The Screengrab : inside man

DVD Digest for May 26, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spike Lee's Next "Miracle"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the release next week of Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee's first movie since his biggest hit, the atypically good Inside Man, John Colapinto profiles the director in The New Yorker. [Not available online] Colapinto notes that Lee has made eighteen feature films, "three of which (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X) have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race." That count seems a little soft: for instance, it's hard to think of any reason besides an obsession with race for making Bamboozled, and even the movie that Lee clearly intended as a showcase for his warmer, fuzzier side, Crooklyn, included a subplot about the foul odor emitted by the film's token white man, played by David Patrick Kelly in outrageous honky drag. After scoring a great success with an ingenious genre picture that required him to mostly give it a rest, Lee's new movie, "the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers" in World War II, gives him a chance to climb back on his hobbyhorse and also to issue the public proclamations that have sometimes seemed to be his real art, which his movies are only intended to promote. As Colapinto writes, the film is meant "as redress not only for [Clint] Eastwood's Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie The Longest Day--and before." It will be remembered that Lee instigated a vicious back-and-forth between himself and Eastwood by complaining about the absence of black soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima; after Eastwood invited the younger filmmaker to shut the fuck up, Lee called him "an angry old man" and advised Dirty Harry that "we're not on a plantation either." That stroke was standard operating procedure for Lee, who has a history of shutting down discussions by accusing his attackers of racism, a move that has traditionally left them sputtering defensively. The down side of this tactic that it's left Lee with a public image that he may now regret, if only because it may have overshadowed his reputation as a moviemaker. "People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage," he told Colapinto. This misperception makes Lee very angry, and the article describes a man who, because of that, is walking around in a constant state of rage.

One reason he has for being ticked off--even when he has access to Colapinto, a writer who is so much on his side that he even seems to like Summer of Sam and the godforsaken color dance interlude in Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It--is that getting funding isn't as easy for him as it used to be. Lee would probably argue that it's never been easy for him, but a lot of filmmakers before Lee wanted to make a biopic about Malcolm X, and Lee was the one who got to bitch in the press about not being given a big enough budget after the epic production was given the green light. (One of the other filmmakers who wanted to make it was Norman Jewison, who was almost ready to go, with Lee's star Denzel Washington in the lead role, when Lee nudged him aside by making a public stink about how wrong it would be for a white director to be entrusted with Malcolm's story.) Miracle at St. Anna wasn't Lee's first choice for a follow-up to Inside Man; it was what he could get funded after he discovered that the box-office cachet he had picked up from that movie wasn't enough to get studios interested in his other dream projects, a James Brown biopic and a movie about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (St. Anna didn't make the studios salivate, either; Touchtone Pictures signed on to distribute it only after European companies ponied up the money.) It'll be interesting to see whether an historical drama benefits from some of the gravity that Lee has acquired in recent years, seen best not in Inside Man but in his documentaries 4 Little Girls, whose title refers to the victims of a racially motivated church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, and the Katrina epic When the Levees Broke. Stanley Crouch, who wrote a searing attack on Lee back in 1989, believes that his nonfiction-film work has had a strong, salutary effect on Lee: "There was something about the dignity of those people he encountered when he was making 4 Little Girls that had a very deep impact on him, and in some way they seemed to help him grow up. When you got kids yourself and you're talking to the father of someone whose child was blown up by the kind of people who blew those kids up, and you see that this person is not ranting and raving in some kind of theatrical purported rage of the sort that you see in Do the Right Thing." Miracle at St. Anna opens on September 26.

Related stories: Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face

Morning Deal Report: James Franco Will Howl

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

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

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

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

Related:
Franco Enjoys Interview
Time Traveling with Spike Lee

Spike Lee Goes to War

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

For a long time, the Spike Lee joint was a genre unto itself – an occasionally arresting but highly unfocused mish-mosh; with one year’s Girl 6 blurring into another year’s She Hate Me, it was almost as if Lee was making one, long strident movie with the overriding purpose of drawing attention to its essential Spikeness. That changed somewhat with the 2006 release of Inside Man, a more-or-less straightforward take on the heist genre. Now Lee is putting the finishing touches on another film in a venerable Hollywood tradition: a war movie called Miracle at St. Anna.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Lee describes the movie as “a story about faith and what exactly the miracle is, that's left up to individual people - there are several miracles in this film, and I hope people can see them. All I will say is that, having lived on this earth for 57 years, I know that miracles happen.” One of those miracles must be Lee reaching the age of 57 despite being born in 1957, but I digress.

St. Anna is based on a novel by James McBride, which recounts “the deeds of four ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ from the US Army's Negro 92nd Division, who are trapped behind enemy lines in Tuscany, the book is like a Roman mosaic, piecing together different narratives to reveal the complex moral landscape of war.” Lee is shooting the picture at the legendary Cinecittà Studios in Rome and in the actual battle sites in the Tuscan mountains – the first time the director has filmed outside the United States.

“For me, this film is a homage to Rossellini, De Sica, and those cats,” says Lee, revealing an unexpected passion for Italian neorealism. Lee hopes to premiere the film at the Venice Film Festival later this year.

When Good Directors Go Bad: She Hate Me (2004, Spike Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In addition to being one of America’s most celebrated directors, Spike Lee is one of its most productive, with more than two dozen feature films, documentaries, and television films to his credit along with innumerable shorts, commercials and music videos. Unfortunately, sometimes this productivity has led to a decrease in consistency. Lee has made a number of masterpieces in his career, but he’s also made his share of stinkers, the most notorious of which was 2004’s She Hate Me.

Now, if there’s one word that would never be used to describe Spike Lee, it’s timid. After all, he’s the man who in only his second feature made a campus musical about skin color (School Daze), who made a racially-motivated riot the climactic sequence of Do the Right Thing, and who made the first Hollywood film to actually address 9/11 (25th Hour). In addition, Lee has always been driven by current events. In the words of another Lee, the late Arthur, “the news today will be the movies of tomorrow,” and with She Hate Me, Spike Lee addressed many hot topics of the day- same-sex parenting, Enron, corrupt pharmaceuticals companies, the stereotype of the sexually-powerful black man, the then-recently-disbanded XFL, and the declining state of African-American families.

Sounds like a lot, right? The trouble is that Lee doesn’t quite know how to deal with it all. As a result, She Hate Me is all over the map, not only story-wise, but tonally as well. In one scene, the film’s protagonist, Jack (Anthony Mackie), might be having a heartfelt conversation about values with his father or his best friend. In the next, the film will become an outrageous sex comedy in which Jack beds down the entire starting five of a woman’s basketball team, powered only by Viagra and Red Bull. For long portions of the film, Lee seems to almost forget about the insider-trading scandal in which his former boss has implicated him. The film has no real direction or momentum, so it devolves into one damn thing after another, and by the time Jack has been called before a Senate subcommittee, we’ve long since thrown up our hands.

Another problem is that the comedic moments don’t work. There’s nothing inherently funny about the film’s edgiest and most infamous plot strand- Jack’s side job as a hired stud paid to impregnate rich lesbians (including characters played by Kerry Washington and Monica Bellucci, among others) at $10,000 a pop. So it falls to Lee to make these scenes work, and he’s not up to the task. Looking back at Lee’s career, I can’t help but notice that many of his worst-reviewed films (She Hate Me, Girl 6, the better-than-its-rep Bamboozled) are comedies. That seems a little strange, considering how wonderful She’s Gotta Have It is, and how funny his non-comedy films can be- remember the old guys on the corner in Do the Right Thing or Denzel Washington’s unconventional detective in Inside Man?

So why does Lee have such a problem with outright comedy? In She Hate Me, it just feels like he’s trying too hard. It’s not enough that Jack sleeps with five lesbians in one night- Lee goes overboard to make these scenes as outrageous as possible, crafting quick-cutting montages of Jack’s conquests, turning the women into overpowering stereotypes who call him “bitch boy” (among other things), and then showing Jack and his “magic wand dick” giving them all massive screaming orgasms in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be lesbians. If that’s not enough, Lee includes several animated sequences in which a sea of sperm (all bearing Jack’s face) race toward a waiting egg. It all gets to be too much after a while.

In the end, what’s the point that Lee is trying to make? I think Lee’s message is a simple one, and not a new one for him- “do the right thing.” Trouble is, it takes roughly 2 ¼ hours (!) to get to that point, by which time we’ve long since gotten lost amid all the zany sex antics and the whistleblowing scandal and the wacked-out digressions in the plot (John Turturro riffing on Don Corleone, anyone?). As sprawling and ambitious as Lee’s best films can be, they always maintain a clear focus, but that focus escaped him in She Hate Me, and this as much as anything else is what sinks it. Yet, as bad as it is, it’s certainly never boring. Given the ill-fitting parts of the story, it’s hard to imagine it working at all, but most filmmakers would have tried to rein it in and play it with a straight face. Lee goes in the opposite direction, and while it still doesn’t work, I’ll have a hard time forgetting it. Whether that’s a good thing, I’ll leave for you to decide.