Zodiac

From the beginning, David Fincher’s evocation of the still-unsolved case of the Zodiac killer has been something of an anomaly. It’s a serial-killer movie that practically never goes for cheap thrills, and a three-hour fact-based period piece that’s almost bereft of epic sweep. In short, it’s tough to put my finger on what exactly makes Zodiac such a masterpiece. For me, the most awe-inspiring aspect of the film is its near-obsessive attention to detail, one that’s downright fanatical even by the standards of the true-crime genre. But using the thousands of tiny clues and incidental pieces of business that surrounded the Zodiac case, Fincher immerses us fully in the world of the case, one in which the crime-solving technology and interdepartmental procedures of the day were always several steps behind the schemes of the killer.

Also worth mentioning: Everything Will Be OK (sorry, no trailer)

When I was making this list, I decided to restrict myself to feature-length films. However, taking into account all new movies I saw this past year, none hit me quite as hard as Don Hertzfeldt’s thrilling new animated short, Everything Will Be OK. In little more than fifteen minutes, Hertzfeldt tells the story of a man who is doomed to die. His doctors give up on him, his mother moves in to help, and the man himself goes off the deep end. And then, without warning, he suddenly gets better, much to everyone's annoyance. Everything Will Be OK has the feel of an especially good Raymond Carver story, both in its sense of irony and its reliance on small but significant detail, but the twisted sense of humor and unique animation style is all Hertzfeldt. Call it number zero in my top 10.

Top 10 of 2007: Scott Von Doviak

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

People say I’m a weenie for thinking this, but I feel these year-end top ten lists should be handled like the Hall of Fame: there should be a five-year waiting period in order to avoid any embarrassing blunders. Believe me, I have a record of top tens dating back to 1999 preserved forever on the Internet, and never fail to experience twinges of regret, shivers of shame and head-scratching moments of pure bewilderment when I look back at them. I’d feel much better right now if I were compiling my favorites of 2002, but rules are rules, so here are 10 movies I hope I won’t feel terrible about praising when 2012 rolls around:

10. Zodiac

For about three-quarters of its running time, David Fincher’s serial killer procedural is about as engrossing, stylish and smartly assembled as mainstream cinema gets, expertly evoking the 1970s (Mark Ruffalo, in particular, transforms himself into a broody ’70s actor in the De Niro/Pacino mode) and humanizing a story that could have been run-of-the-mill exploitation. It’s penalized a few notches here for running out of gas in the final reels: those scenes between the obsessed investigator and his long-suffering wife were already old and tired in the ’70s.

9. Juno

The first five minutes of Juno are so overloaded with quirkiness, it’s as if director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody are desperate enough to make an immediate impression that they’ll settle for making a bad one. That the movie is able to not only recover but go on to become an affecting (and very funny) story about real people making difficult choices is a tribute to their talent, and especially that of Ellen Page in a star-making performance as the titular pregnant teen.

8. Knocked Up

Why settle for one unplanned pregnancy comedy when 2007 was fertile enough to produce twins? You could quibble about gender politics, but then you’d miss out on some of the year’s biggest laughs courtesy of the ever-expanding Apatow Comedy Empire. (Honorable mention: Superbad. Not so much: Walk Hard.)

7. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Speaking of movies that recover from the opening five minutes, here’s one that treats you to the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heaving, flabby buttocks obscuring some delightful Marisa Tomei nudity (don’t worry, though – there’s plenty of that later). In what is not so much a comeback as a rejuvenation, octogenarian Sidney Lumet has crafted a twisty tale of familial betrayal enlived by a Hoffman performance so vivid, you can smell the desperation.

6. Breach

Billy Ray makes his own special brand of what one friend of the Screengrab refers to as “guys in suits” movies. Like Ray’s debut Shattered Glass, Breach is a low-key yet subtly gripping thriller about a man whose life of lies crumbles within the institution that has defined him. In this case, that man is contradictory CIA agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper, never better), a deeply religious, sexually kinky traitor to his country. No 007-style glamour and action here; the suspense emerges from the mundane but meticulously detailed life of a Cold War spy trying to stay one step ahead of his colleagues.

5. Deep Water

Sure, having too much money and free time sounds like fun, but that way of life is not without its pitfalls. This fascinating, disquieting documentary details a 1968 solo sailboat race around the world, and the amateur sailor, Donald Crowhurst, who pinned his family’s future on the whim of winning it. Pieced together from newsreels, Crowhurst’s original 16mm film and contemporary interviews, what begins as a bracing tale of men against the sea becomes a full-blown descent into madness.

4. Killer of Sheep

I am assured by publicists that Charles Burnett’s 1977 thesis film counts as a 2007 release, so there’s no reason not to include it here. This stark slice of inner city life finds drama in the smallest moments; even the routine purchase of a used motor becomes an exercise in heartbreaking futility. Never stooping to heavy-handed message-making, Sheep packs an emotional wallop in the end.

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Don’t wait for the inevitable scripted remake of this simple tale of two men vying for the world’s record high score in Donkey Kong. It won’t begin to capture the wit, drama and humanity of Seth Gordon’s outrageously entertaining documentary. Pitting an ’80s relic coasting on past glories against a regular guy with a history of failures in life, overseen by an indelible gallery of game-geeks and marked with unexpected developments and reversals of fate, it’s the most purely joyful movie experience of the year.

2. No Country for Old Men

For much of the decade Joel and Ethan Coen looked like they were heading down the long road of diminishing returns, but they came all the way back with this transcendent thriller set on the Texas border. The most faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel imaginable, it still couldn’t be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. The brilliant suspense sequences and Javier Bardem’s chilling turn as a malevolent killer are the obvious attractions, but it’s the final lyrical moments that linger when the lights come up.

1. I’m Not There

Less perfect in every way than No Country, this fractured Bob Dylan biopic is nonetheless my pick for movie of the year. Scrambling the singer-songwriter’s legend and bouncing it off a series of funhouse mirrors, director Todd Haynes delights in the ever-more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors embody various aspects of the Bard, none more memorably than Cate Blanchett, who virtually channels Dylan’s hipster-dandy incarnation. It’s a dazzling mind-fuck for hardcore Dylan fans and perhaps a complete trainwreck for anyone else, but as a biography of an artistic sensibility – warts and all – it can’t be topped.

The Voice Has Spoken

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In what may be, and indeed, had damn well better be, one of the very last outbreaks of opinion regarding the movies of 2007, the seventh annual Village Voice Film Poll (now joined at the hip to the L.A. Weekly) has arrived in port. Topping the list, which is based on the views of 102 voting critics: "Paul Thomas Anderson's wildly ambitious meditation on God, oil, and family values," There Will Be Blood. (The description is from Voice critic and living institution J. Hoberman, whose own person top ten list begins with I'm Not There, to which he devoted umpteen memorable words last November.) Other to picks: Blood star Daniel Day-Lewis, I'm Not There's Cate Blanchett and No Country for Old Men's Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actress and Actor, Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight, and Sarah Polley's Away from Her for Best Forst Film. The Best Actress nod went to the highly deserving Anamaria Marinca of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a movie which landed in fourth place in the Best Film rankings--not bad at all considering that the movie wasn't actually shown here in 2007 except on the festival circuit. Considering that it opens theatrically here soon--we just saw a trailer for it today, in fact--we're not sure why so many critics agreed that they just couldn't wait until next year to vote for it, but hey.

Inspired by a True Story, and Improved On

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Ann Hornaday measures the differing approaches to factual accuracy in recent movies claiming to be "based on a true story", an old-fashioned turn of phrase that has of late been retrofitted to read "inspired by true events", or even, in the case of I'm Not There, "Inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan." Historical inaccuracy in historical movies is nothing new--Cecil D. DeMille told a few stretchers in his time--and it's not always reprehensible. Hornaday writes that "Accuracy is the great bugaboo of biopics and historical dramas, whose standards of success lie in how well they tell a story, not how closely they adhere to the facts. Filmmakers should excise, compress and invent -- in other words, lie -- only when they have to, and only to support, rather than weaken, the story's factual, historical framework." Still, some of the decisions filmmakers make can leave you guessing; what notion of larger truth did Ridley Scott think he was serving with American Gangster, when he chose to alter the private life and personal style of the drug dealer Frank Lucas to make him seem classier and more admirable, while at the same time cooking up a phony, messy back story for the cop who arrested Lucas to turn him into a dysfunctional slob? Whatever their motives, filmmakers as a rule seem to have no problem heeding the words of Kasi Lemmons, whose recent Talk to Me was criticized by survivors of its real-life hero, Petey Green, and who had a ready answer as to why she hadn't sought them out or read Green's autobiography: "I thought I might get distracted with too much reality."

Dueling Dylans

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:30:00 GMT

As if Todd Haynes hadn’t already made things confusing enough by casting six different actors to play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, now John C. Reilly is horning in on the action. In Walk Hard, Reilly’s mock rocker Dewey Cox goes through a brief Dylan phase, as seen in the clip below. Reilly may not make you forget Cate Blanchett anytime soon, but to his credit, he does his own nasally singing on “Royal Jelly,” which was written in the Bard’s surrealist-hipster style by one of his many folk-rock descendents, Dan Bern.

Hoberman Hails Haynes

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

In a long piece in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman calls Todd Haynes's I'm Not There "part of the larger, ongoing Dylan revival brilliantly orchestrated by his manager, Jeff Rosen" and also "the movie of the year." Hoberman suggests that this might be the Bob Dylan movie that Dylan himself repeatedly tried to make but never could have achieved; nobody but Haynes, "who studied film as semiotics" and who in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine had already "taken pop stars or pop music for a text," could have. As Hoberman sees it, only a filmmaker as audacious as Haynes could be worthy of this subject. "Certain cultural figures have a particular inevitability. Charles Chaplin and Elvis Presley rode technological waves, surfing to superstardom on powerful socio-economic currents. Had Chaplin never come to America, another slapstick comic would have emerged to reign over the nation's nickelodeons; Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then — having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning — vanish into a folk tradition of his own making." — Phil Nugent

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: I'm Not There, Hitman, The Mist, August Rush, Feed, Lili Taylor

Peter Smith — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

I'm Not There: "The screen would be a poorer, smaller place without such ambition."

Hitman: "I am a lover of trashy, violent movies, and Hitman is an insult to violent trash."

The Mist: "Frank Darabont loves Rod Serling. I mean really loves him."

August Rush: "Even if you're not the musical type, you might suspend your disbelief long enough to be stirred."

Feed: "Despite a handful of choice moments (Jerry Brown snorting nose spray), there's not enough here to justify a seventy-six-minute run time."

Q&A: Lili Taylor: "These days, there's not a lot of stuff actors can use to protect themselves from the roles, and protect themselves from the audience's projections."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We'll be back on Monday.

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent

Haynes Special

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Todd Haynes was too busy promoting I'm Not There to introduce a special screening of his 1995 Safe at Portland's Northwest Film Center, so he sent this video.

Nice to see him playing with dolls again. — Phil Nugent

Take Five: Rock Stars

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a rock star, especially if they have the good grace to die early and provide the scriptwriter with a nice tidy ending that doesn’t involve getting old and boring. With Control, Anton Corbijn’s celebrated directorial debut, opening this weekend, we’ll get to see how the movies do with the compellingly tragic story of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis; his cult status, enigmatic qualities and spectacular suicide would seem to make him an ideal candidate for big-screen immortality. But while we wait for this and Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic I’m Not There to hit our local screens, we can always immerse ourselves in previous big-screen treatments of rock and rollers — both real and imaginary — that Hollywood has brought us.

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)

It wasn’t really until the 1970s that Hollywood came to terms with the idea that rock music wasn’t some passing fad (check out, oh, say, any movie about rock 'n' roll made during the 1960s as evidence), but they figured out quickly enough that the best rock star was a dead rock star. The first truly successful rock biopic wasn’t really the stuff of Hollywood legend — it played awfully fast and loose with the historical facts, and its script set a hokey, faux-spiritual tone that a lot of later movies would follow — but it’s worth watching for a standout lead performance as the chief Cricket by a pre-laughingstock Gary Busey, and excellent supporting roles by Charles Martin Smith and Conrad Janis.

SID AND NANCY (1986)

Very few people were in as good a position to make the quintessential punk-rock biopic than Alex Cox. He’d already proven with Repo Man that he was probably the only director of the 1980s who really understood punk-rock music, and with Sid and Nancy, he managed to strike just the right tone of empathy and tragedy. Gary Oldman, who'd go on to have a stellar career, does a fantastic job playing the born-to-die hellraiser Sid Vicious; Chloe Webb, who wouldn’t, is equally fantastic as the doomed Nancy Spungeon. A depressing but essential rock 'n' roll biography.

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? (1993)

Falling into a lot of the same traps as The Buddy Holly Story (and, for that matter, a hundred other rock biographies), this look at the surprising career arc of Tina Turner falls into the trap of beatifying its subject — not surprising, given that it’s based on her own autobiography. It also spends so much time demonizing Ike Turner as an abusive monster (which he was) that it doesn’t really convey the sense of him as a musical genius (which he also was). Still, it’s redeemed by winning performances in the lead roles by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. Ike’s own autobiography remains unfilmed.

BACKBEAT (1994)

Possibly due to the notoriously litigious nature of the surviving members of the band, Hollywood has always had a standoffish approach to telling stories about the life and times of the biggest rock band in history. Maybe it’s because of the approach this nearly forgotten independent flick took towards the development of the Beatles that it managed to succeed on its own terms. Telling the story of the early days of the band and focusing on the forgotten Stu Sutcliffe, it’s by turns hokey and transcendent, and manages like few films before or since to make something fresh out of one of the most-told stories in pop music history.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998)

Todd Haynes’ underappreciated interpretation of the glam rock era doesn’t name any names — it doesn’t have to. We all know that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is playing a veiled version of the chameleonoid David Bowie, and that a magnetically sexy Ewan McGregor is an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain. And, in a way, the approach couldn’t be more fitting — the glam era was all about radical reinvention, fluctuating identities, and sexual ambiguity, and that’s what Haynes delivers in spades, along with a healthy dose of political paranoia, divine mystery and straight-up rock and roll fun.

— Leonard Pierce

Rock Around the Crock

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

David Carr's story in the New York Times — posted yesterday — is a typical trend piece. Entertainment journalism (and, hence, people like me, admittedly) couldn't survive without the occasional story that identifies three or more roughly similar things happening at roughly the same time and concludes that it means something important; still, Carr's piece struck me as particularly off the mark. He concludes that we're in for a renaissance of movies about rock music: he cites documentaries on Tom Petty, plus features like Across The Universe (The Beatles), I'm Not There (Bob Dylan) and break-out hit Once.

What Carr seems to be getting out, without being really aware of it, is how the rock biopic has displaced any other kind of biopic, with VH1's Behind The Music cited as the prototype for every rise-and-fall arc peddled. "We all know these stories from VH1’s Behind the Music, and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them," weighs in Judd Apatow, apropos of his upcoming spoof Walk Hard. (We do?) The real question is, why are biopics nowadays seemingly all about musicians just old enough to be canonized — where are the artists (it's been years since Pollock), politicians and writers? When Richard Attenborough stopped churning out stuff like Gandhi and Shadowlands, did the genre die? If so, why?

The cynical, probably correct answer, is "because these movies suck." Still, it's a question worth thinking about; boomers are getting older and more secure about canonizing previously disreputable idols. Notice how Carr doesn't cite Musician (a recent documentary about jazz avant-gardist Ken Vandermark), Dig! (the indie-music bible featuring The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols), or Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. It's not a rock renaissance, it's another smug round of cultural gentrification. I smell another think piece coming on; hire me, New York Times! — Vadim Rizov