The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 2-8, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

First of all, I should mention that we here at the Screengrab are sensitive to your complaints that the place has become something of a boy’s club, strewn with boxer shorts, empty beer cans, baseball cards and “adult reading material.” To that end, we’ve tidied up a bit, sprayed some lilac-scented Febreeze around, and are now prepared to welcome the newest member of the Screengrab team, Sarah Clyne Sundberg. Sarah made her debut earlier today with Olympic Games Past, so please extend your warmest greetings. As for the betesticled among us, we’ve been busy this week:

You ever think “Hey, that movie could have been directed by that other guy!” Well, so have we! Here are 15 Movies That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed by Someone Else (Parts One, Two, Three and Four).

The Midnight Meat Train probably won’t be coming anywhere near you, but maybe you can catch Elegy or In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

How about a triple feature from the Summer of ’78: Revenge of the Pink Panther, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Hooper were all clogging the drive-ins 30 years ago. None of them really summed up the season like The Endless Summer, though.

Best wishes to Morgan Freeman for a speedy recovery and a painless divorce!

Scarlett Johnasson and Penelope Cruz did their best to lower our expectations of their lesbian makeout session in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

While cleaning out Screengrab headquarters, we found these Boxes of Kubrick.

Jason Statham as Daredevil? Britney Spears in Faster, Pussycat…Kill! Kill!? Maybe in the Parallel Universe Film Guide.

Rejoice in my misery as I resume my Unwatchable quest to view every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list, including College Road Trip and Kickboxer 3: The Art of War.

That’s it. Get your motor running, head out on the highway!

Movie Review: "In Search of a Midnight Kiss"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It's August, a time when the summer movie season is running on fumes and new releases are traditionally thought to be at their suckiest. It's a time when an unexpected little pleasure can generate a great deal of audience good will and vacuum up a lot of business without much competition, as M. Night Shyamalan proved when The Sixth Sense opened with no fanfare in August 1999. Now the writer-director Alex Holdridge may be in a position to step into the void with In Search of a Midnight Kiss, which opened at New York's IFC Center this past week and opens wider on Friday. Holdrige's movie bills itself as coming from "the producer of Dazed Confused and Before Sunrise", and it's the latter title that tips you off to its ambitions: set during a period of about twenty-four hours in the life of the hero, Wilson (Scoot McNairy), a recent transplant to Los Angeles and aspiring screenwriter, it is a worthy addition to the "will-they-or-won't-they?" romantic genre. The girl in the equation is Vivian (Sara Simmonds), who answers Wilson's Craigslist ad "Misanthrope seeks misanthrope"), placed in a desperate attempt to not be alone on New Year's Eve.

Midnight Kiss is not a two-person movie, though it might be better if it were. The subplot involving Brian McGuire as Kathleen Luong as Wilson's supportive friends, whose own relationship is threatening to enter a potentially scary new stage of its own, sometimes feels like padding, even though Luong is a shot of lemonade as the faithful girlfriend who feels flattered to discovery that the pathetic Wilson thinks of her when he's masturbating. Having Wilson's private moments with his Johnson interrupted is typical of the kind of gag that Holdridge uses to prevent this love story from overdosing on its own sweetness. Mostly, though, he's indebted to his actors: unlike some of the leading men employed by Judd Apatow, Scott McNairy knows how to play loser hopelessness as a passing phase in the life of someone who might plausibly be a real catch when he snaps out of it. For her part, Sara Simmonds, who has the kind of face that can make a camera question its religious beliefs, and who's playing a character who comes on as an unreachable bitch because she's just been hurt and feels like taking her sweet damn time working up to the learning-to-trust-again level, is able to make the bitchiness funny and to let the character's vulnerability shine through without making an emotional mess of it. Midnight Kiss doesn't have the beautiful, unearthly flow of Before Sunrise or Once; a degree of contrivance remains visible. But the actors are so winning and play their characters' need to break through their loneliness with such touching restraint that when, towards the end, Simmonds worries that there'll be "no more nights like this," it sounds like a projection of a possible future more heartbreaking than anything in Wall-E. Slipping into theaters just as people start stumbling, in a daze, back to their college campuses, In Search of a Midnight Kiss is unquestionably the date movie of the year so far. Unless you've got tire treads for legs, in which case Wall-E still has the edge there.

The Screengrab : in search of a midnight kiss

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 2-8, 2008

Movie Review: "In Search of a Midnight Kiss"