The Screengrab : ingmar bergman

Set Your DVR!: May 27, 2009 - the foreseeable future

Hayden Childs — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This is the last time I’ll write one of these columns (unless, of course, someone wants to hire me to do so), but I just wanted to mention how much fun it has been. I know that I haven’t been doing these as frequently as I should. My real job has been taking precedence, and now that I actually will have some time, there ain’t gonna be no Screengrab no more. So, since we are near the end, I wanted to write a super-deluxe column. Luckily, cable tv has made that easy by scheduling a ridiculous number of great movies in the near future!

Wednesday, May 27
On Wednesday, the best bet is Errol Morris's documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which is playing on IFC at 12:15 pm central/1:15 pm eastern (and sorry for the late notice!). Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is an impressive attempt to impose order into the chaos of the interviews, which is reflected in the subjects' chosen careers. Overnight, TCM is showing It Happened One Night at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern.

Thursday, May 28
Thursday has John Sayles's Lone Star on TCM at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. That's one of the best Sayles movie, but I don't really need to tell you this, do I, dear Screengrab reader?

Friday, May 29
Starting at 5:30 am central/6:30 am eastern, Friday has six, count 'em, six, flicks worth a watch. First up is Amarcord, Fellini's last great movie, on IFC at the aforementioned time and again at 11:35 am central/12:35 pm eastern. Then TCM has The Blue Dahlia, the only movie based on a screenplay by Raymond Chandler, at 7:45 am central/8:45 am eastern. It's not the best film noir, but The Blue Dahlia has quite a lot going for it. In the afternoon, TCM is running Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. That's a great movie despite the ludicrous accent Welles sports throughout. In the evening, Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern. Ovation keeps the aspect ratio of the films it runs, but it does cut for commercials frequently and sometimes bleeps adult language in racier movies. There's no adult language in The Triplets of Belleville, though. If something darker is more your style, IFC is showing Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden at 7:15 pm central/8:15 pm eastern and again overnight at 12:30 am central/1:30 am eastern. Also overnight is the Jamaican crime flick that made Jimmy Cliff an international star, The Harder They Come, on TCM at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern.

Saturday, May 30
Saturday is always a good day for cable movies. The first one I want to mention is New World Order, as discussed by my esteemed colleague Mr. Scott Von Doviak, which is playing on IFC at 9 am central/10 am eastern. That's awfully early for conspiracy theories! I guess they have to get moving early on Saturday before the Military-Industrial-Fast Food-Big Oil-Computertronic-Cell Phone-Google-Movie Critic Complex gets its coffee. Unfortunately, IFC is also showing it at 3 pm central/4 pm eastern, which is all part of their plan, man! I also want to mention The Searchers on AMC at 11:30 am central/12:30 pm eastern. Don't watch good movies on AMC. They cut 'em down to 4:3 aspect, and then pan-&-scan them. It should be a crime to show The Searchers in anything other than widescreen. So skip it on AMC and get the DVD instead. Saturday afternoon is more promising. Ovation is showing Waking Life at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Not everyone loves or likes that movie, but I thought it was striving mightily towards something, and it deserves points for that. TCM is showing (in the correct widescreen aspect and uncut) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at 4 pm central/5 pm eastern. If you missed The Triplets of Belleville on Friday, Ovation is showing it again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 11 pm central/midnight eastern.

Sunday, May 31
Peter Weir's The Last Wave is one of those movies that I have a hard time rating. On one hand, it has a spooky ambience and haunting conceit that it doggedly maintains throughout. It features the only performance by Richard Chamberlain that could conceivably be called "acting" that anyone ever caught on film. On the other hand, the ending is profoundly silly, especially after all the dread leading up to it. With that caveat, I recommend that you take in a viewing if you haven't seen it. It's on IFC at 7 am central/8 am eastern and again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern. Ovation is also running Crumb at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. Also recommended: since Sunday, May 31 is the ostensible last day of the Screengrab, spend your day perusing our archives!

Monday, June 1
There's funny and there's John Ford. The funny is Duck Soup on TCM at 1:30 pm central/2:30 pm eastern, then The Awful Truth on TCM at 5:15 pm central/6:15 pm eastern, and finally Young Frankenstein on Fox Movie Channel at 8:30 pm central/9:30 pm eastern. But TCM is running a John Ford film festival overnight starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with Directed By John Ford, a documentary about the man as narrated by Orson Welles. Then there's Stagecoach (9 pm central/10 pm eastern), which is the movie Orson Welles watched to learn how to make movies, then The Horse Soldiers (10:45 pm central/11:45 pm eastern), The Quiet Man (1 am central/2 am eastern), and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (3:15 am central/4:15 am eastern). That's a lot of horse opera (with an Irish interlude), but it's well worth it. Be sure to keep an eye on TCM this month, because they're running blocks of movies by great directors through all of June, sometimes two a day.

Tuesday, June 2
Ovation has the neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (aka Bicycle Thieves) at 2 pm central/3 pm eastern and again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and overnight at 1 am central/2 am eastern. Thrill to the despair of a family man clinging to existence in post-war Rome! At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, TCM is showing It Happened One Night, the first in a Frank Capra film festival running overnight. At the same time, Fox Movie Channel has Vanishing Point. But I recommend that you catch Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey on Ovation at that time (although it's playing again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern). It's a fairly obscure documentary about the electronic musical instrument and its inventor that packs a surprising story and an emotional punch.

Wednesday, June 3
Nothing today, sorry (if he's your thing, TCM has a King Vidor film festival this evening, so check it out). Perhaps you could spend your day weeping for the lost Screengrab and cursing the cruel economy?

Thursday, June 4
TCM is running an Ingmar Bergman film fest starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with an appearance by the director on the Dick Cavett Show from 1971. Then there's The Seventh Seal (8 pm central/9 pm eastern), Wild Strawberries (9:45 pm central/10:45 pm eastern), Persona (11:30 pm central/12:30 am eastern), Hour Of The Wolf (1 am central/2 am eastern), and The Passion of Anna (2:45 am central/3:45 am eastern). The first three in particular are necessary viewing for film geeks.

Friday, June 5
IFC has Before Sunrise at 4:15 pm central/5:15 pm eastern, but TCM is running Carol Reed movies all day and Steven Spielberg movies all night. Check out the schedule. Of course, I especially recommend The Third Man at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern.

And this is as far out as I'm going with specific recommendations. But watch TCM for Fritz Lang Day on June 8, Preston Sturges Night on June 10, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa on June 11, Jacques Tourneur on June 12, and... I should really cut this off here. It's been fun! Thanks for reading!

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

3. THE GODFATHER (1972)

4. DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

As I discussed in my entry about Dr. Strangelove this past Thanksgiving, when we listed the movies we were most thankful for, it does the world the eternal service of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “comedy” and “masterpiece” need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, there’s a reason that most comedies aren’t great films: focusing on good jokes usually means ignoring things like extremely skillful direction and design, and staffing your cast with comedians usually means sacrificing the possibility of great acting. None of that applies here: Stanley Kubrick is at the very top of his game, applying his masterful sense of pace and visual keenness to the proceedings, and he brings just the right mix of actors to this pitch-black story of nuclear paranoia. By anchoring the film with a stunning triple-role by Peter Sellers, then the funniest man alive, and then coaxing master-class comic performances out of non-comic actors like George C. Scott, he managed to create a movie that was as brilliant as it was brilliantly funny. And good grief, is it funny: Terry Southern, the century’s finest portrayer of inappropriate behavior in high places, had a field day, coughing up at least a half-dozen of the funniest scenes in movie history. If the phone call to the Soviet premier, the scenes between Sellers and Sterling Hayden, or Slim Pickens’ loopy speechifying don’t crack you up, maybe humor just isn’t your thing.

5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

Film noir is far and away my favorite genre of film, so it’s curious that the one I choose as part of my ten greatest movies of all time is arguably not of the genre at all. The stellar adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel has plenty of noir trappings, but its focus on the lawman rather than the criminal, its traditional mystery structure, and its optimistic outcome puts it far more in the vein of a standard detective story than a true film noir. But for all that, it still captures the look and feel of post-war crime dramas like nothing before or since, and its masterful evocation of Chandler’s L.A. is unparalleled – quite a feat considering most of it was shot on studio back lots. Its brilliance is unquestionably the result of the collaboration of four men at the peak of their creative powers: Chandler, who created the unforgettable source material; novelist William Faulkner, whose script captured Marlowe under glass and then gave him a jolt of dangerous sexual electricity; Humphrey Bogart, who is simply as good as he can be in a role that seemed written just for him (though it wasn’t, not even close); and director Howard Hawks, who applies his professional approach to make the impenetrable narrative walk a razor’s edge. But the contribution of three women to this masculine film should never be ignored: Lauren Bacall, young and sexy and confident as hell, playing Marlowe’s lover/foil; Martha Vickers, as Bacall’s sister, who accomplishes the astonishing feat of stealing the film out from under her; and co-writer Leigh Brackett, one of Hollywood’s unsung heroines, who kept Faulkner’s contributions from getting too excessive and tightened the script until it rang. Simply amazing.

6. WEEKEND (1962)

7. PSYCHO (1960)

It seems equally strange that I’d count as one of my favorites a movie that more or less buried the noir genre. By shifting the focus of the killer from a dangerous badman on a doomed but comprehensible mission to an unpredictable psychopath who couldn’t be reasoned with, let alone understood, Alfred Hitchcock set a precedent for movie villains that later proved to be a disaster; but in his hands, it was a triumph. It was a major departure for Hitchcock, but shifting the emphasis from suspense to shock proved to be surprisingly simple for someone of his talents. As in all great films, every element comes together: from Hitchcock’s incredibly taut direction to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score to Saul Bass’ memorable credits to terrific performances from Anthony Hopkins and Janet Leigh (in one of the motion picture industry’s all-time greatest fake-outs), the great things about the movie totally overwhelm the viewer and leave you with the unmistakable confidence that you’ve witnessed greatness. It’s been a running gag here for years that Psycho can more or less be placed on any list we happen to put together; that’s a testament not to how much we love the flick, but to how much greatness it contains.

8. RAGING BULL (1980)
9. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
10. THE CONFORMIST (1970)

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

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch has never been what you’d call a mainstream director -- his last feature film, if I recall correctly, began with him videotaping old Polish factories -- but despite his reputation as an artsy iconoclast, he’s also got a streak of razzle-dazzle showmanship and the ability to hook an audience like nobody’s business when he puts his transcendental mind to it. Perhaps owing to the relatively commercial nature of the film’s origin as a pilot for ABC (infamously ordered and then canceled by network muttonheads for being too “Lynchian”), Mulholland Drive kicks off with a psychedelic jitterbug scene that gets the adrenalin pumping like any good overture, then moves into an opening sequence freighted with intrigue, atmosphere and dramatic possibility like a master class in cinematic storytelling: a beautiful woman in a limousine at night...a man with a gun about to kill her...a doomed car full of hedonistic teenagers screaming towards them, and then...CRASH! The man with the gun is killed, the beautiful woman staggers off into the Los Angeles night, her memory obliterated...and I’m ready and willing to follow Lynch wherever he wants to go. (AO)

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

As Magnolia and There Will Be Blood ably demonstrate, PT Anderson knows how to open a film. And in terms of audacious electricity, Anderson’s finest inaugural stanza can be found in his 1997 breakthrough Boogie Nights. A 3-minute single shot, it begins with the film’s title on a flashing movie marquee before the camera tilts left and then right (like an amusement park rollercoaster), then tracks a driving car to the entrance of a hopping nightclub, and then enters the club alongside Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Luis Guzman, eventually moving around and onto the dance floor, to the surrounding tables and finally behind rollerskating Heather Graham. A bit of egotistical showmanship? Without question. Yet more than merely a superficial calling-card gesture, Anderson’s brash opening aesthetic stunt efficiently introduces many of the story’s key characters, as well as conveying the euphoric glitz and glamour of a California scene dominated by wannabes flirting with their celebrity dreams. (NS)

MANHATTAN (1979)

Most of the time, when a director proclaims that his setting is “practically another character”, it’s a bunch of hooey, an oft-repeated cliché spouted off by hacks who want to be congratulated for shooting on location. But for Woody Allen, it was different. For years, Allen’s films came to be synonymous with a way of life -- cultured, neurotic, more than a little wary, resolutely cosmopolitan -- that could only come from being steeped in the cultural mecca of the Western hemisphere. Film after Allen film paid homage to the city he loved, but none more so than the one named after his borough of choice. Yet true to form, even at the beginning of Manhattan, Allen grapples with his conflicting feelings on the city -- is it the world’s greatest city, or a symbol of everything that’s wrong with society? The fact that Allen can switch instantaneously from one viewpoint to the other suggests that in his mind, they’re merely two sides of the same coin. As Allen himself says in the film, the New York he knows exists in black and white and is accompanied by Gershwin, much like the film itself, which would imply that the town he loves belongs more to the past than to the present. Looking back at the film thirty years later, these directorial choices give the film a quality that’s both nostalgic and timeless, implying that even now, even with the World Trade Center and the House That Ruth Built gone (and Allen working mostly overseas), these are still part of the city, if only in our collective memory. (PC)

8 1/2 (1963) & WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)

The dream sequence is an opportunity for a film to break out of the logic of its narrative and bare a character's fears for the audience -- unlike real dreams, which run a gamut of emotion, dream sequences in films tend to focus on anxiety. By breaking away from the internal logic of the film, the dream sequence can take a breath and develop an established character, and for this reason, very few films start with dream sequences. Fellini's 8 1/2 does, however, and Bergman's Wild Strawberries launches into one not long after the start. In the dream in 8 1/2, Fellini-substitute Anselmi dreams of being trapped in a traffic jam, all of the other drivers and passengers staring blindly at him (other than the old man pawing a starlet). He fights his way out of his car and flies away. Then he's flying over a beach, with a doppelganger holding a rope attached to his leg. An accountant rides up on a horse, cape flying behind him like the Knight at the beginning of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. His doppelganger insists that he come down, and he plummets into the ocean, waking up in terror. Pretty clear what that's about, right? Anselmi is first trapped in traffic, the great metaphor for go-nowhere-fast modern times, and when he escapes, he is dragged back down by his own ambitions and promises to moneymen. Anselmi starts the movie in a dream, spends much of it wallowing in memory, and finally ends the movie with dream-logic. His beginning dream is about his fear of being trapped, reeled in by his own accountants and his own professional persona, unable to fly and falling. In Wild Strawberries, Professor Borg dreams of faceless clocks and faceless people, time falling away while his own death stumbles before him. Although it's dream-logic, the meaning is written clearly and most of the action of the movie, in which Borg tries to fix the mess he's made of his life, follows. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

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

Reviews By Request: Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, voting for my next Reviews By Request column can be found at the end of this review.

The “late period” films of Federico Fellini are one of the major blind spots in my moviewatching history. I’ve seen nearly all of his earlier works, up to and including the “transitional” work 8 ½, which remains my favorite of his films. However, the only Fellini films I’ve seen after this are Amarcord (which I love) and Satyricon (which I don’t), but I was certainly familiar with these films’ critical reputations, which tend to echo the sentiments expressed by the loudmouthed intellectual in the movie line in Annie Hall.

Having just seen Juliet of the Spirits for the first time, I can’t argue with the opinion that it’s an “indulgent” film, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, since it reveals aspects of their maker that his more disciplined films could not. Supposedly, Fellini intended Juliet of the Spirits to be a tribute to his wife and frequent leading lady, Giulietta Masina. If this is the case, it’s a funny sort of tribute. Yes, Juliet (played by Masina) sticks to her principles when her husband cheats on her, and eventually finds escape from their marriage. But for most of the film, she is portrayed as a hapless victim, carried along by the whims of the film- and those of her husband.

Consider the way that she is portrayed visually. Juliet never seems to fit in no matter where she is. From the beginning of the film, when her husband (played by Mario Pisu) hosts an impromptu dinner party, the guests are garishly dressed and glamorous, while Juliet wears a simple dress and a matronly brown wig. This will be a trend throughout the film, as Juliet clashes with her more decadent surroundings. Likewise, throughout the film Fellini accentuates the Masina’s petiteness, often showing her amidst people (even her own mother) who tower over her. In other hands, Juliet’s inability to fit into the film’s world would be a defiant statement, but Fellini’s feelings about it seem to be more complicated than that. One can see that he feels affection for his wife, but he can’t resist being drawn toward the decadence that had become such an integral element of both his life and his work.

And what is one supposed to make of the way Juliet is treated by the film after discovering her husband’s infidelity? A more conventional film might have taken the husband to task for his cheating, but not Fellini, who kept mistresses throughout much of his adult life. Instead, one character after another tells Juliet that in order to win her husband back, she needs to embrace her sexual side- to be more like, say, her buxom, sexually liberated neighbor Suzy, played by Sandra Milo, who by her own admission put in time as one of Fellini’s mistresses. Needless to say, Juliet has some trouble with this advice, especially as it relates to her own Roman Catholic upbringing.

The worldview we see in Juliet of the Spirits is a decidedly pre-feminist one, and one that’s a little hard to stomach. But at the same time, one needs not agree with what a film is saying to appreciate the film itself, and Fellini uses the framework of this story to lay bare his own ideas about marriage, sexuality, and the female gender in general. Because these ideas run so contrary to more “enlightened” points of view that have found their way into most contemporary works of art, Juliet of the Spirits is more thought-provoking than a more politically correct film might have been.

And even if you’re not down with Fellini’s worldview in Juliet of the Spirits, it’s hard to argue with the sheer visual splendor of the film, Fellini’s first in color. Many of world cinema’s greatest filmmakers first made the transition to color during the 1960s- Bergman and Antonioni had already made the switch, with Buñuel and Kurosawa still to come. What these filmmakers had in common is that they didn’t simply make the change for commercial reasons, but treated color as another filmmaking tool to be used wisely. In Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini uses color to create images that would not have had the same impact in black and white, as when he painted the walls red to create unease during a scene in which Juliet visits a mysterious healer. Also striking is the full spectrum of colors found in Suzy’s cavernous home (reminiscent of a fantasy version of a brothel), which contrasts with Juliet’s memories of her Catholic upbringing, which are full of solid shades of red and grey, with innocent white on the children and the almost impossibly dark violet (not black) of the nuns’ robes. Juliet of the Spirits is a feast for the eyes- and, with Nino Rota’s mindbending score, for the ears as well.

In doing research for this review- which must no doubt seem as rambling as the film itself- I came across the following quote from Fellini:

“We don't really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within… [The] problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him-right be she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can't become whole or free until he has set woman free-his woman. It's his responsibility, not hers. He can't be complete, truly alive until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave of libidinous acts or a saint with a halo.”

Perhaps this quotation is the key to what Fellini was attempting with Juliet of the Spirits- not simply translating these ideas into cinematic form, but also struggling to reconcile them with his own weaknesses and deeply-ingrained ideas of what women meant to him in his life. Of course, it’s hard to say what Masina really thought of all this, but that’s part of what makes the movie so darn fascinating, isn’t it?

When coming up with a theme for the next Reviews By Request selection, I kept thinking back to this week's DVD release of The Wrestler and reflected on the fact that I've seen only a handful of movies from the eighties salad days of Wrestler comeback kid Mickey Rourke. So the next Reviews By Request will attempt to remedy this. Some of the titles I've listed below have solid reputations, others not so much, but I haven't seen any of them. That I've seen not only 9 1/2 Weeks but also Wild Orchid (not to mention Double Team) says a lot about me as a moviegoer, but that's a topic for another time. Anyway, which of these should I review next?

Online Surveys & Market Research

Due to a software snafu involving the new polling software, the above poll may be displaying too small to be easily readable, so here are the options in chronological order: Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Year of the Dragon, Angel Heart, and Johnny Handsome. Hope that helps. And ss always, feel free to sound off in the comments section below. See you in two weeks!

Screengrab Self-Promotion Theater #1: De Zomer Kamp

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:19:00 GMT

We've reached the Horse Latitudes of the film-going year, and Screengrab feels your pain. Sure, there's 17 hours of Steven Soderbergh's Che to look forward to, but then what? If you've already seen all of the prestigious 2008 releases, you're basically stuck with off-season programmers like Hotel For Dogs or (egad) Bride Wars.

And so, to help alleviate the mid-winter entertainment blahs, I'm launching a new feature, Screengrab Self-Promotion Theater, whereby I selflessly share a few of my old zero-budget short movies with you, the grateful public.

First up is De Zomer Kamp, an entry in the 2008 Boston edition of the 48 Hour Film Project (featuring the music of theremin supergroup, The Lothars). Enjoy!

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE IS THANKFUL FOR:

BARTON FINK (1991)

It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself agreeing with the French, and it wouldn’t be the last. But when this richly layered film by the Coen Brothers swept the major awards at Cannes, it was, for me, a confirmation that what I had only previously suspected was indeed true: Joel and Ethan Coen were not just good directors, not just great directors, but the greatest living American filmmakers. Barton Fink, to this day, is not one of the Coens’ best-loved films; it tends to be very divisive, and while its greatness isn’t frequently in question, where it belongs in their filmography is hotly disputed. For me, even in the wake of later triumphs like Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country for Old Men, it seems obvious that it’s one of their greatest movies, and likely their best altogether. For a movie that was apparently scratched out during the making of Miller’s Crossing to help the Coens overcome a bad case of writer’s block, it’s astonishingly deep and complex, a deft blend of satirical comedy, character-driven drama and existential horror that seems all along to be about one thing and ends up being very profoundly about another. Not even The Big Lebowski equals Barton Fink as an evocation of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and its intricate, dreadful set design surpasses anything the Coens have ever done. And to top it all off, it’s one of the few cinematic evocations of the process of writing that isn’t an embarrassment. The day I saw Barton Fink is the day I finally realized that the greatness of Hollywood films wasn’t a thing of the past: it was something I was living through.

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

One of the marks of a truly great film is that it seems you can never find enough things to say about it. Sitting down to write this, I wondered what I could mention about The Big Sleep that I hadn’t already talked about a hundred times; but now, I realize I could write a hundred pages about it and still not even begin to cover all the things worth discussing. Although everyone involved with this imperishable hardboiled detective yarn was at the top of their game, its greatness is largely the work of four geniuses at the absolute peak of their powers: the brilliant pulp novelist Raymond Chandler, who provided the source material about Philip Marlowe’s foray into pornography, blackmail and murder; the great novelist William Faulkner, who was brought on to write the unforgettable screenplay and who added his own raffish twists; the consummate professional, director Howard Hawks, who filmed one of the tightest movies of the era; and actor Humphrey Bogart, who cemented his role as perhaps the greatest leading man of all time with his utterly wonderful performance as Marlowe. Every single set piece in the film works perfectly; it’s a testament to how well the movie succeeds that whenever someone brings up the fact that the plot has a massive hole in it, it’s only to say that it doesn’t really matter one whit. The movie is drenched in L.A. atmosphere despite its back lot settings, and not a single performance is a dud: Bogart and lead actress Lauren Bacall got all the attention, but everyone, from the hired goons to the butler, shines during their moments on camera. Often identified as the father-film of the golden age of noir, I’d argue that The Big Sleep is lacking a few key elements of my favorite cinematic genre, but it does contain enough of them that it kick-started my interest in crime dramas; and maybe it’s a good thing that it’s not pure noir. If it was, it would have no competition.

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Dr. Strangelove did a lot for me. It was one of the first movies of my color-charged adolescence that taught me how to appreciate the virtues of filming in black and white. It was my first introduction to the work of the savagely funny Terry Southern, whose ultra-black absurdist humor, and whose underlying premise that people in high places were like as not entirely insane, would be a huge influence on my later life. It was my second encounter, after The Shining, with the great Stanley Kubrick, who I am still convinced is even more brilliant than he is generally given credit for, and that’s considerable. But most of all, what it did for me was to convince me of something that, up until then, I had not believed, and that even now, in my darker moments, I suspect might not be the case: it convinced me that a funny movie could also be a great movie. I had always had an affinity for comic writing, especially of the variety as poisonous and coal-black as that found in this Cold War apocalyptic comedy, but I was also learning to appreciate great art, and I so rarely found the two within shouting distance of one another that I started to despair. The truly great, I decided, and the truly funny, were incompatible, and I’d have to make a choice. Luckily, Dr. Strangelove came around and showed me how wrong I was. It is unquestionably a great film: brilliantly structured, astonishingly well-filmed, crammed full of great performances, and featuring a few set pieces (the first shots of the War Room, in particular, and the breathtaking hand-held shots of the invasion of Burpelson Air Force Base) that are undoubtedly the work of a great filmmaker. But it is also a paralyzingly funny movie, and the telephone conversation between Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley and the unseen Soviet premier may be the most hilarious scene I’ve ever encountered.

PERSONA (1966)

Just before I saw Persona for the first time, I was starting to get worried about myself. My taste in movies ran decidedly towards rugged genre work, and there was something unsettlingly dude-ish about my attraction to films about murderers and lowlifes. And I didn’t quite understand what great acting really was; I tended to confuse character with acting, and I often mistook dynamic presence for talent, not realizing they are two substantially different things. What’s more, my attempts at appreciating Ingmar Bergman had been pretty thoroughly jobbed. Sitting in a small theatre in Phoenix in 1993, though, changed all those things. Persona, which today I count as one of the very tiny number of movies I’d contemplate if asked to name my all-time favorite films, was a quiet, sinuous film whose significant emotional power came entirely from within instead of being generated by external threats. Its acting was explosively great, and yet so subtle and calm as to be nearly invisible; it taught me the value of reaction, of contemplation, and of silence to great acting. It showed me what Bergman was truly trying to do, and allowed me to finally appreciate him for what he was; and, beyond that, it proved to me, in the same way Dr. Strangelove had proven that comedy and genius were not incompatible, that a movie could be deeply, intrinsically philosophical and not be pretentious, preachy or incomprehensible. Genre film never really relinquished its hold on me, and I later figured out how to look far enough below the surface that I could see depth when there had seemed only to be tension; but that’s a lesson I never would have learned if it weren’t for Persona.

WAVELENGTH (1967)

“Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses never happened,” asked the Scottish experimental writer B.S. Johnson, “and still rely on the crutch of storytelling?” It’s a question I’d learned to ask of literature, but until I lucked into a screening of Michael Snow’s daring structuralist masterpiece Wavelength in college, I had not yet learned to ask it of film. Every movie on my list, I included because I’m thankful that it introduced me to some new element of filmmaking that hugely enriched my life as a viewer. In the case of Wavelength, it’s simply stated: it taught me that there was such a thing as experimental film. That alone opened up huge new vistas for me, and led me to great filmmakers like Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Chris Marker, and, especially, Stan Brakhage. Wavelength itself is quite a curiosity, even decades after its debut: a 45-minute tracking shot across a New York loft, accompanied by disjointed conversation, hints of a murder, an atonal whine, the final and unending terminal focus on a photo of the ocean. It straddles the border between narrative and non-narrative while opening up huge possibilities for visual poetry, the freeing of the camera from spatial limitations and traditional usages, and the nature of time in this most time-based medium. Prints of Wavelength are hard to come by, and often as not in terrible condition; it would be wonderful if America treated Snow (who filmed Wavelength here) as well as he’s regarded in his native Canada.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS (1982)

This Italian film, directed by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is about the people who don't fight in war but who just do their best to keep their lives from being completely overrun when it comes to town. In this case, the people are Tuscan, and it's late in the summer of 1944, with World War II winding down and the local fascists preparing to blow up anything they can before the Americans arrive. The people of the village sneak out under dead of night and prepare to hit the road, hoping to stay alive until they encounter the Yanks; the movie is presented as the memories of a woman who was six years old then, and it's infused with a playful surrealism that colors the many incidents, making them seem touched by magic. Which, at this point, is entirely appropriate for a movie where the people can't wait to embrace the invading Americans.

14. PLATOON (1986)

Drawing on memories from his own experiences in combat, Oliver Stone won Best Director and Best Picture for his grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War, where (in the words of star Charlie Sheen, back when he was a serious actor rather than a smirky sitcom star), “We did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves.” Earlier films (notably Apocalypse Now) had, of course, tackled the Southeast Asian “police action,” but the topic was generally as unpopular on the big screen as Iraq films are today. Platoon, premiering four years after the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., marked a cathartic cultural shift in America’s perception (and digestion) of the war: without Platoon’s critical and commercial success (and the flood of Vietnam movies, TV shows and video games that followed), a parody like 2008’s Tropic Thunder would have been unthinkable, not to mention sacrilegious. Yet, even though Vietnam era slang (being in “the shit”) and combat details (cigarette packs in helmet bands, etc.) are now war movie clichés, I’ll never forget seeing Platoon for the first time, when the wounds of America’s last great military misadventure were finally starting to heal, then watching shaken veterans around the theater hanging back after the lights came up, grouping together in pain and reminiscence.

13. SHAME (1968)

It’s probably no coincidence that most of Ingmar Bergman’s starkest films were made at the height of the Vietnam War, a time when the horrifying images of battle were being broadcast on television sets all over the world on a nightly basis. Bergman’s most explicit take on the horror and senselessness of war, Shame, begins in quintessential Bergman fashion, focusing on a pair of married musicians (played by Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, of course) who have retreated from their old lives onto a remote Swedish island. Their marriage could hardly be called happy, but it’s comfortable and secure, far removed from the rest of world, including a war that’s been raging in the distance. Suddenly and without warning, the war comes to their doorstep. But despite the handful of battle sequences, Shame has nothing to do with combat, and everything to do with the poisonous effect of war on everyone it touches. Ullmann, who is concerned only with the well-being of herself and her husband, finds herself accused of treason. Their home is destroyed. Ullmann sleeps with a local bureaucrat, perhaps out of self-preservation, but perhaps for other reasons. And Von Sydow reveals himself to be either a coward or a vindictive scumbag, depending on one’s perspective. Bergman refuses to pin the story to a single war -- it’s certainly not Vietnam, in spite of when he made it. Instead, Shame is a condemnation of the very idea of war and the effect it has on humanity -- not merely the literal death and destruction, but also the psychic fallout it leaves in its wake, which can linger long after any memory of why the war was fought in the first place.

12. HENRY V (1944) & (1988)

Shakespeare's play, which came in so handy for pundits looking for a point of comparison for George W. Bush's transformation into a great war leader after 9/11, was a propaganda piece celebrating the great victory of the outnumbered English by the overburdened French at the Battle of Agincourt. But because Shakespeare knew the value of ambiguity and multiple meanings, the work is open to various interpretations and can be staged in different ways to emphasize different possible themes. Laurence Olivier had a personal triumph as both director and star with the 1944 version, which, being made during World War II, not surprisingly treated the material as the occasion for a rousing, jingoistic hard sell for patriotic warfare. Forty-five years later, Kenneth Branagh, making his movie debut as a director and also starring in the title role, had no war to promote and so saw fit to stage the work as a big, baroque spectacle with ironic attitudes towards the expressions of patriotic fervor, film noir lighting, and what Pauline Kael called a "deranged Darth Vader entrance" for himself. As it is, both movies are huge, happy wallows in showy stagecraft and the best acting the British can always offer at the snap of a finger. (Branagh's, in particular, is the kind of movie where Paul Scofield has a walk-on.)

11. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein, master of the montage and one of the greatest pioneers of early cinema, made two classic war films, both very different from one another. His first, Battleship Potemkin, is often cited as one of the greatest movies of all time, and that’s not just hype: aside from the legendary Odessa Steps sequence, it contains some of the earliest uses of montage, and generally establishes itself as a movie using visual language light-years beyond what anyone else was doing at the time. But as a war film, it is unquestionably subversive: it was designed as a piece of pure propaganda in which the oppressed sailors of the battleship rise up in righteous anger against their cruel Czarist overlords. At no point do we have anything but sympathy for the heroic mutineers, and no less a personage than Josef Goebbels declared that anyone might become a Bolshevik after viewing the movie. Alexander Nevsky, on the other hand, is as much a celebration of patriotism and loyalty as Potemkin was of rebellion and revolution. It didn’t reach its peak of popularity until a few years after it was made, when Russia and Germany were at each other’s throats, but its ability to induce a patriotic fervor, as audiences cheered at the Russian peasant army driving out the Teutonic Knights, was unmistakable. And while it wasn’t the artistic success that Battleship Potemkin was, it did feature an unforgettable score and one scene that rivals the Odessa Steps sequence: the famous battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, which stands as one of the most thrilling battle sequences ever staged for film.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve been taking reader suggestions for our Top Tens of late, and this week’s list, suggested via “electronic mail” by F.O.S. (Friend of Screengrab) Kaegan has the added advantage of being topical, what with the ten million recent reviews of Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen that cleverly elucidated how the film’s high school cliques and self-aware characters were just like something from a John Hughes movie...but for real! (And without any Wang Chung on the soundtrack).

Spurred by Kaegan, we henceforth present fifteen worthy homages and/or bad imitations, depending how you look at it (and NOT including Brian De Palma’s numerous Hitchcock rip-offs, which we’re saving for an upcoming list of, well, best and worse Hitchcock rip-offs...so stay tuned)!

FREEWAY (1996), Not Directed by John Waters

I’ve written about Freeway so recently that I’ll merely direct you to that write-up for my thoughts on Matthew Bright’s deranged cult classic...but, considering the film’s white trash milieu, indomitable characters, gleeful celebration of violence and depravity and startling against-type casting, it seemed fitting to kick off the list with the greatest Baltimore-of-the-West film the Prince of Puke never directed.

MIAMI BLUES (1990), Not Directed by Jonathan Demme

In the eighties, Jonathan Demme amassed a sizable following with his films Melvin & Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Each of these films showed a flair for offbeat comedy, as well as an affinity for marginalized characters. So when Miami Blues hit screens in 1990, the handful of people who actually paid to see it could have been forgiven for believing it was Demme’s latest directorial effort. Hell, it was produced by Demme and his usual producing team, shot by Demme’s usual cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, edited by Demme regular Craig McKay, and co-starred newly-hot leading man Alec Baldwin, who had a supporting role in Married to the Mob. But manning the director’s chair wasn’t Demme, but rather his old Roger Corman colleague George Armitage, whose most notable title up to that point had been 1971’s Private Duty Nurses. The style of Miami Blues bears definite resemblance to that of Demme’s work, but Armitage’s sense of humor is more twisted, as in the scene where Baldwin’s Fred Frenger (a Demme name if there ever was one) steals police detective Fred Ward’s gun and badge, plus his false teeth just to rub it in. But if Armitage’s brand of sick humor doesn’t exactly jive with his old pal’s more generous comedy, the two share an affection for characters who are essentially good, embodied here in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Suzie, a kind-hearted prostitute who gets stuck on Fred and comes off like the slower cousin of Something Wild’s Audrey. Once it begins to dawn on Suzie that Fred is far more dangerous than she’d anticipated, her answer is both quirky and heartbreaking: "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me."

THE THIRD MAN (1949), Not Directed by Orson Welles

It's easy to understand why people got the wrong idea about The Third Man. Orson Welles not only gives an electrifying performance as Harry Lime, but improvised various bits of the character's memorable dialogue, including his famous line about Swiss cuckoo clocks. (Indeed, he became so closely associated with the character that he went on to voice him in a radio show called The Lives of Harry Lime a few years later.) The film itself is infused with the kind of morally unhinged noir sensibility that Welles would later master in Touch of Evil, making it seem entirely plausible that his was the mind behind the film. Many of The Third Man's most daring shots, from the shadowy confrontations in the sewers of Vienna to the final, heartbreaking walk taken by Alida Valli, resemble Welles' visual pyrotechnics in his own films, and the overall dark tone of the movie, as well as little touches like the overlapping dialogue, the low-angled two-shots, and the interesting lighting, are all reminiscent of movies that Orson Welles really did direct. To top it all off, Welles was already a famous (or infamous) director when The Third Man opened in the U.S., while Carol Reed, though well-known in his native England, wasn't particular renowned here. But the all-too-common assumption that Orson Welles "really" directed the film does a disservice to the talented and innovative Reed, who, while not on his star's level of genius, was nonetheless a very dedicated, professional and skilled director. Indeed, in at least one way, it was Carol Reed who did Orson Welles' job and not the other way around: Harry Lime's hands reaching through the sewer grate near the movie's end belong to Reed and not Welles, who was gallivanting around Europe when the scene was filmed and hadn't even shown up on set yet.

INTERIORS (1978), Not Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Like a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is obsessed with the work of Ingmar Bergman. Unlike a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is actually capable of getting movies made and widely released across the country. For years, Allen – whose obsession with Bergman is arguably both wider and deeper than his understanding of Bergman – had been trying to get people to take him seriously, and with Interiors, he pulled the trigger in a big way, inspired by Bergman's stark, chilly tales of family unhappiness in everything from the photography to the poster design. Never had Diane Keaton stared so wistfully out of a poorly lit window; never had Woody Allen failed to appear in one of his own movies; and, most importantly, never had a film by America's leading comedic director been such a relentless bummer. Interiors proved to be a massive critical success, with only a few grouches wondering if someone so adept at comedy needed to be spending his time making second-rate imitations of art films by a Swedish director who was still alive and perfectly capable of making such films himself. (Indeed, Bergman managed to one-up Allen even in the casting department: Woody had wanted to use Ingrid Bergman for the role of Eve, but she was already committed to filming a movie in Europe with, you guessed it, Ingmar.) Regardless of whether or not you think of Interiors as a failed Bergman knock-off or a successful Bergman homage, one thing's for sure: it ain't funny. The "I liked your earlier, funnier work" has become a comic cliché of its own when applied to Woody Allen's movies; Interiors is the movie that set it all off.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

The Rep Report (August 1--5)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Nobody can accuse Elliott Gould of having micromanaged his career to death. Gould scuffled for work for many years before 1970's M*A*S*H made him not just a star but a counterculture icon and a Time cover boy. Just a couple of years after his anointment by newsmagazine, bad career decisions and personal choices had left Gould with his head in a bad place and reputation for being not just borderline unemployable but, as Pauline Kael put it (not unaffectionately), an "anachronism." These days, Gould is regarded not as a superstar or a flake but a pretty solid pro--okay, maybe a flaky pro--and his best performances particularly the work he did for Robert Altman in M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, and California Split, hold up as well as anything done in front of a camera in the 1970s. (His Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, once a lethal flop, is now widely remembered as one of the great comebacks of all time.) "Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age (August 1--21) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music features all those pictures as well as Gould's first significant movie role, as one of the titular quartet in Paul Mazursky's 1969 satirical time capsule Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. In an interview in the current issue of Stop Smiling that centers on California Split, Gould calls himself "a jazz actor", and in these musical, improvisationl performances, which have a tossed-off feeling that belies their technical daring and emotional depth, it's easy to see what he means. The program is padded out with other early-'70s pictures that mostly serve to chart the course by which Gould contrived to stay employed in movies between gigs with Bob and Paulie. (The big exceptions are the limper than limp I Love My Wife and the overblown, hollow Harry and Walter Go to New York, which don't serve any purpose whatsoever.) Getting Straight, one of Gould's biggest hits, is a campus-unrest flick directed by Richard (The Stunt Man) Rush that provides a taste of what a thinking-young-person's exploitation movie was like circa 1970. Busting (1974), an attempt to package law-and-order politics in a loose, sort-of-comic Gouldian package, wound up being most notable as the movie that taught Starsky and Hutch how to dress. And Ingmar Bergman's 1971 The Touch, a movie that did Gould no good in any department--it didn't do Bergman any favors either--is worth checking out if you're a Bergman completist or would like to see just why so many people thought that, by that point, Gould had already worn out his welcome.

Starting August 2 and running through most of the month, the Museum of Modern Art's "Collaborations in the Collection" series spotlights Joel and Ethan Cohen, a pair of filmmakers whose collaborative creator was kind of inevitable. But as the programming points up, the Coens have also made a virtue of repeatedly teaming up with those they've done good work with, including cinematographers Barry Sonnenfeld (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing) and Roger Deakins (everything else, basically) as well as the composer Carter Burwell and such actors as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito, and Frances MacDormand, whose collaboration with Joel Coen extended to matrimony.

CHICAGO: At the Gene Siskel Film Center, the 14th Annual Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video --"The Midwest’s biggest and best celebration of the black experience on film, Black Harvest highlights talent from around the nation and around the world, with a special emphasis on our own Chicago-based filmmakers"--will run from August 1 through the 28th. On August 5, critic and interviewer Elvis Mitchell, last seen on the Turner Classic Movies series Under the Influence, where he barely managed to overcome his shock at hearing Quentin Tarantino confess that he has never seen the Judy Garland A Star Is Born, will swing by with a print of his new HBO film The Black List, Vol. 1 tucked under his arm, and the night after that will include a special screening of the monumental new Katrina documentary Trouble the Waters. A smaller but still very affecting documentary touched by Katrina, Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, is also among the many feature films and shorts.

From August 2 through the 24th, the Siskel Center will host "Paradjanov the Magician", a celebration of the vibrantly colored, strange and moving work of the Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov. It includes a new print of his masterpiece, Shadows of Our Fogotten Ancestors.

SAN FRANCISCO: Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles, a stunning, black and white semi-documentary look at a group of Native Americans drifting through a dazed, aimless existence in Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, was recently plucked from forgotten obscurity by some hardy restorers and, "presented by" Native American novelist Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett, recently started making its way across the country thanks to Milestone, the same company that brought Burnett's Killer of Sheep back from the dead. It plays the Castro August 1 through the 7th.

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives' "Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" (August 1--23) boasts an impressive array of films inspired by the writings of the cult pulp writer. Although Goodis was American and many of the films included here were Hollywood productions, the best known titles are both French: Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), based on Goodis's Down There, which remains one of the freshest and most thrilling products of the New Wave, and Jean-Jacques Beinex's 1983 The Moon in the Gutter, which remains one of the ghastliest things ever brought into the world by the misguided will of man.

LOS ANGELES: August 1 and 2, the Los Angles County Museum of Art presents "Two Comedies by Pietro Germi", and they're the right two: the justly famous Divorce Italian Style (1961) and the even funnier follow-up Seduced and Abandoned (1964), both featuring the luscious comedienne Stefania Sandrelli. The only way to imagine a better package for a hot weekend would be if the museum would spring for a lemonade waterfall.

Summerfest '08: "Suddenly Last Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Last week on Summerfest '08, we brought you a ripe slice of faux-Tennessee Williams by way of William Faulkner, with the overheated 1958 steamer The Long Hot Summer. This week, we're cutting out the middleman and bringing you actual Tennessee Williams -- or as actual as Tennessee Williams could get given the restrictive studio censorship of the 1950s -- with Suddenly Last Summer. As if reacting to a thrown-down gauntlet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a year after The Long Hot Summer debuted, said "Oh yeah? We'll just see about that!", and brought in an even more dysfunctional cast to film an even more flowery tale of sexual repression with an even more transparently, and yet never explicitly, gay subtext than Hollywood was previously willing to put up with. If you think all this sublimated gayness, sweaty sexuality, and boiled-over Freudianism is pretty heavy water for a frivolous feature about movies with the word 'summer' in the title to carry, well, blame Hollywood, not us -- apparently there's something about the months from May to September that gets producers and directors all moist and lascivious. If someone out there has access to a university press, there's probably a good thesis floating around about why, exactly, "summer blockbuster" has transitioned in meaning these last few decades from "steamy romance about forbidden love" to "movie with lots of CGI where stuff gets blown all to shit". It probably says something profound about our culture, unless it doesn't.

Anyway, let's get on with the latest forbidden fruit in our cinematic basket: crack open some cognac, find yourself a nice Mediterranean beach on which to lounge, and join us for a viewing of Suddenly Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Catherine Holley (played by a luscious-looking Liz Taylor) has just returned from Europe, where she has gone all wiggy. Apparently, while she was visiting, her cousin Sebastian, played by nobody because we never see him, was killed under mysterious circumstances, and the whole thing was just too, too unpleasant and caused Catherine to have a nervous breakdown. Once she starts to recover, she makes cryptic but extremely disturbing comments about Sebastian's demise, which rubs his mom (played by Katherine Hepburn as the wonderfully named Mrs. Violet Venable) the wrong way. Violet insists that Sebastian was a very nice young man and a deeply sensitive artist and that's all there is to that, and when Catherine insists that there was something peculiar about the lad, she is instructed to shut her yapper or have it shut for her, in the person of professional psychiatrist and lobotomy practitioner Montgomery Clift. Eventually the truth comes out, or as much of the truth as the producers were allowed to show at the time: Sebastian was murdered by his neighbors for his predatory sexual practices, and Catherine -- like Violet before her -- was being used by the nefarious fellow as his procurer. (In fact, what is only hinted at in the movie is made explicit in the play: Sebastian was a pederast at worst and a seducer of young men at best, who was not only killed by his neighbors, but eaten by them as well. Creepy!)

THE PLAYERS: As if the plot of the movie, with its pedophilia, murder, pimping, lobotomies and cannibalism wasn't a big enough bummer, apparently the behind-the-scenes action was soaked in bad vibes as well. Pretty much everyone involved in the production of Suddenly Last Summer hated each other with a capital H: Katherine Hepburn hated Elizabeth Taylor for stealing her spotlight. Elizabeth Taylor hated Joseph L. Manckiewicz for mistreating her friend Monty Clift. Manckiewicz hated Clift for his alcoholism, bad behavior and unprofessional demeanor. Producer Sam Spiegel hated Montgomery Clift because he was gay. And the screenplay was co-written by Gore Vidal, who basically hates everyone on general principles. Clift had been in a horrible car accident on his way to Taylor's home before filming began, and the treatment he received (and dished out) on the set helped send him into a downward spiral from which he would never recover; and Taylor, on the end of a prolonged stretch as America's sweetheart, gained a reputation for difficulty during the filming of Suddenly Last Summer that would dog her throughout the 1960s and beyond.

SUMMER FUN: There's less fun going on here than in any film we've yet reviewed as part of Summerfest '08. Even Ingmar Bergman comes across as a good-time party happenin' kind of dude compared to the dour demeanours and permanent trauma expressed on screen in this bummer in the summer. Between Sebastian getting eaten by his neighbor and Liz and Kate being posthumously unmasked as gay pimps, no one is particularly enjoying themselves in this movie, not even the normally impish Gore Vidal. The one guy who has something to do in the movie other than feel sorry for himself is the psychiatrist played by Montgomery Clift, who if nothing else has the golden opportunity to run a couple of million volts through Liz Taylor's thinkbox, but even that doesn't seem to get him very excited.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Folks, this movie stars Montgomery Clift as a brain specialist. He ain't wearing no Hawaiian shirts. We never get to see Sebastian, but it's a pretty fair bet he would prefer to have been killed and eaten to wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Albert "Dr. Cyclops" Dekker, who in perfect keeping with the tone of the film was a closeted homosexual who died of autoerotic asphyxiation with hypodermic needles jutting out of his arms and curse words written on his body, appears in Suddenly Last Summer, and while he might conceivably owned a Hawaiian shirt, he's certainly not wearing one here. Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams likely never touched a Hawaiian shirt in their entire lives. This is possibly the least Hawaiian-shirt-friendly summer movie ever made.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Although the film is set in the 1930s, the fashions are all contemporary to when it was made, in 1959. And that's good, if for no other reason than it allows us to take a gander at the lovely Liz Taylor bedecked in a white bikini when seeing Liz Taylor in a bikini was still a very desirable thing. Of course, there isn't much of it -- the movie was made from a stage play, and almost all of the action still takes place indoors -- and she isn't exactly having a party in her bikini as she is sitting around feeling suicidal and blathering on and on about how her gay cousin was killed and eaten by teenagers. Still, in a movie as relentlessly bleak as Suddenly Last Summer, you take what you can get. Party on!

Tartan Fades To Black

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:55:00 GMT

One of the oldest and most respected independent distribution houses in the United Kingdom, Tartan Films, is taking down its shutter. Plagued by financial difficulties and distribution concerns, Tartan has closed down its offices, dismantled its American arm (Tartan Video USA), released all of its employees, and begun the process of selling off its highly respectable catalogue to other distributors. In recent years, Tartan had been best known for its "Asia Extreme" series, which brought movies like Oldboy and the original Japanese version of The Ring to the West, but the catalog of the 26-year-old company included everything from Bergman's Wild Strawberries to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

According to Screen Daily, other distributors are rushing to snatch up some of the prestige titles in Tartan's collection (handled currently in the U.S. by Palisades Media); elsewhere, Time Out takes time out to remember some of Tartan's finest releases (ranging from Jodorowsky's El Topo to Verhoeven's The Fourth Man). Although the company had been in dire financial straits for some time, no particular reason has been given by company founder Hamish McAlpine as to why Tartan went out of business so quickly (Geoffrey Macnab speculates in the Guardian, and lays some blame at the foot of McAlpine's desire to produce films himself; his first major effort was the disastrous English-language remake of Michael Haneke's Funny Games). This has no doubt got other indie distributors, especially in the U.K., wondering: who's next?

Summerfest '08: "Smiles of a Summer Night"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Our goal here at the Screengrab for the Summerfest '08 feature is to give you a dozen or so movies, all of which have "summer" in the title, which you can watch to no great pain while you are waiting for your dog to bring back the tennis ball you threw in the ocean. Unsurprisingly, most movies with the word "summer" in the title – and, indeed, most movies that are about summer, or are set during the summer, or are released during the summer, or in any way have the lemonade-and-sunscreen scent of summer about them, are pretty light, fluffy concoctions, spilling over with good will, gentle humor, and people wearing far less clothing than they normally would. Today, though, is different. Today we'll be featuring a movie by none other than Ingmar freakin' Bergman. Bergman: the man who single-handedly inspired Woody Allen to become a huge bummer. Bergman: the man whose most famous film involves a dying knight playing a desperate game of chess with the personification of Death itself. Bergman: the man whose very name is synonymous with incredibly heavy European art cinema. Could this man possibly direct a breezy summer movie (or, in this case, a breezy sommar movie)? Could this man, whose movies are stuffed with miserable families, emotional trauma, and metaphysical turmoil, give us, of all things, a fun little comedy?

Grab a chilled bottle of Svedka, book your tickets on Scandinavian Airlines, and join us for some Smiles of a Summer Night!

THE ACTION: Meet Frederik Egerman. He's a Swedish attorney and self-involved clothes horse with a gorgeous teenage wife named Anne. There's one problem with their marriage: they haven't consummated it yet. Meet his son (from a previous marriage) Henrik, a recent graduate from divinity school, who faces a serious impediment to entering the priesthood: he's got a big hard-on for his stepmother Anne – and since she's off-limits, he's carrying on an affair with Petra, his father's maid. Meet Desirée Armfeldt, an actress that Frederik used to have a crush on and who is seriously envied by Anne. She lets it be known that she has feelings for Frederik, which pisses Anne off to no end. Desirée is currently seeing another well-off fop named Carl-Magnus Malcolm, whose wife, Charlotte, is a good friend of Anne. Are you following all this? No? Good. We weren't either, to be perfectly honest with you. Just take our word for it that wacky hijinks and hilarity are bound to ensue.

THE PLAYERS: Hard as it is to believe, Smiles of a Summer Night – which plays, alternately, like an Oscar Wilde comedy of manners and a more subdued, highbrow version of Three's Company – was written and directed by none other than Ingmar Bergman, the grand old man of highly cerebral and incredibly depressing Swedish art films. The movie that started out as Sommarnattens Leende isn't exactly the strongest film in his oeuvre, aesthetically speaking, and tonally, it's a bit jarring to think that this is what he produced just prior to making the deep, masterful The Seventh Seal. Still, despite its novelty value as a light, sunny comedy – or perhaps because of it – it's become a favorite of Bergmanophiles the world over, with Woody Allen essentially rewriting it as A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Stephen Sondheim launching his own adaptation with A Little Night Music. The 1955 production (set, uncharacteristically for Bergman at the time, in a contemporary milieu) also features an all-star cast of the director's favorite actors, including the legendary Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and Ulla Jacobsson.

SUMMER FUN: Generally speaking, there isn't a lot of summer fun in Ingmar Bergman movies. Sure, characters sometimes go to the beach, but it's usually to have nervous breakdowns, sexually traumatic encounters, or existential crises stemming from their incestuous affairs. They don't got to drink banana daiquiris and snap each other with towels. While Smiles of a Summer Night is, indeed, based during the four days of the calendar year that pass for summer in Scandinavia, it's frightfully low on frat-boy hijinks and authority figures falling into swimming pools. There is a certain element of summer fun, but it's typical Bergmanesque stuff for the overeducated clove-smokers in the back row: going to the opera, falling into mud puddles, and having ever so delightful romantic misunderstandings.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Despite its contemporary (well, contemporary for Sweden in the mid-1950s) setting and alleged comic tone, there is not a Hawaiian shirt anywhere to be found in Smiles of a Summer Night. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that there is not a Hawaiian shirt anywhere in any of the films of Ingmar Bergman. Given that the two main characters are unrepentant fops, it is likely that if they were to even encounter someone wearing a Hawaiian shirt, they would have him arrested and imprisoned. The closest anyone in a Bergman movie comes to wearing a Hawaiian shirt is when Max Von Sydow dresses up in a gaudy Fu-Manchu-from-Mars getup in Flash Gordon. And, just to head this question off at the pass, assume that there are no scenes where people do body shots as Boston plays over a CD jukebox.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: There's no denying that Sommarnattens Leende is stuffed with beautiful women. Although its approach to sexuality is pretty strait-laced (not surprising for the times, but it's a bit mild for Bergman), the ladies are lovely to look at, especially Ulla Jacobsson as Anne and Eva Dahlbeck as Desirée. However – and I do not wish to alarm you here, but it is my duty as a movie reviewer to tell the unvarnished truth, no matter how unpleasant – there is not a single bikini in the entire movie. This would be inexcusable enough in what is essentially a romantic summer comedy, but lest we forget, this movie was made in Sweden – the home of the world-famous Swedish Bikini Team! Despite this inexcusable lapse (what, Bergman couldn't have gotten one lousy off-season Bikini Team member to play the maid or something?), we'd still recommend this uncharacteristic but rewarding film by the master of Swedish cinema; if nothing else, it'll help you feel smarter and classier after a viewing of Summer Catch.

Reviews By Request: Faithless (2000, Liv Ullmann)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “borstalboy” for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run the afternoon of Thursday, July 3 due to the holiday) see the bottom of this post.

On the surface, Faithless tells a story that’s been told thousands of times before. It’s a story of infidelity, with the fortyish Marianne (Lena Endre) falling in love with family friend David (Krister Henriksson), and leaving her husband Markus (Thomas Hanzon) to be with him. It’s an age-old story, familiar from plenty of novels, plays and films. There are numerous ways the story could play, perhaps as a thriller or a domestic melodrama. But in the end Faithless is neither of these, due in large part to a character I haven’t yet mentioned- the key character in the story. He’s a director played by Erland Josephson, who’s aging, thoughtful, solitary. A man not unlike Ingmar Bergman.

Faithless, directed by Liv Ullmann from a screenplay by Bergman, is not so much the story of a love affair as it is the story of the memory of that affair and the deep and painful scars it left on the lives of all it touched. The film begins and ends with the director, who sits at his desk to write down the story, and much of the story is structured as a dialogue between the director and his characters. Most of the time, we see him talking to Marianne- or more precisely listening to her- as she tells him her story. Yet whose story is it? In the film’s opening scene, we see the director conjure Marianne as if from thin air, emerging from the shadows as his conception of her comes into focus. But where did this conception come from?

More than most films, Faithless practically demands a level of familiarity with both the personal and professional lives of its makers. Bergman was, of course, one of the world’s greatest and most celebrated filmmakers, and Ullmann his frequent leading lady and muse. Offscreen, she was also his lover- hardly his first and certainly not his last- and his treasured friend as well. In many ways, Marianne feels like a surrogate of Ullmann, and Bergman can be seen not only in the director (Josephson was his closest friend) but also in the distant, severe David.

So what did Bergman and Ullmann hope to accomplish in making Faithless? Perhaps, to its makers, the film represented a shared act of empathy. It’s significant that the director imagines Marianne- not David or even Markus- as his story’s central player. By seeing the unfortunate series of events through her eyes, the director (and, one presumes, Bergman) finally comes to understand the emotional toll this had on her, albeit many years after the fact. But the understanding goes both ways, as Ullmann frequently makes use of Josephson’s face in reaction shots. At various points, we even see him reacting in pain or horror even before Marianne tells him what happened, in anticipation of what she’s about to say. It’s as though there’s a dialogue going on right before our eyes between writer and director, with Bergman apologizing for all the pain he’s caused and Ullmann reminding him of how deeply it hurt, even as she forgives him his sins.

Given his status as a master filmmaker, it’s tempting to watch Faithless solely as en film av Ingmar Bergman. But Ullmann’s own contributions to the film should not be underestimated. Visually, the film has a lushness and warmth that isn’t characteristic of Bergman films, which makes it more effective when Ullmann employs Bergman’s more clinical style in the scenes between Josephson and Endre, as well as key moments involving the character of David. But where the difference between the two filmmakers is most apparent comes in the characterizations. Bergman’s characters usually come off as archetypes, personifications of the psychological traumas or anxieties inherent to the stories they inhabited, and this suited his filmmaking perfectly. But the characters in Faithless have broader emotional palettes than the residents of Bergman’s world. Seen in their flashback scenes, they’re capable of joy and sorrow and passion, and of becoming caught up in the moment. Look at the scene where Markus discovers Marianne and David in bed together. As Markus tries to sort out his feelings, David keeps chuckling to himself, not out of cruelty but because he’s embarrassed at not wearing any pants. In turn, Marianne can’t help but chuckle as well, even as she wrestles with her own emotions. I can’t imagine Bergman directing this scene in this way, but it works perfectly.

Looking back at my review, I can’t help but notice that I’ve barely touched upon the acting in the film, although every performance is ideal, especially Lena Endre as Marianne. And I have devoted very little space to the film’s infidelity storyline which occupies the great majority of the film’s 2 ½ hour running time. But you can find great acting and stories of infidelity in any number of movies. What makes Faithless truly special is the way it presents two great cinematic artists- friends, collaborators, ex-lovers- trying to make peace with each other. In her final act of graciousness, Ullmann lets the camera rest on the director, alone once again, as he tries to piece together his memories so that he can write them down. After all, at this point in his life, what else can he do?

Previously on Reviews by Request:

The New Kids (1985, Sean S. Cunningham)

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972, Kenji Misumi)

Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Baxter (2000, Jérôme Boivin)

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you a week from Thursday!

Cannes Rundown, Days 10 and 11- I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.

Paul Clark — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:01:00 GMT

As the Cannes Film Festival enters its final days before the announcement of awards on Sunday, here’s one final roundup of reviews. We begin with Charlie Kaufman’s highly-anticipated (by me, anyway) directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Would Kaufman’s inexperience behind the camera cause him to become timid and soften his edge? If reviews are any indication, don’t bet on it.

AO Scott in the New York Times- “Mr. Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.”

But not all were so impressed. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice- “Collapsing in sodden self-reflexivity after a promising 40 minutes, Kaufman’s arch, interminable phantasmagoria—with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Job-like theater director—retroactively improved all but the most miserablist movies I saw at Cannes.”

Other competition titles:

Jeff Wells on Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo- “I knew I was seeing something intensely audacious and stylistically exciting, but the political arena it depicts is so dry and complex and wholly-unto-itself that gradually the film makes you feel as if you're lying in an isolation tank.”

Laurent Cantet’s The Class/Entre Les Meurs, according to Time Out’s Geoff Andrew- “Everything rings absolutely true in this film, and everything is utterly engrossing from start to finish, despite the apparent lack of a straightforward narrative during the first hour… There are no easy answers proffered to the various questions raised about education, schools and society, but the film makes for admirably lucid, subtle and thought-provoking drama throughout. And the kids are terrific.”

Cinematical’s James Rocchi tears into Wim Wenders’ latest, The Palermo Shooting- “After Palermo Shooting ended (with a title card offering the film as a tribute "To Ingmar (Bergman) and Michelangelo (Antonioni)," which made me imagine Bergman and Antonioni saying Uh, thanks, but. ... from the next world), the Cannes press audience booed and laughed and stumbled out into the streets for detailed digressions and discussions on how, exactly, Wenders had, as our British friends say, lost the plot. Palermo Shooting goes fairly off the mark, or fires blanks, or has a damp fuse; I'm not sure about which firearm metaphor applies here, and if Wenders can't be bothered to have any cohesion to his signs and symbols, why should I?... It's still a little sad to see a major filmmaker make such a series of major mistakes in the name of a fairly minor film.”

While I certainly admire Cannes’ devotion to Wenders, perhaps the competition would be better served if, instead of reserving spots for ex-Palme winners past their prime, the selectors would give some love to gifted up-and-comers who deserve a higher profile People like, say, Kelly Reichardt, whose Wendy and Lucy played in Un Certain Regard. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Mike Goodridge- “Reichardt's films are quiet and detailed, and in Wendy And Lucy , she provides an all too believable picture of how fine is the line between getting by and becoming homeless and destitute… Unlike Old Joy, which was a two-hander, Wendy And Lucy is told entirely from the point of view of one character - and her dog, of course. The beauty of the film is not only in telling a story with so few words but in showing the wordless tenderness that exists between woman and dog in a society which has cast her onto its fringes. “

Also of note was the Un Certain Regard prizewinner, Tulpan. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Jonathan Romney on the film- “Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect.”

Justin Chang in Variety on Albert Serra’s Birdsong- “Patience was no doubt required of the Three Wise Men as they made their way toward Bethlehem, and the same will be required of auds who seek out "Birdsong," Albert Serra's minimalist reinterpretation of the Magi's journey. Hushed, contemplative but often quite droll experiment offers beautifully sculpted images on a black-and-white canvas across its sometimes hypnotic, sometimes tedious runtime.”

Wendy Ide praises Eldorado in the London Times- “This off-beat tragicomic road movie from Belgium is one of the sleeper hits of the festival. Screening in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, it’s a far cry from the dour, grey perception of Belgian cinema fostered by the work of people like the Dardenne brothers…The landscapes and soundtrack choices evoke American road movies of a bygone era; the sensibility is definitely European.”

Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, according to Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times- “Abel Ferrara's new film, "Chelsea on the Rocks," represents a kind of homecoming for the Bronx-born director and longtime chronicler of the New York City underbelly. Ferrara, best known for urban tales of damnation such as "Bad Lieutenant" and "King of New York," moved to Italy several years ago, fleeing a city transformed by the Rudolph W. Giuliani regime and the Sept. 11 attacks, not to mention a cultural and economic climate that had grown more hostile to maverick filmmakers.”

Finally, here’s a link to Karina Longworth’s live-blogging of Quentin Tarantino’s Film Lecture at Cannes. I’ve seen how fast that dude talks, and my fingers are hurting just thinking about it. Bang-up job, Karina.

Take Five: Sweet Revenge

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied: "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies." So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers. We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even. While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud. The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir. When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things: the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane. As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven announced his arrival as a forced to be reckoned with in the world of horror with this, his feature film debut. Too cheap, too raw and too frankly disturbing to entirely escape the exploitation-flick label, this direly unnerving story about a gang of hoodlums who opportunistically murder a pair of teenage girls only to find themselves, a short time later, staying at the home of the father of one of their victims, has far more going on emotionally, dramatically and philosophically than you might expect. But even if it were just cheap horror, it would be one of the most effective cheap horror films of its era. Powerful, creepy, and almost unbearably tense. Bizarrely, Last House on the Left is based on Ingmar Bergman's masterful medieval drama of 1960, The Virgin Spring!

THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)

Tellingly, this would be the last of a fertile period in the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's career where he explored his characters' relationship with God. He'd never make another movie like it, and though it netted him an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, its shockingly open depiction of rape and revenge caused waves of controversy at the time of his release. Bergman's favorite actor, Max Von Sydow, gives one of the best performances of his career as the father of a young girl who is attacked and killed by bandits who, through empty fate or inexplicable divine intervention, arrive in his home looking for charity. They find only a bloody end. Bizarrely, The Virgin Spring is based on Wes Craven's groundbreaking revenge-horror film of 1972, The Last House on the Left, through reverse time warp technology!

STRAW DOGS (1971)

Perhaps no revenge thriller in the history of cinema has been more controversial than Sam Peckinpah's brutal meditation on masculinity and cowardice. Easily as vicious and manipulative as the worst grindhouse exploitation flick, it dresses up its blackly beating heart in such undeniable artistry that it leaves even people who have seen it and assessed it time and time again not knowing exactly how to react to it. The film features Dustin Hoffman, in an emotionally exhausting performance, as a mild-mannered professor whose good nature is taken for granted once too often by local bullies; it caused incredibly extreme reactions on its release (with Pauline Kael writing one of the most memorable reviews of her long career in startled reaction to it) and continues to do so even now, nearly forty years down the road.

CAPE FEAR (1962/1991)

This effective psychological thriller, based on a terse little novel by John D. MacDonald, has been made twice -- once in a taut quasi-noir version in the early '60s by J. Lee Thompson, and once in a much darker and more provocative way by Martin Scorsese. The particular twist of both versions of Cape Fear is who, exactly, thinks revenge needs to be taken: the protagonist, Sam Bowden, thinks he needs to take revenge against Max Cady, a vicious criminal who's gunning for his family. Cady, on the other hand, thinks he's the hero of the movie -- he's the one looking for revenge against Bowden, who failed to properly defend him in court years before and doomed him to years of harsh imprisonment. The first is too little seen by modern eyes, and the second is wrongly reviled; both are worth a good look for their tense ambiguity.

Eva Dahlbeck, 1920 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:44:00 GMT

Eva Dahlbeck has died, exactly a month short of her eighty-eight birthday. Born near Stockholm, she studied acting at Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre before beginning a career on the stage and in movies that established her as one of the country's finest and most charming actresses as well as one of the great beauties of the day. She was a big star with a wide-ranging career, but in the West her name remains inextricably linked with that of Ingmar Bergman, who between 1952 and 1964 used her in six of his early films, including Secrets of Women, A Lesson in Love, Dreams, Brink of Life, and the greatest of Bergman's comedies, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). She largely retired from the screen after their last collaboration, Now About These Women, in 1964; though she continued to make occasional film appearances until 1970, she concentrated on her second career as a succesful novelist and poet. In recent years she had suffered from Alzheimer's. Her husband of more than sixty years, Sven Lampell, died last summer — as, of course, did Bergman.

Max Von Sydow: Bergman's Violin

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

In a brief interview with Lynn Hirschberg in The New York Times Magazine, Max Von Sydow Max von Sydow talks about his long association with Ingmar Bergman, who died last year. “'He had been ill for almost a year, but we had been in close contact over the phone. . . . ' Von Sydow’s wife interrupted him. 'Tell about the last time he spoke about you,' she said. Von Sydow paused again. 'He said, "Max you have been the first and the best Stradivarius that I have ever had in my hands,” ' von Sydow recalled. 'We loved each other, and I know when he stopped working, when he became ill, he missed it. He missed his actors.' Von Sydow says that "working with Bergman was always worthwhile."

Not incidentally, working with Bergman made him a star. “I actually know the moment I became known. It was at the Cannes Film Festival, when they showed The Virgin Spring. I walked into that theater as one person and I walked out as another.” Of course, there's being known and then there's being known. in the early years of his international career, Hollywood thought it knew who Von Sydow was: a tall, stern-looking guy with a sinister accent who seemed impressively foreign. “They sent me Dr. No. They wanted me to play the villain. I said no. And then they offered me the part of Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. I said yes to that. For years, Hollywood only asked me to play a villain or a biblical figure.” This past year, the 78-year-old Sydow had one of his best recent roles as the 92-year-old father of the paralyzed hero of Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. “After Julian sent me the script, we didn’t discuss it very much. He didn’t tell me that, in some ways, I would be playing his father. But movies are like that — I had never met Mathieu Amalric until the day of our first scene, and he had to shave me. It was rather intimate, and he did cut me. But it’s always that way: you’re supposed to be involved with someone in the film and you’ve just met them for the first time and then, 10 minutes later, you say, ‘I love you,’ and you are in bed.”

DVD Digest for January 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week's DVD Digest is a bit slow for new Hollywood fare, but the wide array of foreign-language films and classics should more than compensate.

DVD of the Week: This week's most intriguing new DVD for lovers of classic film is Eclipse Series 7: Post-War Kurosawa. The Criterion Collection launched Eclipse last year to distribute box sets of their lesser-known titles, from semi-forgotten works of acknowledged masters (Ingmar Bergman) to films by more obscure auteurs (Raymond Bernard), in modestly-priced editions. Post-War Kurosawa is certainly in that vein, spotlighting five of the director's early films, made between 1946 and 1955. The films run the gamut from courtroom dramas to political epics, with nary a samurai in sight. Of particular interest is 1946's No Regrets for Our Youth, Kurosawa's first film after World War II and his first of two collaborations with Ozu's muse Setsuko Hara. Other films in the set are I Live in Fear (1955), The Idiot (1951), One Wonderful Sunday (1947), and Scandal (1950). As with all Eclipse releases, there are no features to speak of in the Post-War Kurosawa box, but in my mind, the chance to delve into an as-yet-underexplored corner of a master filmmaker's career is special enough.

As I said before, it's a light week for recent Hollywood releases. Aside from the double feature of New Line's Mr. Woodcock and Lionsgate's Good Luck Chuck (also available on Blu-Ray, a DVD duo for those with more money than sense), you're pretty much stuck with direct-to-DVD fare like Sony's Already Dead and Love Lies Bleeding, and MGM's Wedding Daze. However, for the more arthouse-oriented buyer, I would recommend the Region 1 release of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century (Strand). a movie which came this close to cracking my top 10 of 2007.

New TV on DVD includes The New Adventures of Old Christine, Season 1 (Warner), The Rockford Files Season 5, and the latest installment in the seemingly deathless phenomenon, Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest. Wow, a Family Guy special with plenty of pop-culture references- who saw that coming?

But don't fret. This week finds a solid selection of classics for your home viewing pleasure. Criterion is represented by a snazzy edition of Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966). MGM is finally releasing on DVD Spike Lee's 1986 breakthrough She's Gotta Have It. You can gear up for the upcoming Oscar nominations with 1967's Best Picture winner In the Heat of the Night in a new 40th Anniversary Edition from MGM. You could spend time with romance favorites classic (Fox's An Affair to Remember 50th Anniversary Edition) and modern (MGM's When Harry Met Sally Collector's Edition). Or you can even geek out with Sony's Ray Harryhausen double feature Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea, both available in two-disc special editions. But you get my point. Don't let the lack of contemporary releases get you down- there are plenty of classics to keep you going all week.

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

The Rep Report (Dec 6 - 14)

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Spanish Cinema Now begins on December 7 and runs through the 27th. The schedule this year includes a special program devoted to the works of the late Pilar Miro, one of the rare women to make a filmmaking career for herself in the wake of Franco's death. Seven of her features will be shown, including her last movie, the 1996 version of Felix Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives' Ingmar Bergman: Light and Shadow (December 6 - 20) gives admirers of the late director, whose death last summer was one of the supreme, sad film events of the year, to remember some of his proudest achievements (including Persona, The Seventh Seal, and Shame) in handsome prints on the big screen. The final selections, wisely, are The Magic Flute and Fanny and Alexander, either of which can serve as a timely rebuttal to the idea that Bergman has nothing to offer in the way of holiday festivity.

— Phil Nugent

Life After Bergman

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas, in the course of interviewing Max von Sydow about his role in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, gets the legendary Swedish actor to open up about his special relationship with the late Ingmar Bergman, and to discuss the kinds of scripts (ranging from "boring" to "flat-out bad") he has to pass up to get to the truly choice roles he says he can now afford to take in his sunset years. "Most roles I am offered are fathers or grandfathers who die after twenty-five pages," says Von Sydow. — Leonard Pierce

The Rep Report (November 20 - December 6)

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: For two days, the Brooklyn Academy of Music offers a smartly selected tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman. On November 20, Bibi Andersson will be on hand to introduce a film that boasts one of her most astonishing performances, the 1967 Persona; that will be followed by a too-rare screening of one of Bergman's greatest and most seldom-seen features, the richly textured anti-war lament Shame, introduced by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. On November 21, you can spend Thanksgiving Eve, appropriately enough, sinking deep into the epic family drama Fanny and Alexander.

BOSTON: From November 23 through December 6, the Brattle hosts Watching the Detectives, described as a chance "to fully explore the lighter or more colorful film that also feature some of the world's greatest detectives." I'm not sure what's so light about Klute, and "colorful" isn't the first word it brings to mind either, but part of the charm of the program is its random-mix quality. The first week is heavy on movies based on "classic" literary detectives, including double bills featuring William Powell as Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and as Philo Vance (The Kennel Murder Case) and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple (Murder She Says and Murder Most Foul), as well as Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and Alec Guinness as Father Brown in The Detective. There's also a rare chance to see a new 35 mm print of Stephen Frears' 1972 debut film, Gumshoe, starring Finney as an amateur sleuth with a midlife crisis and a Bogart fixation. And on December 3, celebrate David Lynch Day in Cambridge with Blue Velvet and the American broadcast version of the Twin Peaks pilot.

PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater's Fifth Annual Thanksgiving Kung Fu Marathon on November 22 offers twelve hours of martial arts flicks with all the trimmings for five dollars. Sounds like a public service to us.

— Phil Nugent