The Screengrab : james gray

Tim Roth's Good Old Days

Phil Nugent — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

"I can't believe I even did shit like this back then." That's Tim Roth, talking to John Patterson of The Guardian about how he got his breaktrhough role as Trevor the skinhead in Alan Clarke's Made in Britain. "For the final audition - which I think was in front of the producer, the writer David Leland, and Alan - I turned up early on purpose. I came in and I told 'em, 'When you need me I'll be in the park across the way,' knowing full well they'd be watching me through the window. And I did some, you know, character work in the park. And luckily a friend of mine turned up who was in a band called King Kurt. And he has this fucking huge mohawk and I'm bald and we started mock-fighting and he's making a peacock noise - and then the police turned up and got involved - and Alan and his lot are all watching me out the window. And then I went in and did a reading; but by then it was more of a formality than anything else."

Having made his bones with Clarke, and gone on to do memorable work with such directors as Mike Leigh (Meantime), Stephen Frears (The Hit), Chris Menges (A World Apart), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover), Robert Altman (Vincent & Theo, where his performance as Van Gogh inspired Pauline Kael to describe his acting, admiringly, as "a form of kinetic discharge"), Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction), James Gray (Little Odessa), and Woody Allen (Everyone Says I Love You), Roth is currently starring in the Fox TV series Lie to Me, a transparent attempt by the network to find another overqualified, sardonic Brit to build a hit around before Hugh Laurie plows his motorcycle under a truck. Under these circumstances, it may be no surprise that Roth seems to have latched onto this interview as an excuse to tell all his best stories to someone who might have trouble comprehending his accent. Roth has actually done a lot of work in American movies: "Gary Oldman came to the States to do State Of Grace and he built the bridge for a lot of us who came after. Then I came out and I thought at the time it would be better to keep playing Americans because the casting directors mostly didn't know who the fuck I was; they thought I was American!"

However, his image here is that of indie guy, thanks to his having done so much of his best work in films like Tarantino's or the sadly neglected black comedy Gridlock'd, which may perhaps have suffered from audience's reluctance to laugh at a film about a couple of junkies when one of them was played by Tupac Shakur, who did not survive to see the premiere. On Reservoir Dogs, Roth recalls, ""My agent had me look at Mr Blonde or Mr Pink. I said, 'No, I like Orange.' Because I liked the idea of an Englishman playing an American, playing a cop, pretending to be a bad guy. Complete deception through and through! And I remember walking back to the trailer with Harvey Keitel one day, us both covered in blood, and saying, 'I think this might be pretty good.'" As for Tupac, "He was a natural. A really good actor. I didn't even know who he was then, which is fucking typical of me, but I didn't. [He was] charismatic, funny, and incredibly articulate. We became very good mates. In fact, somewhere in the vaults of Death Row Records, there's a tape of me and Tupac rapping, which is hilarious." We'll see how funny he thinks it is when someone does the right thing and puts them on eBay.

Roth himself made an impressive directing debut ten years ago with the harrowing family drama The War Zone. He still hasn't had the chance to follow it up, but if Lie to Me hangs around for awhile, the chance to store up his TV money might make for a way back to that. "I learned most about directing from the bad directors I've worked with," he says, "because you're better off knowing what not to do"

Screengrab Flashback, 1987: Crispin Glover, Kicking Against the Prick

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

As our heroic Oscar show live-bloggers pointed out, the Academy Awards broadcast did clear up one pressing question: more than a week after Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre, bearded appearance on the David Letterman show, it's still open season on the actor turned rapper. This is kind of s shame, if only because James Wolcott seems to have been proven right in his speculation that all the slack-jawed fascination Phoenix inspired in his few minutes on Dave's couch has come at the price of a lack of serious attention and box office for the movie he was ostensibly promoting, Two Lovers, his latest collaboration with writer-director James Gray. Still unanswered, though, is the question of whether Phoenix is genuinely flaking out publicly (or worse), or if, as has been suggested, he's engaged in some Andy Kaufman-style prank or long-term Borat-type project. Though for some of us watching, the appearance summoned up not thoughts of either Sacha Baron Cohen or Latka's creator but Crispin Glover. If that's the role model that Phoenix meant to invoke, he's a rare bird indeed.

Glover's turn in the spotlight came in the summer of 1987, when he was supposed to be promoting Tim Hunter's River's Edge, the tragic-teen melodrama in which he had his biggest movie role to date. (Up to that time, he was best known for having played Michael J. Fox's father in Back to the Future.) Glover's freakish, hand-waving performance in River's Edge garnered mixed reviews at best, and it helped create a climate in which the still relatively little-known actor was widely perceived as something of an oddball. Even so, his Letterman appearance exceeded even the most baroque expectations. Acting as if he were about to keel over from anthrax, Glover boogied out onstage in thrift-shop clothing, platform shoes, and a fright wig, and began to frantically stammer about how the jackals in the media were writing about him as if he were some kind of weirdo. Apparently incited to demonstrate what a normal fellow he was by some girls in the audience who called out, "Nice shoes!", Glover made a muscle, invited his host to arm wrestle, then leaped up to demonstrate his ability to kick as high as the seated Letterman's head. He did in fact, kick very close to Letterman's head, which seemed to be the cue Dave was looking for to announce that their revels now were ended.

In those pre-Internet days, word of what had gone down spread rapidly across college campuses, in some cases with VCR-recorded evidence that was disseminated with what we used to call "tape trees." (And I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.) Word was slow to get out that Glover was playing a character, Rubin, who would eventually be the focus of a barely seen feature film, 1991's Rubin and Ed, co-starring Howard Hessman and directed by Trent Harris (The Beaver Trilogy). This explanation fails to explain how Glover thought anyone not privy to this information could have been expected to watch him unravel with anything other than open-mouthed bewilderment, or why he thought that the notoriously crankly control freak Letterman would be delighted to watch him melt down on his time and feel the draft from his oversized clodhoppers tickle the side of his face.

Coupled with his work in River's Edge, the Letterman show appearance cemented the direction of Glover's acting career, which is to say that it officially redefined him as an unvarying token of sheer weirdness. (His subsequent failure to appear in the sequel to Back to the Future, which he followed up by suing the filmmakers for violating his "image" by having the actor who replaced him made up to resemble him, also earned him the reputation of a weirdo who was hard to deal with.) By the time of his cameo in Wild at Heart, Glover was seen as the sort of person David Lynch shoehorns into a movie if he's afraid that it might not be strange enough. Although Glover's few opportunities to play a relatively normal person, in mostly small roles in such films as John Boorman's Where the Heart Is and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? have shown him to be a capable actor with a surprisingly sweet screen presence, his biggest roles and ripest paydays have been for flaunting his geek-show side in such films as Charlie's Angels, Bartleby, and Willard. (More recently, he reunited with the director of Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, to incarnate the title role in Beowulf.) A well-established young actor with a string of successes to his credit, Phoenix will not be so easily pigeonholed. At this point, most people would be relieved to hear that he's having a laugh, even if he did throw a labor of love movie under the bus in the procession, and after a shave, the industry would welcome him back with welcome if wary arms. But is he kidding? It's a dubious sort of joke that serves to turn you into a punchline for Ben Stiller's use. Stay tuned.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 7-13, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Listen, I’m a man of few words and I’ve got skulls to impale with a rusty machete, so I’m gonna make this short and sweet. The Screengrab ran down my entire history this week, with Precursors: Friday the 13th Parts I-III, IV-VI, and VII-X. Frankly, I don’t think they showed me the proper reverence, but I’ll make my displeasure known at the appropriate time. I’m also a little miffed that I was left out of Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). Every one of my relationships has ended with a hunting knife sticking out of someone’s eye socket, which should be your first hint that I belong on the list. But again, I’ll make sure the right people hear about this, and they won’t be happy.

Meanwhile, here are some more Screengrab posts to read. Be sure to leave the light on. Reviews: Two Lovers, Gomorrah and The Rock-afire Explosion

Screengrab Q & A: James Gray and Two Lovers

He's Hot, He's Oscar-Nominated, and He's Dead: The Heath Ledger Stealth Award Campaign

Reviews By Request, Oscar-Nominated Edition: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Unwatchables: Baby Geniuses and In the Mix

Believe It Or Not: Patrica Highsmith's Ripley, On Screen

Video of the Day: Lindsay Lohan's Screen Test

Screengrab Q & A: James Gray and "Two Lovers"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:30:00 GMT

The writer-director James Gray's last movie, We Own the Night, had the most visually stunning car chase scene in some thirty years, and that's an achievement that a lot of moviemakers would be happy to retire on. But though Gray knows his way around an action scene, his first three features are all stories about men involved in crime that can't be easily shoehorned as genre movies. His latest, Two Lovers (which Nick Schager reviewed earlier this week), might at first glance seem to be a change of pace, because the violence is all emotional. But on a deeper level, the movie, in which Gray returns to the Brighton Beach area of his feature debut Little Odessa and reunites with the star of The Yards and We Own the Night, Joaquin Phoenix, is of a piece with his earlier work, all family dramas about people in extreme situations torn apart by mixed feelings and divided loyalties.

How did you come around to wanting to tell this story?

It was really a combination of three different things that sort of inspired the movie. I was at a party with Gwynneth Paltrow, and she said to me, "Y'know, I'm quitting acting, and I'm just gonna raise my kids." And I said, "That's terrible, because you have a real gift, and now you're not going to use it." And she said, "Well, what do you care? We were never gonna work together, you make movies about guys who shoot guns off all the time." Which sucked.

And it wasn't how you saw yourself?

Well, I kinda did, but at the same time, you don't want people thinking that's all you can do. So the seed was planted then, and you might almost say this movie was my rejoinder. Then I got my wife pregnant, and we both had to go to a genetic counsellor. It turns out there are sixteen or seventeen disorders that are connected to your genetic makeup. There's something called Tasacs disease, which is a genetic disorder. My wife and I were fine, but I learned that if the man and the woman are both potential carriers, the child has such-and-such a chance of getting the disease. And the counsellor told me that couples break up over this. I thought that was interesting, and it got me to thinking about the precarious nature of relationships, but I just sort of put it in the drawer, thinking maybe later I could do something with it.

Then, when I was waiting to start shooting We Own the Night, I was waiting for Mark Wahlberg to be available, and one night I pulled this collection of novellas and short stories by Dostoevsky off the shelf one night, and I read "White Nights." I had read it twenty years earlier, and then I was too young to really read it. This time, I read it and I thought, what a wonderful story about the unknowable nature of desire. I thought, this is something worth pursuing. But I couldn't really remake that film; it's already been made into a film by Visconti, and Bresson did his own version. But in a way, it could use updating. I thought that if you told that story today, the person would probably be under heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and he'd be called bipolar or manic depressive, any of the maladies that have been invented because of the advent of psychoanalysis. And I thought that I could use a couple that broke up, maybe because of the fear of something like Tasac's disease, as a starting point.

So I decided that the challenge here would be to make a movie about love and desire and have it not be a comedy. I wanted to play it straight, and for it to have ... [pause] an authenticity of emotion. I wanted to do it with no postmodern irony and no jokes at the expense of the characters, so that we would be totally with them. I just thought that would be worth pursuing as an experiment. It's funny, because in most ways it's the least autobiographical of the films I've made. But some people have said, oh this must be more autobiographical than your other films, and I go--[expression of horror]--No! I mean, I'm happily married, to this fabulously beautiful woman, but I guess what they mean, I hope what they mean, is that I try to put myself into the film as much as I can.

Joaquin Phoenix's performance struck me as really brilliant, and it's very daring. It shows a real willingness to risk the audience not liking him, and even, as you say, to laugh at him because he's so openly vulnerable. You've worked with him twice before; did you have him in mind for this from the start?

I wrote the part for him and I would not have made the movie if he hadn't wanted to do it. He's unbelievably complex, and he really knows how to relate the inner turmoil of a person who's kind of at war with himself. He's an artist, and his only priority when he's working is to the character. That's really rare.

What about Gwynneth Paltrow? Because she also shows a side of herself here that I'm not sure she's explored in a movie before.

I've known her socially and loved her personally, and I know her as a very different person that whatever's this public image of her, but I didn't know what it would be like working with her. Joacquin and I were both very nervous about it, because we'd heard that she likes to do two or three takes, no improvisation, knows her lines, does it very precisely, and goes home. And Joaquin and I like to do twenty, thirty takes, do a lot of improvisation, really explore. And we just adored working with her. She has such emotional intelligence, and was so present in the scenes. And what I found was that, working with her, Joaquin started to become more precise, and she started to improvise, and they sort of met somewhere in the middle. It was a very happy set.

You seem to have a history of getting actors who might have some kind of established image and getting something different from them than they've shown before.

Actors are kind of hostage to context, very much hostage to the narratives they're in. Movie drama is so intimate, and you can see what the actor is doing all the time, so there's no lying in movies. Its emotional truth twenty-four frames a second, and you either believe it or you don't. And if you don't believe it, you don't believe it forty feet high. I try to give actors a context where they can play more than one thing, and sadly, I don't think they often get a chance to try to do that. I think that most American movies ask the actors to only play one level of performance, which is the action in the scene, not what's going on beneath.

The movie has this view of the destructive possibilities of love and the choices people make that's a little scary. And finally, you have this ambiguous sort of ending that probably looks like an uncomplicated happy ending, except that the person at the center of it all knows that it's not that simple.

An upbeat ending is fake, unless it's something like a Fred Astaire musical, which is meant to be transcend reality. And an unhappy ending is gratuitous and bleak and often just a kind of bogus existentialism. So what you want to do is square the circle and present an ending that could be perceived as part bitter, part sweet, because that's life. You know, when the Titanic sank, there were seven hundred survivors, and half of the witnesses believed that the ship broke in two as it sank, and the other half believed that the ship just basically went... [points his hand down and mimes it diving straight towards the floor] Two people who saw the exact same thing can have two completely different reactions, and that to me is a presentation of the world, in complete.

Review: "Two Lovers"

Nick Schager — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As a director, James Gray is an old-school anachronism, not only because of his fondness for straightforward genre mechanisms but, just as crucially, for his dedication to melodramatic sincerity. That quality takes center-screen in Two Lovers, a romance whose earnestness borders on the creaky yet has a way of creeping under one’s skin, crowding out any minor concerns about the stolidity of its love-triangle narrative. As in The Yards and We Own the Night, Gray’s latest benefits from an impeccable sense of place, in this case modern-day Brooklyn, whose windy chill, intimacy and ethnic character all lend warm, comfortable authenticity to the tale of Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), the son of a Jewish dry cleaner back living with his parents after having been left by his fiancé and committed, post-suicide attempt, to a mental hospital. Leonard’s downcast eyes and penchant for mumbled monosyllabic utterances express a damaged soul but Phoenix, acutely in tune with Gray’s depiction of his milieu (in this, his third collaboration with the director), refuses to reduce his indecisive protagonist to simply the walking wounded. Playfulness flirting around the corners of his eyes and mouth, and immature stubbornness lurking underneath his surface hesitancy, Leonard is a man hurt but not hopeless, his spirit – as evidenced by a supremely evocative opening wannabe-fatal dive off a pier – scarred but not irrevocably so.

Unable to off himself, Leonard returns home to a dad (Moni Moshonov) concerned and a mom (Isabella Rossellini) on pins and needles, as well as two women who waltz into his life and provide Two Lovers with its title. The first is Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), whom Leonard’s parents set him up with in a fairly transparent effort to solidify a business deal with Sandra’s father. Brunette, sensible and nurturing, she’s the smart choice, which would make her the choice for Leonard if not for the appearance of Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a striking blonde with thorny issues – a bothersome father, a drug addiction, a relationship with a married lawyer colleague (Elias Koteas) who pays for her apartment in Leonard’s parents’ building – that strike a chord with troubled Leonard. They’re yin-yang mother-lover poles, a dichotomy whose schematism would be vexing if not for the passion, as well as the sober rationalism, with which Gray dramatizes the scenario. Not once does the director treat his material with anything less than heartfelt intensity free of winks, nudges or concessions to overblown hysterics. Instead he focuses so intently on character details (such as Leonard’s idiosyncratic habit of counting train cars as they approach a station) and setting (the blustery cold of an apartment building rooftop, the euphoric, sizzling-color energy of a club, all captured in beautifully unfussy, classical widescreen) that the gradual development and resolution of the plot seems not rote but fervent, prickly, alive.

Conscious that Sandra is maternal and reliable (“I want to take care of you” she tells him over lunch), and incapable of squelching his uncontrollable ardor for Michelle, Leonard ensnares himself in a situation that must, inevitably, lead to a choice between following his head and his heart, between remaining in his socioeconomic class or venturing outside it, between embracing home or plunging headfirst into the wild, vast unknown. Emboldened by performances – Phoenix needy and reckless, Shaw invitingly anodyne, Paltrow desperate and messily desirable – whose unaffectedness obliterates the roles’ conventionality, the passionate Two Lovers eventually sides with its protagonist’s more imprudent impulses. However, if Gray’s film is romantic, it’s not of a comforting sort, miring itself in the implacable irrationality of desire, and the self-destruction that it can wreak. Barreling forward, engagement ring in pocket, to a final decision, Leonard is cast as a man in thrall to emotions over which he has no reign, and in his helplessness – and his decision to follow said feelings through to their risky conclusion – Gray finds as much sorrow as bliss. Love is exhilarating, maddening and cruel in Two Lovers, and tragedy, if one might call it that, comes not just from painful loss, but from being forced to compromise, to settle for more than one could have hoped for and yet less than one momentarily dared to dream.

Trailer Review: Two Lovers

Paul Clark — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

I consider myself a fan of the films of James Gray, unlike the majority of American critics, who are pretty lukewarm about his work. So naturally, I’m pretty eager to see his latest film, in which he steps outside the cops’n’robbers milieu for the first time in his career to make, of all things, a love story. But this being Gray, the film looks to be more downbeat and steeped in a New York seventies-era sensibility than most films of this sort. One thing I find especially striking in this trailer is the simple sincerity of the dialogue- unlike many big-screen lovers, who seem to be so idealized they’re scarcely believable as people, I have no trouble recognizing the characters I see here. I also have hopes for Joaquin Phoenix’s performance- supposedly his last- as Gray seems to be one of the few filmmakers out there who brings out new sides of the actor. Two Lovers may not be what most moviegoers are looking for from a date movie, but I’d rather see one love story like this than twenty Pretty Womans.

Morning Deal Report: Brad Pitt Seeks Lost City

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

We Own the Night director James Gray is adapting the nonfiction book The Lost City of Z for Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B. Pitt will star as British soldier and spy Percy Fawcett, who “left Victorian society to explore in the Amazon, and he became obsessed by the idea of an advanced civilization he called Z, which he believed existed in the depths of the jungle. Along with his son, Fawcett headed into the jungle in 1925 in search of Z and was never seen again,” Variety reports.

Mumblecore mavens the Duplass Brothers are set to make their studio debut with “an intergenerational comedy” for Fox Searchlight. “The studio is in talks with Marisa Tomei, John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill to star in the film, which will center on a budding romance between a man (Reilly) and woman (Tomei) that the woman's son (Hill) attempts to foil,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Get ready to hold your lighters aloft. “New Line has won an auction for screen rights to Rock of Ages, a stage musical that does with '80s rock anthems what Mamma Mia! did with Abba tunes,” Variety reports. “The show is propelled by signature '80s rock anthems popularized by Journey, Twisted Sister, Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, Foreigner, Bon Jovi and REO Speedwagon.” What, no Loverboy?

Related:
Brad Pitt Jilts Aronofsky Again
Die Mumblecore Die

Cannes Rundown, Day 7: Featuring Angelina Jolie as George C. Scott

Paul Clark — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:34:00 GMT

So far this year, Cannes has served primarily as a spotlight for the best of world cinema, featuring new films by masters like Arnaud Desplechin, the Dardenne brothers, Jia Zhang-ke, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and an out-of-competition bonus from Terence Davies. But today, American directors finally got their moment in the Croisette sun, with works by Cannes favorites Clint Eastwood and James Gray premiering.

Eastwood, making his first fest appearance since 2003’s Mystic River, opened Changeling to mostly positive notices. Here’s Variety’s Todd McCarthy on the film- “"Changeling" impressively continues Clint Eastwood's great run of ambitious late-career pictures. The outstanding screenplay… has deceptive simplicity and ambition to it, qualities the director honors by underplaying the melodrama and not signaling the story's eventual dimensions at the outset. Characters and sociopolitical elements are introduced with almost breathtaking deliberation, as dramatic force and artistic substance steadily mount across the long-arc running time.”

Time’s Richard Corliss, also on Changeling- “Changeling is an epic, fact-based story — depicting sadistic, systematic corruption in the municipal government, the police department and the medical establishment of 1920s Los Angeles — that has the novelty of being virtually unknown today… At its center are the heartache and heroic resolve of a woman who has lost the one person she loves most and is determined to find him, dead or alive, against all obstacles the authorities place in her way. In that sense the movie is a companion piece to last year's Cannes entry A Mighty Heart, in which Jolie played the wife of kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl — except that Changeling is far more taut, twisty and compelling.”

Meanwhile, the reaction to James Gray’s Two Lovers was somewhat less universally positive. ScreenDaily’s Allan Hunter- “Two Lovers is the third successive James Gray feature to play in Competition at Cannes and it has become harder to discern why the selectors keep such resolute faith with this particular American auteur. Two Lovers is a maudlin, melancholic tug at the heartstrings that marks a welcome break from Gray's preoccupation with crime and corruption. It is well-crafted and ably acted but never especially moving and winds up feeling like something from the classier end of the American TV movie spectrum.”

But Glenn Kenny has a soft spot for Gray’s film- “Most of my U.S. colleagues here hated James Gray's new film even more than they did last year's booed-right-here We Own The Night, which I wasn't too crazy about myself. But I gotta give it up—as earnest and awkward as this loose rethink of Dostoevsky's "White Nights" can get, it frequently moved me… Turning away from the crime-steeped milieus of his previous features, Gray aims for a kind of deliberately ache-filled romanticism that no other filmmaker I can think of is particularly interested in today. Good for him, says I.”

Also, playing out of competition:

A.O. Scott writes on Raymond Depardon’s Modern Life for the Paper of Record- “Mr. Depardon, from a rural background himself, is more interested in details and personalities than in generalizations. It is nonetheless impossible to ignore the fatalism that hovers over both the elders and their would-be inheritors as they have their taciturn, matter-of-fact say. At the end, Mr. Depardon promises to return, and you can’t help but wonder what will be left of this noble, difficult and ancient form of life when he comes back for the next film in the series.”

Pierre Scholler’s Versailles elicited this reaction from The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt- “The abandoned child is a sure-fire dramatic devise, and it is to writer-director Pierre Schoeller's credit that in "Versailles" he uses it to explore true sentiment rather than mere sentimentality. Indeed the child character is essentially abandoned twice in the movie, yet no violins sob on the soundtrack.”

Finally, the reaction of The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr to Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool is hardly the consensus, but it’s worth repeating all the same- “It's my first encounter with Alonso, and I'm told his earlier movies, "La Libertad" in particular, are quite good. This one struck me as a Bela Tarr movie left to die in a snowbank.”

Sounds like my kind of movie, actually…

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

The Movie Moment(s): Notable Moments of 2007, Part 2

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Seth's secret shame, Superbad

2007 was a great year for dark and despairing cinema, but less so for really good comedy. But if nothing else, it can lay claim to at least one comedy sequence for the ages, even while it's so raunchy it would've made Curly Howard blush. In the scene, Seth (Jonah Hill) confesses to his best friend Evan (Michael Cera) his longstanding compulsion to draw penises. Of course, Evan has a hard time believing it (2007's funniest line in a walk: "Dicks? Like a man dick?") but the wonder of the scene is that Hill plays it completely straight. Seth is clearly ashamed of himself, angered by the trouble it's brought him, and annoyed that no one seems to understand his plight. In addition, screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (note the first names) make the details in the scene so specific that I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't drawn from real life. Which, of course, only makes it that much funnier.

Chase in the rain, We Own the Night

A lot of people would claim that the chase sequence at the end of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof is the year's best action scene, but I'd go to the mat instead for James Gray's We Own the Night. Tarantino's was well-choreographed and nicely sustained to be sure, but it couldn't match the pure visceral impact of Gray's. For one thing, there's real urgency in the scene- Joaquin Phoenix's Bobby has just learned that his former Russian mob associates have not only figured out where he's hiding but are planning to kill his police chief dad, and he's racing through the rain to stop this from happening. In addition, the direction is almost unbearably tense, as Gray shoots the scene entirely from inside Phoenix's car, with brutal violence glimpsed through his windshield as the wiper blades whoosh back and forth. Gray has never been known as an action director, but he shows a gift for it here, which makes me all the more grateful that he's refused to sell his talents short by making a string of mediocre thrillers. Instead, he's done his own thing so far, and although his three films haven't won him a mass audience like Tarantino, he's remained an interesting filmmaker in his own right, and We Own the Night is his best film to date.

Little Anton Ego, Ratatouille

By now most of us expect greatness from Pixar, especially when Brad Bird is directing, but like any truly great filmmaker, Bird is still capable of surprising us with his talent. Nowhere in Ratatouille is this more true than a scene near the end of the film where the dreaded food critic Anton Ego (the inimitable Peter O'Toole) drops in at Gusteau's to review the food prepared by its celebrated new chef, Remy, a rat voiced by Patton Oswalt. Counter to popular logic, Remy serves him the relatively low-class dish ratatouille, the quality of which blindsides Ego so much that he briefly flashes back to the meals of his childhood. The beauty of the moment owes largely to its brevity, as Bird executes the flashback so suddenly and in so few brush strokes that it blindsided me with its simple perfection. Rather than coming off like a cheap Freudian reading of Ego's character, this scene speaks to something more universal, and it's Ratatouille's most vivid illustration of the idea that great food truly belongs to us all.