The Screengrab : invasion of the body snatchers

Screengrab Review: "Alien Trespass"

Nick Schager — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Because simply loving them wasn’t enough, X-Files producer R.W. Goodwin chooses to actually make his own cheesy ‘50s sci-fi film with Alien Trespass, a saga too jokey and graphic to be taken as a straight homage, and yet also a touch too straightforward to function as loopy satire. The result of this indecisive approach is that his out-of-this-world tale – about an extraterrestrial who crash-lands on Earth and attempts to stop the people-devouring monster that’s escaped from his spaceship – merely coasts along limply, lacking ribald tongue-in-cheek humor as well as the unironic self-seriousness that epitomized its spiritual predecessors, of which The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are the most obvious. The prelude, in which a phony newsreel precedes (and hypes) the “feature presentation,” sets the off-kilter mood. Yet unlike with Grindhouse’s phony peripheral trappings, Goodwin’s intro can’t muster much in the way of laugh-out-loud humor or meta-cinema commentary. Instead, like the subsequent action, it just sits there, almost as lifeless and inert as the puddles of human remains that are left after the alien creature Ghota has eaten.

In California’s Mojave Desert in 1957, a meteor shower watched by nearby townspeople, including astronomer Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack), brings with it a plummeting UFO. Much to his horny wife Lana’s (Jody Thompson) frustration, Ted goes to investigate, and is promptly snatched by a towering, silver, Gort-like figure known as Urp who inhabits Ted’s body and goes looking for the one-eyed, tentacled, man-eating Ghota before it begins to reproduce – a process that wouldn’t stop until the global population had been consumed. Meanwhile, a pushy boy and his prudish girlfriend canoodling at a lover’s lane narrowly escape the Ghota (which can make itself invisible) and, together with a greaser buddy prone to spouting era-specific slang, try to warn their fellow citizens, which include Ted-infatuated waitress Tammy (Jenni Baird), cop Vernon (Robert Patrick), and chief Dawson (Dan Lauria). Corniness ensues, with Goodwin shooting in rich Technicolor, employing a spot-on orchestral score, and replicating his beloved genre’s rhythms and tropes with enough fidelity that his film soon reproduces the torpid pacing and distinct absence of suspense typical of crummy B-movies.

McCormack, Baird and Patrick all deliver predictably wooden and/or broad performances, but the Ghota (despite being seemingly made out of rubber) looks too good for a supposed cinematic relic, just as the sight of Lana showing cleavage and wearing lingerie, or a deputy’s discussion of the vomiting and bloodletting that accompanies radiation poisoning, are too explicit for what’s supposed to be a project produced under the watch of the Hays Code. Of course, exaggeration is an acceptable means of parody, but Alien Trespass never goes far enough to warrant such a designation, instead occupying a dull, purposeless middle ground. The film’s aimlessness is epitomized by Tammy’s climactic speech to save Urp from those who believe him to be a murderer, an oration that evokes the this-is-the-underlying-message sermons of likeminded sci-fi adventures, yet – because Goodwin hasn’t bothered to lend his material even a whiff of subtext – meanders about in search of direction. More tepid-cute imitation than captivating critique, Alien Trespass merely makes one pine for the un-self-conscious predecessors that inspired its creation.

Morning Deal Report: And Another “Thing”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:50:00 GMT

Just as every generation apparently needs its own version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Universal has decided the time has come around again for The Thing. We last saw the outer space critter in John Carpenter’s 1982 version, and now the studio “has set Battlestar Galactica exec producer Ron Moore to write the script and commercials director Matthijs Van Heijningen to direct the re-imagining… It is set in a Norwegian camp and chronicles how the shape-shifting alien was first discovered and overcame the inhabitants of that camp.”

A new James Bond movie is on the way – sort of. “The writer who took on Daniel Pearl will tackle the creator of 007,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “John Orloff, who penned Par Vantage's A Mighty Heart, about the slain Wall Street Journal reporter, has been brought on to pen the screenplay for Fleming, a biopic about Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.” We’re hoping Orloff doesn’t slight the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang years.

Amanda Seyfried is A Woman of No Importance. That’s not a judgment call; it’s just that the Mamma Mia! star is set to headline a new adaptation of the Oscar Wilde comedy. “Donald Zuckerman's producing and Bruce Beresford's directing from Howard Himelstein's script,” Variety reports.

Related:
Goldeneye: James Bond's Birthplace
Diablo Cody Unwraps Jennifer's Body

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We'd Most Like To See (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

WHIT STILLMAN (& CHRIS EIGEMAN)

Like caviar or triple-malt scotch, the films of Whit Stillman are rarified, WASPy treats best savored while the rest of the world noshes on Big Macs and beer. Around the time Richard Linklater was eavesdropping on his beloved Austin eccentrics in Slacker and Kevin Smith was chronicling the lives of hyper-articulate, dirty-minded New Jersey wage slaves in Clerks, Stillman’s indie debut, Metropolitan, focused on yet another chatty, self-contained subculture: the privileged debutantes and awkward urban haute bourgeoisie of the Upper East Side twentysomething social circuit. Dry, sardonic Chris Eigeman and nervous, schleppy Taylor Nichols were Metropolitan’s standouts, and Stillman wisely paired the sweet-and-sour comic duo as brothers in his follow-up, Barcelona, a witty, extremely low-concept picaresque about boorish Americans abroad in 1980s Spain. Eigeman also starred in The Last Days of Disco, the final installment of the director’s overeducated white people trilogy (and also his last film to date). For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, given its thematic and tonal similarity to its predecessors, Disco (which also features Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale and Robert Sean Leonard) was considered a disappointment by most fans and critics (if not by Stillman himself, who enjoyed the tale of bed and club-hopping yuppies enough to retell the story again a few years later as a fake roman-a-clef in the voice of one of the film’s characters). Sadly, Stillman’s vision was too wordy, insular and quirky even for art house audiences, making it impossible in recent years for him to finance subsequent projects, the worst result of which (to my way of thinking) is the resultant lack of good roles for the hilarious (and criminally underused) Eigeman. Yet the Internet Movie Database says that Stillman is currently adapting Christopher Buckley’s novel Little Green Men, and though no cast is listed yet, with luck maybe it’s a good sign that Eigeman (recently Spirit Award-nominated for his directorial debut, Turn the River) will someday appear in front of the camera again and not just behind it.

BROOKE ADAMS

In the late '70s and early '80s, Adams' dark-haired beauty, sense of fun, and tantalizing hint of neurosis (in such films as Days of Heaven, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Tell Me a Riddle, The Dead Zone, and Almost You) made her the thinking horndog's indie movie star of choice, but then she drifted out of sight. She only turned up in movies a couple of times during the '90s, most notably in Alison Anders's 1992 Gas Food Lodging. That same year, she married Tony Shalhoub, with whom she had a daughter the next year. In 2002, she had her only big movie role of recent years in Made-Up, a charming but barely seen comedy that Shalhoub co-starred in and directed, from a script by her sister, Lynne Adams. About the only other way to have gazed on her in recent years would be to monitor Shalhoub's TV series; she's made guest appearances on both Wings and Monk. So long as they're happy, I'm happy. I miss her, though.

MARE WINNINGHAM

In 1985, Winningham co-starred in the prototypical Brat Pack movie St. Elmo's Fire, when she was 26. Dramatically, she was at a disadvantage for being cast as the least emotional, mildest mannered of the seven lead characters, though she also had an edge in that she was the only one of the movie's stars, besides Ally Sheedy, who could act a lick. (At the time, anyway: Rob Lowe had his moments fifteen years later on The West Wing.) Winningham has the kind of virtues that can easily be cast as negatives, but she's such a capable, talented actress that her honesty and decency can seem radiant and illuminating rather than starchy and prim; to fully appreciate her, check out the 1995 Georgia, where her superb performance as a hard-working, mess-cleaning musician can be viewed aside Jennifer Jason Leigh's gruesomely self-immolating, exhibitionistic display as her self-immolating sister. The worst thing that could ever be said of Winningham is that her honorable acting style has sometimes failed to make the dull, underwritten roles she's been stuck with seem livelier than they are, but anyone who saw her as the unconventional love of Anthony Edwards' life in Miracle Mile (1989) or the blubbering girlfriend who's quick to dump the jobless Timothy Hutton in Made in Heaven (1987) knows that her gifts include a wild streak. As she enters her middle years -- she turns fifty next year -- it sure would be something to get to see the nice girl be given the chance to cut the hell loose.

PAMELA REED

It's easy to imagine aspiring directors in Hollywood being sent forth into the valley armed with one basic, flawless piece of no-brainer advice: if you have a scene that you want the audience to stay awake for, stick Pamela Reed onscreen. Since 1980, her first year in movies, inviting David Carradine and Sonny Landham to have a knife fight for her honor (Carradine: "What does the winner get?" Reed: "Nothin' you ain't both already had.") in The Long Riders and presenting Paul La Mat with a marriage proposal that should have come with a free toaster in Melvin and Howard, she's been practically storming off the screen and slapping the cell phones out of people's hands. Why has this woman never been offered the chance to carry a movie? Is it thought that a woman with her energy and internal strength would alienate audiences if they had to put up with her for more than a few scenes at a time? Sure, that makes sense: it's not as if Bette Davis had a career. But I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't be grateful for what we get of her, especially given that she's spent most of the past decade hanging around TV sets. This did give her the chance to revive one of her greatest roles, the fully caffeinated political campaign manager T. J. Cavanaugh of Robert Alman's Tanner '88 and its 2004 sequel Tanner on Tanner. On the other hand, that Jericho thing didn't do anybody any good. She belongs on the big screen, where she can take on dragons big enough to make it seem like a fair fight (as does her co-star from Tanner and The Right Stuff, Veronica Cartwright, and Amy Madigan, another actress who doesn't need to chug kerosene before she arrives on the set to breathe fire).

PIPER PERABO

Can it really be called a comeback if a star never quite hit it big in the first place? Consider the sad case of Piper Perabo. In 2000, she was being called Hollywood's It Girl, with two high-profile projects on the horizon. Unfortunately for her, those projects were The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Coyote Ugly. The former was a notorious stinker in which Perabo's performance got lost amid the second-rate animation and hammy turns from Robert DeNiro and Rene Russo. The latter was a modest success, but one that had less to do with its nominal lead than audiences flocking to see scantily-clad dancing female bartenders. Having gained no momentum whatsoever from her alleged star-making vehicles, Perabo's career quickly hit the skids, with the actress appearing in a string of lame-brained thrillers and forgettable comedies, with the occasional supporting role in the Steve Martin-headed Cheaper By the Dozen franchise. Eight years after being declared the Next Big Thing, Perabo was last seen playing second banana to a cast of talking Chihuahuas. Frankly, that's a shame, because despite the disappointing trajectory of her career, Perabo remains a vibrant, fetching actress with an infectious smile and a surprisingly soulful side. Just look at her brief appearance in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige -- as Hugh Jackman's ill-fated lover, Perabo brings more genuine spark and feeling to her role than her more tabloid-friendly costar Scarlett Johansson could hope to muster. Even better is 2001's Lost and Delirious, a mostly forgotten Canadian film about teenage sexuality in an ivy-covered boarding school. Perabo steals the show as Paulie, a rebellious young woman nursing a hopeless love for her reluctant classmate. It's a performance that's so white-hot with intensity and charged with eroticism that she eventually becomes more than the film can really take. So why exactly was she last seen in a movie that called for her to bark into a telephone? Your guess is as good as ours.

Click Here For Part One, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

14. CARRIE (1976)

Brian De Palma's purest and best horror movie is also the most potent of the horror genre's many essays on just how close high school is to hell on Earth. Sissy Spacek, at 26, turns in a phenomenal performance as the outcast who has to contend with mean girls at school and a mean mother of a Jesus freak (Piper Laurie) at home. Given the chance to shine for the first time in her life, she winds up onstage dripping with pig's blood in front of her jeering adolescent tormentors, who don't know that she's telekinetic and is about to stick the local tacky-jewelry manufacturer with a whole lot of unclaimed class ring. If you can watch the ensuing carnage without rooting for her, you must have been a cheerleader.

13. AUDITION (1999)

Ringu, a.k.a. The Ring, kicked off an American hunger for the weird eyes and dark, stringy hair of the ghosts of Japanese horror, but even more scary than a ghoul that crawls out of your TV set (a highly frightening but fairly uncommon occurrence) is an actual living woman who wants to do terrible, terrible things to you with needles. Sure, Sadako’s victims in The Ring may have a bad week and die, but the victims of shy, pretty, bat-shit crazy Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) wind up with no feet or tongue in a burlap sack for a much longer time. And then die. What makes the film even more disturbing is that it starts out like a carefree romantic comedy, until suddenly...not so much, kinda like Sleepless In Seattle with torture.

12. THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Shot in the woods of Tennessee over the course of almost a year and half on a budget of less than $400,000, and slowly released to the public over an even longer span of time, Sam Raimi's gore-drenched take on the lost-out-here-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-weird-shit-going-on genre looks like the work of some enthusiastic kids who'd stayed up late watching junk like Equinox on TV and went a little crazy making their own home-movie version of it -- except that these kids had talent, as well as the rare determination to see their little art therapy project/get rich quick scheme through to the end. Some connoisseurs see this early, primitive effort as just a stepping-stone to the slapstick wonders of the openly parodic Evil Dead II, but the raw energy of this thing, which is often funny and just as often genuinely scary, is a testament to how well primitivism can work in the horror genre.

11. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)

Jack Finney’s classic novel of (literal) social alienation was first brought to the screen in 1956, and since then it’s been officially remade three times (not counting rip-offs and “homages"). And, while the original Don Siegel adaptation has its rightful defenders, I’ve always been partial to the 1978 version starring Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy and, of course, the incomparable Donald Sutherland. Naturally, I’m biased: I saw this version on the big screen at an impressionable age, and it was the first movie I’d ever experienced where the good guys didn’t win...making me wonder if I could really trust the other people in the theater with me (or even my parents) and giving me an early taste of the existential angst I would become a lot more familiar with in my adolescent and adult life. Best of all, the movie inspired a game in my neighborhood where one pod person would go around infecting everyone else until there was only one “human” left. Trust me, you don’t know terror until you’re the last survivor on your street, waiting for the end as a dozen weirdly screaming pre-teen aliens slowly surround your hiding place.

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

Contributors: Andrew Unborn; The Vengeful Ghost of Phil Nugent

In Other Blogs: Faster, Britney...Kill! Kill!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny is skeptical about a rumored remake. “A couple of my esteemed colleagues have expressed slightly guarded enthusiasm over the extremely shaky prospect that Quentin Tarantino will direct Britney Spears in a remake of Russ Meyer's 1965 exploitation classic Faster Pussycat...Kill! Kill!, but I can't say it pushes any of my buttons, personal or otherwise. Of course the argument that, for what it's worth, Pussycat got made but good the first time isn't gonna cut any ice if in fact a remake is in the cards. But really...Britney Spears. Who cares. Her cultural currency—which is entirely distinct, as I'm sure you know, from tabloid currency—is as low as it's ever been…Having Tarantino hand-hold her through a turn as a loudmouth psycho drag-racing lesbian stripper will do exactly what for her at this point?” I don’t think this one’s worth worrying about. It’s taken how many years to get Inglorious Bastards going? Cooler heads will prevail.

Flickhead checks out some obscure DVD releases from restoration house Legend Films. “Set in the trendy inner sanctum of late 1970s encounter groups where narcissism overtakes self awareness, Bill Persky’s Serial (1980) is as safe as an episode of Love, American Style peppered with four-letter words, Sally Kellerman’s boobs and Lalo Shifrin’s quaint muzak score. (With some embarrassment, I confess the theme, ‘A Changing World,’ rattled around in my head for days after.) It’s a quietly amusing time capsule of Marin County after the fall of The Sixties, where middle age and middle class values are perpetually analyzed by quack psychologists and individuals fearful of commitment. An intriguing companion piece to Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), this slice of Left Coast lunacy includes Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, Bill Macy, a coked-out therapist played by Peter Bonerz, the woefully undervalued Barbara Rhodes, and Christopher Lee — Christopher Lee! — as a gay biker named ‘Skull.’”

At the House Next Door, Andrew Johnston revisits Risky Business. “As much as I loved them, teen sex comedies didn’t exactly make me feel good about being the kind of kid I was in 1983, the year I turned 15. They all took place in a world where smart and sexually inexperienced kids (i.e., guys like me) were always laughably pathetic, and rich ones (me again) were universally evil and arrogant. Here, finally, was a movie that didn’t pass judgment on those qualities. In the opening scene, our hero Joel Goodson recounts a dream in which he’s riding his bike home through his affluent neighborhood and winds up inside a neighbor’s house where a nubile girl invites him to join her in the shower, a dream that turns into a nightmare when the shower stall turns into a classroom full of his peers taking the SAT, for which he’s three hours late. How could I not identify with the guy?”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson becomes the last film blogger on earth to see The Dark Knight. “When we were in college, a music critic friend of mine who delighted in making "best ever / worst ever" statements proudly (and sincerely) proclaimed that Bob Dylan's Blood On the Tracks was the single greatest artistic achievement in the history of mankind. We teased him about the hyperbole, but I admit I liked him all the more for saying it. Unguarded, unbounded enthusiasm is a wonderful thing to behold, to feel, and to share…I waited a couple weeks to see The Dark Knight and I even though I felt lukewarm about the movie, I couldn't wait to talk about it.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, in honor of the Tom Cruise cameo in Tropic Thunder, Spoutblog presents the 10 Best Small Roles for Big Stars. Some are fairly obvious (no such list would be complete without Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross), but I admittedly had forgotten all about Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days. “Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio.”

When Good Directors Go Bad: Rising Sun (1993, Philip Kaufman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Normally, I try not to get hung up on whether a movie is commercial. While it’s undeniable that films that are intended for a large audience have to satisfy a different set of expectations than those that aren’t, I generally do my best to consider the movie based on how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. However, it’s undeniable that some filmmakers have sensibilities that are well-suited to commercial filmmaking, and others who don’t. Some of our best filmmakers (like Martin Scorsese) are even able to move back and forth between big-budget filmmaking and more personal work. Others have a harder time with it. One director who falls into the latter category is Philip Kaufman, and nowhere is this more apparent than his 1993 film Rising Sun.

Rising Sun was based on a novel by Michael Crichton, whose work was experiencing a surge in popularity in the early nineties. Crichton’s novel combined the ever-popular murder mystery genre with the then-current topic of Japanese encroachment on the American business market. Rising Sun wasn’t one of Crichton’s best novels, but there was potential there for an interesting film, and the choice of Kaufman to direct was inspired. Kaufman had been working for almost three decades, directing eccentric twists on popular genre films like 1972’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But his best-known work came in the 1980s, with his rich adaptations of tricky works of literature including The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.

It’s clear from Kaufman’s pedigree that Fox was looking for a classy, A-list adaptation of Crichton’s bestseller. However, I’m not sure classy was the way to go with Rising Sun. This is a story that incorporates such elements as boardroom intrigue, high-tech surveillance, the Japanese “shadow world” of Los Angeles, and a woman who gets off on being asphyxiated. Yet Kaufman directs the film like it’s high drama. The result is lifeless and inert. And if there’s one thing you don’t want in a movie where a character eats sushi off a woman’s bare breasts (with a nipple/sake chaser), it’s inertia.

But if Rising Sun is a washout as a guilty-pleasure entertainment, it’s just as uncompelling as an exposé of Japanese culture. When it was first published, Crichton’s novel drew fire from Japanese-American groups for its portrayal of their business culture as being ruthless and conniving. But even when I saw the film back in 1993, most of the more shocking details seemed pretty quaint. Granted, some of the more supposedly anti-Asian elements were toned down for the movie, but no matter which form it took, Rising Sun had surprisingly little insight into Japanese culture that hadn’t been expressed in a more interesting way elsewhere.

Which leaves us only with the murder mystery, which offers few surprises. Early in the film, Sean Connery’s wise Capt. John Connor tells Wesley Snipes’ Lt. Web Smith, “When something seems too good to be true, then it’s not true.” Not particularly sage advice, but apparently advice that was heeded by Kaufman, Crichton, and co-screenwriter Michael Backes. Why else would they waste almost an hour setting up an obvious decoy villain? Once it becomes clear that the film is content to cycle through every twist and turn we expect from it- the fake villain, the heroes getting thrown off the case, the ugly revelations about their pasts, the emergence of the real villain, and so on- all that’s left is counting down the minutes between “surprise” revelations. And at 129 minutes, that’s a lot of counting.

Kaufman has always had a knack for casting, and in 1993, a movie top-lined by Connery and Snipes still qualified as an A-list production. For his part, Snipes is pretty solid in the film. I’ve long believed Snipes to be undervalued as an actor, due first to his career long being mired in forgettable action fare, then more recently because of his legal problems. Web Smith isn’t a great part- certainly not as flashy as his supporting role in Mo’ Better Blues- but he does all he can with a character who’s essentially playing straight man to Connery. I especially like his slow burn moments, when he tries desperately to maintain his cool in the middle of confounding and/or ridiculous circumstances. Crichton objected to Fox’s casting of Snipes in a role that was written as white man, but I think that it works here, giving the film a complicated yet sympathetic lead in a way that grounds the story.

Connery, on the other hand, is content to coast through the film, propelled largely by his own presence. Crichton famously wrote the role of John Connor especially the Scots legend, but both the character and the performance are something of a dud. Connery’s role consists primarily of being right all the time and deigning to offer advice to those less enlightened than he. Unfortunately, this arrogance extends to the performance itself, with Connery (who also executive-produced) putting forth no more effort than necessary to earn his pay.

What’s more, Kaufman and Crichton take every opportunity they can to underline exactly how wise Connor is, most notably by pitting him against vulgar anti-Japanese Lt. Graham (Harvey Keitel), who refers to the Japanese as “nips” and decries their presence in this country. Unfortunately for the film, Keitel’s live-wire performance upstages Connery’s self-important one, with Keitel getting almost all of the best lines (my favorite being his declining of an offer of sushi: “no thanks. If I get a craving for mercury, I’ll eat a thermometer”).

When I look at Kaufman’s filmography, I can’t help but marvel at some of the novels he’s adapted for the screen. After all, here’s a guy who has successfully adapted some near-unadaptable material, including books by Tom Wolfe and Milan Kundera. Who would have thought it would be Michael Crichton who would defeat him? But just because Crichton’s books seemingly adapt themselves doesn’t mean that Kaufman was the right director for the job. As a director who specialized in literate fare, scenes like the one in which Wesley Snipes is attacked in the middle of a raid by an irate nude woman just aren’t in his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, Rising Sun was the beginning of a downturn in Kaufman’s career, leading first to the respectfully yet hardly enthusiastically-received Quills seven years later, then another misguided commercial project, Twisted, in 2004. Hopefully, one of his announced upcoming projects- perhaps his proposed Nicholas Ray film Interrupted- will get him back on track.

Enter the Moviedrome

Peter Smith — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:45:00 GMT

British cineastes love Alex Cox for his BBC series Moviedrome, which highlighted cult films. Until its demise in 1994, it was required viewing on a Sunday night, when Cox would pop up and introduce a couple of short films that he felt were neglected, interesting or screwed-up. This was when "cult" didn't have that sniffy sense of intellectual superiority. A lot of filmmakers cite Cox's excellent Moviedrome introductions as kicking off their interest in cinema. Unseen since their original broadcast, they've now popped up on YouTube. The very first Moviedrome introduction, above, for The Wicker Man, also features Cox's definition of cult. Others have included Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Halloween, a film he's reluctant to praise. Hopefully his more enthusiastic intros to Mishima, The Parallax View and Django will make it onto the net soon. — Faisal A. Qureshi

The Rep Report (October 24 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: As part of the annual Earshot Jazz Festival, the Northwest Film Forum is hosting a trio of documentaries that offer chilled sights and sounds for music and movie lovers, from October 23 to November 1. The mini-fest opens with the new Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer and Ron Mann's 1981 Imagine the Sound, featuring Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Archie Shepp, and Bill Dixon. Then, starting on the 26th, comes Bruce Weber's newly restored Chet Baker profile Let's Get Lost, a movie that we are always happy to tout.

NEW YORK: New French Films (October 24 - 28) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music provides audiences with the chance to buck the increasingly spotty international distribution system and see the New York premieres of some recent work from France. One film, Je t’aime...moi non plus: Critics and artists is a documentary, on the role of the film critic, directed by the actress Maria De Medeiros, that will be followed by a panel discussion including such critics as Kent Jones, Dave Kehr, and Dennis Lim.

Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema (October 26 - November 14) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is designed to provide an entry point for audiences unfamiliar with Yugoslavia's cult reputation as a hotbed of experimental and provocative film making. The schedule crams in thirteen classics from the "golden age" of Yugoslav filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, eleven more recent works, and a selection of eleven shorts, curated by Croatian film scholar Mato Kukuljica, showcasing the achievements of "the Zagreb school of animation." Krsto Papic, Dejan Sorak, and Ognjen Svilicic, three directors whose combined careers span some fifty years of moviemaking, will be in attendance.

LOS ANGELES: It's that time of year again, and the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theater just wants to say, from the bottom of its heart: Boo! Starting Wednesday, October 25 (with the classic ghost stories The Haunting and The Uninvited) and continuing on Thursday (with the funkier '70s sci-fi of Demon Seed and the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it throws on a couple of double features as a simmering build-up to its Dusk-to-Dawn Halloween Horror-Thon on Friday the 27th. With two films by Italian gorehound Lucio Fulci and movies by Tod Browning (Freaks), Stuart Gordon (From Beyond), and Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) that probably aren't the first thing even those guys would tell their mother's friends about, this is not the horror marathon of guys who believe in doing things half-way.

— Phil Nugent