The Screengrab : john cassavettes

Set Your DVR: The World’s Greatest Sinner

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Screengrab to bring you a special bonus edition of Set Your DVR. Unless you’re a night owl, you’ll want to do just that, because this bad boy doesn’t start until 2:15 in the blessed a.m. (1:15 Central) on Turner Classic Movies. But it’s a real rarity: the one and only motion picture directed by one of the great madmen of cinema, Timothy Carey. You’ve seen him in movies by Stanley Kubrick (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and John Cassavettes (Minnie and Moskowitz,, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie)…and if you still can’t picture him, I direct your attention to his frenzied shirtless hillbilly boogie from Poor White Trash:

So…that guy. Of The World’s Greatest Sinner, Jerry Renshaw of the Austin Chronicle writes: “Words like ‘offbeat’ are far too mild for this disconcertingly sleazy and base idiot-savant oddity that I cannot recommend highly enough for fans of the bizarre.” Personally, I’ve been waiting years to see this one and my DVR is already set. Again, it’s early tomorrow morning, Saturday, April 18th at 2:15 a.m. (1:15 a.m. Central) on TCM.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

Abby Mann, 1927 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Abby Mann has died at the age of 83. For many years there, Mann symbolized Serious, Hard-Hitting screenwriting on Moral Issues inspired by Contemporary Themes. Like his doppelganger, Paddy Chayefsky, Mann attracted attention for his work on such "golden age of television" shows as and Studio One., where his seriousness of intent and hard-hitting tone made it clear that he would be a natural collaborator for the director-producer Stanley Kramer. Kramer brought Mann into movies, where he won an Academy Award for his first screenplay, for 1961's Judgement at Nuremburg, and followed that up by adapting Katherine Anne Porter's novel Ship of Fools for Kramer. He also wrote A Child Is Waiting, produced by Kramer and directed by John Cassavettes; Vittorio De Sica's The Condemned of Altona; and the Frank Sinatra vehicle The Detective. By the end of the 1970s, his and Kramer's brand of speechifying topical melodrama was actually more in demand in TV than in movies, and Mann gravitated back to the small screen; he inadvertently created the hit cop show Kojak and made Telly Savalas a star by writing The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a 1971 TV-movie based on an actual case of police injustice, with Savalas's "Kojak" as the muckraking hero; in 1978, he had his sole fling as a director by filming his script for the 1978 miniseries King, starring Paul Winfield as the civil rights leader. That program stirred up controversy for speculating on a conspiracy behind King's assassination, much as his 1985 script for The Atlanta Child Murders was criticized for implying that the black man convicted for the crimes, Wayne Williams, was a patsy for a mysterious white killer, or killers. His last filmed scripts were for the HBO films Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992), Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995), and Whitewash: The Clarence Bradley Story.

Independent of What?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The Screengrab is, regardless of our tinkering around with the mainstream, really all about independent film. See? Right up there at the top of the page, it says "news, gossip and comment for indie-film addicts". We go out of our way to bring you the latest and best in indie film news every single day.

There's just one problem: what exactly do we mean by 'independent film', anyway?

It's a question that a lot of people have been asking lately, as the lines between the big studios and the little moviemakers grows increasingly blurred and the meaning of 'independent' -- always nebulous in the arcane world of cinema financing -- becomes more difficult than ever to determine. The latest blogger to contemplate the meaning of independent cinema is Cole Drumb at Film.com, who uses an essay by the always-engaging Ray Carney as his jumping-off point.

Drumb, using Carney's questions about the nature of independent film (and what distinguishes it from, say, independent opera) as his basis, goes on to ask at what point an independent filmmaker ceases to be one; to what degree mainstream work subsidizes independent effort; and where we're heading in the indie world as festivals become more commercialized and studio consolidation leads to more and more mainstream interest in the indie circuit. It's an intriguing set of questions, at least, and attempts to contextualize people like the Coen Brothers and John Cassavetes against a modern definition of independent film.

Screengrab Review: Chop Shop

Peter Smith — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Review by Bilge Ebiri.

With 2006's Man Push Cart and his latest, Chop Shop, Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani has made a good case for himself as the neorealist poet laureate of New York's immigrant underside. Shot with breathtaking immediacy and featuring casts of non-professionals in real-life locations, Bahrani's films give narrative shape and compelling character shadings to documentary worlds. The result is something that feels like a new language being born, even though it owes a conscious debt to both non-fiction filmmakers like Shirley Clarke and realist narrative masters like John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica. Which is all just a fancy way of saying you really, really should not miss Chop Shop.

Bahrani trains his camera on parentless street kid Alejandro, aka Ale (Alejandro Polanco, in what must surely be the performance of the year, so far), who lives with his teenage sister Isamar above the auto-body shop where he often works. Both fiercely loyal and persistent, he's a street-hustling capitalist in training (see if you can spot the eerie similarities between this and There Will Be Blood), except that he's trying mainly to just keep his head above water. What dreams he has — and he does have them — are expressed with a poetic spareness that is both haunting and evocative. There isn't really that much plot to speak of — and yet the film is riveting, in part because Bahrani stays so focused on Ale's unflinching desire to stay ahead of the game.

Even so, the director still manages to effectively convey the broader world of the chop shops of Queens, so that a portrait of a community emerges from the film's accumulation of detail, character, and incident. And despite all the gritty despair and documentary intensity of Chop Shop, there's something lovely and almost mystical about Bahrani's vision: Like the best fairy tales, it is at heart a harrowing story about an innocent child in a scary world. Just don't look for any happy endings this time around. — Bilge Ebiri

2008 Independent Spirits Award

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Independent Spirit Awards, designed as a counterpoint to the Academy Awards (and traditionally handed out the day before the Oscars ceremony) were distributed this past Saturday. It may say something about the current state of the movie industry that, at first glance, the list of nominees did not seem as glaringly different from the list of Oscar nominees as might have been expected, though if the two institutions tended to pick their nominees from basically the same talent pool, they tended to diverge in their selection of winners. Juno won for Best Picture, while its Oscar-garlanded screenwriter, Diablo Cody, took the prize for Best First Screenplay, and its star, Ellen Page, won for Best Actress. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor prize for his work in The Savages, whose writer-director, Tamara Jenkins, won for Best Screenplay. Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Actress went to Chiwetel Ejiofor (for Talk to Me) and Cate Blanchett, who dedicated her award to her I'm Not There co-star, Heath Ledger. Rounding out the major categories were Julian Schnabel's award as Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which was also honored for its cinematography, by Janusz Kaminski), John Carney's Once (winner for Best Foreign Film) and Scott Frank's The Lookout (Best First Film). The evening also marked the first appearance of a new award named in honor of the late, great Robert Altman, to honor the film that makes the most impressive use of its ensemble cast; it was given to Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. The movies got a little more independent, or at least a lot more obscure, a bit further down the list with John Eska's August Evening, winner of the John Cassavettes Award for best feature made for under $500,000. Among the hardcore independent filmmakers on hand, Eska did the best job of putting his place in the food chain, in relation to the Philip Seymour Hoffmans and the Cate Blanchetts, in pespective by taking the stage and saying that he wanted to thank his agent, the only problem being that he doesn't have one yet.