The Screengrab : kevin spacey

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Philip Seymour Hoffman in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Do not watch the attached clip until you see the movie. I repeat: see the movie first. Ironic though it may seem given the title of this movie, this scene cannot stand for the whole expericne of Synecdoche, New York. Actually, that's sort of the point of the movie: the little moments of life can never replace the whole of experience. In the above scene, which is the last in the movie, the end is nigh, all is in tatters, and it's too late for new realizations. I find the scene almost unbearably poignant, which is quite the magic trick, considering all of the weird, unsettling elements the run through the scene. And yet: always the tears. (HC)

Kevin Spacey in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)

The murder of Spacey's Jack Vincennes in Curtis Hanson's adaptation of James Ellroy's '50s-set police procedural is designed to be the single greatest shock in a movie full of them, and a low point in the audience's capacity to hope for a bearable outcome: if a guy this smart could walk right into his killer's kitchen with his guard down, what hope is there that the lugs he leaves behind will be able to crack the case? Spacey does it full justice, running the gamut from dismay to despair to dark-humored self-amusement at having been played, all in about half a minute, while letting the light drain from his eyes as if he'd been able to borrow God's personal dimmer. If Spacey has done little since he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, at least in terms of his choice of movie roles (except give audiences reason to think that he might be far less smart than advertised), let no one doubt that the man has chops. (PN)

Jeff Daniels in SPEED (1994) & Denis Leary in GUNMEN (1994)

Speed is as nifty as high concept gets, a pretty much perfect wind-up toy movie, but it does have one, almost jarring moment of pure, deep feeling: the moment when Daniels, the best actor in the cast by a fair margin, triggers the explosive device that he immediately realizes is going to kill him, and just stands there, trying to be ready for what he knows is coming and can't prevent. Amusingly, the noisy, rolling junkyard that is the Mario Van Peebles-Christopher Lambert flick Gunmen, which came out a few months earlier, includes a scene that, while kind of dandy on its own, gains weight when seen as a pre-emptive parody of the Jeff Daniels scene. Gunmen's chief villain, played by Denis Leary, whose constant flow of exasperated, blustering complaints and insults makes it seem as if he's throwing peanut shells at the screen even as he himself is in the movie, barges into a cabin, throws open the door, and eyeballs the bomb that's set to go off in a second. "Well," he says, choosing his famous last words carefully, "fuck me!" (PN)

Paul Reubens in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Words fail me. (PN)

Shelley Winters in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

It's safe to say that the ten minutes captured in the clip above constitute a snapshot of one of the worst marriages in cinema. I'm sure Shelley Winters' Willa Harper would have gladly traded her union for the relatively sane one in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? First, her new husband, the preacher-ish Harry Powell lets her know in no uncertain terms that there will be no canoodling in this marriage. Then there's how her kids claim that Powell is constantly trying to threaten them into revealing where her no-good murdering thief of a first husband hid the money he stole from the bank. And her boss up at the store, Icey Spoon (!!!), who pushed her into this marriage, is always sticking her nose in as if nothing's wrong. Then, when she realizes the truth about Powell, she's too far gone to even attempt to defend herself. Her final resting place (starting at around 3:25 in the clip below) illustrates just how tragic a role that life has chosen for her. (HC)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Dreamworks Has a Dream

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

“DreamWorks has acquired the life rights to Martin Luther King Jr. and is bringing a biopic on the slain civil rights leader to the bigscreen,” Variety reports. Steven Spielberg is among the producers. "We are all honored that the King Estate is giving us the opportunity to tell the story of these defining, historic events," Spielberg said. "It is our hope that the creative power of film and the impact of Dr. King's life can combine to present a story of undeniable power that we can all be proud of." It remains to be seen whether Spielberg will direct.

George Clooney’s Goats have found a home. The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson’s nonfiction book, is in post-production and distribution rights have been snapped up by Overture, per The Hollywood Reporter. “CAA packaged and sold the satire, in which Ewan MacGregor stars as a reporter who comes across a solider (Clooney) who reveals that the U.S. Army is using paranormal techniques in Iraq. Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges co-star, Peter Straughan wrote the screenplay and Clooney, Heslov and Paul Lister produced.”

But there’s more Clooney news! The Cloon will star in A Very Private Gentleman, an adaptation of the Martin Booth novel to be directed by Anton Corbijn. ‘Clooney will play an assassin who hides out in an idyllic Italian town before carrying out a final assignment. He resists his usual aversion to human interaction, and his friendships and romantic entanglements complicate his mission.”

Morning Deal Report: Hugh Jackman Unbound

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Madeleine Stowe makes her writing and directing debut with Unbound Captives, a western set to star Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Robert Pattinson. “Though Stowe's a newcomer behind the camera, getting the job and landing that cast is a payoff for her risky decision to turn down millions of dollars for the script in 1993…She would have played a woman (now to be played by Weisz) whose husband is killed and her two children kidnapped by a Comanche war party in 1859. She is rescued by a frontiersman, to be played by Jackman. Pattinson will play the son,” Variety reports.

Does the phrase “Scent of a Woman with a finance-y twist” make you shiver with anticipation? Please seek medical attention immediately. Al Pacino is in talks to star in Blink, an adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell’s nonfiction bestseller. Stephen Gaghan’s script “will center on the relationship between an older man (Pacino) and the twentysomething son he was never close to. The two reconnect early on in the pic, and the boy, an idealistic drifter who's teaching in a downtown New York school, and the father, a finance type living in Connecticut, must navigate their new relationship,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Kevin Spacey will try to win back our hearts as Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack, to be directed by George Hickenlooper. “Film, formerly titled Bagman, stars Spacey as the once high-powered lobbyist whose bribery schemes and fraudulent dealings with Indian casinos ultimately landed him in prison.”

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. K-PAX (2001)

K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it dares to teach us that all mentally ill people can be Magical Negroes if they try. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it makes one pine for the relatively wise and somber tones of Patch Adams. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because its twinkly-winky score underlines every single emotion onscreen, which are themselves shaded in primary colors and writ large enough for a pre-schooler to grasp. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because Kevin Spacey approaches his mentally ill/spaceman character as if the ideal mentally ill spaceman is part-Jack Nicholson and part-Bono, basically a smirk in shades. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because supporting characters are constantly telling the audience how awesome Keven Spacey’s mentally ill spaceman is. In truth, any one of these reasons is enough to make K-Pax a bad movie, but the real problem with K-Pax is that it insists that the audience swallow all of this Hallmark-lite hokum when it knows that it’s heading towards a broad Christ metaphor that even Kirk Cameron would shy away from. This movie is the strongest cinematic argument ever made for involuntary lobotomies.

2. FORREST GUMP (1994)

I never intended to see this movie. But I was staying with a friend who insisted that I had to see it now now now because it would change my life. Maybe it did. I swore that as God was my witness, I would never sit through Forrest Gump again. And I’ve kept that promise. Like the title character, I grew up in Alabama. Being from there means that I tend to detest movies set in Alabama, which are all about the oh-so-colorful hicks who live there with their strange okra-eating ways, and usually star people who seem to have learned everything they know about Southern accents by watching Hee Haw reruns (as Hal Crowther once wrote, can you imagine seeing the tables turned with a movie set in New York where the cast was full of genuine rednecks from Alabama and Mississippi mimicking Howard Cosell?). But the setting is just the surface gloss of this movie's bone-deep stupidity. From what I understand, Winston Groom’s novel is a rather clever satire of the late 20th century, but I have never read it. The movie is the opposite of satire, a picaresque story designed to tug and strain at heartstrings, to make grown men weep and ladies quiver with its story of the extraordinary man-child Forrest Gump. But underneath all that gooey Lifetime Movie stuff, the message is that idiots deserve your respect. Idiots make history happen. Idiots stick to their core principles and blindly charge forward, damn the facts, and are blessed by the god of their choice. Did the makers of this film never read Of Mice And Men? Idiots destroy the things they are supposed to protect. Forrest Gump negates that story, and dares to tell the audience that idiots are born leaders. Perhaps it's needless to say, but this movie is directly responsible for the eight long years of the Bush Administration. Whenever you hear the words "mission accomplished" from an official source, you should know that they're really saying "stupid is as stupid does." The success of Bill Kristol makes a lot more sense if you imagine him droning on about how life is like a box of chocolates.

3. MOULIN ROUGE (2001)

Combining all the fun of epilepsy with all the subtlety of musical theater, Moulin Rouge was like a romance novel written by high-fructose corn syrup. I'm pretty sure that this movie gave me inoperable cancer. Of the soul. I know that there's people out there who like it, but I cannot imagine why. Among its sins are bad editing, terrible acting, actors singing the ubiquitous hits of any generic Clear Channel radio station, an eyescaldingly hideous color scheme, and a plot that would embarrass Danielle Steele. The only redeeming thing about it is that it should make it clear to all the homophobes out there that homosexuality cannot be passed around like a virus, because if it were, this movie would be Patient Zero for the Campy Queer Flu.

4. SIGNS (2002)

Are there words in the English language more terrifying than “Written, Produced and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan”? Signs is about aliens who come to Earth to help Mel Gibson recover his faith in God. Signs is also about helping Mel to understand his wife’s dying words, in which she somehow predicted that hostile aliens would invade a planet which is more than 70 percent covered in liquid death and presciently knew that Mel's baseball-loving brother could save her child with a well-swung bat. Signs is also about how brilliant alien invaders who can build spaceships and disrupt electrical signals and stuff like that might decide that the best way to begin their invasion is by invading a child’s birthday party in Brazil, irritating a farmer's dog, or hiding in a pantry. Hoo boy. Too bad these aliens couldn't take the obvious route of replacing everyone around Mel with pod people. Or bursting out of his stomach at a family dinner. That would have been quite the twist!

5. NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)

Oh, it’s sooooo deep. Those people will do anything for fame! I realize Oliver Stone thinks he’s being all clever about the MTV generation, but this is a movie devoid of ideas desperately trying to pass itself off as a smart film. It's like The Honeymoon Killers remade by MTV Cribs, only less so. I think that the makers of this movie would say that overexposure to the media makes people crazy and amoral, but that doesn't explain why they fought lawsuits blaming this movie for copycat murders by overexposed fans. They're trying to have it both ways: trying to say that the movie is against the violence it portrays, even as the whole point of the movie is the glorification of that violence. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original script, has allegedly disowned the movie, and it's clear why. Tarantino may not be the deepest filmmaker - a lot of his clever flourishes don't have a whole lot of thought behind them - but he has a great eye and a working brain and he understands that satire has a point. All of Tarantino's films have cold-blooded killers in them, and all of them ask for you to sympathize with a killer, one way or another. Tarantino doesn't feel a need to explain how these killers got to be that way, nor does he bludgeon the viewer with faux-irony about how society views these killers, especially not while producing his trademark extremely-stylized violence. But Stone, on the other hand, doesn't know how he feels about his killers. His movie seems to be saying over and over again that they are awesome, and what's more, everyone in his movie (other than the victims, presumably) is a cold-blooded, amoral murderer. That's not satire. It's nihilism. Say what you will about the tenets of Quentin Tarantino, but at least he has an ethos.

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

Contributor: Hayden Childs

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Nick Schager's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1) THEY'RE JUST MY FRIENDS (2006)
2) HOUSE OF THE DEAD (2003)
3) PAY IT FORWARD (2000)

So sickly sweet is the premise of Pay it Forward – little altruistic boy (Haley Joel Osment) devises a domino-effect plan in which people repay favors by doing good deeds for others – it’s likely to give you diabetes. And so brazenly manipulative is Mimi Leder’s award-baiting drama, which also concerns Kevin Spacey’s badly burned social studies teacher finding love with Osment’s alcoholic mommy Helen Hunt, that it may as well feature “Award Clip” subtitles under its many mawkish scenes. Did I mention that, after Osment has compassionately started to change the world, the kid gets shot dead? Shameless doesn’t begin to describe the multitude of tear-jerking ploys employed by this sentimental weepy.

4) BABY GENIUSES (1999)
5) BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)
6) SUPER CAPERS (2009)

All the references in the world can’t save Super Capers from being the nadir of cinematic homages, a tongue-in-cheek riff on ‘80s superhero and sci-fi films which believes that merely alluding to classic predecessors is enough to keep fanboys entertained. Sloppy and inane, it nightmarishly epitomizes the downside to technology affording wannabe filmmakers the means to realize their big-screen dreams.

7) BATMAN & ROBIN (1997)
8) MIXED NUTS (1994)
9) THE EXORCIST II (1977)
10) TROLL 2 (1990)

The forthcoming documentary Best Worst Movie will surely win Troll 2 some new fans, if only because it’ll clue filmgoers into the mind-boggling scene in which young protagonist Joshua prevents his family from eating evil food by urinating all over the kitchen table. Yet no matter how unintentionally funny it may be, there’s no getting around the sheer dreadfulness of this pseudo-sequel, which in every respect lives up to – if not actually surpasses – its disreputable reputation.

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

Contributor: Nick Schager

Trailer Review: Moon

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As digital effects become cheaper and more accessible, more independent filmmakers have been able to tackle genre films that would have been unavailable to them a few decades ago. Consider the upcoming film Moon- whereas a big-budget movie about a long-term lunar mission might colonize the titular orb with a crew that spans multiple races and age groups, newcomer Duncan Jones’ film basically tells the story of one man played by Sam Rockwell, alone on the moon with only a robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and occasional transmissions from Earth to keep him company. Of course, a role like this requires a particular kind of actor, and Rockwell looks pretty perfect here, being the sort of performer who always begins to start with a screw loose only to gradually lose more as the stories progress. The premise of the film seems to owe something of a debt to Solaris (pick one), but one hopes that Jones will find an interesting wrinkle on it. If nothing else, it looks like Rockwell came to play, which is more than we can say about his bland work in last year’s Frost/Nixon.

Sundance Preview: Five Movies to Skip

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of tonight’s kickoff of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I’ve been previewing the must-see films: Tuesday we looked at documentaries and yesterday we checked out the narrative features. But it’s not all sunshine and lollipops. Every film festival of note screens its share of duds, and you don’t want be wasting valuable time you could spend riding a giant inner tube down a snowy peak. (Seriously, if you’re in Park City this week, do this. It’s super fun.) Here are five movies I’d scratch off my list if I happened to be in town.

BLACK DYNAMITE

Sure, this could be entertaining. The trailer makes it looks like pure blaxploitation pastiche, as if it’s the missing third piece of Grindhouse. The Sundance guide does nothing to dissuade me from this perception: “Black Dynamite is a throwback with an attitude. Hilarious, campy, hot, and sexy, it plays with every cliché from 1970s film and television, with a few new ones thrown in for color.” Personally, I think that could get real old real quick, but then, I sat through both I’m Gonna Get You Sucka and Undercover Brother, so maybe I’m just burnt out.

THE INFORMERS

Less Than Zero and American Psycho have their defenders, I suppose, but none of them are currently typing these words. So this description doesn’t particular light my fire: “Sex, drugs, and new wave...Los Angeles in the early 1980s: a time of excess and decadence, and nobody captures it better than Bret Easton Ellis as he coadapts his own acclaimed novel for the screen.” That’s not a world I have any interest in revisiting, although given that the cast includes Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder and the late Brad Renfro, I wouldn’t mind seeing a warts-and-all making-of documentary. I’m guessing it was not a placid, well-oiled production.

SHRINK

In another time – it seems so distant now – I would have watched Kevin Spacey read the phone book. His string of ‘90s performances, including Glengarry Glen Ross, Swimming with Sharks and The Usual Suspects left me eager to see what he’d do next. Then he caught the worst case of Oscar-itis since Nicolas Cage. (Pay It Forward. K-PAX. The Fucking Life of David Fucking Gale!) Now I can scarcely stand the sight of him, and Shrink sure doesn’t sound like the movie that will change that. “What happens when the people we count on to hold us together…are barely holding it together themselves? Jonas Pate's Shrink is a striking, fast-paced exposé of the ‘other’ Hollywood, featuring folks living outside their comfort zone and the people who put them there. Henry Carter (Kevin Spacey) is a psychiatrist with an A-list clientele, including a once-famous actress (Saffron Burrows), an insecure young writer (Mark Webber), and a comically obsessive-compulsive superagent (Dallas Roberts).” Kevin – get help!

SPREAD

The Sundance guide’s description of Spread is simply overflowing with sentences that make me never want to set foot in a movie theater again. ‘Los Angeles is often the customary site for mythmaking in the American cultural iconography. It is a place, for instance, where the legend of the sexual exploits of the male gigolo seems perfectly at home in the decadent universe of Hollywood dreams and nightmares. Surely inspired by the classic tradition of American Gigolo and Shampoo, Spread is such a perfectly tuned, contemporary depiction of the trials and tribulations of sleeping your way to wealth and success that, guilty pleasure or not, it’s irresistible. Especially so since it’s driven by the iconic persona of Ashton Kutcher. – ” Aaaand, this is the point where I make a break for the bathroom and hug the toilet close to my face. I didn’t even get to the part about his romancing of “middle-aged client” Anne Heche. There are some visuals I don’t need in my head.

SPRING BREAKDOWN

I don’t want to hate on Amy Poehler or (especially) Parker Posey, whose big screen appearances have been all too scarce of late, but this looks like absolute dogshit. “For Judi, Gayle, and Becky, tragically unhip bosom buddies pushing 40, “make-your-own-pizza night” constitutes the pinnacle of revelry. But when Judi’s fiancé turns out to be gay, Gayle’s face repulses a blind guy, and Becky’s beloved cat kicks the bucket, they’re ready for real pampering. Dusting themselves off, the trio heads for some R&R;on South Padre Island, where Becky’s supposed to chaperone her boss’s daughter.” Seriously, try to get through the trailer above. This is a Sundance movie? Time to hit the slopes!

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the summertime, studios roll out their big budget cinematic adaptations of the hottest comic books, video games and Pez dispensers, but as the kids trudge off to the hallowed halls of academe (and then later return home for the holidays with their heads full o’ book learnin’), Hollywood gets all classy for a second and does its best to lure us away from actual theaters and libraries with big screen versions of all the hot Broadway plays we couldn’t get tickets for and all the literary classics we never quite got around to reading.

The Screengrab Book Club is already loading up on barbiturates in preparation for our field trip to the Titanic road show version of novelist Richard Yates' dour de force Revolutionary Road, but THIS week the play’s the thing as Doubt and Frost/Nixon open wide, dangling their multiple Tony awards and nominations like so much Oscar bait.

Yet, while it’s true that some of filmdom's greatest movies have greasepaint in their DNA (like Casablanca which, according to resident dramaturg, Paul Clark, was based on a play that never quite made it to opening night), there’s an equally long list of productions that somehow went rotten like Denmark in the tricky transition from footlights to klieg lights...

...prompting your internet pals down here in the cheap seats to put aside our Playbills for a moment and pay tribute to THE BEST (AND WORST) STAGE-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF ALL TIME!

HAIR (1979)

Oh, sure, I know what you’re thinking: everybody hates hippies. But me, I was only a baby when the REAL flower children walked the Earth, dropping brown acid, failing to bathe and tripping out to six hour Grateful Dead guitar solos. And sure, by the time I was old enough to mythologize Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, most of the Woodstock Generation had either overdosed or transformed into hateful Regan Democrats or politically correct fascists. So in a way, Hair has always been my Camelot: an idealistic, romanticized fictionalization of an era that sounds good in theory but was kind of a drag to actually live through. I was a prepubescent tot when my parents took me to a fantastic, anarchic live production of the show with a cast that stripped right down to their bushy pubes at the end of the first act and brought the audience up on stage to dance around with them at the end of the second: easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (or anywhere else, for that matter). And, yes, live rock combined with real live nudes is a pretty tough hand to beat...yet Milos Forman did an admirable job translating the experience to celluloid a few years later with an adaptation that combined the energy and catchy pop-rock score of the stage show with a relatively coherent storyline, a bunch of loose-limbed Twyla Tharp choreography and some big budget frills no theatrical production could ever hope to match, like a cast-of-thousands production number on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and a memorable money shot of Beverly D’Angelo’s naked boobies. The Age of Aquarius RULES!!!!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Pay attention to me now because you wanna what? You wanna make a real fuckin' movie out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie with brass balls, not some pussified Masterpiece Theater bullshit. What does it take to make that movie? It takes ABFAM to make that movie! A for Al, as in Pacino, as in his only performance in the past 20 years that's worth a shit, where he isn't just yelling all the time like he lost his fuckin' hearing aid. B is for Baldwin, as in one of the great five-minute performances in movie history. You're in, you're out, bada bing. F is for fuck, which we say a lot, but also for Foley, as in director James Foley, who doesn't try to "open the play up" with some flashback about how Ricky Roma's dad was mean to him or any of that Hollywood shit. A little moody lighting, a jazzy James Newton Howard score, and a fistful of talented actors, that's all you need. That brings us to another A, and that's for Alan Arkin, not to mention A-listers Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey before he went all gooey on us. Now that's a hell of a cast, and I'll even let you get away with Jack Lemmon if he lays off the heart-tugging crap once in a while. Finally you got M for Mamet in his prime – a maestro composing a profane symphony from the bitter grievances of loser salesmen and the greasy machismo of the winners – and not some half-assed parody like you're reading right now.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

In truth, I never hear of the two Philip Barry plays George Cukor filmed (1938's Holiday and this) being revived in the theater much, and there's good reason for that. It's hard to top Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for one thing; more pertinently, if cruelly, the plays simply aren't that good. Holiday is all downhill after the first hour, and Philadelphia similarly tends to collapse into sogginess whenever Hepburn has a nervous breakdown; humanism becomes bad melodrama. But there's much greatness here, almost enough to justify the film's high reputation: the social tete-a-tetes, of course, Grant's opening assault on Hepburn, and the rare, to-be-savored interaction of Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In the clip above, a drunken Stewart trades banter with (and somehow almost holds his own against) a sober Grant; filming good theater, Cukor doesn't push the pacing much, allowing much time for "business" just for its own delightful sake.

ORDET (1955)

If you watch the opening titles of Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet, you will see only one person credited -- not Dreyer or any of the cast members, but Kaj Munk, who penned the passion play on which the film is based. This deference Dreyer shows to Munk here is important, since few adaptations of plays respect their source material more than Ordet does. In bringing the drama to the screen, Dreyer employs next to none of the traditional devices that are generally used to "open up" a play -- most of the action takes place inside of two neighboring houses, few extras are seen, and characters can sometimes be seen looking at offscreen action, much like they would on the stage, without a cutaway to what they're seeing. Yet at the same time, Ordet is always completely cinematic, using the resources of film less to enlarge the film's world than to observe it in keen, precise detail. If Ordet is deliberately paced, that's because Dreyer takes the time to burrow deeply into his characters' lives and the community in which they live. In the hands of a less capable director, Kaj Munk's play would come off as shameless and more than a little preachy, especially considering how the story ends. But with Dreyer's serenely confident direction, Ordet creates a hushed atmosphere that infuriates most audiences but which will enthrall more patient viewers. And it's this hush that's key to the movie's greatness, creating a world with plenty of empty spiritual space just waiting to be filled. It's only because Dreyer's direction has created a world in which the possibility of grace is very real that the film's final scene has the impact it has.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

As far as adaptations go, Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is an interesting case. All the dialogue comes right out of Shakespeare, but the structure of the film comes from Welles' production "Five Kings." No matter -- Chimes is a great Shakespeare movie, the dramatic saga of the portly knight that the Bard never got around to writing. Aside from the comic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff was largely a supporting player, yet he became one of Shakespeare's most enduring and beloved characters, and Chimes at Midnight perfectly encapsulates why. A far cry from the noble rulers in whose orbit he circled, Falstaff was a knight gone to seed -- fat, dissolute, always in debt, with a weakness for women and the drink. But then, this was what makes him so relatable to the groundlings -- after all, it's difficult to empathize with the troubles of ruling a sovereign nation, but easy to identify with being low on cash. In addition, the more expansive nature of the cinematic medium allowed Welles to mount a battle scene, all the better to show Falstaff packed into a suit of armor, wandering aimlessly at the rear of the battle, the polar opposite of the valiant knights of legend. But while Falstaff sometimes came off as a figure of fun in Shakespeare, Welles' choice to shift the focus from the kings to Falstaff himself works to give the character nobility in his own right. Welles' performance helps immeasurably -- he's such a life force that you can understand why those in his life love him and forgive him his trespasses. The shift in focus pays off most profoundly in the end once his old companion Prince Hal, now Henry V, has assumed the throne. In the original, this scene marks the new king's putting aside his old, innocuous ways. But by seeing the action through Falstaff's eyes, Henry's cold proclamation, "I know thee not, old man," becomes heartbreaking. It's easy to understand why Henry snubs his old friend, but still -- Falstaff really deserved better.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Paul Clark

When Good Directors Go Bad: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, Clint Eastwood)

Paul Clark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Forty years ago, the idea that Rowdy Yates from TV’s Rawhide would turn out to be a talented director would have seemed ridiculous. Yet it came to pass, with Clint Eastwood proving to be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers. In addition, he’s also one of its most prolific, churning out an average of one film almost every year over the past decade. But in spite of making such well-regarded films as Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, the truth is that when a filmmaker works at such a rate, there are bound to be some clunkers in the bunch. Surely enough, Eastwood had his share of mediocre or even subpar films throughout his career, even in the fertile period of the nineties. In the case of movies like True Crime and Blood Work, the middling quality of the films wasn’t too big a deal, as they were disposable adaptations of forgettable airport novels.

Then there was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A far cry from the likes of Absolute Power, Midnight was based on an honest-to-goodness acclaimed work of literature. John Berendt’s book, based on an actual Savannah, GA murder case, was a publishing phenomenon, residing on the New York Times bestseller list a full four years. For the first time since his Academy Award-winning Unforgiven, Eastwood was making an honest-to-goodness prestige project, and he devoted all his attention to directing the film, handing over the acting duties to the likes of Kevin Spacey and John Cusack. Anticipation was high, especially among fans of the novel who were curious to see how Eastwood would translate it to the screen.

Trouble is, like many really good books, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil doesn’t exactly lend itself to being adapted. While most good adaptations are inspired by books with strong, tight stories, much of the appeal of Berendt’s book is anecdotal, with plenty of fascinating characters orbiting around the story’s center, the trial of Jim Williams. Unfortunately, Eastwood is generally at his best when working with a relatively straightforward plot, and consequently, his attempts to mix the court case with the incidental dramas in Savannah just don’t quite work. It doesn’t help that Eastwood never really allows Savannah to become a natural element of the story like it ought to be. Watching his more successful adaptation of Mystic River, it’s hard to imagine the story taking place anywhere else, but I almost never got that vibe from Midnight, in which the city feels more like a backdrop than an actual setting.

Part of the problem is that Eastwood shies away from one of the book’s most important themes- the hypocrisy of Savannah’s upper-class when confronted by Williams’ homosexuality. Berendt’s novel addresses the almost tangible sense of abandonment that Williams felt when his “friends” refused to testify on his behalf once word of his sexual predilections came to light. But while it’s mentioned in passing in the film, Eastwood makes far too little of which should be a central issue. Without this undercurrent, the trial loses most of its energy, becoming little more than a mediocre courtroom drama with a few mild twists.

Also disappointing is the film’s treatment of the friendship between protagonist John Kelso, a Berendt surrogate played by John Cusack, and the story’s most famous supporting player, The Lady Chablis, who plays herself. In both the book and the film, the two characters- one a straitlaced northerner, the other a local transsexual- get to know each other as the story progresses, and while it’s pretty clear that nothing sexual ever transpires between them, there’s a tantalizing ambiguity about Chablis’ feelings toward Kelso. Sadly, Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock seem skittish about the possibility that audience members might think their hero is gay, so they concoct him a love interest who wasn't in the book, played by Eastwood’s daughter Alison. The romantic subplot is a complete waste of time, never advancing the story or working in any other way other than to reassure the audience that John Kelso is all about the ladies.

That said, both Cusack and The Lady Chablis are actually quite good in the movie. Cusack plays his usual charming, brainy type, but then, the story needs a levelheaded character in the middle of the eccentric locals. And The Lady Chablis is pretty priceless, especially when she’s playing off Cusack- I can’t imagine a more established actor playing the role even half as convincingly, no doubt because she’d already been playing the role for years even before the book, let alone the movie. And most of the rest of the cast is also fine- Spacey is courtly but subtly menacing in one of finest performances, and Jack Thompson has fun as Spacey’s defense attorney, a local hero (he’s the owner of the University of Georgia’s mascot “Uga”) who’s surprisingly neither a blowhard nor an over-the-top rube. The weak links are Alison Eastwood (who to her credit has almost nothing to do) and Jude Law as the murder victim, who when we see him in flashbacks is too mannered by half.

More than most filmmakers working today, Eastwood works in the classic tradition, allowing the film’s story to dictate his directorial decisions. Unfortunately, it never feels like he got a handle on the story. The courtroom scenes have no momentum, there’s too much gratuitous material involving Alison Eastwood’s character, and the local color just doesn’t work like it does on the page. After all, it’s one thing to imagine a guy walking a nonexistent dog or tethering flies to his clothing, and another entirely to actually see them. And late in the game, Eastwood abandons his low-key and realistic style to inject some magical realism into the film, but the moment doesn’t work because it feels so out of place with his style.

In the end, one gets the sense that Eastwood’s brand of filmmaking just didn’t mesh with Berendt’s story. Perhaps someone like Robert Altman could have pulled it off, given his gifts with ensemble casts and Southern settings, or even the documentarian Ross McElwee, chronicler of the Deep South in films like Sherman’s March and Bright Leaves. I might have suggested Errol Morris, considering his ability to portray eccentrics without condescending to them, but then, Morris' previous fiction feature didn’t turn out so well, did it?

Morning Deal Report Returns

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Please, people, stop with the telegrams and picket lines and frivolous lawsuits already! We get it! You can’t live without the Screengrab’s daily roundup of the latest wheeling and dealing out of Hollywood. You need to know which superheroes, videogames and misguided horror remakes may or may not ever make it someday to a theater near you. Well, we’ve heard you loud and clear, and we’re pleased to present the return of the Morning Deal Report.

Speaking of videogames, the Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on Gears of War, to be directed by Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard) for the “reconfigured” New Line. “Set on the planet Sera, the game thrusts players into a battle for survival between humans and a race of creatures that surface from the bowels of the planet known as the Locust Horde. Players assume identities of soldiers on Delta Squad as they fight to save Sera's inhabitants.” The game’s designer, Cliff Bleszinski, says, “Disney made a great movie out of a theme park ride, and somebody is sooner or later going to make a great one out of a video game.” And by that logic, sooner or later someone will make a great movie out of stereo instructions.

Variety reports that Sam Raimi will helm the latest Dennis Lehane adaptation, this one of a book that hasn’t even been released yet. The Given Day, due in September, revisits Lehane’s Boston turf, this time in 1919 “with the city in turmoil as soldiers are returning home from WWI, having brought back an epidemic of Spanish influenza. Attempts to unionize the police department have set the stage for a historic strike and two cops take center stage.” The same report notes that Raimi is “also aligned to reinvent the Jack Ryan franchise at Paramount,” presumably without either Harrison Ford or fellow Lehane adapter Ben Affleck.

And some news that’s either out of Variety or one of my deepest, darkest nightmares: Kevin Spacey will star in Shrink as a psychiatrist to the stars whose clients include Robin Williams. Stock up on scenery, because there won’t be any left once these two are finished chewing it.

A Brief History of “Milk”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

There have been some awkward moments lately for Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who spent 16 years trying to bring an adaptation of Randy Shilts’ 1982 Harvey Milk biography The Mayor of Castro Street to the screen. There is indeed a Milk biopic set to hit theaters this fall, and Zadon and Meron “have fielded all sorts of congratulatory calls in recent months from people excited to hear that after years of struggle,” that film has finally been made.

But the problem is that film, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn, isn’t their film. According to the L.A. Times, “Zadan and Meron's project is dead in the water, beaten into production by the Van Sant film, which is due for release this fall from Focus Features. To add salt to the wound, several key people involved with Milk, including Van Sant, were once involved with Zadan and Meron's film.”

We’ve seen Hollywood release two near-simultaneous volcano movies and even two Truman Capote biopics within a few months of each other, but don’t count on history repeating in this case. Still, as Times writer Patrick Goldstein notes, “The movie may be dead, but it leaves a colorful corpse behind. During the project's odyssey, Zadan and Meron worked with an impressive set of filmmakers, including Bryan Singer, Van Sant and Oliver Stone, the last having spent a memorable evening with the producers visiting a string of gay bars in the Castro district. Over the years, a host of actors had shown interest in the project, including Robin Williams, Kevin Spacey, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Kline, James Woods, Richard Gere and Steve Carell.”

It’s too bad the Stone version didn’t get made, if only because we’d love to see a DVD extra documenting his Castro tour. This happened before Stone completed JFK, a movie that didn’t exactly endear him to the gay community, “which was infuriated by the film's portrayal of several key assassination conspirators as debauched homosexuals. Never one to back away from a fight, Stone gave an incendiary interview to the gay and lesbian newsmagazine the Advocate, in which he compared Queer Nation to a Nazi group, saying ‘they work through intimidation and fear.’ ” Whoops! Stone then suggested that hey, maybe Gus Van Sant might be a better man for the job, and even though it worked out that way, Zadan and Meron were left behind.

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

BOB’S COUNTRY BUNKER, THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

I’m not exactly sure where Bob’s Country Bunker is supposed to be. I lived in Chicago for 15 years, and there’s no place in the city even remotely that rowdy – not even on the South Side. The closest we got was the Hideout, and even they managed to keep the boisterous crowd placated without the aid of chicken wire. But if I’d ever managed to find Bob’s Country Bunker, I would have spent every night there, especially if it meant getting to see the Good Ol’ Blues Brothers Boys Band play dubiously down-home versions of “Rawhide” and “Stand By Your Man”. Bob’s Country Bunker may not have been the best place to play – their willingness to cut off the power of anyone without enough Hank Williams songs in their repertoire and their stingy no-comped-drinks-for-the-band policy can’t have made them many friends – but the mood was infectious, the waitstaff was brave even in the face of hundreds of pounds of flying broken glass, and the atmosphere was just perfect, all Nudie suits and unironic trucker hats. Plus, they had both kinds of music – country and western!

THE CHINK’S, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Another bar I never managed to track down in Chicago was the impolitically named Chink’s. (It had to be in Chicago, because everything David Mamet does takes place there, even when it’s explicitly stated that it doesn’t.) But maybe it’s for the best; it didn’t look like the most relaxing place in the world. Oh, sure, it was a quiet little dive with cheap tiki drinks, and the Chink made a mean egg roll, and the décor was decent enough – all mail-order-catalog Chinese and whorehouse-red light bulbs. It was the kind of people you met that would stress you out: let’s say you just go in for a nice cocktail to beat the murderous heat, as did Jonathan Pryce’s helpless James Lingk. The next thing you know, some desperate, flop-sweating real estate salesman, like Al Pacino’s Ricky Roma, has sat down next to you, given you some borderline terrifying spiel about how he sometimes takes a massive shit that feels like sleeping for twelve hours, and before he even finishes telling you it’s okay to fuck little girls, you’ve agreed to buy some overpriced condo in Arizona somewhere. Nope, a man can’t relax in a place like that...

...so instead, we’ll am-scray outta Big Windy and bar hop Back East to...

TONY’S PLACE, MEAN STREETS (1973)

Arriving for the night's festivities at the crimson-tinted neighborhood dive where he and all his buddies hang out, Robert De Niro makes a phenomenal entrance, with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" playing as he glides along the length of the bar in slow motion to meet the best friend (Harvey Keitel) whose face registers his approach as if it were a death sentence. Soon De Niro and Keitel are adjourning to the back room for a two-man improvisational jam session in which the English language gets slapped around a little, which barely prepares the viewer for the confrontations to come: between a punk on the make (Robert Carradine) and a target he corners in the men's room (David Carradine), between a returned military veteran (Harry Northrup) and his demons, and finally between De Niro's Johnny Boy and the affronted loan shark Michael (Richard Romanus), who has to deal with Johnny Boy's amused disbelief that Michael could have ever seriously imagined that he was ever going to get his loan repaid. The movie also features a visit to a rival joint, a pool haul where the guys get into the movie's famous brawl choreographed to "Please Mr. Postman," which feels like Our Gang hijinx compared to what goes on at the home front. It's about as good a vision as any movie's ever offered of a bunch of guys trying desperately to enjoy themselves in Hell...

...not unlike the Greenwich Village denizens of the next stop on our tour...

HARRY’S BAR, THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973)

Harry Hope's waterfront bar in The Iceman Cometh is the anti-Cheers, a place where all the regulars know each others' names, and have got each others' numbers, to boot. They're really regular, too; most of them haven't left the premises in ages, not even just to stick their heads out the door to confirm that the sky is still blue. These desperate lost souls are so hard up for some diversion that all they've got to look forward to is the semi-annual arrival of their favorite drunken traveling salesman, Hickey (played in the 1960 movie version by Jason Robards, in 1973 by Lee Marvin and later on stage by Kevin Spacey), in the hopes that maybe this time his dirty jokes will have funny endings. Woe to them, Hickey has just murdered his wife and is so impressed with himself for having finally taken an active approach to dealing with his problems that he wants to make all his washed-up friends shave, change their socks, and get back out into the world. Luckily, in his big monologue, Hickey reveals that he may have had less than pure motives for throttling the Missus and is hauled off by the cops, and Harry and company, relieved to discover that they've just been humoring a psycho, can return to their daily routine of talking about how they're going to turn their lives around the day after tomorrow, just as soon as they drain this keg. If the story were set in the present day, Hickey would be given his own daytime TV series and released into the custody of Oprah.

TREES LOUNGE, TREES LOUNGE (1996)

But don’t let all the big city neuroses and overpriced drinks get you down. Just a short stagger from Manhattan in neighboring Long Island, you’ll find a slightly less depressing breed of barfly whiling away the hours at Trees Lounge, the neighborhood haunt of Steve Buscemi’s hangdog hero Tommy Basilio in the beloved character actor’s writing/directing debut. This semi-autobiographical tale unspools in a parallel universe where Buscemi never got serious about the acting thing, but instead spent his entire life in the self-loathing stupor that defined his early twenties, driving an ice cream truck and bedding inappropriate women like Daniel Baldwin’s teenage daughter, Debbie (played by Chloë Sevigny in a wise-child performance we somehow forgot to mention in last week’s Jailbait Sweet 16). Yet, while sometimes grim, Buscemi’s gin-soaked world is never hopeless, thanks to healthy shots of gallows humor, a great soundtrack on the jukebox and a who’s-who of top-notch indie drinking companions like Debi Mazar, Mark Boone Junior, Rockets Redglare, Eszter Balint, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan and Samuel L. Jackson.

Who’s up for another round? The night is still young and Screengrab’s buying as the Pub Crawl continues through Boston, Europe and beyond in Part 3!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

This modern day take on Lolita, reviled by some, adored and Academy-Awarded by others, tells the story of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a miserable hen-pecked middle-aged loser reinvigorated by a surge of life-altering lust for the sexually aggressive friend (Mena Suvari) of his mopey teenage daughter (Thora Birch). To attract Suvari’s character, Angela, Burnham starts working out, pumping up his body while channeling happy memories of his irresponsible, pot-smoking youth. Eventually, Burnham gets his wish to have sex with Angela...but, upon learning that the allegedly promiscuous girl is actually a virgin, he pulls back from the brink at the last moment, suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, an adult. And then he gets shot in the head...a nice, throwback moment to the old Hays Code days when moral transgression always led to a grisly end, cautioning the rest of us against stepping over the line. Yet transgression is part of the film’s DNA, and while I can appreciate the reasons why certain people hate this movie (the artifice, the middle-aged lust thing, the Spacey Smarm Quotient), I nevertheless enjoy the message of the smart Alan Ball script that we are not defined by our age, our possessions, or the way we’re perceived, and lying to ourselves about who we’d rather be instead of accepting who we really are leads to heartache, rage, bad relationships and, occasionally, bullets in the head. Like many dirty old men before him, Lester Burnham thinks he wants sex with a much younger woman, but what he really wants is to simply be much younger, with all of life’s possibilities ahead rather than fading away in the rearview mirror.

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

And speaking of fin de siècle movies with “American” in the title co-starring Mena Suvari...this raunchy-sweet comedy was a throwback to 1980s teen sex comedies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Porky’s, Screwballs, Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, Zapped! and etc., etc. etc. Yet somehow, despite scenes of adolescent pie-fucking, discussions of inappropriate relations with a flute at teenage band camp, tons of high school sex and the deflowering of a pubescent boy by a predatory Mary Kay Letourneau-esque older woman, American Pie barely raised a flicker of controversy upon its release, possibly because it was simply too funny and ridiculous to get all het up about...but also perhaps because of the genuine affection writer/directors Chris and Paul Weitz had for their characters, male and female, as opposed to presenting them as figures of scorn and/or inflatable sex dolls (or just so much bloody meat, like the unfortunate young victims in any number of slasher flicks from Halloween to Hostel, where sex literally equals death). As the esteemed Mr. Pierce’s notes in an earlier post on Lolita, Nabokov’s book, for all the controversy surrounding it, was actually funny...and American Pie, a kind of classic in its own right, proves once again that sometimes the best way to deal with the scary issue of sex is simply to laugh.

FREEWAY (1996)

And then there’s the less funny side of sex: molestation, prostitution and violence against women, all of which is faced and overcome by a modern day So-Cal Red Riding Hood in this astonishing exploitation film by jailbait auteur Matthew Bright, whose fetish for pigtails and ponytails drove him to personally style the hair of his actresses...which must make him a creep, right? And yet, despite Bright's seemingly shady fascination with underage sexuality, this is one of the most empowering, ass-kicking girl power movies I’ve ever seen. Reese Witherspoon leaves this one off her resume, and yet her portrayal of the indomitable white trash warrior Vanessa Lutz is, hands-down, the single best performance of her career, promising a future of nitro-fueled intensity that (Tracy Flick aside) pretty much fizzled into perky romantic comedy fluff. Remember how cool Emilio Estevez was in Repo Man before he became...y’know, Emilio Estevez? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The story pits Witherspoon’s illiterate, underage Lutz against a crack whore mother (Amanda Plummer), an abusive stepfather, the L.A.P.D. and, most notably, Kiefer Sutherland as the story’s Big Bad Wolf, Bob Wolverton (get it?), a leering bogeyman of a sexual predator. The escalating verbal and physical warfare between Lutz and Wolverton taps into something downright primal and possibly Freudian, as if Bright is investing all his forbidden love for the raw sexuality and electric vitality of youth into Lutz and all the self-loathing shame surrounding his secret, twisted obsessions into Wolverton, then letting the two duke it out in a steel-cage match. The result is the greatest B-movie John Waters never made, a loud, raucous, thriller with jaw-dropping stretches of pitch-black comedy and a truly startling cameo by the queen of Jailbait Cinema, the one and only Brooke Shields, who shows up (along with Mr. Bright’s even more peculiar sequel to Freeway) in part three of this list.

KIDS (1995)

In Kids, the first feature directed by the legendary photographer Larry Clark, a bunch of teenagers spend a day and a night wandering around New York City in the summer. They have sex, shoplift, beat the crap out of somebody, take drugs, and have an orgiastic party. There's no plot to speak of, but there is a suspense hook: Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has just learned that she's contracted AIDS from the mushmouthed, seventeen-year-old lothario Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a serial deflowerer of girls who imagines that his sexual partners will always remember him if he's their first but who loses any interest in them after that, and she sets out to try to find him before he can rack up his next intended victim, Ruby (Rosario Dawson). (She is unsuccessful in this.) The whole movie is sunk so deep inside its obsessions with selfish teenage kicks that it gives the feeling that the screen could use a bath. When it first appeared, Kids was THE controversial indie film of its season, and it was defended by some moralists who argued that Clark and his twenty-two-year-old screenwriting partner Harmony Korine were obviously showing us these youngsters acting like animals--which is the closest thing they have to an interesting quality--as a "wake-up call" to parents. Please. Clark's subsequent films (Bully, Wassup Rockers), and for that matter the photo collections with which he'd made his name (Tulsa, Teenage Lust) have only served to confirm that Clark likes to film teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking because he likes to watch teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking; pointing a camera at it gives him an excuse to indulge in his hobby, which he is of course entitled to share with others who have similar interests. Those of us who used to get bored with such things after about three minutes even when we were teenagers need to look elsewhere.

HARD CANDY (2005)

At 21, Ellen Page sure is a hard-working gal. Juno may have made her a star when it opened late last year, but in recent months we've seen the arrival of three other movies in which she stars or has prominent roles (Smart People, The Tracey Fragments, and An American Crime, which played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but recently premiered on Showtime cable). In fact, the success of Juno was the explosion coming at the end of a long fuse set by the cult home video success of Hard Candy, a two-character drama that uses the then-teenaged actress's mixture of seductiveness and spikiness for all it's worth. She plays a 14-year-old who has struck up an Internet correspondence with an adult photographer (Patrick Wilson); when she meets him for the first time, she invites herself back to his place with the promise of hearing a Goldfrapp mp3 he boasts of having. Once they get back to his place, it turns out that she's springing a trap; taking him prisoner, she informs him that she knows that he's a pedophile who's involved in the murder of a girl, and she proceeds to torture him, threaten him with exposure and castration, and cajole him to do the right thing and commit suicide. It's to Page's considerable credit that, by turns enticing, alarming, and outright scary, she remains fascinating throughout, even though she can't make her character believable; she has a degree of infallible self-assurance that would be hard to buy in a SWAT team leader, let alone a 14-year-old girl playing cat and mouse with a psycho on his home turf. Her choicest moment of degradation for her prey may be when, having gotten him where she wants him, she casually reveals that she actually thinks Goldfrapp is pretty lame. Other movies (such as The Professional) know that the viewer's inner pedophile will be flattered by seeing a young girl insist that she wants the older man even if he has the nobility (and the box-office savvy) to not follow through; Hard Candy knows that, while castration threats are pretty bad, the best way to make the older man shrivel up is to let him know that, when he thought he was being cool and up to date, he was actually sounding like an old fart.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

SXSW Review: 21

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s not unusual for South by Southwest to select a high-profile studio release as the opening night attraction, but it’s hard to understand how a movie as slick and empty as 21 could have been chosen for the honor. It’s an anti-SXSW film if ever there was one.

Directed by Robert Luketic (Monster-in-Law), 21 is based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, although there’s no evidence on the screen to suggest that anyone involved with the production read any further than the title on the book’s cover. Mezrich’s book is nonfiction; Luketic’s movie is nonsense.

Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) is Ben Campbell, an M.I.T. student with plans to attend grad school at Harvard. The tuition is a little out of his reach: in the neighborhood of $300,000. His nonlinear equations professor Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey) takes an interest in Ben and invites him to join an extracurricular student group he’s mentoring. These math geniuses have used their skills to develop a sophisticated blackjack card–counting system – or at least, we’re forced to assume it’s sophisticated. Screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb have boiled the mechanics of 21, one of the most engrossing sections of the book, down to a handful of gestures and code words.

Rosa and his students take the act on the road to Vegas, where they work the tables as a team. The big flaw in their plan is that they apparently only hit the casinos where Laurence Fishburne is in charge of security. Soon the entire operation is at risk, along with Ben’s future.

Spacey isn’t believable for a second; Larry the Cable Guy would make a more convincing math professor. As the team’s two Asian-American members, Liza Lapira and Aaron Yoo radiate ten times as much charisma as Sturgess and co-star Kate Bosworth in a fraction of the screen time. (The actual M.I.T. blackjack team was predominantly Asian-American, but heaven forbid we be deprived of bland, attractive white people in the leading roles.) Between the Scorsese-lite stylistics and the dumbed-down plot (including a stupid vengeance twist and an obligatory romance), it’s tempting to think the SXSW powers-that-be chose to show 21 first only to make the rest of the festival selections look even better.

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Narrative Films

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we took a look at the most notable documentaries playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, which kicks off a week from today in Austin, TX. Today let’s check out the narrative films. Unfortunately, some of the movies we’re most excited about don’t have trailers available online, but here’s the best of the rest.

21

Truthfully, we’re torn about this one. It’s based on the terrific nonfiction thriller Bringing Down the House, about a team of MIT students who become blackjack experts in Las Vegas, and it may actually contain the first bearable Kevin Spacey performance in years. But the casting of bland Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth has us wincing, particularly since the real MIT Blackjack Team was made up primarily of Asian-Americans.

Mister Lonely

A Michael Jackson impersonator falls for a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. "Meanwhile, a miracle is happening somewhere in a Latin American jungle." It could be unbearably precious, but it is Harmony Korine's first movie since Julien Donkey-Boy, so we can’t help but be curious.

New Orleans Mon Amour

Director Michael Almereyda made the little-seen but weirdly compelling Happy Here and Now (which played SXSW in 2003) in pre-Katrina New Orleans. After the flood, Almereyda returns to the Crescent City tell the story of a surgeon trying to get his life back together as the city tries to do the same.

Goliath

Austin’s own Zellner Brothers may not be following the Coens to the Oscar podium anytime soon, but they do have their own special brand of comedic deadpan. Their latest feature Goliath, about a man searching for his lost cat, got a mixed reaction when it premiered at Sundance, but the hometown crowd is sure to be on their side.

Baghead

Greta Gerwig is the undisputed queen of mumblecore, starring in no less than three such films at this year’s SXSW festival. One of them is the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead, the mumblecore horror-comedy about four friends spending a weekend at a woodsy cabin, where they are menaced by a man with a paper bag over his head. Even if you can’t stand these sort of inarticulate twentysomething characters, you can at least hold out hope that Baghead will do something terrible to them.

As a bonus, here’s a short film that will be playing this year’s festival. It’s called "I Slammed My Dick in the Drawer." We think it’s self-explanatory.

SXSW Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The full roster won’t be released until sometime after Super Bowl Sunday, but the preliminary highlights of the 15th annual South by Southwest Film Festival have been announced.

As you read here yesterday, kicking off the 2008 fest on March 7th will be 21, based on the self-explanatory Ben Mezrich book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. It’s probably long past time to keep hoping for Kevin Spacey to return to form, but his role as the professor who masterminds the ring of blackjack geniuses would seem to be his most promising in years. Kate Bosworth co-stars as the world’s sexiest math student.

Other intriguing entries include Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary retrospective on the always prickly and entertaining sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, and Wild Blue Yonder, in which Celia Maysles turns the tables on her famous documentarian father and uncle, Albert and David Maysles.

On the back burner, there’s Michael Radford’s Flawless, in which Demi Moore and Michael Caine team up for a diamond heist, and Run, Fatboy, Run, in which Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg attempts to win a marathon and the respect of his family. It’s directed by David Schwimmer, if you want to start curbing your enthusiasm now.

SXSW runs from March 7th through the 15th, all over Austin, TX.

Trailer Roundup: 21

Paul Clark — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

If Hollywood is to be believed, smart people are only interesting when they're using their intelligence for selfish, greedy ends. So it is here, in a movie inspired by an actual case in which a group of college students took a Las Vegas casino by counting cards in blackjack. Of course, blackjack and math aren't particularly fun to watch by Hollywood's standards- blackjack doesn't have the built-in drama of poker, after all- so the trailer includes plenty of tricked-up filmmaking like sped-up play and funky camera angles. In addition, he's still trying to force Kate Bosworth on us, despite her being largely rejected by paying audiences (seriously, what was she doing as Lois Lane?). Still, I'll see this, since a friend of mine worked as an extra in some the MIT scenes, and I'd like to support him. It helps that this looks somewhat better than his last extra gig, last year's The Game Plan.