The Screengrab : le samourai

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Nick Schager's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1) DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)
2) THE SHINING (1980)

With all due respect to Stephen King, who famously disliked this adaptation of his novel, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is horror cinema nirvana, an unsettling vision of paternal and spousal madness crafted with the director’s trademark icy precision. Jack Nicholson’s performance is deservedly iconic, yet it’s the disquietingly unnatural atmosphere – generated by, among other things, those little twin ghouls, the nude grandma specter in the bathtub, Looney Tunes cartoons, and subtle allusions to Native American history – that truly turns this haunted hotel tale into a nerve-jangling classic.

3) MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4) ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
5) BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)
6) LE SAMOURAI (1967)
7) STALKER (1979)
8) AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)

The production of Aguirre: The Wrath of God was so troubled that, as rumor has it, director Werner Herzog either threatened to shoot star Klaus Kinski, or plotted to have his indigenous cast members do the dirty deed once shooting was completed. Such insanity may be fantasy, but it’s in keeping with the spirit of Herzog’s mesmerizing 1972 feature about the titular Spanish conquistador, whose adventurous exploration of the wild unknown in search of greatness makes him a fitting surrogate for the mad genius director.

9) POINT BLANK (1967)
10) CRISS CROSS (1949)

Robert Siodmak is better remembered for 1946’s The Killers, a superb noir in its own right. Yet it’s this relatively unsung gem that stands as the director’s finest work in the genre, a beautifully constructed, sensual and tense thriller – about Burt Lancaster’s lovesick loner returning home to L.A. and becoming embroiled in a love triangle with his ex, Yvonne De Carlo, and her new gangster beau Dan Duryea – that expertly delivers all those things noir is famous for: love, obsession, betrayal, and a fatalism so potent that it leaves a lasting mark.

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

Contributor: Nick Schager

Screengrab Review: "The Limits of Control"

Nick Schager — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Having already combined samurai and noir cinema in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jim Jarmusch begins his latest, The Limits of Control, with none-too-subtle nods to Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime-saga masterpiece Le Samouraï. Shot with gliding, hallucinatory grace by Christopher Doyle, Jarmusch’s film fixates on the preternaturally stoic countenance of a nameless loner (Isaach De Bankolé) as he lies silently in bed (the day turning to night as his eyes remain open), practices his morning Tai Chi, gets a business assignment from two unidentified men in an airport terminal, and travels to Spain, where he follows a schedule of sitting at an outdoor café each day and ordering two espressos. The ritual is the thing for this mysterious agent, whose comportment suggests a criminal vocation but whose motivations remain doggedly opaque, obscurity which Jarmusch, working from his own script (which begins with a Rimbaud quote), amplifies by lacing his set-up with import-heavy declarations like “Everything is subjective” and “Reality is arbitrary.” The mood is Point Blank by way of Jarmusch’s own Dead Man, the action quickly taking on the guise of a dreamscape in which every action, every gesture, every utterance seems a telling, emblem-laced clue.

What begins as an intriguingly symbolic gangster-saga-turned-spiritual head-trip, however, quickly turns into a slab of inert pretentiousness. Jarmusch has always had a tremendous gift for blending genres and moods, for mixing off-the-cuff cool with piercing action and heady profundity. But with The Limits of Control, he almost completely loses the thread – or, rather, clings too firmly to his story’s lifeless atmosphere, refusing for an instant to modulate his one-note tone. With a torpor that’s supposed to imply weightiness, Jarmusch’s film follows De Bankolé’s protagonist from one Spanish locale to another, where he meets a kooky contact – Tilda Swinton in a blonde wig and tan cowboy outfit; John Hurt as a scruffy weirdo; Gael García Bernal’s anonymous nobody – and exchanges boxer-decorated matchbooks that conceal ciphered instructions about his next destination, as well as sleeps with (but does not bed) a nude beauty (Paz de la Huerta). Each pit stop is typified by recurring coded dialogue (“You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”) and bits of ruminative jibber-jabber (about old movies, or about the molecular structure of wood), all delivered with an expressionless solemnity that strives to posit the proceedings as a cerebral trip down the psychological rabbit hole, yet elicits mostly exasperated eye-rolling.

There’s little doubt that Jarmusch intends his saga to represent something profound. Unlike the aforementioned Point Blank or Le Samouraï, however, he neither makes his encompassing point remotely clear, nor attempts to couch his thematic arguments via an engaging, exciting genre vehicle. The Limits of Control plods along with a self-seriousness that borders on parody, far too convinced of its own grave philosophical significance to offer anything approaching a thrill or an alleviating moment of levity, much less a sly wink that would reposition the film as a self-referential riff on affected crime cinema. Do the overhead shots of De Bankolé’s two espressos speak to life’s symmetry? Or are they meant to evoke eyes, which in turn are the “windows to the soul”? And what of the fact that De Bankolé’s ultimate target is a businessman (Bill Murray) ensconced in a soundproof hillside office bunker who – signifier alert! – rests his toupee on top of a skull? Is he a Dick Cheney stand-in? Jarmusch’s oblique story provides no tantalizing hints, a situation that will surely lead some to tenaciously parse the underlying meaning of the director’s self-important rumination, but for most others, will simply test the limits of their patience.

OST: "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If you've been following the "OST" feature here at the Screengrab for a while, or even if you're just familiar with the kind of chicanery that goes on in the music business under the guise of protecting intellectual property, you'll know that an astonishingly large number of movie soundtracks present you with a product that's wildly -- even borderline fraudulently -- different from what you encountered in the movie. The difficulty and cost of obtaining clearance rights to music, especially for small, cash-poor independent films, and the greed and short-sightedness of record companies (or just their willingness to butt heads with equally greedy movie companies over the size of their slice of the pie) has sunk many a soundtrack. Jim Jarmusch's inventive, compelling Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ran afoul of this very problem, but with a curious endgame: there are, in fact, two available records affiliated with the movie -- one best described as a soundtrack, and the other a score. Both are extremely worthwhile, but neither is completely successful on its own; both are very different in character, although they were written by the same person; and both feature material from the film as well as material that never appeared in it, though only one is available in the United States.

It should come as no surprise that Jarmusch's 1999 pseudo-remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's fantastic Le Samourai features a terrific soundtrack. As befits his image as a New York hipster filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch's movies have always placed music in a prominent position; from the haunting, unnerving guitar wails of Neil Young that formed the basis of the soundtrack to Dead Man to the exotic, emotionally powerful jazz-funk of Ethiopian composer Mulatu Astaque that was featured in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch is one of a handful of directors -- others include Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola -- who can be counted on to take as much care with the soundtrack as they do with the film itself. After reading that Italian-American mafiosi were fond of gangsta rap, and consulting with his star Forest Whitaker, Jarmusch decided to bring in the RZA, producer and mastermind behind the hugely influential Wu-Tang Clan, to write both the score and the soundtrack to Ghost Dog. This began a collaboration between the two that became deeper and more profound than either had anticipated; the RZA ended up consulting with Jarmusch on some of the language of the street hustlers in the film, helped out with the design and costuming, and even appears briefly in the film (as do Timbo King and a handful of the Wu-Tang Killa Bees auxiliary). The movie and the music are gorgeously integrated on every level, reflecting a realness that couldn't have come about if any other director and any other musician had been behind it: scenes are perfectly broken up by the intrusion of killer hip-hop tracks (all of which the RZA wrote, produced, or both); the scenes themselves feature gorgeous nighttime driving shots of Whitaker's lethal but loyal assassin, accompanied by evocative, skeletal beats also made by the RZA.

Unfortunately, things went awry, as things often do. Epic, which then had a stranglehold of a contract on the RZA's work, saw the release of the film -- which they couldn't have cared less about -- as nothing more than an opportunity to release new RZA-penned singles to the hip-hop market. They saw no value whatsoever in the instrumental score he'd worked so hard on, and which so perfectly complemented the film. As a result, when the licensing deal was penned with Razor Sharp, the company that released the soundtrack, Epic gave them permission only to use the hip-hop songs the RZA produced, and none of the instrumental score. Eventually, an alternate version of the soundtrack -- this time featuring a number of excellent selections from the score -- was released, but only in Japan. The result is the unsatisfying split alluded to above: here in America, the only version of the soundtrack you're likely to find is the one featuring the rap songs -- which, make no mistake, are almost uniformly excellent, but suffer from a lack of completeness. If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, or shell out extra money to import the version available there, you'll get parts of the score -- at the cost of the great rap singles. So, in the end, the Ghost Dog soundtracks remain two imperfect halves of an incredible whole, and are likely to remain so as long as greed gets in the way. Or, to put it another way, forever.

BEST TRACKS: Assuming you're either unable or unwilling to get hold of the Japanese version of the soundtrack to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, we'll assume that you're listening to the American version, illustrated above. (The score segments are replaced by rather useless "samurai code quotes" from the movie.) Don't despair, though; while you aren't hearing the whole picture, you're still getting some amazing RZA-penned hip-hop. Some of the best tracks here include the Wu-Tang's featured track, "Fast Shadow", a raw-sounding, desperate slice of urban paranoia; "Strange Eyes", a groovy, expressive effort by the Wu spinoff group Sunz of Man; and, especially, "Don't Test/Wu Stallion", an evocative, insinuating dub groove by underrated Jamaican toaster Suga Bang Bang, which slithers from one pole to another over a killer minimalist beat by the RZA, which suggests the score that you're missing.

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