The Screengrab : julianne moore

Precursors: Next (2007)

Nick Schager — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Nicolas Cage learns that a piece of paper buried for years in a time capsule holds clues to impending catastrophes in this Friday’s Knowing, but it’s not the first time the Academy Award-winning thespian has had insight into forthcoming events. Just two years ago, Cage headlined Next, a loopy sci-fi saga in which his Cris can see two minutes into the future, a superpower that the government (here in the form of an out-of-place Julianne Moore) seeks to utilize in their efforts to locate a nuclear device hidden somewhere in downtown L.A. It didn’t take great prescience to see that this Lee Tamahori-helmed saga wouldn’t resuscitate Cage’s reputation as an overacting ham, as one look at his Da Vinci Code-long hair in the trailer made clear the film’s general lack of quality control. Yet anyone interested in an unpretentious B-movie could do far worse than this genre flick, despite the fact that the CG effects are so subpar they suggest that Paramount tightened the purse strings after watching dailies of Cage and love interest Jessica Biel attempt to generate (non-existent) romantic chemistry. Tamahori is reasonably adept at orchestrating action and his set pieces, especially one of Cris evading giant logs as he races down a hillside, are equal parts cheesy and thrilling. Cage, meanwhile, is his typically mannered, overwrought self whether in tense or quiet moments, which is another way of saying he’s consistently awesome-bad.

Morning Deal Report: Giamatti and Witherspoon Are Downsizing

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Alexander Payne has finished his latest script, a “social satire” (aren’t they all?) called Downsizing. Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon and Sacha Baron Cohen are all attached, and it’s clear from the plot description that Payne is taking the title quite literally. Giamatti plays “a man low on money who decides he can have a much nicer life if he undergoes a process to shrink himself,” Variety reports.

Atom Egoyan is remaking the French thriller Nathalie…, and naturally he’s calling it Chloe. The story “centers on a married woman (Julianne Moore) who hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to find out whether her husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her. The prostitute, however, cons her about the nature of her husband's fidelity, a move that puts the family in jeopardy,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Sam Raimi and Jonathan Demme have been added to the upcoming SXSW roster. Raimi’s work-in-progress Drag Me to Hell will screen in the midnight slot at the Paramount Theater on March 15, while Demme will premiere his latest documentary, Neil Young Trunk Show. Yes, Jonathan Demme has made another Neil Young performance film. I can’t stop him.

Related:
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Scorsese Passes the Baton to Demme on Bob Marley Documentary

DVD (Mini-)Digest for December 23, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Christmas is just two days away, and for you last-minute shoppers, the studios are unloading several of their late summer and early fall releases to fill out an otherwise slow DVD week.

The most notable of the bunch is Burn After Reading (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the Coen brothers’ follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. Much more comedic than its feted predecessor, Burn has a no less bleak view of human nature. Consequently, despite the many laughs the film has to offer, the film is much more disquieting upon reflection than one might guess while watching it. But even if you’re just in the mood for entertainment, you should still be able to relish the game performances, especially those given by Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt’s unspeakable hair, and the priceless double act of J.K. Simmons and David (Sledge Hammer!) Rasche.

This week’s other releases include Anna Faris doing what she does best in The House Bunny (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Meg Ryan, Annette Bening and friends in The Women (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Steve Coogan taking comic aim at both Shakespeare and the alleged sexiness of Jesus in Hamlet 2 (Universal); and the fashionably unhinged Julianne Moore in Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace (Weinstein).

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

VADIM RIZOV'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

HEALTH (1980)

A lot of Altman films have bad reputations, at least among non-believers, but HealtH was legendarily deemed unreleasable; planned for a release during the 1980 presidential election, it didn't play anywhere before it was finally let into a grudging run at New York's Film Forum in 1982; it's subsequently plunged into obscurity, seen only in extremely rare revivals and occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel. A memorably facile regular charge against Altman is that he did little more than cluster people together and occasionally zoom in; HealtH basically is that movie, but if you enjoy Altman, it's a blast. A naked attempt to update Nashville for the 1980 election, HealtH's political commentary is just as weak as that of Nashville, with less density to cover it up. Kent Jones once wrote that Altman's "tendency ... to go systematic" almost killed this movie, but if you enjoy that process on top of little more than a string of verbal and visual non sequiturs (my favorite: a guy in a tomato costume — don't ask — jumping into a pool for no good reason), it's well worth tracking down. Truly a fans-only effort.

KILLA SEASON (2006)

I guess I'm kind of ridiculously humorless, because the whole idea of "guilty pleasures" strikes me as part of the reason people are getting dumber: it's easier to recognize bad material, sit back and mock it than try to engage with anything serious and remotely challenging. For some people, the whole genre of "guilty pleasures" takes over entirely from the non-guilty kind and they surrender. Which is fair enough if you're working a demanding job or have a tough life and don't really care about movies and just want the laughs. But if you have the time and leisure (unemployment induced or otherwise) to want a guilty pleasure that actively challenges your endurance, say hello to Cam'ron's directorial debut Killa Season. Not technically a direct-to-video film (limited tri-state area screenings were scheduled for its release), Cam'ron's endless ode to gangsta life begins with a back-alley craps game which turns into a man getting whacked over the head with an empty bottle for a minor betting infraction, then everyone cheering as Cam'ron pisses all over him while chanting "No homo." Killa Season's main achievement is being consistently morally depraved and technically incompetent at all times. If the amateur videography and dialogue that makes mumblecore sound like the snappiest film noir you ever saw (Juelz Santana: "They trying to take over the block"; cut to random guy: "Yo, let's take over the block") aren't enough to entice you, stay for levels of moral filth surpassing Salo. For sheer grossness, the close-ups of coke pellets being shat out by mules are hard to beat, but less-extreme scenes like the ones where Cam'ron spits on a little girl are constantly forthcoming. At well over two hours, Killa Season will make you question your dedication to unintentional hilarity. Me, I watch it once a year.

TRANSPORTER 2 (2005)

Transporter 2 treats real-world physics with less precision than your average Looney Tunes cartoon. Over the course of Louis Leterrer's film, Jason Statham, when not systematically evading and defeating various goons and hirelings (including a hired assassinatrix who, for good kinky measure, shoots up a hospital in her lingerie — Transporter 2 defeats subtext by being even dumber than you'd expect) — consistently test-drives cars in ways I've never seen. My favorite is when, to get rid of a time-bomb on the car's underside, Statham's character hooks it on a construction crane as part of a perfect 360 that lands him on the opposite roof just as the bomb explodes. But there's also the completely nonsensical climactic fight, where Statham and his Euro-foe (Alessandro Grassman) duke it out, bullets and all, while a plane plummets into the ocean, and even after. With such sublime visions of human possibility, why carp about the real world? There's also a smaller pleasure here: anyone fond of the Europudding productions of the '70s — where a bunch of awkwardly accented actors were brought together into an under-written film calculated for nothing so much as maximum exploitation of every country the cast came from — should dig the awkward polyglot cast. When Grassman hisses (in relation to his evil plot to disseminate air toxins) "That's right. Breathe, my friend, breathe" — well, if you're not amused, I can't help you.

HANNIBAL (2001)

The Silence Of The Lambs is a well-crafted and compelling film, but it's basically kind of a drag: with every year, the sexual tensions driving Buffalo Bill seem a little less compelling and defensible, and the sexism card seems like more of a time capsule. Hannibal, on the other hand, is just stupid. Although Ridley Scott's come a long way since Alien, it takes a truly brain-dead mind to settle on his unique way of expressing conflict. When Hannibal's on, the "Goldberg Variations" play; when his nemesis (Gary Oldman) is chewing the screen, the "Blue Danube" plays. And when they meet, they both play at the same time. Hannibal is mostly remembered for its final gross-out brain-eating scene, but it offers more than that: if the sexism seems a little dated in Silence, the leering misogyny of Ray Liotta here is entirely, uh, Liotta-esque, and the constant shots of Florence are pretty without getting all Merchant-Ivory.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Morning Deal Report: Post-Election Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The news out of Hollywood is a little scarce this morning. Apparently there was some kind of political thing going on last night or what-have-you. Things are so slow, The Hollywood Reporter is headlining Jonathan Lipnicki news. You remember Lipnicki, right? The kid from Jerry Maguire? “The human head weighs eight pounds”? Well, the lad is now a senior at Los Angeles' Agoura High School and plans to star in the psychological thriller The Other Side of Innocence. (That would be “guilt,” I think.) He’ll play “a damaged young man who becomes romantically involved with the unhappy daughter of the local chief detective while a serial killer is threatening their town.”

Tough guys galore have signed on for 13, an English-language remake of the 2005 French pic 13 Tzameti. Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, Jason Statham, Sam Riley, 50 Cent and Ray Liotta are all on board for the story of “a young man who stumbles into an underground competition where the wealthy gamble on human beings in a Russian Roulette-like competition,” per Variety.

Ginnifer Goodwin and Nicholas Hoult have joined Colin Firth and Julianne Moore for A Single Man, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel. “Goodwin is Mrs. Strunk, a suburban mom who doesn't share her husband's dislike of their neighbor, a gay professor (Firth). Hoult will play Kenny, a sexually ambiguous grad student who shows an unusual interest in the professor,” per THR.

Related:
Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas
The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Oh Say Can You See: The "Blindness" Controversy

Phil Nugent — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hot on the heels of the great Tropic Thunder/"retard" controversy come reports that groups for the unsighted are angry about the new movie Blindness, with the National Federation for the Blind planning protests when the film opens in theaters tomorrow. The movie, which was directed by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian whiz kid responsible for City of God and The Constant Gardener, is a dystopian fantasy that depicts the effects of an epidemic that sweeps through a large city, rendering its inhabitants blind. It stars Julianne Moore as a woman who doesn't go blind but pretends that she has so that she can remain with her husband, played by Mark Ruffalo, when he and others who have been stricken are quarantined. The city is unnamed --the movie was shot principally in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with additional shooting in parts of Canada and Uruguay--and the characters have names like "The Doctor", "The Doctor's Wife", "The Thief", "The Accountant", and "Woman with Dark Glasses." Those capable of taking a hint might conclude that the film is intended as an allegory with symbolic characters, but when representatives of the NFB attended a preview, all they saw--or heard, and had described to them or something--was a major motion picture in which a bunch of people who instantly and mysteriously lose their sight insist on taking a glass-half-empty attitude about it. Christopher Danielson, a spokesman for the 50,000-member NFB, says that the blind "face a 70 percent unemployment rate and other social problems because people don't think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help — at all." For instance, the movie includes images of people who are struck blind while driving, with unfortunate results. The NFB seems to feel that if anyone who sees Blindness comes away less inclined to hire someone who can't see as a bus driver, then Fernando Meirelles and Miramax will have a lot to answer for.

Nothing if not artistically ambitious, Blindness was adapted by screenwriter Don McKellar (who also acts in the movie) from the highly praised 1995 novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago. (Saramago, who has described his book as "an allegory about the fragility of civilization", apparently took a great deal of convincing to sell the movie rights to anyone, and turned down the first offer he got from Meirelles, as well as an offer from Gael Garcia Bernal, who wound up playing the pivotal role of "the King of Ward 3.") So far, the movie hasn't been able to live up to the book's level of acclaim. It bombed at Cannes last spring and inspired walkouts when it was shown at the more recent Toronto Film Festival. Responding to criticisms, Meirelles has done considerable tinkering with it for its theatrical release, eliminating a voice-over narration and trimming a scene of "sexual violence" that set off the smoke alarms at Toronto. But there's not much he can do to placate the complaints from blind groups, which are grounded in a basic objection to the concept itself. Marc Maurer, the president of the NFB, has said that "The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie," adding, "“The National Federation of the Blind condemns and deplores this film, which will do substantial harm to the blind of America and the world. Blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved. They are unable to do even the simplest things like dressing, bathing, and finding the bathroom. The truth is that blind people regularly do all of the same things that sighted people do." Including, it seems, look for reasons to get their noses out of joint over a movie.

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.

Trailer Review: Savage Grace

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I had the good fortune to see Savage Grace a few months ago, so my perspective on this trailer is somewhat different than most of the ones I review. But frankly, I'm a little torn. The trailer wisely focuses on the film's best aspect, Julianne Moore's performance. After several years making mostly forgettable Hollywood product, Moore is back in her element as Barbara Baekeland, the mentally-unstable heiress to the Bakelite plastics fortune and victim of a notorious 1972 murder. However, by concentrating on Moore, the trailer oversimplifies the story, turning a bizarre family saga into a relatively conventional- albeit kinky- idle-rich true crime story. Needless to say, the film deals in some touchy material, and IFC no doubt had a difficult time figuring out how to sell it. But I'm not sure toning it down for mass consumption is the way to go- as a film by a major New Queer Cinema director that's being released unrated, the film clearly isn't meant for mass consumption, so why shy away from material that promises to get arthouse audiences talking?

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Savage Grace"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The 1985 book Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, told the story of Barbara Daly, a social climbing beauty who married Brooks Baekeland, the heir to a plastics fortune, and her incestuous relationship with her damaged son, Tony, who wound up stabbing her to death in 1972. Coming out when it did, in the era of the Reagans and Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the book had a special appeal, especially since it was written mostly in the form of an oral history, with testimony from various observers and other interested parties. Tony's murder of his mother may have made it possible to file it neatly under "true crime", but what gave it is juice was the chance to sit in on what amounted to a seminar's worth of gossip about just how deeply twisted and fucked-up a very rich, very beautiful, very socially ambitious family really was. For maximum impact, the book ought to have been filmed not long after it came out, maybe with Brian De Palma or the Barbet Schroeder of Reversal of Fortune at the helm, but it might still be good sleazy fun if Tom Kalin hadn't gotten ahold of it.

As he demonstrated with his first film, the art-house train wreck Swoon, Kalin lacks, and may be completely uninterested in, certain attributes that are helpful to narrative filmmakers. He isn't very good at working with actors to develop characters, he can't shape his materials into a coherent story, and he has no ability to create a sense of believable life onscreen. What he mainly has is an interest--a chilly, academic interest--in "transgressive" behavior that, in Swoon, resulted in a movie that, to the extent that it was coherent at all, seemed to suggest that Leopold and Loeb were martyred victims of society because all they did was kill a kid, whereas everybody else was homophobic. Savage Grace seems taken with the idea of Barbara Daly Baekeland as heroic victim, a woman who's so much ;arger than life that the world can't possibly give her all the love and attention she requires. It's a choice that cuts off Julianne Moore's oxygen supply as an actress; instead of getting the chance to play the sacred monster of the book, she's stuck in a vaccuum, working her Mona Lisa smile. The movie begins with Barbara (Julianne Moore) and Brooks (Stephen Dillane, whose performance as a stiffly dashing natural aristocrat looks to have been researched by spending a few mornings studying Eric Braeden's Victor on The Young and the Restless) already married, and already practically sworn enemies. It's less interested in even comprehending how they wound up together than in charting the downward spiral of Barbara and Tony (played as an adult by Eddie Redmayne, a relative newcomer to movies who needs to learn that it's okay to just tell the camerman, "Look, don't light me so that I look like that guy in Napoloen Dynamite, okay?"), in each other's arms.

Even with Moore spouting such lines to her son as, "Will you still love me when my hair is gray and my tits are sagging?", the relationship is much closer and more tender than it was portrayed in the book; Barbara is no longer the kind of woman who'd ship her kid off to school to get him out of her way while she's planning to lay siege to the dinner-party circuit, and Tony is no longer a violent, angry boy whose final attack on his mother was just the last in a series. (The actual death scene is staged as a Sid and Nancy-style cop-out: Hey, let's go in the kitchen and act out hysterical scenes from old Joan Crawford movies, oh shit, look out for that knife!) It would seem odd if Tony did have a well of killing rage stored up against his mother in this version, because Moore's Barbara doesn't seem to cause him much pain; her social-climbing foolishness hurts no one but herself. Dishonest as it is, what really kills the movie is Kalin's simple inability to bring any of this stuff to life. His erotic images--Tony dancing on the beach with another boy to please a girl he likes; Barbara, at the wheel of a car with Tony and the girl in the back seat, swerving around to toss them into each other's arms; a little homage to Un Chant d'Amour with Tony's boyfriend from the beach delicately slipping a puff of cigarette smoke into his mouth-- have no excitement to them, and the most explicit sex scene, with Barbara coming to Brooks as a supplicant on her knees and he brutally taking her from behind, is mean-spirited in a way that does nothing but stress the dubious notion of Barbara as everybody's victim. She winds up alone in her big house, attempting suicide in between bouts of sex with gay men, including her son. Julianne Moore goes through her paces dutifully, but she might need to take a little break from representing scandalously rethought versions of maternal figures from earlier eras. The truth is that she doesn't get much of a chance here to do anything that doesn't set off echoes of things she's done before, and when you consider what she actually gets up to here, it's kind of scary to think that she's in a rut.

Trailer Review: Blindness

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This is a first-rate teaser in the classic sense, in that it gives audiences a taste of the film's premise and little else. I'd venture a guess that all of the footage we see here is taken from the opening twenty minutes of the film- we meet the characters, the plot (taken from a novel by Jose Saramago) is introduced, and the titular malady escalates to epidemic proportions. It's tantalizing and highly effective. Like Children of Men's Alfonso Cuaron before him, director Fernando Meirelles appears to bring a certain level of deep-seated spirituality to the film's science-fiction roots, something that's apparent even in this relatively short teaser, which is nonetheless full of ethereal fades to white and Gods'-eye-few camera shots. Also, it's nice to see Julianne Moore working in a project worthy of her talent again, after too many ill-fitting comedies and cookie-cutter melodramas, and costars like Gael Garcia Bernal and the always-compelling Mark Ruffalo should make a good match for her.

Oscar's Next Show

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Some people just can't get too much of a good thing. With one of the most enriching movie years in history behind us, and one of the most highly anticipated Academy Awards in decades less than a week old, Scott Feinberg's 'And The Winner Is' blog is finally looking ahead to...

...the 2009 Oscars.

That's right, folks: just because none of these movies have been seen yet — just because most of them, indeed, have not even been made yet — doesn't mean the LA Times' irrepressible scamp isn't going to go ahead and handicap them for their chances of taking home Oscar Gold a little over a year from now.

Although Feinberg approaches this ridiculous effort with tongue at least partially in cheek, that doesn't mean he's not somewhat dismayingly comprehensive in his look at whose names might be prominent come Oscar eve '09. Among his choices as early, early, unbelievably early favorites: Benecio del Toro for Best Actor as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine; Julianne Moore for Best Actress in Blindness; John Patrick Shanley for the screenplay of Doubt, an adaptation of his own play; Gus Van Sant for directing Sean Penn in Milk, the life story of the assassinated gay rights activist and San Francisco city supervisor; and any number of high-profile performances from Kate Winslet.

Okay, Scott, okay... but can't we elect a President first?

Afternoon Deal Report: A Fitting Tribute to Hasbro's Tradition of Quality

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:20:00 GMT

Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have joined the cast of G.I. Joe. This seems apt, given Tatum's startlingly realistic face.

Julianne Moore will star in the supernatural thriller Shelter.

After (ahem) a monstrous opening, Cloverfield has dropped 68% at the box office. Course, when you're up against an aesthetic triumph like Meet the Spartans, which made $18 million last weekend. . .

Crash is becoming a series on Starz. That's the ensemble drama Crash, not the Cronenberg flick about car-fucking, unfortunately.

Luc Besson's next project will be a three-film adaptation of Aventures, a beloved French comic about a novelist in World War I-era Paris.

The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've pitched in our two cents on the best films of 2007, and my esteemed colleague John Constantine has weighed in on the year's worst. But to paraphrase the late Roman Hruska, don't mediocre movies deserve a little recognition too? They make up the bulk of each year's crop of movies that get released (and probably also the bulk of those that will barely see the light of day), and every so often you see one whose unexceptionalism really stands out. So now, as the new film year begins to heat up with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival and the first big commercial releases of 2008, let's take one last minute to salute 2007, by remembering the movies that everyone has already gotten a head start on forgetting.

BROOKLYN RULES: This '80s-set tough-neighborhood movie attracted a little attention upon its release because it was written by Terence Winter, who won acclaim for his work on The Sopranos. Winter must have been worried about being accused of repeating himself if his movie too closely resembled The Sopranos, so he wrote something that, like 98% of the tough-neighborhood movies of the last thirty-odd years, rather resembles Mean Streets, except there's no crazy young Robert De Niro figure, and he is greatly missed. Instead, we have our audience surrogate, the clean-cut young dude who's going to grow up to be a writer and tell this story, played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.; his buddy who ever since he was a kid always wanted to be a gangster, played by Scott Caan; and their harmless goofball pal who was born with a target on his back, played by that asshole who plays the unendurable Turtle on HBO's Entourage. The cast also includes Alec Baldwin as the local hot-tempered mob boss, who demonstrates that his transformation into a comedian hasn't been so complete that seeing him carve someone's ear off at a deli counter isn't exactly on a par with seeing a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielson playing a hooker's mean trick in the 1987 Nuts. The best way to tell this movie apart from a thousand other Mean Streets/GoodFellas knock-offs is that it's the one that goes the farthest to pull its punches; it keeps hinting that terrible things are on the verge of happening to the principle characters, and then nothing really terrible ever does, unless for some reason you think there's something regrettable about finally seeing Turtle get his.

I'M REED FISH: Better you than me, as they say. This strained exercise in indie quirkiness was written by Reed Fish and stars Jay Baruchel (the goofy aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby) as Reed Fish, who everyone in his small town loves and counts on to help them make sense of this crazy old world. But Reed has relationship troubles: he's engaged to Kate, played by Alexis Bledel (of Gilmore Girls), but what is he supposed to do about these tender feelings developing between him and Jill, played by Schuyler Fisk (the fetching and talented daughter of Sissy Spacek and There Will Be Blood production designer Jack Fisk)? These are the kind of problems you'd sell your soul to the devil to have. The movie has been failing to involve the audience for quite a long time before it pulls a whammy and reveals that what we're watching is a movie within a movie, and that the actual Reed, Kate, and Jill are in the audience, and experiencing mixed emotions about seeing their intricate love lives captured on film. The "real" Reed, Kate, and Jill are played by actors named, respectively, John Penner, Valerine Azlynn, and Shiri Appleby. It's all very meta. There apparently really is a Reed Fish who wrote the thing; at least, he has his own IMDB and MySpace pages and blog, which is about as real as you can get these days. On the blog, he celebrated the mixed reviews and middling box office of his labor of love by writing, "We didn't do crazy big business or anything, but hey, most movies like ours don't ever even get the chance to get into theaters, so no sweat." Low aspirations can seem an appealing thing compared to full-blown show business megalomania, but you don't really want them to show up quite so nakedly on the screen.

NEXT: Ever since Blade Runner made science-fiction guru Philip K. Dick a recognizable name in the movie industry, Hollywood has practically developed a whole subgenre in big, noisy, cluttered action pictures that are ostensibly "inspired" by Dick's work. In 2006, with his rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater actually found a way to film one of Dick's late novels so that the black-comic eeriness would slowly, quietly envelop the viewer and the ideas would have room to breathe. Hollywood gets back on track with this big-budget slice of sound and fury, directed by Lee Tamahori, once the respected director of the emotionally searing Once Were Warriors, now a man who tells the actors where to stand so they'll be properly positioned in relation to the exploding fireballs that the CGI guys will fill in later. Nicolas Cage plays the hero, a man who can see what's going to happen a couple of minutes into the future. This is a talent that comes in handy when he hits the casinos, or tries to evade an FBI capture team led by Julianne Moore, who recites her lines as if she were only using as much of her brain as she can spare while silently counting her money and memorizing her lines for the next Todd Haynes picture. (As for Cage, for all the abuse he takes these days, he remains a talented guy who does generally try to stagger his roles so that he does one picture of at least nominal artistic credibility for each sewer-dwelling money gig. As it happens, this movie came out between Ghost Rider and the National Treasure sequel, suggesting that he may have gotten his calendar dates screwed up.) The whole thing ends with a shockeroo twist ending that effectively cancels out everything that's come before it, which is fine by me, and that also could be seen as a threat to launch a sequel, which is not.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF VERNON LESLIE: These aren't as grating as some movies I saw this year, and Angela Goethals does give a very winning performance as the heroine of Vernon Leslie. But between the two of them, they do a lot to sum up why the fake documentary, usually presented in the guise of sci-fi fantasy or satirical comedy, has fast become the most half-assed, tedious subgenre popular among low-budget indie filmmakers. You can see the reasons for its appeal: it enables filmmakers to patch a movie together largely from simple shots of actors talking directly to the camera or "interviewing" one another, and it allows them to pass off things like shitty lighting and cruddy visuals as a mark of "authenticity." But when you set out to use this form to do something like depict life in a world that's been nearly depopulated by a killer virus (as in Ever Since the World Ended), you'd better have a script that's cleverly worked out to the nth degree instead of one that makes it seem that you're just aimlessly kicking the idea around the parking lot. Vernon Leslie is more professional — the supporting cast includes Scott Wilson, Zelda Rubinstein, and genre-movie stalwart Robert Englund — but that just makes its disposable feel that much more irritating. (It's also more derivative; it's about a film crew that's making a tag-along documentary about a serial killer, an idea that, fifteen years earlier, served the makers of the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog. The big difference between the two films is that Man Bites Dog was supposed to be about a "real" murderer, whereas Vernon Leslie is set in the B-movie universe inhabited by Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger. It's built on a familiarity with the rules of the slasher-movie genre that makes you want to get the filmmakers a library card.) There's been a bit of an explosion in fake documentaries these last few years, and most of them seem to have been made by people who have no grasp of how much care and planning goes into making something like Zelig seem like a real movie. With any luck, Cloverfield will help to blow the wheels off this particular bandwagon.

Face/Off: Children of Men

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, permit me to bore you with one of my very earliest movie memories. My mom took me to the 1973 animated Disney version of Robin Hood, in which the title character was played, if memory serves, by a small red fox. And when this fox was asked to express his feelings towards Maid Marian, he sang out, "I love her more than life itself!" The line was, I now suspect, not wholly original, but at the time it was new to me, and it stirred me deeply. I think that from that moment on, I have lived my life in hopes of finding someone, or something, I loved more than life itself. So far, the results have been mixed, but I can truly say of Children of Men that I love it more than life itself and that the movie has in turn accepted my love gracefully and never punishing me for it by using it to make me feel stupid, small, or unworthy, which is more than I can say for certain redheads of my acquaintance.

Since there are no bad scenes in the picture, and in fact precious few that could not be pointed to as jaw-dropping evidence of its stature, it is not easy to single out one, but I will settle on the chase scene from around the middle of the movie, with Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey and Pam Ferris fleeing the farmhouse in a car that won't start, with the goonish "revolutionaries" in hot pursuit. Coming after the much-remarked earlier car-chase-shootout that the director, Alfonso Cuaron, and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, labored so hard to capture in a single shot, it's hard not to see this scene as a statement on Cuaron's part: "Technology is great that I could do that, huh? Oh by the way, I can do this, too!" The terrible suspense of the scene, accomplished over what ought to be the handicap of our knowing that Owen isn't going to check out this early in the story (but wait — didn't we know that about Julianne Moore, too? For Christ's sake, push harder, Clive!), is nerve-racking testimony both to Cuaron's sheer skill and the effortless way that Owen, with his unforced audience rapport, has quietly laid claim to the viewer's emotions. It just goes on and on, a moment of horror stuck in the mire, like a nightmare that you start hating yourself for not waking up from. It's so simple it's dumbfounding that it should be so powerful — but then not everybody who ever got his hands on a camera, a car, and a half-dozen actors is in Cuaron's league. Most of them don't deserve to be regarded as being in the same profession.

Leonard, since I know you are an intelligent and honest man, I imagine that about this point you'll want to just chime in, "Yup, he's right, no way to argue with any of that," and then we can both sign off for the day.

LEONARD PIERCE: As tempting as it is to just type "you're right" and collect my fee for two-words'-worth of effort, I feel that would be a disservice to our readers, as well as to my reputation as a combative jerk. I am glad that, in Children of Men, you have found the unconditional love that is the object of all human striving. Perhaps I am a cynic, but I have given up hope of ever discovering such purity of feeling in any human endeavor outside of a bottle of gin; it is, I fear, beyond the capacity of any woman, stuffed animal or movie — and, I say with some regret, especially beyond the capacity of Children of Men. Like the cliché about political outrage, I fear that if you can't find anything to dislike in Cuarón's crowning achievement — and particularly in the car-chase-that-isn't — you just aren't looking hard enough.

On a certain level, I almost want to agree with you; there are hardly any bad scenes in the picture, provided you define 'scenes' as the big, impressive set pieces that stick in the mind after viewing it, and not the tedious and often eye-roll-inducing moments that hold those scenes together. My initial reaction on seeing the film was that it was a dozen or so individual scenes ranging from very good to absolutely brilliant, but all held together by a rickety, nonsensical plot that was amounted to little more than a series of hokey chase scenes. Six set pieces in search of a movie, you might say. And nothing seemed, on subsequent viewings, to affirm that first reaction than the farmhouse chase scene. There were scenes in Children of Men that left me breathless with their virtuosity and emotional power, but so sorely did the chase scene test the sacred principle of suspension of disbelief that if I was out of breath, it was only from heavy sighing. Having already established the later-to-be-beaten-into-the-muddy-earth point that people are often so blinded by their own interests that they will behave selfishly under the worst of circumstances, Cuarón's script now asks us to believe that the revolutionaries (I certainly can't dispute your characterization of them as goonish, though I mean it more in a Peter Sellers way than a Benito Mussolini way) are not only asinine, but supremely incompetent. The director even seems to anticipate the objection to this outlandish chase scene, establishing by a clunky bit of exposition that the armed rebels can't just open fire on the car lest they injure the pregnant Kee, a.k.a. the most important MacGuffin in the world. We're not made privy to what the disastrous consequences would be if they just shot Clive Owen, or the car tires, or just found someone who could run faster than an aging, out-of-shape reporter pushing a car through the mud, but one assumes they would be equally intolerable.

This isn't just a case of not being able to accept a film's internal logic. I'm perfectly willing to go along with the entire scenario of the movie, nebulous as it might be. But this scene is purely a case of a filmmaker having a neat idea and pushing ahead with it no matter how nonsensical it plays out on screen, just to show that he can do it. It's called shredding, and it can surely be impressive, but it's rarely noble.

At this point, my friend, there is no shame in a one-word surrender, though I sense it might take the form of "Nuts."

PHIL NUGENT: I could say that Children of Men is, like many great movies, a dream, a nightmare vision of how bad things could be based on where we are now, then leap aboard that "internal logic" qualifier and ride the sucker like Seabiscuit. But as it is, the scene in question is one that I think makes perfect sense in human terms. If it looks a little odd at first glance, I would submit that this is because even sophisticated filmgoers are so used to action scenes that derive their full measure of believable human behavior based on what happens in other movies' action scenes that they may at first be confused by seeing one in which the characters onscreen act like people. Three of them are scared out of their wits and the rest of them just discovered, at an ungodly hour, that their world is collapsing. It makes sense that the atmosphere would be a little different than in the planned murder that precedes it or confused in a different way than in the full-blown firefight that will come, when a killing fever that spreads across several city blocks inflames and emboldens the people caught up in it. Nor do I find it unlikely that the guys with the guns might not want to just blow Clive Owen's head off in front of the little mother. None of them want to do anything that might jeopardize that pregnancy, and since none of them has been on hand for one before — and had already concluded that they'd never get the chance — why is improbable or contrived that they'd choose to err on the side of caution and not subject her to a bloody trauma? It's not as if Owens's escape isn't on the order of a miracle. (Am I conceding that the happy conclusion of the scene, if not the elements that go into it, counts as an implausibility? I suppose I might be. Certain implausibilities one learns to accept, as a filmgoer, as the price of getting the movie on to the next scene.)

And I must object to your referring to Kee as a MacGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated definition of a MacGuffin is "what the spies are after but the audience don't care." Love it or hate it, surely we can at least agree that Children of Men would not be the same movie, in either its intentions or its actual achievement, if it had been possible for the casting director to have ever said to Cuaron, "We're having trouble finding the right person to play the only pregnant woman in the world; how about we just change her to a roll of microfilm?" On the other hand, I applaud your description of the revolutionaries as being more of the Peter Sellers than the Baader-Meinhof variety. But then, I have a sneaking hunch that this might be true of most "real" self-styled revolutionary terrorists, maybe even including the real Baader-Meinhof gang.

LEONARD PIERCE: One of the reasons the chase-scene revolutionaries in Children of Men don't make sense in human terms, to me, is precisely because they (like many real-world terrorists, which is presumably a big reason why they're terrorists instead of, say, accountants) don't tend to err on the side of caution. Of course their world is collapsing — and faced with a world on the verge of collapse, people don't often react with thoughtfulness and circumspection. With the most important thing on the face of the planet slipping with painful slowness through their grasp, it's very hard to believe that the revolutionaries, especially the furious dreadlocked blond who's been looking for an excuse to blow Clive Owen's head off for half the movie, would suddenly get all overwhelmed with softness lest they upset the little mother. If they let Kee escape, the baby is as gone as if she lost it from trauma, so why take the chance? (Incidentally, the point you raise about the goons being unfamiliar with the mysteries of childbirth, to me, exacerbates the unreality of the scene rather than mitigates it; if they don't know how pregnancy works, why would they know they'd be endangering it by taking Clive out at the kneecaps?)

Beyond that, the scene seems to contradict the film's own message: it is a lamentable aspect of selfish human nature that people will behave in harmful and destructive ways even when everything around them is falling apart. This is certainly the message conveyed by the mass social unrest depicted in the rest of the film — faced with a world that may cease to exist in fifty years, people behave in the most appallingly short-sighted ways. And yet in the farm chase, shown in microcosm, the revolutionaries behave in just the opposite way. It's not the first or the last time these mixed messages appear (the presence of the baby in the movie's final quarter has a magical pacifying effect on the violent mind of man, except when it doesn't), but it's one of the most egregious, and it's frustrating — almost maddening — for those in the audience who desperately want the movie not to screw up the good will it creates with its often stunning and brilliant set pieces.

I suppose that, in the end, we have to resort back to the old cliche about the suspension of disbelief — if you really buy into the premise of a film and find yourself enjoying it, you're much more likely to forgive or even embrace the implausibilities it may throw at you. From your perspective — from the perspective of someone who loves Children of Men more than life itself — the scene is a perfect example of the sort of miracle its director can pull off, a moment that in lesser hands could have been an embarrassment, but instead works perfectly and serves to reveal some of the movie's greatest strengths and deepest truths. From my perspective — from that of someone for whom Children of Men is an ambitious failure, a collection of great scenes that never quite manage to cohere — it's just something that stays with you as a reminder of why the movie wasn't all that it should have been.

That Guy!: Wallace Shawn

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Squat", "toadlike" and "bespectacled" are not the first three adjectives you want on the list when you're building your movie star résumé. But That Guy! isn't about movie stars. It's about character actors, B-listers, stock-in-traders — and Wally Shawn is one of the best. Best imagined as the guy who gets parts for which Bob Balaban is simply too macho and charismatic, Shawn suffered perhaps the ultimate indignity when, playing Diane Keaton's ex in Manhattan (his movie debut), he was described as a "homunculus" by none other than Woody Allen, himself not entirely lacking in homuncular qualities. Still, the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn has managed to carve out a decent Hollywood career playing nebbishes, losers and schnooks — while simultaneously building an eminently respectable career in New York as an insightful, volatile playwright whose work is intelligent, fiercely political and often controversial. Harvard-educated and terrifically well-informed, Shawn has written opinion pieces for The Nation, interviewed Noam Chomsky, and produced a widely-read translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, all while appearing in Hollywood fare ranging from Clueless to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. His distinctively nasal, high-pitched voice has made him a natural for animation, and he's provided memorable voice-overs as Rex the dinosaur in the Toy Story franchise and Bob Parr's insufferable boss in The Incredibles. Only a few of Wallace Shawn's outstanding plays have made it to film; while a David Hare-directed version of The Designated Mourner (perhaps his finest work) was made in 1997, it was seen by precious few people, and his most popular script, Aunt Dan and Lemon, remains unfilmed. But as an actor, Shawn has endeared himself and his ungainly appearance to thousands of people who know nothing about his off-Broadway existence.

Where to see Wallace Shawn at his best:

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981)

The movie that put Wally Shawn on the map — and gave him his first and last leading-man role to date — was made at a time when he was still known only as the author of some well-reviewed plays in New York. Louis Malle's filmed adaptation of a number of actual conversations Shawn had with his friend Andre Gregory, who has been the director of a number of Shawn's plays, turned out to be a surprise hit, proving that there was a bigger audience than previously suspected whose idea of a good time was watching two overeducated Manhattanites argue about whether or not an electric blanket is morally defensible.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)

Wallace Shawn's best-known role is as the not-so-masterful criminal mastermind Vizzini in Rob Reiner's beloved adaptation of William Goldman's The Princess Bride. It is here that he gives new meaning, or lack thereof, to the word "inconceivable," and gets to play straight man to Andre the Giant in one of Hollywood's oddest comic pairings. (Shawn claims that he played the role of Vizzini perfectly straight, since he lacks a sense of humor. That claim in and of itself would seem to suggest otherwise.)

VANYA ON 42nd STREET (1994)

A meta-referential film that is both an adaptation of Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya and a movie about making that adaptation (and making the movie about making the adaptation), Vanya on 42nd Street is one of the most successful blends ever of film and theatre, thanks largely to its explosion of talent: aside from Wallace Shawn in the title role, it features great performances from Julianne Moore as Yelena and Brooke Smith as Sonya, a crackerjack script by David Mamet and tight, taut direction by Louis Malle, and a big-screen reunion of Shawn and Andre Gregory, again playing himself.

— Leonard Pierce

That Guy!: Xander Berkeley

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

This week’s That Guy!, the long-awaited Xander Berkeley, is a groundbreaker in many ways. He’s the first character actor we’ve featured in this spot whose name starts with an X; he’s also the first to have designed his own my-skin-is-falling-off makeup while portraying a person suffering from acute radiation poisoning. But he also follows in some well-traveled paths: he’s the second person we’ve featured to have come to prominence as a cast member of 24, a show that seems to specialize in snatching up talented Hollywood character actors, as evidenced by previous That Gal! Mary Lynn Rajskub and future That Guy! Dennis Haysbert. Like a lot of other contemporary character actors, he’s found steady work as a voiceover specialist (appearing, as has almost every other B-lister in the business, on the Justice League cartoon), and he bankrolls artsy projects like his back-to-back appearances in Timecode and The Cherry Orchard with, er, slightly more pedestrian fare like Barb Wire and The Rock. A favorite of maverick director Alex Cox, Berkeley appeared in three of his films in a row early in his career. His first role was as a grown-up Chris Crawford in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and he’s gone on to make almost seventy feature films in twenty years (his most recent was Seraphim Falls), qualifying him as one of the hardest-working men in show business despite being almost completely unknown to most people who don’t watch 24. Berkeley, a New Yorker by way of Jersey, has specialized, in his latter days, in bland, arrogant schmucks who are up to no good. But he's displayed a terrific range in his remarkably prolific career, playing everything from typical romantic male leads to scene-stealing darkly comic turns, as in his cameo role as a cab driver in Leaving Las Vegas. He’s also almost certainly the only actor we’ve ever featured who has portrayed an eight-armed violinist who robs banks alongside a robotic Soviet vending machine.

Where to see Xander Berkeley at his best:

SID AND NANCY (1986): The first and best of Xander Berkeley’s lengthy collaboration with Alex Cox comes in this desperate, moving biopic of Sex Pistols provocateur Sid Vicious and his clinging, doomstruck girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. Berkeley portrays the drug dealer Bowery Snax, a living symbol of the pathetic degradation of the couple’s final days; when he delivers the line “Sid, Nancy, pull up your pants”, it encapsulates everything sadly wrong with their entire lives as well as an ugly reflection of the day-to-day reality of the junkie.

SAFE (1995): Berkeley’s finest hour came in this Todd Haynes masterpiece of the alienation of affluence. Playing the husband of Julianne Moore’s panic-stricken housewife, he must transition from unlikable standoffish breadwinner to bizarrely sympathetic and utterly confused caregiver, as the woman he married undergoes a transformation neither she nor anyone else can explain or even articulate. It’s a tremendous performance, in some ways the moral center of the film, and in a just world, it would have made him a big star.

AIR FORCE ONE (1997): It’s hard to pick a favorite from Berkeley’s mainstream movie appearances; he’s done good work in, among other films, Terminator 2, Apollo 13, A Few Good Men and Shanghai Noon. Our favorite, though, is probably his rogue Secret Service agent in Air Force One, part of a rash of "fightin’ president" movies in the late 1990s. Not only was it a reunion of sorts with Sid and Nancy’s Gary Oldman, but it was perhaps the pinnacle of his understated snotty jerk roles, even if the script requires him, along with everyone else in the movie, to do far too much yelling.

— Leonard Pierce