The Screengrab : ken russell

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. FIELD OF DREAMS (1989)
2. JFK (1991)

Some would argue that Natural Born Killers is the ultimate Oliver Stone audiovisual freakout, but this celebration of the noble questing rectitude of a deranged slime ball named Jim Garrison will always have a special place in the spittoon of anyone who, like me, once lived in New Orleans and shared a city with that particular waste of space. There was a time when Stone himself actually seemed to think that Garrison's "theory" about the assassination of Kennedy had something to it, but that misguided period in his life was over by the time the movie opened, and Stone shifted to arguing that while, of course, everything Garrison ever said or did was manure, the important thing was to create a "counter-myth" to balance the "official myth" of the Warren Commission report. Marginally more sophisticated observers have tried to defend the movie on the grounds that, in its hyper thyroid dementia, it "captures" the mindset of many unfortunates who were mentally discombobulated by the turmoil and tragedy of the '60s. Maybe it does; the "Flesh Fair" sequence in Spielberg's A1 perfectly captures my mindset when I'm caught in traffic with a migraine, but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Anyway, we don't really go for rampaging homophobia here at the Screengrab, and however you want to dress this piggy up in fancy bows, it'll still be a street crazy rant about how the queers killed Kennedy. Add to its crimes the fact that it extended Kevin Costner's fifteen minutes.

3. NICKELODEON (1976)

The director Peter Bogdanovich was coming off a couple of terrible failures (At Long Last Love, Daisy Miller) when he came up with the plan for this lavishly scaled comic tribute to the early days of moviemaking, which amounted to his climbing inside his own coffin and personally nailing the lid shut. At Long Last Love may actually be the more revealing film in terms of the nostalgic alienation that killed off Bogdanovich's once soaring career, but it just so happens that this is the one that's just been released on DVD, and as always seems to happen nowadays whenever one horribly (and justly) reviled failure reappears in a new format (and with a gimmick--the DVD version offers the film in black and white, which Bogdanovich says is how he wished he'd made it--a few people have piped up to say that it is and always was an unappreciated masterpiece. Seriously, this shit has to stop. There ought to be some constants in this world.

4. REVOLUTION (1985)

Remember Hugh Hudson, who was garlanded as a major new director after his first feature, Chariots of Fire, won the Academy Award for Best Picture? No, you don't, and here's one of the reasons why. The best thing you can say about it is that it made its star, Al Pacino, realize that his best course might be to take four years off if that's how long it took him to be extra sure about his next script.

5. THE MUSIC LOVERS (1970)

Ken Russell is to Art and Music Appreciation what Oliver Stone is to Contemporary American History: visually overblown, crassly energetic, cheaply sensationalistic, and, like Dick Cheney, proud of his indifference to the facts whenever they contradict the "deeper truth" he knows in his heart to be right. This hysterical take on the life of Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) also shows that they have a shared affinity for homophobia and conspiracy theories. It's a wonder that Stone didn't ask Christopher Gable to reprise his role as Tchaikovksy's plotting, cast-off lover as one of the conspirators in JFK; it's not as if vampires don't live a long time.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

SWEET & LOWDOWN (1999)

Woody Allen phones in a lot of half-cooked shit and Sean Penn frequently comes across as a self-important knob, but every few years, both men remind us why it is we liked them in the first place (and put up with them all the rest of the time). With Sweet & Lowdown, the stars aligned so both Allen and Penn were ascendant simultaneously (effortlessly restoring faith in both after late 20th century missteps like Celebrity and U-Turn, respectively). Penn earned an Oscar nomination for his tall-tale, faux-biopic portrayal of Emmett Ray, a selfish lout redeemed only by his outstanding talent as one of the world’s best guitarists (second only to Django Reinhardt) and an occasional awareness of his own flawed character. The enigma of humanity’s capacity for timeless beauty and mindless cruelty has always fascinated Allen, and here he explores the specific dichotomy of musicians (and, presumably, filmmakers) who are capable of great art, but also truly shitty behavior like, say, running off with a girlfriend’s adopted daughter...or, in Ray’s case, mistreating a sweet, adoring mute girl, played to perfection by Samantha Morton, who also received an Academy nomination for her efforts).

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)

Brothers of the Head is a ludicrous story, a faux-documentary about a protopunk band fronted by conjoined twins. However, despite the absurdity of the premise (someone is forming a novelty act with conjoined twins and allowed Ken Freakin' Russell on the grounds with a camera?), the movie does its level best to play the story out with a straight, and often tragic, face. The music is not bad and the sexual connotations are almost as clever as the sex in Velvet Goldmine. But the whole seems to be a little less than the sum of its parts. The twin themes seem pulled from Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. The dissolute rock lifestyle seems to be based on the Stones in Gimme Shelter and Cocksucker Blues. In some scenes, the twins appear to be exhausted by the constant filming, aching for some privacy. In other scenes, the documentary premise slides away, unneeded at the moment. Not a bad way to spend 90 minutes, but not the best way, either. Check out the reference materials first.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974)

This wacked-out midnight spectacle, which was released and re-released between 1974 and 1976 without ever finding much of an audience, was written and directed by Brian De Palma, at a transitional period between his early satirical comedies (Greetings, Hi Mom!) and the horror movies that would make him bankable. The plot, which scavenges a shelfload of classic scare movies, involves a composer who runs afoul of a Phil Spector-like pop svengali (played by the mutant music and TV celebrity Paul Williams, who also wrote the score) and, after being robbed of his face and voice, returns to haunt the mogul's palace as a masked ghoul. De Palma uses this pretzel of a narrative as an excuse for an explosion of visual flash, with the kind of humor usually found only in classic MAD comics.

PERFORMANCE (1970)

This film, which marked the joint directorial debuts of Donald Cammell (who also wrote the script) and Nicolas Roeg (who did the cinematography), was originally finished in 1968 but so badly freaked out the studio, Warner Bros., that they sat on it for two years before exposing it to the light of day, probably in the hopes that it would have the same effect on it as Dracula. James Fox plays a gangster who is forced to take it on the lam and ends up bunking in a big house with Mick Jagger as a burned-out rock star and his playmates, played by Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton. The movie had no end of trouble just getting made so that it could horrify the studio brass. It was part of the deal to get it made that it include a new Jagger/Richards composition to be performed by Jagger, but rumor has it that Jagger and Pallenberg got carried away during their love scenes and actually got down on the set, despite the fact that the filming coincided with Pallenberg's time as Richards' inamorata, with the result that Richards became sulky and was in no mood to do his usual collaborative songwriting work with his lead singer. Ry Cooder was reportedly pressed into service to help Jagger pound out "Memo from Turner", which he performs in a fantasy sequence that's the high point of the film -- an electrifying moment made all the more fascinating by the fact that for most of the film, Jaggger is a cipher with next to no screen presence. (As for Fox, he did his part for the movie's mystique by converting to evangelical Christianity and retiring from acting for a decade, inspiring rumors that the decadence of the experience had broken him like a dry twig in a hurricane. Brutal, unsettling, eye-popping and impenetrable, the movie remains one of the few true '60s head trips, like the movie version of the greatest acid-rock album covers you've ever seen.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

Natasha Richardson, 1963 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Natasha Richardson, who has died, at 45, after a well-reported accident on a Canadian ski resort, was born into it. Natasha, like her sister Joely, was the daughter of the director Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (who in turn was the sister of Lynn Redgrave and the daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson). Natasha made her movie debut at four in her father's 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which her mother played the female lead. After studying at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Richardson began her career in earnest at the Old Vic, where she played such roles as Ophelia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1986, she appeared with her mother in a production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Although a famous name can help someone get a foot in the door in the entertainment business, it is not automatically a guarantee of a successful career, something that could be attested to by any number of people who probably owe me a dinner for not mentioning their names. But by the time Richardson made her mature movie debut, playing Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's 1986 Gothic, it was clear that she had the talent to back it up. Her first real chance to show what she could do on-screen came in 1988, when Paul Schrader cast her in the difficult title role of Patty Hearst. In her review in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that Richardson had "been handed a big unwritten role" and added, "She feels her way into it, and she fills it" and "always has something in reserve--you keep waiting for what she may show you next."

In the next few years, Richardson appeared in the movies Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and Widows' Peak (1994). She also appeared on TV in a 1987 production of Ibsen's Ghosts, and in 1993 in production of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer, the political drama Hostages, and the TV film Zelda, in which she played Zelda Fitzgerald. She also married the producer Robert Fox in 1990. In 1993, she won great acclaim in both London and New York for a production of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, in which she co-starred with Liam Neeson. The two were much praises for the intensity of the sexual chemistry their characters displayed, a chemistry that was apparently not entirely, in the words of Jon Lovitz, acting! Richardson, was was divorced from Fox in 1992, married Neeson in 1994. They appeared together that same year in the Jodie Foster movie Nell.

Although Richardson continued to appear in movies, ranging from the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap and Maid in Manhattan to the 2005 Patrick McGrath adaptation Asylum and 2007's Evening, co-starring her mother, she seemed less interested in really pursuing a career than in taking her challenges wherever they appeared. The most notable ones appeared on the stage, where she won a Tony for starring in Sam Mendes's 1998 revival of Cabaret, appeared in the 1999 Broadway production of Patrick Marber's Closer, and played Blanche DuBois in a 2005 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She also starred in the 2001 CBS miniseries Haven. She was also known as a prominent supporter of charities devoted to fighting AIDS, the disease that killed her father in 1991. She and Neeson had two sons, Micheál, 13, and Daniel, 12.

Summer of '78: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78! I’ve been on vacation, so this week we’re catching up on the past few Thursdays.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Release Date: July 24, 1978

Cast: Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, George Burns, Donald Pleasance, Sandy Farina, Steve Martin, Aerosmith

The Buzz: The classic Beatles album comes to life on the big screen...without the Beatles. Or as its producers claimed before its release, “This generation’s Gone with the Wind.”

Keywords: Beatles, Based on Album, Cornet, Glass Coffin, Hot Air Balloon, Drugged Drink

The Plot: There’s a plot? Well, let’s see…crinkly narrator George Burns tells us of a magical town called Heartland, full of love and joy and the wonderful music of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sgt. Pepper left his musical instruments to the town of Heartland – instruments with the power to make dreams come true, Burns (as Heartland mayor Mr. Kite) tells us. Eventually Pepper’s grandson Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and the Henderson brothers (The Bee Gees) form a new version of the band, which becomes quite popular. Hollywood music mogul B.D. Hoffler (Donald Pleasance) signs the band to his label, and they must leave Heartland – and Billy’s girlfriend Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina) behind. While the boys are away being corrupted by the music biz, Heartland is taken over by Mean Mr. Mustard and his singing robots. They hate joy! They hate love! They love money! They steal the magical instruments and Heartland descends into decrepitude. Now superstars, Billy and the Hendersons are alerted to the disappearance of the instruments by Strawberry and set out to recover them. They also perform a benefit concert for the town, with guest appearances by Earth, Wind and Fire and Future Villain Band (played by Aerosmith). This is when things get really confusing, but somehow Strawberry is killed, Billy is depressed and tries to kill himself, but a weathervane turns into Billy Preston, who shoots lightning out of his hands to save Billy and also turn some other people into nuns. Or something like that.

The Test of Time: This movie fails just about any test you’d like to give it, but none more so than the test of time. I can see why it seemed like a good idea in ’78: the first wave of Beatle nostalgia was sweeping the land, with the Beatlemania revue lighting up Broadway (“Not the Beatles, but an incredibly simulation!”) Producer Robert Stigwood had successfully brought the rock musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy to the screen. Put two and two together and you get…an incoherent exercise in Ken Russell-lite psychedelia with a nearly unlistenable soundtrack, and one of the most notorious bombs of the ’70s. What’s really amazing to me is that I’d never seen it before now. Even at the heights of my own Beatle mania in the ’80s, I never sought it out; its reputation was always that terrible. And, I must say, well deserved. Produced more than a decade after the album that inspired it, the movie is actually much more dated than its source (which, lets be honest, is pretty dated itself). I don’t think anyone has ever accused Peter Frampton or The Bee Gees of being timeless artists, but even so, their disco fried versions of the Beatles classics are enough to make me doubt I ever liked the songs. They might as well be singing the lyrics phonetically for all the meaning and emotion they’re able to wring out of them, and the songs are all used in such numbingly obvious ways. (“Say, the sun is coming up in this scene. What would be a good number to sing here?”) And then there’s the “Golden Throats” parade of guest performers, including George Burns and his timeless rendition of “Fixing a Hole.” Seriously, did any of you buy this soundtrack album and listen to it on purpose? I mean, more than once? Steve Martin’s goony take on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is often cited as one of the few highlights, but I think that’s overstating the case. Only Aerosmith’s “Come Together” works, and of course it was the only real hit. The movie ends with a group sing-along of the title track that's obviously intended as a tribute to the famous Sgt. Pepper album cover, but is more like dying and going to ’70s Celebrity Hell. Among the luminaries on hand are Carol Channing, Sha Na Na, Wolfman Jack, Leif Garrett, and Seals and Crofts. It’s certainly a thrill.

Quotable Quote: “She came in through the bathroom window.”

2008 Equivalent: The obvious choice would be Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical Across the Universe, but unfortunately that came out last year. So I’ll have to go with Mamma Mia!

Previously on Summer of '78: Revenge of the Pink Panther

DVD Digest for July 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a comedic visionary gets the Criterion treatment, Jack goes nuts on Blu-Ray, and the unholy pairing of Martin Lawrence and Donny Osmond hits DVD.

DVD of the Week: Jacques Tati was one of the greatest comic filmmakers ever to man a camera, a brilliant visual filmmaker whose skill at engineering gags was only matched by that of Buster Keaton. Criterion has previously released Tati’s classics M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time, and now they’ve made available a snazzy new edition of Tati’s final theatrical feature Trafic. In Trafic- also the final onscreen appearance of Tati’s signature character Monsieur Hulot- Tati takes on car culture, as Hulot takes to the highways in a souped-up camper and encounters all sort of automotive mishaps and outrageous technology. Compared to the almost impossibly ambitious Play Time, Trafic’s humor is quirkier, but Tati’s sense of timing and gentle humanism are as present as they ever were. The DVD also includes the two-hour documentary In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot from 1989, as well as a number of interviews with the filmmaker and a new essay from critic Jonathan Romney. Trafic may not be as well-known as many of Tati’s beloved classics, but it’s nonetheless an important title in his filmography, definitely worthy of the attention Criterion has lavished on it for this release.

This week’s recent releases on DVD include: College Road Trip (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the aforementioned Lawrence/Osmond vehicle; Jason Statham in the true-crime inspired The Bank Job (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Step Up 2 the Streets (Disney, also Blu-Ray), a sequel no one actually asked for; Aaron Eckhart in Meet Bill (First Look); the Christina Ricci-starring fractured fairy tale Penelope (Summit Entertainment); and the Brazilian Oscar submission The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (WEA). In addition, this week brings a trio of horror releases- Asylum (MGM), Shutter (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and the omnibus film Trapped Ashes (Lionsgate), whose participants included Ken Russell, Monte Hellman, and Joe Dante.

TV-on-DVD releases this week include Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (Warner) and Saving Grace: Season 1 (Fox).

Finally, the week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Warner).

Ken Russell’s Hospital Bed Film Festival

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

While Googling Ken Russell today (I had my reasons), I learned that the director of such cinematic oddities as Lisztomania and The Lair of the White Worm is keeping busy writing a weekly column for The Times of London. It turns out that Mr. Russell has much in common with your pals at the Screengrab; for one thing, he likes to make lists. And as you might expect, these lists often contain some eccentric and unexpected choices. For example, in his column on his top ten favorite movie characters, he includes the “glamorous, vulnerable and ‘totally cutting-edge’ duo Romy and Michele, played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow, those inseparable flatmates bound for their high-school reunion with exaggerated resumés and loveable optimism. No, I haven’t miscounted. It’s a tribute to their ability to complement each other’s performance that their double act in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997) makes them unforgettably one.”

In his latest column, Russell reports: “I have just returned from that hospice of fun, the hospital, with a new knee - and this time I went in well-prepared with DVDs.” What strange and wondrous visions did the Altered States director choose for his convalescence? Well, Groundhog Day for starters, the title of which Russell explains to his British audience as “a peculiarly American festival, in which legend has it that if a groundhog (a cross between a giant squirrel and a skunk) catches sight of its own shadow on February 2, then six weeks of winter will follow - and they always do and it always does.” This selection makes sense when Russell explains it: “And isn't every day a Groundhog Day in hospital?”

Russell’s other choices range from Cocteau’s Orphee to Evan Almighty, but the most perverse just might be Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom, about “a Danish hospital built on tainted ground, where the ghosts mingle with bewildered patients and eccentric doctors, one of whom is so enthusiastic about his work that he performs a liver transplant on himself.” This is a little like picking United 93 as your in-flight movie…and we wouldn’t put that past Russell, either.

From the Nerve Film Issue: Ken Russell's Phallic Frenzy

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Today in Nerve's Film Issue: Joey Rubin interviews writer Joseph Lanza on his Ken Russell biography, Phallic Frenzy:

I begin the book with two traumas — he calls them traumas — that he had in his youth. One was when he was about eight years old and he went to see this movie about the Loch Ness monster. He saw this horrifying monster [which, to him, looked like] a penis. Then, he was about thirteen when he went to see Walt Disney's Pinocchio. He talks about watching Pinocchio's nose grow, and what he calls his "little willy" growing, but there's also a hand next to him groping it — an older gent — and that also terrified him, and he ran from the cinema.