The Screengrab : killer of sheep

The Rep Report (August 1--5)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Nobody can accuse Elliott Gould of having micromanaged his career to death. Gould scuffled for work for many years before 1970's M*A*S*H made him not just a star but a counterculture icon and a Time cover boy. Just a couple of years after his anointment by newsmagazine, bad career decisions and personal choices had left Gould with his head in a bad place and reputation for being not just borderline unemployable but, as Pauline Kael put it (not unaffectionately), an "anachronism." These days, Gould is regarded not as a superstar or a flake but a pretty solid pro--okay, maybe a flaky pro--and his best performances particularly the work he did for Robert Altman in M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, and California Split, hold up as well as anything done in front of a camera in the 1970s. (His Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, once a lethal flop, is now widely remembered as one of the great comebacks of all time.) "Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age (August 1--21) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music features all those pictures as well as Gould's first significant movie role, as one of the titular quartet in Paul Mazursky's 1969 satirical time capsule Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. In an interview in the current issue of Stop Smiling that centers on California Split, Gould calls himself "a jazz actor", and in these musical, improvisationl performances, which have a tossed-off feeling that belies their technical daring and emotional depth, it's easy to see what he means. The program is padded out with other early-'70s pictures that mostly serve to chart the course by which Gould contrived to stay employed in movies between gigs with Bob and Paulie. (The big exceptions are the limper than limp I Love My Wife and the overblown, hollow Harry and Walter Go to New York, which don't serve any purpose whatsoever.) Getting Straight, one of Gould's biggest hits, is a campus-unrest flick directed by Richard (The Stunt Man) Rush that provides a taste of what a thinking-young-person's exploitation movie was like circa 1970. Busting (1974), an attempt to package law-and-order politics in a loose, sort-of-comic Gouldian package, wound up being most notable as the movie that taught Starsky and Hutch how to dress. And Ingmar Bergman's 1971 The Touch, a movie that did Gould no good in any department--it didn't do Bergman any favors either--is worth checking out if you're a Bergman completist or would like to see just why so many people thought that, by that point, Gould had already worn out his welcome.

Starting August 2 and running through most of the month, the Museum of Modern Art's "Collaborations in the Collection" series spotlights Joel and Ethan Cohen, a pair of filmmakers whose collaborative creator was kind of inevitable. But as the programming points up, the Coens have also made a virtue of repeatedly teaming up with those they've done good work with, including cinematographers Barry Sonnenfeld (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing) and Roger Deakins (everything else, basically) as well as the composer Carter Burwell and such actors as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito, and Frances MacDormand, whose collaboration with Joel Coen extended to matrimony.

CHICAGO: At the Gene Siskel Film Center, the 14th Annual Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video --"The Midwest’s biggest and best celebration of the black experience on film, Black Harvest highlights talent from around the nation and around the world, with a special emphasis on our own Chicago-based filmmakers"--will run from August 1 through the 28th. On August 5, critic and interviewer Elvis Mitchell, last seen on the Turner Classic Movies series Under the Influence, where he barely managed to overcome his shock at hearing Quentin Tarantino confess that he has never seen the Judy Garland A Star Is Born, will swing by with a print of his new HBO film The Black List, Vol. 1 tucked under his arm, and the night after that will include a special screening of the monumental new Katrina documentary Trouble the Waters. A smaller but still very affecting documentary touched by Katrina, Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, is also among the many feature films and shorts.

From August 2 through the 24th, the Siskel Center will host "Paradjanov the Magician", a celebration of the vibrantly colored, strange and moving work of the Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov. It includes a new print of his masterpiece, Shadows of Our Fogotten Ancestors.

SAN FRANCISCO: Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles, a stunning, black and white semi-documentary look at a group of Native Americans drifting through a dazed, aimless existence in Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, was recently plucked from forgotten obscurity by some hardy restorers and, "presented by" Native American novelist Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett, recently started making its way across the country thanks to Milestone, the same company that brought Burnett's Killer of Sheep back from the dead. It plays the Castro August 1 through the 7th.

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives' "Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" (August 1--23) boasts an impressive array of films inspired by the writings of the cult pulp writer. Although Goodis was American and many of the films included here were Hollywood productions, the best known titles are both French: Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), based on Goodis's Down There, which remains one of the freshest and most thrilling products of the New Wave, and Jean-Jacques Beinex's 1983 The Moon in the Gutter, which remains one of the ghastliest things ever brought into the world by the misguided will of man.

LOS ANGELES: August 1 and 2, the Los Angles County Museum of Art presents "Two Comedies by Pietro Germi", and they're the right two: the justly famous Divorce Italian Style (1961) and the even funnier follow-up Seduced and Abandoned (1964), both featuring the luscious comedienne Stefania Sandrelli. The only way to imagine a better package for a hot weekend would be if the museum would spring for a lemonade waterfall.

The Rep Report (April 8--18)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: Anyone who's had the aurally disheartening experience of watching a silent film with one of those canned, rinky-dink organ accompaniments that used to predominate public-television broadcasts should want to tip his hat to the Club Foot Orchestra, the San-Francisco-based ten-piece group that, starting in 1987, has composed and performed a whole string of new scores for various silent classics. On April 12, the Castro Theatre presents three great movies with live music from Club Foot: Buster Keaton's perfect comedy Sherlock Jr. as a special "discount-priced matinee", and an evening double bill of two peerless nightmares from Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated vampire film Nosferatu. It's hard to think of a better way to treat your eyes and ears on a Saturday night.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives gets its goofy on with "American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin" (April 11--18), a retrospective of the work of the onetime Warner Bros. animation director who saw his years working with Bugs, Elmer, and Daffy as a mere apprenticeship for handling Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. In his most distinctive work, Tashlin used his "living cartoons' and color and the Cinemascope screen as tools with which to create a Silly Putty universe. Things kick off with Tashlin's rock and roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, a Mansfield vehicle that includes performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Julie London. Part of the humor now comes from the film's cluelessness about the staying power and the sound of rock; between that and the exaggerated sleaziness of its show business milieu, it's a movie in which Little Richard comes across as practically the most rational person on screen.

NEW YORK: The Fifteenth New York Annual Film Festival opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 9 and runs through the 15th. This year's festival, which includes forty features from across the continent, includes a special focus on the emerging phenomenon on female African filmmakers, including Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, and Zina Saro Wiwa. The festivities will also include receptions honoring Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soynika, to be held at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery, adjacent to the Walter Reade Theater.

And we couldn't let this pass without a salute: tonight, at 7 P.M., the Film Society presents Erik Nelson's documentary profile of our man, Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which includes an original score by another living god, Richard Thompson. Both Nelson and Ellison his own bad self will be in attendance.

A Top Ten List For Next Year

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By now, even compulsive listmakers like your humble Screengrab staff are getting sick to our bones of year-end top ten lists. We've seen them all, or at least we've seen all the movies that are on them, and you can only hear so many times how goddamn great the Coen Brothers are, even if you really, really believe it. But leave it to Film Threat to come up with one last 2007 recap, and actually make it worth reading: Phil Hall counts down the Ten Best Unseen Films of 2007. (And he's right: we haven't seen any of these).

Each year, for whatever reason, a lot of filmgoers -- even critics, industry types, and other insiders -- don't have the opportunity to see a lot of the films completed and released during that calendar year. Possibly they've only gotten an overseas release, or they're having trouble getting a distrubutor, or they're still making the festival circuit, or they go straight to video or are only available from the filmmaker. (By way of example, two of the Screengrab's favorite movies of 2007 were dated far earlier; the Oscar-winning German drama The Lives of Others, while completed in 2006, only showed in the U.S. at one film festival that year, while Charles Burnett's masterful Killer of Sheep was made over three decades ago but is only now seeing theatrical release due to clearance rights issues and financial problems.) That's why lists like Hall's are valuable; they provide us with a sort of checklist for movies we might likely see in the year or years following for which our eyes should be peeled.

Among the movies he recommends as noteworthy but largely unseen in '07: a computer-animated adaptation of the clever geometric-political allegoy Flatland; Discovering Cinema, a twin-bill documentary about the struggle to bring sound and color to motion pictures; Another Sky, a British period drama from 1954 that received extremely limited theatrical release and is just now being given a deluxe DVD treatment by Facets; Beef: You Are What You Eat, a Troma-esque low-budget horror satire about a cannibalistic serial killer who preys on bodybuilders; and The Tragic Story of Nling, intriguingly described thus: "If Samuel Beckett made animated shorts, he would’ve created something along the lines of Jeffrey St. Jules’ weirdly hilarious of an alcoholic man and a talking donkey plotting to escape a post-apocalyptic garbage dump."

Top Ten of 2007: Phil Nugent

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

1. There Will Be Blood, directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson

A triumph of personal filmmaking, epic scale division, and an excellent argument that anyone who nominates anyone whose initials aren't D.D.-L. for the title of greatest living movie actor is a fool.

2. Killer of Sheep, directed and written by Charles Burnett

A triumph of personal filmmaking, garage-inventor division, and worth the thirty years' wait.

3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel, written by Ronald Harwood, from the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Set almost entirely behind the eyes of a paralyzed stroke victim, it is in just about every way the most adventurous movie in recent memory, Schnabel’s visual imagination, which is kinetic yet lyrical and charged with feeling, has somehow enabled him to make a movie that is a celebration of the pleasures (and a lament for the lost possibilities) of a life cut short that never feels bathetic.

4. The Host, directed by Bong Joon-ho, written by Baek Chul-hyun and Bong Joon-ho

Big rubber monsters and real blood. In his previous film, the police procedural Memories of Murder, Bong demonstrated a special talent for treating genre conventions with satirical irony in a way that only heightened the story’s emotional impact. With its rude shocks, horse laughs, family of unlikely heroes and absolute lack of faith in the official protectors of society, his twist on the rampaging-mutant horror movie may be more fun than anything else seen this year.

5. Once, directed and written by John Carney

This small love story — Before Sunrise as a Dublin-set pop musical — is also the suspense film of the year: the first time you watch it, a part of you is on the edge of your seat, waiting for the inevitable wrong step that never comes. As perfect and buoyant as a soap bubble glistening in the sunlight.

6. Away from Her, directed and written by Sarah Polley, from a story by Alice Munro

As an actress, Polley has had the hint of something wise-beyond-her-time going on behind those heavy lids since before she was ten. Her directoral debut, about a marriage of some forty years’ duration that’s finally torn asunder by the wife’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, is an uncommonly mature romantic drama, and in many ways an uncommonly hard, clear-eyed one. Julie Christie’s mere presence as the unreadable, coquettish old woman lends the movie some star power, but Gordon Pinsent and Olympia Dukakis give risk-taking performances that keep the film raw and alive.

7. Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava, written by Brad Bird.

An exhilarating triumph of sheer craft from the director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, and a major return to form for Pixar after the sugared gas tank of Cars.

8. Control, directed by Anton Corbijn, written by Matt Greenhalgh and Deborah Curtis

An uncommonly solid, beautiful-looking rock-star biopic, with relative newcomer Sam Riley giving a bracingly unsentimental yet thoroughly winning performance as Ian Curtis of Joy Division. (In one of his few previous movie roles, Riley turned up briefly in 24 Hour Party People, playing Mark E. Smith of the Fall.) With its black and white cinematography (by Martin Ruhe and John Watson), its confident grasp of the period and its milieu, and its surprising bursts of humor, this is one of the rare films that threaten to give music video directors-turned-moviemakers a good name.

9. Knocked Up, directed and written by Judd Apatow

There are nits you could pick, but here’s what makes them all seem ridiculous: more quotable, genuinely funny lines and inspired, perfectly shaped jokes per square inch than in any movie since the last time somebody produced a script by — hell, I don’t know, John Guare, maybe? Alan Bennett? Ben Hecht!?

10. Year of the Dog, directed and written by Mike White

This is the first time that White has directed one of his own screenplays, and the results are confident and exciting enough in their strangeness to make one suspect that some of the earlier movies he wrote seemed shifty and half-baked because the directors weren’t as eager to turn convention on its head as White meant for them to. Molly Shannon is amazing as the frustrated, lonely spinster-in-the-making whose attempt to change her life is dotted with missteps and false starts but ends in triumph — triumph for her, at least, whether her friends (or the audience) can see it that way or not.

Top 10 of 2007: Scott Von Doviak

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

People say I’m a weenie for thinking this, but I feel these year-end top ten lists should be handled like the Hall of Fame: there should be a five-year waiting period in order to avoid any embarrassing blunders. Believe me, I have a record of top tens dating back to 1999 preserved forever on the Internet, and never fail to experience twinges of regret, shivers of shame and head-scratching moments of pure bewilderment when I look back at them. I’d feel much better right now if I were compiling my favorites of 2002, but rules are rules, so here are 10 movies I hope I won’t feel terrible about praising when 2012 rolls around:

10. Zodiac

For about three-quarters of its running time, David Fincher’s serial killer procedural is about as engrossing, stylish and smartly assembled as mainstream cinema gets, expertly evoking the 1970s (Mark Ruffalo, in particular, transforms himself into a broody ’70s actor in the De Niro/Pacino mode) and humanizing a story that could have been run-of-the-mill exploitation. It’s penalized a few notches here for running out of gas in the final reels: those scenes between the obsessed investigator and his long-suffering wife were already old and tired in the ’70s.

9. Juno

The first five minutes of Juno are so overloaded with quirkiness, it’s as if director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody are desperate enough to make an immediate impression that they’ll settle for making a bad one. That the movie is able to not only recover but go on to become an affecting (and very funny) story about real people making difficult choices is a tribute to their talent, and especially that of Ellen Page in a star-making performance as the titular pregnant teen.

8. Knocked Up

Why settle for one unplanned pregnancy comedy when 2007 was fertile enough to produce twins? You could quibble about gender politics, but then you’d miss out on some of the year’s biggest laughs courtesy of the ever-expanding Apatow Comedy Empire. (Honorable mention: Superbad. Not so much: Walk Hard.)

7. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Speaking of movies that recover from the opening five minutes, here’s one that treats you to the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heaving, flabby buttocks obscuring some delightful Marisa Tomei nudity (don’t worry, though – there’s plenty of that later). In what is not so much a comeback as a rejuvenation, octogenarian Sidney Lumet has crafted a twisty tale of familial betrayal enlived by a Hoffman performance so vivid, you can smell the desperation.

6. Breach

Billy Ray makes his own special brand of what one friend of the Screengrab refers to as “guys in suits” movies. Like Ray’s debut Shattered Glass, Breach is a low-key yet subtly gripping thriller about a man whose life of lies crumbles within the institution that has defined him. In this case, that man is contradictory CIA agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper, never better), a deeply religious, sexually kinky traitor to his country. No 007-style glamour and action here; the suspense emerges from the mundane but meticulously detailed life of a Cold War spy trying to stay one step ahead of his colleagues.

5. Deep Water

Sure, having too much money and free time sounds like fun, but that way of life is not without its pitfalls. This fascinating, disquieting documentary details a 1968 solo sailboat race around the world, and the amateur sailor, Donald Crowhurst, who pinned his family’s future on the whim of winning it. Pieced together from newsreels, Crowhurst’s original 16mm film and contemporary interviews, what begins as a bracing tale of men against the sea becomes a full-blown descent into madness.

4. Killer of Sheep

I am assured by publicists that Charles Burnett’s 1977 thesis film counts as a 2007 release, so there’s no reason not to include it here. This stark slice of inner city life finds drama in the smallest moments; even the routine purchase of a used motor becomes an exercise in heartbreaking futility. Never stooping to heavy-handed message-making, Sheep packs an emotional wallop in the end.

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Don’t wait for the inevitable scripted remake of this simple tale of two men vying for the world’s record high score in Donkey Kong. It won’t begin to capture the wit, drama and humanity of Seth Gordon’s outrageously entertaining documentary. Pitting an ’80s relic coasting on past glories against a regular guy with a history of failures in life, overseen by an indelible gallery of game-geeks and marked with unexpected developments and reversals of fate, it’s the most purely joyful movie experience of the year.

2. No Country for Old Men

For much of the decade Joel and Ethan Coen looked like they were heading down the long road of diminishing returns, but they came all the way back with this transcendent thriller set on the Texas border. The most faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel imaginable, it still couldn’t be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. The brilliant suspense sequences and Javier Bardem’s chilling turn as a malevolent killer are the obvious attractions, but it’s the final lyrical moments that linger when the lights come up.

1. I’m Not There

Less perfect in every way than No Country, this fractured Bob Dylan biopic is nonetheless my pick for movie of the year. Scrambling the singer-songwriter’s legend and bouncing it off a series of funhouse mirrors, director Todd Haynes delights in the ever-more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors embody various aspects of the Bard, none more memorably than Cate Blanchett, who virtually channels Dylan’s hipster-dandy incarnation. It’s a dazzling mind-fuck for hardcore Dylan fans and perhaps a complete trainwreck for anyone else, but as a biography of an artistic sensibility – warts and all – it can’t be topped.

The Movie Moment: Killer of Sheep (1977, Charles Burnett)

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Of all the films to be reissued in 2007, the most important was Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. The film finally arrived in commercial theatres after thirty years, having been withheld due to music-rights issues. Killer of Sheep was made while Burnett studied at UCLA's film program, and not having the money to buy the rights to the songs, he included them anyway. With a soundtrack including Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, and Louis Armstrong, Burnett wanted to reflect the diverse history of African-American music in the United States.

Thirty years later, it's as easy to appreciate Burnett's musical choices as it is difficult to picture the film without them, had Burnett decided to cut or change them in order to make the film releasable. One scene that's unimaginable without the music finds young Angie (played by Burnett's niece Angela) playing with her doll while Earth, Wind and Fire's "Reasons" plays on a nearby turntable. Once the song starts, Angie sings to the doll, cheating her way through most of the words. Occasionally, she comes upon a lyric she knows for certain, and once she arrives at the song's refrain, she sits up straight and smiles widely, proudly singing the "la-la-las" with the utmost confidence.

The characters in Killer of Sheep are poor, living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, but poverty doesn't stop the children from having fun in their way. Angie sings her song while playing in a closet, but she couldn't be happier. She looks to be four or five years old, and she doesn't feel a bit self-conscious about her surroundings, or not knowing all the words to the song for that matter.

Throughout the film, Burnett juxtaposes the simple pleasures of the children's games with the harsher realities faced by their parents. In particular, Angie's father Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), the titular sheep-killer, is afflicted with a deep despair. Stan's loving wife (Kaycee Moore) tries to help but can't seem to ease his pain. At one point Stan and his wife dance to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth," and Stan's solemn expression throughout this scene sharply contrasts with his daughter's wide smile when she sings, illustrating the capacity for joy that can be lost once the responsibilities of adulthood take root.

Killer of Sheep isn't about a plot so much as exploring the lives of its characters. A film like this only works if it feels perfectly natural, and Burnett gives us one scene after another that feels like it's unfolding before our eyes. At least half a dozen moments in Killer of Sheep might have provided fodder for a Movie Moment column: the shot of half a dozen kids piling out of a hole in an abandoned house, a man who smack-talks in rhyme but quickly runs out of words, Stan's wife checking her makeup in a pot lid, and so on. Killer of Sheep is a film to treasure, and its recent arrival on DVD is cause for celebration. — Paul Clark